I just before managed to kill off a very old and annoying being, which appeared as a centipede. It had split itself into countless parts and also incarnated these parts as humans everywhere. Sometimes there'd be people saying
>karma isn't real
and especially so in the new age community.

While karma is definitely a real substance, the principles behind its repayment and elimination were concocted by this centipede entity. It appears it was created/summoned specifically to be the scapegoat of evil-doers. They would blame this being for anything they themselves had done, and it would then spread the blame out on anyone by transferring it to its shards everywhere, obfuscating who was actually at fault, and creating complex "laws of morality" to protect the original sinners so that they wouldn't be blamed.

This method was formed sometime in the ancient past before many current races were even created, which lead among many of them to various theories concerning what "karma" is, but they weren't able to pinpoint it. The galactic federation has ways to deal with debt and doesn't recognize the existence of "morality" as real, but there had been no focused effort from them to locate and eliminate this issue.

This entity was behind the delay between cause and effect, action and consequence. It may also have lead to the creation of the nation state, where a dominant entity will always have the "final say" in all matters. So totalitarianism of the kind we all know about, seems to be the result of this scapegoat being's innate principles, which state that its original creators must not be blamed. It did this in a roundabout way to obscure who these creators were, as any mention of their identity could lead to blame aimed at them.