Franz Kafka’s The Trial is often read as a story about one man trapped in a legal nightmare. But when we look deeper, it becomes a mirror of the modern world. Kafka shows that in today’s society, the biggest enemy is not a king, not a villain, not even a visible person. The enemy is a “system” — something without a clear face, without a clear name, and without a clear place where you can knock and ask for justice.
In the novel, Josef K. wakes up one morning and is suddenly declared “under arrest.” The most frightening part is not the arrest itself but the complete absence of answers. He does not know what crime he has committed. He does not know who has filed the charges. He does not know how to defend himself. Throughout the story he tries to meet officials, lawyers, court workers, and anyone who can help him. But every time he gets a little closer, the path becomes more confusing. Every step leads to more rules, more waiting rooms, more strange procedures, and more people who cannot actually help him. The deeper he goes, the more hopeless he becomes. Eventually he surrenders — not to a person, not to a judge, but to an invisible machinery that has already decided his fate.
If we look around today, this experience feels familiar.
When someone loses their job in a mass layoff, whom do they blame? The HR team? The CEO? The market? The economy? Artificial intelligence? Global competition? No one knows exactly. There is no single person to hold accountable. It is a chain of decisions made by many people, many pressures, many rules. It becomes a “system decision,” and the individual simply gets crushed under it.
Think of discrimination at workplaces or in society. A person may feel unfairly treated, but whom do they fight? A hiring manager who follows a company policy? A company policy that follows a market trend? A market trend shaped by social biases going back decades? Again, the enemy is not a single person but an environment built over time — a system.
When people struggle with getting a visa, with insurance claims, with healthcare approvals, they face the same uncertainty. Long forms, unclear criteria, automated decisions, call-center agents reading from scripts — no one you can actually speak to, no one who can tell you “why.” You feel the same frustration that Josef K. felt: someone, somewhere has made a decision about you, but you cannot find who that someone is.
Even when we look at bigger issues like pollution, inflation, housing prices, or privacy concerns, it becomes impossible to point to a single cause. Governments blame corporations, corporations blame regulations, regulators blame loopholes, and everyone blames “global forces.” Meanwhile, ordinary people feel helpless, because the problem has no clear source.
When we think about larger questions like poverty, the same pattern appears. Nearly half the world still struggles to meet basic needs such as food, healthcare, safety, and education. But if someone asks, “Who is responsible?”, there is no simple answer. You cannot point to one leader, one policy, one era, or one institution. Poverty is shaped by many layers—history, geography, unequal access to resources, global markets, war, corruption, climate change, and even luck. Each part influences the others, and no single person controls all of it. This creates a system where millions of individuals suffer consequences produced by forces they did not create and cannot easily change. It becomes almost impossible to hold any one source accountable. And just like Josef K., people end up fighting an invisible structure that affects their lives but never shows its face.
This is the brilliance of Kafka. He saw this long before our lives became filled with paperwork, passwords, online forms, automated messages, and giant institutions. In 1925, he already understood that the real power in society would move away from individuals and into the hands of large, faceless structures — courts, offices, banks, corporations, governments, data systems. And once power hides behind a structure, it becomes impossible to confront.
Kafka’s message is not just about fear. It is a quiet warning : when systems grow without transparency or empathy, human beings start to feel like strangers in their own lives. They stop trusting their own voice. They begin to surrender without knowing why.
That is why The Trial still speaks to us today. It reminds us that modern life often feels like a struggle against something we cannot name. Kafka gives shape to this feeling and forces us to see it clearly. Even after a hundred years, his story matches our reality — maybe even more now than in his own time.
Subhro.blog 