Tag: accountability

The Felt Beneath the Table

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Fairness, Commensurability, and the Quiet Violence of Comparison

Fairness and Commensurability as Preconditions of Retributive Justice

This is the final part of a 3-part series. Read parts 1 and 2 for a fuller context.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Before the Cards Are Dealt

Two people invoke fairness. They mean opposite things. Both are sincere. Neither can prove the other wrong. This is not a failure of argument. It is fairness working exactly as designed.

Before justice can weigh anything, it must first decide that the things being weighed belong on the same scale. That single move – the assertion that comparison is even possible – quietly does most of the work.

Most people think justice begins at sentencing, or evidence, or procedure. But the real work happens earlier, in a space so normalised it has become invisible. Before any evaluation occurs, the system must install the infrastructure that makes evaluation legible at all.

That infrastructure rests on two foundations:

  • fairness, which supplies the rhetoric, and
  • commensurability, which supplies the mathematics.

Together, they form the felt beneath the table – the surface on which the cards can be dealt at all.

1. Why Fairness Is Always Claimed, Never Found

Let’s be precise about what fairness is not.

Fairness is not a metric. You cannot measure it, derive it, or point to it in the world.

Fairness is not a principle with determinate content. It generates no specific obligations, no falsifiable predictions, no uniquely correct outcomes.

Fairness is an effect. It appears after assessment, not before it. It is what you call an outcome when you want it to feel inevitable.

Competing Fairness Is Not a Problem

Consider how disputes actually unfold:

  • The prosecutor says a long sentence is fair because it is proportional to harm.
  • The defender says a shorter sentence is fair because it reflects culpability and circumstance.
  • The victim says any sentence is unfair because nothing restores what was taken.
  • The community says enforcement itself is unfair because it predictably targets certain groups.

Each claim is sincere. None can be resolved by fairness itself.

That is because fairness has no independent content. It does not decide between these positions. It names them once the system has already decided which will prevail. This is not a bug. It is the feature.

A Fluid Masquerading as an Invariant

In the language of the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, fairness is a Fluid – a concept whose boundaries shift with context and use – that masquerades as an Invariant, something stable and observer-independent.

The system treats fairness as perceptual, obvious, discoverable. But every attempt to anchor it collapses into:

  • Intuition (‘It just feels right’)
  • Precedent (‘This is how we do things’)
  • Consensus (‘Most people agree’)

None of these establishes fairness. They merely perform it.

And that performance matters. It converts contested metaphysical commitments into the appearance of shared values. It allows institutions to claim neutrality whilst enforcing specificity. Fairness is what the system says when it wants its outputs to feel unavoidable.

2. The Real Gatekeeper: Commensurability

Fairness does rhetorical work. But it cannot function without something deeper.

That something is commensurability: the assumption that different harms, injuries, and values can be placed on a shared scale and meaningfully compared.

Proportionality presupposes commensurability. Commensurability presupposes an ontology of value. And that ontology is neither neutral nor shared.

When Incommensurability Refuses to Cooperate

A parent loses a child to preventable negligence. A corporation cuts safety corners. A warning is ignored. The system moves. Liability is established. Damages are calculated. £250,000 is awarded.

The parent refuses the settlement. Not because the amount is insufficient. But because money and loss are not the same kind of thing. The judge grows impatient. Lawyers speak of closure. Observers mutter about grief clouding judgment. But this is not grief. It is incommensurability refusing to cooperate.

The parent is rejecting the comparison itself. Accepting payment would validate the idea that a child’s life belongs on a scale with currency. The violence is not the number. It is the conversion. The system cannot process this refusal except as emotional excess or procedural obstruction. Not because it is cruel, but because without commensurability the engine cannot calculate.

Two Ontologies of Value

There are two incompatible ontologies at work here. Only one is playable.

Ontology A: The Scalar Model
  • Harm is quantifiable
  • Suffering is comparable
  • Trade-offs are morally coherent
  • Justice is a balancing operation

Under Ontology A, harms differ in degree, not kind. A broken arm, a stolen car, and a dead child all occupy points on the same continuum. This makes proportionality possible.

Ontology B: The Qualitative Model
  • Harms are categorical
  • Some losses are incommensurable
  • Comparison itself distorts
  • Justice is interpretive, not calculative

Under Ontology B, harms are different kinds of things. Comparison flattens what matters. To weigh them is to misunderstand them.

Why Only One Ontology Can Play

Retributive justice, as presently constituted, cannot function under Ontology B.

Without scalar values, proportionality collapses. Without comparison, equivalence disappears. Without trade-offs, punishment has no exchange rate.

Ontology B is not defeated. It is disqualified. Structurally, procedurally, rhetorically. The house needs a shared scale. Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.

3. Why Incommensurability Is Treated as Bad Faith

Here is where power enters without announcing itself. Incommensurability does not merely complicate disputes. It stalls the engine. And stalled engines threaten institutional legitimacy.

Systems designed to produce closure must ensure that disputes remain within solvable bounds. Incommensurability violates those bounds. It suggests that resolution may be impossible – or that the attempt to resolve does further harm. So the system reframes the problem.

Not as an alternative ontology, but as:

  • Unreasonableness
  • Extremism
  • Emotional volatility
  • Refusal to engage in good faith

Reasonableness as Border Control

This is why reasonableness belongs where it does in the model. Not as an evaluative principle, but as a gatekeeping mechanism.

Reasonableness does not assess claims. It determines which claims count as claims at all. This is how commensurability enforces itself without admitting it is doing so. When someone refuses comparison, they are not told their ontology is incompatible with retributive justice. They are told to be realistic.

Ontological disagreement is converted into:

  • A tone problem
  • A personality defect
  • A failure to cooperate

The disagreement is not answered. It is pathologised.

4. Why These Debates Never Resolve

This returns us to the Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation model.

People argue fairness as if adjusting weights would fix the scale. They debate severity, leniency, proportionality.

But when two sides inhabit incompatible ontologies of value, no amount of evidence or dialogue bridges the gap. The real disagreement is upstream.

A prosecutor operating under scalar harm and an advocate operating under incommensurable injury are not disagreeing about facts. They are disagreeing about what kind of thing harm is.

Fairness cannot resolve this, because fairness presupposes the very comparison under dispute. This is why reform debates feel sincere and go nowhere. Outcomes are argued whilst ontological commitments remain invisible.

Remediation Requires Switching Teams

As argued elsewhere, remediation increasingly requires switching teams.

But these are not political teams. They are ontological commitments.

Ontologies are not held like opinions. They are held like grammar. You do not argue someone out of them. At best, you expose their costs. At worst, you force others to operate within yours by disqualifying alternatives.

Retributive justice does the latter.

5. What This Means (Without Offering a Fix)

Justice systems are not broken. They are optimised. They are optimised for closure, manageability, and the appearance of neutrality. Fairness supplies the rhetoric. Commensurability supplies the mathematics. Together, they convert contestable metaphysical wagers into procedural common sense.

That optimisation has costs:

  • Disagreements about value become illegible
  • Alternative ontologies become unplayable
  • Dissent becomes pathology
  • Foundations disappear from view

If justice feels fair, it is because the comparisons required to question it were never permitted.

Ontology as Pre-emptive Gatekeeping

None of this requires conspiracy.

Institutions do not consciously enforce ontologies. They do not need to.

They educate them. Normalise them. Proceduralise them. Then treat their rejection as irrationality.

By the time justice is invoked, the following have already been installed as reality:

  • That persons persist over time in morally relevant ways
  • That agents meaningfully choose under conditions that count
  • That harms can be compared and offset
  • That responsibility can be localised
  • That disagreement beyond a point is unreasonable

None of these are discovered. All are rehearsed.

A law student learns that ‘the reasonable person’ is a construct. By year three, they use it fluently. It no longer feels constructed.

This is not indoctrination. It is fluency.

And fluency is how ontologies hide.

By the time an alternative appears – episodic selfhood, incommensurable harm, distributed agency – it does not look like metaphysics. It looks like confusion.

Rationality as Border Control

The system does not say: we reject your ontology.

It says: that’s not how the world works.

Or worse: you’re being unreasonable.

Ontological disagreement is reframed as a defect in the person. And defects do not need answers. They need management.

This is why some arguments feel impossible to have. One ontology has been naturalised into common sense. The other has been reclassified as error.

The Final Irony

The more fragile the foundations, the more aggressively they must be defended as self-evident.

  • Free will is taught as obvious.
  • Fairness is invoked as perceptual.
  • Responsibility is treated as observable.
  • Incommensurability is treated as sabotage.

Not because the system is confident.

Because it cannot afford not to be.

The Point

Justice does not merely rely on asserted ontologies. It expends enormous effort ensuring they never appear asserted at all.

By the time the cards are dealt, the rules have already been mistaken for reality. That is the felt beneath the table. Invisible. Essential. Doing all the work. And if you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you do not start with outcomes. You start by asking:

What comparisons are we being asked to accept as natural? And what happens to those who refuse?

Most people never make that move. Not because it is wrong. But because by the time you notice the game is rigged, you are already fluent in its rules. And fluency feels like truth.

Final Word

Why write these assessments? Why care?

With casinos, like cricket, we understand something fundamental: these are games. We can learn the rules. We can decide whether to play. We can walk away.

Justice is different. Justice is not opt-in. It is imposed. You do not get to negotiate the rules, the scoring system, or the house assumptions about what counts as a move. Once you are inside, even dissent must be expressed in the system’s own grammar. Appeals do not question the game; they replay it under slightly altered conditions.

You may contest the outcome. You may plead for leniency. You may argue fairness. You may not ask why chips are interchangeable with lives, why losses must be comparable, or why refusing comparison itself counts as misconduct.

Imagine being forced into a casino. Forced to play. Forced to stake things you do not believe are wagerable. Then told, when you object, that the problem is not the game, but your attitude toward it.

That is why these assessments matter. Not to declare justice illegitimate. Not to offer a fix. But to make visible the rules that pretend not to be rules at all. Because once you mistake fluency for truth, the house no longer needs to rig the game.

You will do it for them.

Footnotes from the House: Justice as a Casino Game

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
4–6 minutes

This is part 2 of a structural critique of Justice™. Read Part 1, The Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation Model: Retributive Justice as an Instantiation.

If you want a useful metaphor for how justice actually operates, don’t picture a blindfolded goddess with scales. Picture a casino.

Image: Lady Justice in Casino. The dice are rigged. haha

The rules are printed. The games look fair. Everyone is technically allowed to play. But the mathematics are tuned in advance, the exits are discreet, and the house never risks its own solvency. You don’t walk into a casino to discover whether chance is fair. You walk in to participate in a system whose advantage has already been engineered.

Justice works the same way
– like a casino with house-favoured odds.

By the time a defendant appears, the ontological dice have already been loaded. The system has quietly asserted a set of metaphysical commitments that make certain outcomes legible, actionable, and punishable – whilst rendering others incoherent, inadmissible, or ‘unreasonable’. Because I am a philosopher of language and not a lawyer, I am free from the indoctrination and selection bias inherent in that system. This allows me to critique the system directly without being excommunicated from the club.

Justice Ontology Rev 1Download

What follows are not neutral assumptions. They are ontological wagers, each chosen because its alternative would tilt the field away from institutional power.

Ontology 1: The Self

Asserted (g): Diachronic, continuous self
Excluded (h): Episodic, fragmented, or non-self

Justice presumes that the person who acted yesterday is meaningfully the same entity standing in court today. This is not discovered; it is asserted.

Why? Because retribution requires persistence. Desert cannot attach to a momentary configuration of consciousness. Responsibility requires a carrier that survives time, memory gaps, psychological rupture, intoxication, trauma, and neurological variance.

An episodic self – Parfit’s reductionism, trauma-fractured identity, or situational selfhood – collapses the attribution pipeline. If the ‘self’ is a series of loosely connected episodes, punishment becomes conceptually incoherent. Who is being punished for whom?

So the law treats episodic accounts not as alternative ontologies but as defects: insanity, automatism, incompetence. The self is patched, not replaced.

The house needs continuity.
Without it, the game cannot settle accounts.

Ontology 2: Agency

Asserted (i): Robust individual agency
Excluded (j): Distributed, constrained, or illusory agency

Justice requires that actions originate somewhere. Agency is that somewhere.

The system asserts that agents could have done otherwise in a morally relevant sense. This is compatible with compatibilism, folk psychology, and everyday moral intuitions – but deeply hostile to hard determinism, strong situationism, or neurobiological deflation.

Why exclude weaker agency models? Because if agency dissolves into causation, environment, or neurochemistry, responsibility evaporates. At best, you get risk management. At worst, you get treatment or containment. Retribution has nowhere to land.

So the law nods politely to influences – upbringing, coercion, impairment – whilst ring-fencing agency as the default. Mitigation is permitted. Ontological revision is not. The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise, even if that claim grows increasingly fictional under scrutiny.

The house needs someone who could have chosen otherwise

Ontology 3: Choice

Asserted (k): Discrete, identifiable choice points
Excluded (l): Continuous, coerced, or structurally constrained decision spaces

Justice models human action as a series of forks in the road. At some point, the agent ‘chose’ X over Y. This is enormously convenient.

Continuous decision spaces – poverty gradients, addiction loops, survival trade-offs – are messy. They resist clean counterfactuals. ‘What should they have done instead?’ becomes a sociological question, not a moral one.

So the system discretises. It locates a moment. A click. A trigger pull. A signature. A punch. A text sent.

Once the choice is frozen, the rest of the apparatus can proceed. Without discrete choice points, proportionality and culpability lose their anchor.

The house needs moments, not milieus.

Ontology 4: Causation

Asserted (m): Local, linear causation
Excluded (n): Diffuse, systemic, or emergent causation

Justice prefers causes that point: Who did this? When? How directly?

Systemic causation – economic pressure, cultural narratives, institutional design – creates attribution problems. If harm is emergent, no individual carries it cleanly. Responsibility smears.

So causation is narrowed. Chains are shortened. Proximate cause replaces contributing conditions. Structural violence becomes background noise.

This is not because systemic causation is false. It is because it is unmanageable within a retributive frame.

The house needs causes that fit inside a sentence.

Ontology 5: Reasonableness

Asserted (a): Normative moderation
Excluded (b): Atypical intensity, outsider rationalities

‘Reasonableness’ is the softest and most insidious ontology of the lot.

It pretends to be procedural, but it functions as cultural enforcement. The reasonable person is not an average human. They are an acculturated one.

Intensity becomes suspect. Rage becomes irrational. Grief becomes excessive. Radical interpretations become unreasonable not because they’re false, but because they disrupt cadence.

This ontology stabilises the game by disciplining tone. It doesn’t matter what you argue if you fail to argue it reasonably. Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.

Reasonableness is not required for responsibility to exist, only for dissent to be ignored.

The house needs calm players, not correct ones.

Why These Ontologies, and Not Their Rivals?

Because every excluded ontology threatens legibility. Justice is not designed to discover truth. It is designed to terminate cases. Ontologies that complicate attribution, disperse responsibility, or destabilise narrative continuity slow the machine. So they are ruled out – not explicitly, but structurally.

Once these commitments are in place, disagreement downstream becomes theatre. Arguments about fairness, proportionality, or intent occur within a rigged metaphysical envelope. That’s why reform debates feel sincere yet go nowhere. People argue outcomes whilst the house quietly keeps the rules.

The Point

None of this means justice is a scam. Casinos aren’t scams either. They do exactly what they are designed to do.

The problem is pretending the odds are neutral.

If you want to challenge justice meaningfully, you don’t start with sentencing guidelines or evidentiary thresholds. You start by asking which ontologies are being asserted – and why alternatives are unplayable.

Most people won’t make that move. Not because it’s wrong. Because it requires leaving the table.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

The Ontology–Encounter–Evaluation Model: Retributive Justice as an Instantiation

Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcast, political theoryTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
7–10 minutes

Now that A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis has been put to bed — not euthanised, just sedated — I can turn to the more interesting work: instantiating it. This is where LIH stops being a complaint about words and starts becoming a problem for systems that pretend words are stable enough to carry moral weight.

Read part 2 of this essay.

What follows is not a completed theory, nor a universal schema. It’s a thinking tool. A talking point. A diagram designed to make certain assumptions visible that are usually smuggled in unnoticed, waved through on the strength of confidence and tradition.

Justice Ontology Rev 1Download

The purpose of this diagram is not to redefine justice, rescue it, or replace it with something kinder. It is to show how justice is produced. Specifically, how retributive justice emerges from a layered assessment process that quietly asserts ontologies, filters encounters, applies normative frames, and then closes uncertainty with confidence.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Most people are willing to accept, in the abstract, that justice is “constructed”. That concession is easy. What is less comfortable is seeing how it is constructed — how many presuppositions must already be in place before anything recognisable as justice can appear, and how many of those presuppositions are imposed rather than argued for.

The diagram foregrounds power, not as a conspiracy or an optional contaminant, but as an ambient condition. Power determines which ontologies are admissible, which forms of agency count, which selves persist over time, which harms are legible, and which comparisons are allowed. It decides which metaphysical configurations are treated as reasonable, and which are dismissed as incoherent before the discussion even begins.

Justice, in this framing, is not discovered. It is not unearthed like a moral fossil. It is assembled. And it is assembled late in the process, after ontology has been assumed, evaluation has been performed, and uncertainty has been forcibly closed.

This does not mean justice is fake. It means it is fragile. Far more fragile than its rhetoric suggests. And once you see that fragility — once you see how much is doing quiet, exogenous work — it becomes harder to pretend that disagreements about justice are merely disagreements about facts, evidence, or bad actors. More often, they are disagreements about what kind of world must already be true for justice to function at all.

I walk through the structure and logic of the model below. The diagram is also available as a PDF, because if you’re going to stare at machinery, you might as well be able to zoom in on the gears.

Why Retributive Justice (and not the rest of the zoo)

Before doing anything else, we need to narrow the target.

“Justice” is an infamously polysemous term. Retributive, restorative, distributive, procedural, transformative, poetic, cosmic. Pick your flavour. Philosophy departments have been dining out on this buffet for centuries, and nothing useful has come of letting all of them talk at once.

This is precisely where LIH draws a line.

The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not interested in pedestrian polysemy — cases where a word has multiple, well-understood meanings that can be disambiguated with minimal friction. That kind of ambiguity is boring. It’s linguistic weather.

What LIH is interested in are terms that appear singular while smuggling incompatible structures. Words that function as load-bearing beams across systems, while quietly changing shape depending on who is speaking and which assumptions are already in play.

“Justice” is one of those words. But it is not usefully analysable in the abstract.

So we pick a single instantiation: Retributive Justice.

Why?

Because retributive justice is the most ontologically demanding and the most culturally entrenched. It requires:

  • a persistent self
  • a coherent agent
  • genuine choice
  • intelligible intent
  • attributable causation
  • commensurable harm
  • proportional response

In short, it requires everything to line up.

If justice is going to break anywhere, it will break here.

Retributive justice is therefore not privileged in this model. It is used as a stress test.

The Big Picture: Justice as an Engine, Not a Discovery

The central claim of the model is simple, and predictably unpopular:

Justice is not discovered. It is produced.

Not invented in a vacuum, not hallucinated, not arbitrary — but assembled through a process that takes inputs, applies constraints, and outputs conclusions with an air of inevitability.

The diagram frames retributive justice as an assessment engine.

An engine has:

  • inputs
  • internal mechanisms
  • thresholds
  • failure modes
  • and outputs

It does not have access to metaphysical truth. It has access to what it has been designed to process.

The justice engine takes an encounter — typically an action involving alleged harm — and produces two outputs:

  • Desert (what is deserved),
  • Responsibility (to whom it is assigned).

Everything else in the diagram exists to make those outputs possible.

The Three Functional Layers

The model is organised into three layers. These are not chronological stages, but logical dependencies. Each layer must already be functioning for the next to make sense.

1. The Constitutive Layer

(What kind of thing a person must already be)

This layer answers questions that are almost never asked explicitly, because asking them destabilises the entire process.

  • What counts as a person?
  • What kind of self persists over time?
  • What qualifies as an agent?
  • What does it mean to have agency?
  • What is a choice?
  • What is intent?

Crucially, these are not empirical discoveries made during assessment. They are asserted ontologies.

The system assumes a particular configuration of selfhood, agency, and intent as a prerequisite for proceeding at all. Alternatives — episodic selves, radically distributed agency, non-volitional action — are not debated. They are excluded.

This is the first “happy path”.

If you do not fit the assumed ontology, you do not get justice. You get sidelined into mitigation, exception, pathology, or incoherence.

2. The Encounter Layer

(What is taken to have happened)

This layer processes the event itself:

  • an action
  • resulting harm
  • causal contribution
  • temporal framing
  • contextual conditions
  • motive (selectively)

This is where the rhetoric of “facts” tends to dominate. But the encounter is never raw. It is already shaped by what the system is capable of seeing.

Causation here is not metaphysical causation. It is legible causation.
Harm is not suffering. It is recognisable harm.
Context is not total circumstance. It is admissible context.

Commensurability acts as a gatekeeper between encounter and evaluation: harms must be made comparable before they can be judged. Anything that resists comparison quietly drops out of the pipeline.

3. The Evaluative Layer

(How judgment is performed)

Only once ontology is assumed and the encounter has been rendered legible does evaluation begin:

  • proportionality
  • accountability
  • normative ethics
  • fairness (claimed)
  • reasonableness
  • bias (usually acknowledged last, if at all)

This layer presents itself as the moral heart of justice. In practice, it is the final formatting pass.

Fairness is not discovered here. It is declared.
Reasonableness does not clarify disputes. It narrows the range of acceptable disagreement.
Bias is not eliminated. It is managed.

At the end of this process, uncertainty is closed.

That closure is the moment justice appears.

Why Disagreement Fails Before It Starts

At this point, dissent looks irrational.

The system has:

  • assumed an ontology
  • performed an evaluation
  • stabilised the narrative through rhetoric
  • and produced outputs with institutional authority

To object now is not to disagree about evidence. It is to challenge the ontology that made assessment possible in the first place.

And that is why so many justice debates feel irresolvable.

They are not disagreements within the system.
They are disagreements about which system is being run.

LIH explains why language fails here. The same words — justice, fairness, responsibility, intent — are being used across incompatible ontological commitments. The vocabulary overlaps; the worlds do not.

The engine runs smoothly. It just doesn’t run the same engine for everyone.

Where This Is Going

With the structure in place, we can now do the slower work:

  • unpacking individual components
  • tracing where ontological choices are asserted rather than argued
  • showing how “reasonableness” and “fairness” operate as constraint mechanisms
  • and explaining why remediation almost always requires a metaphysical switch, not better rhetoric

Justice is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.

That should worry us more than if it were merely malfunctioning.

The rest of the story

Read part 2 of this essay.

This essay is already long, so I’m going to stop here.

Not because the interesting parts are finished, but because this is the point at which the analysis stops being descriptive and starts becoming destabilising.

The diagram you’ve just walked through carries a set of suppressed footnotes. They don’t sit at the margins because they’re trivial; they sit there because they are structurally prior. Each one represents an ontological assertion the system quietly requires in order to function at all.

By my count, the model imposes at least five such ontologies. They are not argued for inside the system. They are assumed. They arrive pre-installed, largely because they are indoctrinated, acculturated, and reinforced long before anyone encounters a courtroom, a jury, or a moral dilemma.

Once those ontologies are fixed, the rest of the machinery behaves exactly as designed. Disagreement downstream is permitted; disagreement upstream is not.

In a follow-up essay, I’ll unpack those footnotes one by one: where the forks are, which branch the system selects, and why the alternatives—while often coherent—are rendered unintelligible, irresponsible, or simply “unreasonable” once the engine is in motion.

That’s where justice stops looking inevitable and starts looking parochial.

And that’s also where persuasion quietly gives up.

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Written by Bry Willis and ChatGPT 5.2 after a couple of days of back and forth

microglyphics

“Your Triggers Aren’t My Problem!”

Posted in identity, language, morality, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

…except, sometimes they are.

This came across my feed, the laminated wisdom of our times: Your triggers are your responsibility. It isn’t the world’s obligation to tiptoe around you. A phrase so crisp, so confident, it practically struts. You can imagine it on a mug, alongside slogans like Live, Laugh, Gaslight. These are the language games I love to hate.

Now, there’s a certain truth here. Life is hard, and people aren’t psychic. We can’t reasonably expect the world to read our mental weather reports—50% chance of anxiety, rising storms of existential dread. In an adult society, we are responsible for understanding our own emotional terrain, building the bridges and detours that allow us to navigate it. That’s called resilience, and it’s a good thing.

Audio: NotebookLM Podcast on this topic.

But (and it’s a big but) this maxim becomes far less admirable when you scratch at its glossy surface. What does triggers even mean here? Because trigger is a shape-shifter, what I term Shrödinger’s Weasels. For someone with PTSD, a trigger is not a metaphor; it’s a live wire. It’s a flashback to trauma, a visceral hijacking of the nervous system. That’s not just “feeling sensitive” or “taking offence”—it’s a different universe entirely.

Yet, the word has been kidnapped by the cultural peanut gallery, drained of precision and applied to everything from discomfort to mild irritation. Didn’t like that movie? Triggered. Uncomfortable hearing about your privilege? Triggered. This semantic dilution lets people dodge accountability. Now, when someone names harm—racism, misogyny, homophobia, you name it—the accused can throw up their hands and say, Well, that’s your problem, not mine.

And there’s the rub. The neat simplicity of Your triggers are your responsibility allows individuals to dress their cruelty as stoic rationality. It’s not their job, you see, to worry about your “feelings.” They’re just being honest. Real.

Except, honesty without compassion isn’t noble; it’s lazy. Cruelty without self-reflection isn’t courage; it’s cowardice. And rejecting someone’s very real pain because you’re too inconvenienced to care? Well, that’s not toughness—it’s emotional illiteracy.

Let’s be clear: the world shouldn’t have to tiptoe. But that doesn’t mean we’re free to stomp. If someone’s discomfort stems from bigotry, prejudice, or harm, then dismissing them as “too sensitive” is gaslighting, plain and simple. The right to swing your fist, as the old adage goes, ends at someone else’s nose. Likewise, the right to be “brutally honest” ends when your honesty is just brutality.

The truth is messy, as most truths are. Some triggers are absolutely our responsibility—old wounds, minor slights, bruised egos—and expecting the world to cushion us is neither reasonable nor fair. But if someone names harm that points to a broader problem? That’s not a trigger. That’s a mirror.

So yes, let’s all take responsibility for ourselves—our pain, our growth, our reactions. But let’s also remember that real strength is found in the space where resilience meets accountability. Life isn’t about tiptoeing or stomping; it’s about walking together, with enough care to watch where we step.

Banality of Evil

Posted in anarchism, economics, healthcare, identity, language, morality, philosophy, power, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I thought I was done wittering on about Brian Thompson, the late CEO of United Healthcare, but here we are. His name lingers like the corporate perfume of systemic rot—an enduring testament to how we’ve elevated unethical behaviour into performance art. It got me thinking: what if we brought back a bit of old-school accountability? In Ancient Rome, outlaws lost their citizenship, legal protections, and status as people. That’s right—booted out of polite society. Meanwhile, we’ve done the opposite: we hand out golden parachutes and slap their faces on business magazine covers.

To some, Brian Thompson was a good man – apart from the insider trading, of course. He was successful, a nice guy, funny, and had a good family, and a few million-dollar homes. What else could you ask for? But his success came in the way of blood money. It seems we need fewer people who think like this, not more.

Then I recalled The Purge franchise. And sure, The Purge is a dystopian fantasy, but let’s up the stakes. Picture this: bounties on corporate villains. Not literal carnage, of course—let’s leave that for the big screen—but the return of real consequences. Instead of allowing their PR teams to smooth it all over with buzzwords and philanthropy crumbs, what if we made it socially unacceptable to be a snake in a suit? What if moral suasion—the lost art of persuading someone to do right because it’s, you know, right—actually came back into fashion?

Nietzsche nailed it ages ago. We’ve got two moral codes: one for people and one for money. And guess which one wins every time? All it takes is enough cash and the right rhetoric, and suddenly, everyone forgets who’s really getting fleeced. This is the banality of evil in its purest form: not grand acts of villainy but a shrugging normalisation of corruption. We don’t even consider it corruption. We see it as business as usual. We support and work for these businesses.

The tragedy is that we’ve become so desensitised to it that we are adept at ignoring the stench of moral failure that even calling it out feels quaint. But it’s not hopeless. Some of us still notice. Some of us still care. The real question is, how long can we keep tolerating this farce before we remember that morality isn’t just for the powerless?

Meantime, I just imagine these grubbers being stripped of power and protection, running scared from the likes of Luigi Mangioni.

Apologies

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Apologies. The sacred cow of social rituals. We’re told they’re essential—an ego on its knees, a ritual cleansing of the proverbial moral ledger. And yet, for all their lofty promises of redemption and relationship mending, aren’t apologies just glorified public relations exercises?

If you don’t like my position, I apologise. This is my response to Philosophy Minis, a channel I follow.

The philosophical breakdown you provide is charmingly earnest: admit guilt, promise reform, and repair the damage. It sounds good, doesn’t it? But let’s not kid ourselves—this is an ideal that seldom leaves the page. In practice, apologies are often nothing more than a performance. The “I’m sorry if you took offense” genre is merely the tip of the iceberg; the whole construct is a social mirage, designed more to shield the offender than to restore the wronged.

Take the idea that a “good” apology must paint the apologizer as a villain. In the real world, does that happen? Rarely. Instead, we get the watered-down version—a careful choreography of noncommittal contrition, crafted to absolve the perpetrator while barely acknowledging the harm. It’s the politician’s bread and butter: “I made a mistake” becomes code for “I’m not actually sorry, but my PR team says I should say something.” Serial apologists thrive on this economy of empty gestures, repeating offences with impunity, because they know the script will always offer them an escape hatch.

Then there’s the supposed promise of change—“I will try my best not to do this again.” Admirable in theory, utterly laughable in execution. Actions speak louder than words, but apologies, divorced from tangible behavioural shifts, speak volumes about their futility. The self-flagellation of guilt is easy; reform is hard. The apology may declare, “This is not who I want to be,” but the track record often screams, “This is exactly who I am, and I’ll see you here next week.”

And let’s not forget the crowning jewel of the apology trilogy: relationship repair. The idea that an apology rebuilds bridges is as idealistic as it is naive. True repair requires more than words; it demands effort, time, and trust—not the performative recitation of a three-step apology handbook. Worse, the insistence on a good apology as a relationship panacea risks shifting the burden onto the harmed party. If they don’t forgive, they’re the villain. Apologies weaponized as moral obligations are nothing short of emotional coercion.

Even the social utility of apologies feels overstated. Sure, children may warm to those who apologise, but is this truly evidence of moral profundity, or just a reflection of our preference for surface-level niceties? If anything, our societal obsession with apologies perpetuates the illusion that words can magically undo harm. This is a comforting narrative for offenders, but it does little for the offended.

Ultimately, apologies are not the noble moral endeavour they are so often made out to be. At best, they are flawed attempts at social cohesion; at worst, they are phatic placeholders that substitute genuine accountability with a hollow facsimile. Before we canonise the “good apology,” perhaps we ought to ask whether its real purpose is to humble the ego—or to let it off the hook entirely.