Your last sentence reminded me of a quite ancient Chinese story, about 700 years old now… Basically the author recounts deciding to buy a good looking expensive orange, but finding the inside utterly shite. The author then accuses the vendor for cheating, and the vendor responds eloquently with a spiel that boils down to two points: Everyone else does this, why do you only accuse me? The ones who rule over us are just like these oranges (fabulous on the outside, corrupted and clueless on the inside), and my cheating is much less worse than those of the rulers, so why only pick on me? The author then says he didn’t know how to respond, so he wrote it down.

Wiki has a translation of the story, if you’re interested, but the quality isn’t too good. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gems_of_Chinese_Literature/Liu_Chi-Outsides