This is a companion essay on scaffolding, fiction, and the manufacture of foundations to accompany the parable of the last unicorn.

There is a comforting reflex in modern thought: whenever we sense the creak of scaffolding beneath a social institution, we quickly invent a unicorn to stand upon it. Nations do this, churches do this, democracies do this, economists do this. The unicorn goes by many names – ‘the rule of law’, ‘the rational agent’, ‘the will of the people’, ‘the objective observer’ – but its function never varies. It is the fiction that absolves us of admitting that the structure stands only because we collectively maintain it.

The parable of The Last Unicorn demonstrates this with more grace than a technical argument ever could. An invisible creature held together by instruments calibrated against one another is not a fantasy world –it’s a mirror. The Spiral Gauge and Echo Clock may look whimsical, but they are recognisable descendants of the same Enlightenment machinery that produced the rational self, the autonomous subject, the ideal observer, and the entire metaphysical menagerie used to justify the modern order.

What the Keepers discover – though none dares say it – is that coherence can arise without reference. Systems can be internally consistent, deeply compelling, even socially stabilising, and still refer to nothing beyond the architecture of their own conventions.

The unicorn never had to be real.
Only the scaffolding did.

I. Coherence Without Correspondence

The Instruments in the parable do not triangulate an external object; they triangulate one another. Their perfection is not evidential but self-confirming. This is not a malfunction; it’s how most human systems operate.

• The law justifies itself through precedent.
• Economics justifies itself through models calibrated to other models.
• Morality justifies itself through rhetoric packaged as universality.
• Nationhood justifies itself through symbols that no one sees but everyone repeats.

The Last Unicorn is simply the naked form of this apparatus, stripped of its polite abstractions.

Habermas would insist that discourse can eventually reveal the creature in the centre—call it justice, legitimacy, or rational consensus. But the parable makes the counterpoint: discourse doesn’t reveal the object; it manufactures its silhouette. What thrives is not truth but coherence, not revelation but calibration.

This is what Weber meant when he said ultimate values are inaccessible. It’s what Nietzsche meant when he called truth a mobile army of metaphors. And it’s what moral psychology has spent decades rediscovering under new terminology.

II. The Politics of the Empty Centre

The invisible unicorn is not merely an epistemological jab. It is political.

Empty centres are powerful. A symbol that cannot be verified cannot be falsified. A fiction that cannot be touched cannot be disproved. An entity that must not be seen becomes infinitely malleable to whoever controls its instruments.

This is why the Minister in the parable calls it the Last Unicorn. Singular entities resist comparison. Singular entities cannot be contested. Singular entities demand reverence.

Every modern nation has one.
Every political ideology has one.
Every moral system has one.

The most potent foundations are hollow.

III. When Scaffolding Becomes Sovereign

The final turn of the parable is the most damning: the instruments become the sovereign. The unicorn is no longer needed. The architecture itself becomes authority.

This is not fantasy.
This is the modern administrative state.
This is algorithmic governance.
This is market rationality treated as inevitability.
This is the ‘data-driven’ truth regime.

The instruments outlive the myth they were built to measure.

We no longer believe in the rational agent.
But we still run the Spiral Gauge of behavioural economics.

We no longer believe in impartial justice.
But we still read the Temperament Dial of jurisprudence.

We no longer believe in democratic will as a coherent whole.
But we still update the Echo Clock every election cycle.

The tools remain after the foundations evaporate.

IV. Why Fiction Still Works

A sceptic might object: ‘If the unicorn is not real, why does any of this work at all?’

Because fiction that organises behaviour is not merely fiction. It is a coordination device. It is a Schelling point. It is scaffolding that allows millions of otherwise disjointed perspectives to act as if they shared a common centre.

The fact that the centre is empty does not make it useless.
Emptiness is what makes it usable.

This is what Perspectival Realism gets right: reality exists, but our social truths are not descriptions of it – they are negotiated vantage points that allow us to stop killing each other long enough to build things.

The unicorn works not because it is real, but because it is required.*

V. The Real Danger

The danger is not that the unicorn is fictional.
The danger is that the Keepers forget that it is.

When the scaffolding becomes invisible, those who control the instruments gain the power to dictate reality. The unicorn becomes a weapon. Its measurements become law. The Temperament Dial becomes policy. And any challenge to the system is treated not as dissent but as blasphemy.

Truth becomes whatever maintains the ratios.

If the unicorn is serene, the kingdom must be serene.
If the unicorn demands five hooves, arithmetic must comply.
If the unicorn embodies unity, dissent must be reclassified as disease.

This is how ideologies harden.
This is how objectivities are born.
This is how violence becomes reasonable.

VI. What the Parable Teaches

The lesson is not that reality is subjective, or that truth is arbitrary, or that everything dissolves into mere opinion.

The lesson is disciplinary:

Never confuse the scaffolding with the stone.
Never confuse the instrument with the object.
Never confuse coherence with correspondence.
Never confuse tradition with truth.
Never confuse necessity with ontology.

The unicorn is the modern foundational myth.
The Last Unicorn is the last acceptable one.

The structure stands only because we maintain it.
Its reality is our labour, not its essence.

To recognise this is not cynicism.
It is maturity.

To deny it is not faith.
It is dependence.

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* Aphorism: On the Necessity of Invented Foundations

Some might notice the parallel between this and Voltaire’s quip. This is not accidental.

Per Voltaire, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
This translates into society needing a fiction strong enough to keep everyone from eating each other, but mine goes a level deeper – an Inception moment.

Here, “The unicorn works not because it is real, but because it is required” translates to ‘foundational fictions aren’t just convenient – they’re structurally unavoidable once the scaffolding grows large enough to demand a centre‘.

The continuity is bleak:

Voltaire assumes the fiction stabilises the moral order.

I point out that the fiction stabilises the fiction of the moral order.

In your frame, the unicorn isn’t God – it’s everything Enlightenment metaphysics smuggled in as ‘non-negotiable’: the subject, the sovereign, the Self, the rational agent, the ideal observer, the general will, the scientific method as oracle, ‘rights’, ‘justice’, the whole pantheon of Enlightenment delusion.

Voltaire’s God was a stopgap, a necessary myth to patch a crumbling worldview.
The unicorn is the revealed skeleton of every such myth once the paint flakes off.

And crucially, Voltaire still believed something anchored the system (even if it had to be manufactured). I’m saying the anchor is the manufacturing. The scaffolding is the foundation. There’s no bedrock underneath it, and the system works only by keeping the fiction at the centre just out of reach – sacred, untouchable, instrumentally indispensable.

It’s Voltaire inverted, updated, and stripped of any remaining optimism.

When Voltaire once quipped that if God did not exist, he would have to be invented.
He meant that societies require a fiction sturdy enough to keep the centre from collapsing.

But in the world bequeathed by Nietzsche’s genealogies, Foucault’s power/knowledge, MacIntyre’s fractured moral traditions, and Habermas’s doomed faith in ideal discourse, the point sharpens:

Again, the unicorn works not because it is real, but because it is required.

Reality does not underwrite the fiction; the fiction underwrites reality.

Jaeger’s Perspectival Realism makes the same admission gently: perspectives mediate the real because there is no God’s-eye vantage to appeal to. Felin shows how even ‘rationality’ is stitched from species-specific perceptual biases masquerading as universal norms. Barrett’s constructivist account of emotion reveals that even our affective lives are fabricated from cultural priors rather than discovered as facts.

And once language itself becomes an insufficient instrument – a leaky apparatus propping up its own illusions – the lesson becomes unavoidable:

We do not invent foundations because they are true. We invent them because the scaffolding has grown large enough to demand a centre.

The Last Unicorn is not a creature waiting to be seen; it is the placeholder every society constructs to avoid staring directly into its own void.

When the granite vanishes, the need remains.

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I have more to share on this, but I’ll save it for another day.

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