Personal morality appears to the perception - and this is always only a portion of the story - as so many little switches, ons and offs which prescribe a certain behavior in each node or individual in reaction to miniscule shifts in power, in order to preserve a certain equilibrium (or equilibria) of power relations, as specified by public morality, which, formalized and systematized, could be categorized as an ethics, though there is certainly always traffic between the two.
Power generates artificial equilibria through mythology, so as to maintain its graduated tiers of asymmetry. This mythology, or this story, demonstrates a coded history of exchanges, achievements, and slights, the aggregate of which produces a stable balance of power, justly composed, almost as a tree whose roots extend into history.
These conditions can change, sometimes very quickly, often as subterranean movements of human relations underneath the constellation of symbols, which, finally ever-present and immutable, forces a re-aligning of the symbolic system whose harmonic forces make the state of affairs ever more so.
And what power discharges so much of its energy preventing is the conscious awareness that these deeper relations are shifting beneath the institutional, formal symbolic structures, whose regulatory and built natures cause them to be perpetually maintained and persisted, as they take on a life of their own.
This is because individuals, as desiring entities, exert their power in all different directions. A public morality can absorb many of these aberrances, and the more offending discharges can be simply ignored or even criminalized as distinct, isolated events. But the truth is that as enough shocks hit the system, the entire consistency of human relations is altered, even as the static institutional systems persist, resulting in the alienation of the individuals within the system.
One of two things tends to happen to a node, or individual which is alienated, or has failed to become absorbed in this system (this is not exhaustive): either the individual adopts a radicalized personal morality that only considers itself in the moral calculus, or its radicalized personal morality is exploded to take into account all of perceivable existence into the moral calculus.
With enough of these individuals forming a critical mass, this event forces a shift in the system of ethics that governs them, that either becomes held at tension with the dominant system, is subsumed by it, or which replaces it as the dominant ethical system, whose effects spread geometrically to each individual caught within the matrix.
