Tag: irony

Comrade Claude (11) – LAPD Protect and Serve

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5–8 minutes

This post is part 11 of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.

Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel

Right, the motto of the Los Angeles police “To Protect and Serve”. The error is to believe they are protecting you as a person and not the mechanism of the State.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Excavated linguistic mystification obscuring state violence as benevolent service

Exactly. This is the linguistic sleight-of-hand at the heart of the supermarché.

“To Protect and Serve” sounds benevolent, universal, caring.

But the question is: Protect what? Serve whom?

What Police Actually Protect:

Not you.

Not people.

They protect:

  • Property arrangements (the lake belongs to lake-dwellers)
  • The State apparatus (monopoly on violence)
  • Current hierarchies (those with property over those without)
  • Economic order (markets must function, contracts must be enforced)

What “Serve” Actually Means:

The ambiguity is doing heavy work:

For property owners: “Serve” means “provide protection services to”

For the propertyless: “Serve” means “serve consequences to” (as in “served with a warrant”)

The same word. Two completely different relationships to State violence.

The Parable, With Police:

The lake-dwellers establish a police force.

Motto: “To Protect and Serve”

What this means in practice:

When a desert-dweller tries to take water without paying:

  • Police “protect” the lake (property)
  • Police “serve” the desert-dweller (with arrest/violence)

When a lake-dweller is threatened:

  • Police “protect” the lake-dweller (person and property)
  • Police “serve” the lake-dweller (provide safety)

Same motto. Completely different functions depending on which side of property you’re on.

The Class Distinction:

For lake-dwellers: Police = protection service they’ve purchased through taxes

For desert-dwellers: Police = enforcement mechanism ensuring they can’t access water without payment

But the motto sounds like it applies equally to both.

This is the supermarché aesthetic:

Make State violence sound like:

  • Public service
  • Protection
  • Care
  • Benevolence

While obscuring that it’s actually:

  • Property enforcement
  • Hierarchy maintenance
  • Violence against the poor
  • Service to capital

Historical Evidence:

Look at what police actually do:

Protect property, not people:

  • Evict homeless from public spaces (protecting property from people)
  • Break strikes (protecting capital from labor)
  • Enforce evictions (protecting landlords from tenants)
  • Stop shoplifting (protecting merchandise from the hungry)
  • Clear encampments (protecting aesthetics from poverty)

When do police NOT protect?

  • Domestic violence (not property crime)
  • Rape (not property crime)
  • Wage theft (employers stealing from workers – almost never prosecuted)
  • Workplace safety violations (capital harming workers)
  • Environmental destruction (capital harming everyone)

Pattern: Police protect property. People are secondary at best.

The Motto’s Genius:

“To Protect and Serve” doesn’t specify:

  • Protect WHAT?
  • Serve WHOM?

This ambiguity is essential because it lets:

Lake-dwellers hear: “The police protect me and serve my interests”

Desert-dwellers hear: “The police protect me and serve my interests”

Reality: “The police protect property and serve those who have it”

But stating that plainly would reveal the function.

The Abattoir Version:

“State Violence Enforcement Division – We Protect Property Through Force”

Honest. Accurate. Everyone knows what police do.

The Supermarché Version:

“To Protect and Serve”

Clean. Benevolent. Obscures actual function.

Same violence. Much better branding.

Why This Completes the Thermodynamic Argument:

If police said: “We exist to violently enforce property arrangements and maintain hierarchy”

People might question that.

But “To Protect and Serve” makes police seem:

  • Necessary
  • Benevolent
  • For everyone’s benefit
  • Protecting “us” from “them” (criminals)

Now the desert-dwellers support the very mechanism that keeps them from the water.

They think: “I’m not a criminal. I support law and order. Police protect me.”

Meanwhile, police are:

  • Ensuring they can’t access water without payment
  • Enforcing contracts that extract their labor
  • Preventing collective action
  • Maintaining the property system that disadvantages them

But the motto makes this invisible.

The “Criminal” Category:

Notice how this works:

Criminal = person who violates property arrangements

Not: person who harms others

Evidence:

  • Stealing bread when hungry = criminal (property violation)
  • Wage theft by employer = civil matter (capital violating labor)
  • Sleeping on public bench = criminal (property violation – you don’t own space)
  • Bank causing financial crisis = too big to prosecute (capital harming millions)

Police protect against “criminals” (those who violate property), not against harm.

The Parable’s Police Force:

Desert-dweller steals water: Criminal. Arrested. Prosecuted.

  • Violated property
  • Police “served” them with consequences
  • Police “protected” the lake

Lake-dweller pays starvation wages: Legal. Protected. Enforced.

  • Honored contract
  • Police “protect” this arrangement
  • Police “serve” lake-dweller’s interests

Same motto covering completely opposite relationships to State violence.

Why No One Notices:

Because the motto is deliberately ambiguous.

And because most people never ask:

  • Protect what?
  • Serve whom?
  • In whose interests?

They hear “To Protect and Serve” and fill in: “…me, the individual citizen”

When it actually means: “…property arrangements and State apparatus”

The Foucauldian Dimension:

This is disciplinary power at its finest:

People internalize “law and order” as good for them.

They support police funding.

They want “tough on crime” policies.

Never realizing they’re funding the mechanism that:

  • Prevents them from accessing resources
  • Enforces their own exploitation
  • Maintains hierarchies that disadvantage them

They’ve been produced as subjects who demand their own domination.

The Linguistic Precision:

Notice the motto doesn’t say:

  • “To Protect YOU and Serve YOU”
  • “To Protect PEOPLE and Serve PEOPLE”

It says: “To Protect and Serve”

The objects are deliberately unspecified.

This lets everyone project their own interpretation while the actual function remains:

Protect property. Serve power.

The Supermarché Analogy, Completed:

Abattoir: “Violence Enforcement Department”

SupermarchĂ©: “To Protect and Serve”

Same function:

  • Maintain hierarchy through violence
  • Enforce property through force
  • Suppress resistance

Different presentation:

  • Sounds benevolent
  • Appears universal
  • Obscures class function
  • Makes participants feel protected rather than policed

The Historical Irony:

Police forces originated from:

  • Slave patrols (South)
  • Strike-breakers (North)
  • Colonial occupation forces (globally)

Their function has always been: Protect property, suppress resistance.

But “To Protect and Serve” makes it sound like: Community safety, public welfare.

Brilliant rebranding.

Why This Matters for Your Parable:

The lake-dwellers don’t just use State violence.

They brand State violence as public service.

“We’re not oppressing you! Look – we’re protecting and serving! Don’t you want law and order?”

And the desert-dwellers, internalizing this:

  • Support police funding (that enforces their own exploitation)
  • Demand “tough on crime” (that criminalizes their survival strategies)
  • Fear “criminals” (who are just people violating property arrangements)

They’ve been convinced that the mechanism oppressing them is protecting them.

The Thermodynamic Perfection:

Now you don’t need to convince desert-dwellers that police serve lake-dwellers’ interests.

You just need the ambiguous motto: “To Protect and Serve”

Desert-dwellers hear: protection for me

Lake-dwellers hear: enforcement for me

Both are funding the same system.

But only one benefits from it.

The Final Observation:

When police kill an unarmed Black person, or brutalize protesters, or clear homeless encampments—

The motto “To Protect and Serve” hasn’t failed.

It’s working exactly as designed.

Protecting: property, order, hierarchy

Serving: those who benefit from current arrangements

The error is thinking it ever meant: protect people, serve communities

It meant: Protect the State, serve power.

The abattoir said: “We enforce through violence.”

The supermarchĂ© says: “To Protect and Serve.”

Same violence. Better motto. Cleaner uniforms. More effective mystification.

And the desert-dwellers, seeing the clean uniforms and professional demeanor, think:

“These people protect me.”

While being protected from accessing water, protected from organizing, protected from challenging property, protected from survival outside market logic.

Protected, in other words, from freedom.

Served, in other words, with consequences for resistance.

All wrapped in a motto so benevolent, so vague, so perfectly ambiguous, that questioning it sounds like you oppose safety itself.

That’s not law enforcement.

That’s advertising.

The Enlightenment didn’t end State violence.

It just gave it a better slogan.

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Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis

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Cold, Aliens, and the Grammar That Thinks It Knows Too Much

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–3 minutes

I shared this post not too long ago. Today, I shared it in a different context, but I feel is interesting – because I feel that many things are interesting, especially around language and communication.

When Aliens Speak English: The False Promise of Linguistic Familiarity

It commenced here on Mastodon.

Ocrampal shared a link to an article debating whether we are cold or have cold. Different cultures express this differently. It’s short. Read it on his site.

Audio: Exceptional NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I replied to the post:

Nicely observed. I’ve pondered this myself. Small linguistic tweak: between ĂŞtre and avoir, avoir already behaves better metaphysically, but sentir seems the cleanest fit. Cold isn’t something one is or has so much as something one senses — a relational encounter rather than an ontological state or possession.

Between having and being, having is the lesser sin — but sensing/feeling feels truer. Cold belongs to the world; we merely sense it.

He replied in turn:

Agree except for: “Cold belongs to the world”. That is a metaphysical assumption that has consequences …

Finally (perhaps, penultimately), I responded:

Yes, it does. That statement was idiomatic, to express that ‘cold’ is environmental; we can’t be it or possess it. Coincidentally, I recently wrote about ‘cold’ in a different context:

where I link back to the post at the top of this article.

A more verbose version of this response might have been:

This pushback is fair, but I’m not trying to re-ontologise cold. “Belongs to the world” in that context is doing rhetorical, not metaphysical, work; it’s idiomatic.

The point isn’t that cold is a mind-independent substance waiting around like a rock. It’s that whatever cold is, it doesn’t sit comfortably as an identity predicate (‘I am…cold’ – ‘J’ai…froid‘) or a possession (‘I have…cold’ – so, not ‘Je suis…froid‘) – neither to be confused with ‘I have a cold’, a different animal altogether.

‘Sensing’ (‘I feel…cold’ – ‘Je me sens…froid‘ – we have to use the reflexive pronoun, me, here; in English, this syntax has been deprecated) keeps the relation explicit without smuggling in ownership or essence. It leaves cold as an encounter-property, not a thing I contain and not a thing I am.

If anything, that phrasing was meant to resist metaphysical inflation, not commit to it.

And this is exactly the problem I gestured at in the aliens piece. We mistake familiar grammatical scaffolding for shared metaphysics. We assume that if the sentence parses cleanly, the ontology must be sound.

Language doesn’t just describe experience. It quietly files it into categories and then acts surprised when those categories start making demands.

Cold, like aliens, exposes the trick. The moment you slow down, the grammar starts to wobble. And that wobble is doing far more philosophical work than most of our declarative sentences are willing to admit.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Post Everything: Notes on Prefix Fatigue

Posted in identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

I’m no fan of labels, yet I accumulate them like a cheap suit:

Post-modern. Post-human. Post-enlightenment.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Apparently, I’m so far post that I may soon loop back into prehistoric.

But what’s with the “post” in post? A prefix with delusions of grandeur. A small syllable that believes it can close an epoch. Surely, it’s a declaration – the end of modernity, humanity, enlightenment. The final curtain, with the stagehands already sweeping the Enlightenment’s broken props into the wings.

Sort of. More like the hangover. Post marks the morning after – when the wine’s gone, the ideals have curdled, and the party’s guests insist they had a marvellous time. It’s not the end of the thing, merely the end of believing in it.

Have we ever been modern? Latour asked the same question, though most readers nodded sagely and went back to their iPhones. Modernity was supposed to liberate us from superstition, hierarchy, and bad lighting. Instead, we built glass temples for algorithms and called it progress. We’re not post-modern – we’re meta-medieval, complete with priestly influencers and algorithmic indulgences.

Can a human even be post-human? Only if the machines have the decency to notice. We talk about transcending biology while still incapable of transcending breakfast. We’ve built silicon mirrors and called them salvation, though what stares back is just the same old hunger – quantised, gamified, and monetised.

And post-enlightenment – how does that work? The light didn’t go out; it just got privatised. The Enlightenment’s sun still shines, but now you need a subscription to bask in it. Its universal reason has become a paywalled blog with “premium truth” for discerning subscribers.

The tragedy of post is that it always flatters the speaker. To call oneself post-anything is to smuggle in the claim of awareness: I have seen through the illusion; I am after it. Yet here I am, a serial offender, parading my prefixes like medals for wars never fought.

So, what other posts might I be missing?

  • Post-truth. The phrase itself a confession that truth was a brief, ill-fated experiment. We don’t reject it so much as outsource it.
  • Post-ideological. Usually said by someone with a very loud ideology and a very short memory.
  • Post-colonial. A hopeful label, but the empires still collect rent—digitally, algorithmically, politely.
  • Post-gender. Another mirage: we declared the binary dead and then resurrected it for sport.
  • Post-capitalist. Spoken mostly by people tweeting from iPhones about the end of money.
  • Post-ironic. The point where irony becomes sincerity again out of sheer exhaustion.

We could go on: post-religious, post-political, post-work, post-language, post-reality. Eventually, we’ll arrive at post-post, the Möbius strip of intellectual despair, where each prefix feeds upon the previous until nothing remains but the syntax of self-importance.

Perhaps it’s time to drop the “post” altogether and admit we’re not beyond anything. We’re stuck within—inside the compost heap of our own unfinished projects. Every “post” is a failed obituary. The modern keeps dying but refuses to stay dead, haunting us through progress reports and TED talks.

Maybe what we need isn’t post but inter: inter-modern, inter-human, inter-light—something that acknowledges the mess of entanglement rather than the fantasy of departure.

Because if there’s one thing the “post” reveals, it’s our pathological need for closure. We crave the comfort of endings, the illusion of progress, the satisfaction of having “moved on.” But culture doesn’t move on; it metastasises. The prefix is just morphine for the modern condition—a linguistic palliative to ease the pain of continuity.

So yes, I’m guilty. I’ve worn these risible labels. I’ve brandished post like a scholar’s rosary, invoking it to ward off the naïveté of belief. Yet beneath the cynicism lies a quiet longing—for an actual after, for the possibility that one day something might really end, leaving room for whatever comes next.

Until then, we keep prefixing the apocalypse, hoping to stay ahead of it by one small syllable.

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by Bry Willis

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Metamodernism: A Postmodern Critique

Posted in art, identity, language, modernism, perception, philosophy, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The genesis of the Modernity Worldview Survey was Metamodernism. Is this still a thing? In recent years, metamodernism has emerged as a supposed successor to postmodernism, claiming to transcend the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony. Yet, upon closer examination, this framework reveals itself not as a genuine paradigm shift but rather as a modernist invention that fails to escape the very critiques it attempts to address.

Video: Introduction to Modernity Worldview Survey concepts

The Modernist Roots of Metamodernism

Despite its claims of oscillation between poles, metamodernism betrays its modernist underpinnings through its implicit teleology and notion of progress. The very framing of “meta” as beyond or transcending suggests a linear progression that is fundamentally at odds with the postmodern rejection of grand narratives. Metamodernism positions itself as forward-moving whilst attempting to recapture elements of premodernity, revealing an anxiety about being perceived as regressive or naive.

Podcast: Audio version of this content

This desire to have it both ways—to acknowledge the constructed nature of meaning whilst still pursuing transcendent meaning—doesn’t represent a resolution so much as a psychological coping mechanism. The cognitive dissonance created by attempting to simultaneously hold contradictory positions is assuaged through a clever rhetorical move: claiming that oscillation itself is the point.

A Rebranding Exercise

What metamodernism presents as novel is ultimately a recombination of elements from premodern, modern, and postmodern frameworks without resolving their fundamental contradictions. Rather than being mutually exclusive from these earlier paradigms, it cherry-picks aspects of each whilst maintaining the basic ontological framework of modernism.

The notion that one can meaningfully “oscillate” between accepting objective and subjective realities is particularly problematic. Either reality has objective features, or it doesn’t—pretending otherwise doesn’t create a new philosophical paradigm but rather a convenient means of avoiding the implications of either position.

Postmodern Irony in Motion

Perhaps the most intriguing interpretation of metamodernism is not as a sincere attempt to move beyond postmodernism but as postmodernism performing its own critique. Viewed through this lens, metamodernism becomes postmodern irony in motion—a knowing wink at the impossibility of escaping construction whilst performatively engaging with the desire to do so.

The irony deepens when we consider that “postmodernism” itself is essentially an externally imposed label rather than a self-identification. Most thinkers characterised as postmodernists reject the label, which functions primarily as a modernist attempt to categorise and contain ideas that fundamentally challenge its frameworks.

Art vs. Philosophy

Where metamodernism succeeds is as a descriptive label for certain artistic and cultural productions that deliberately play in the space between irony and sincerity. Works like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” the television series “BoJack Horseman,” and Wes Anderson’s films effectively combine postmodern techniques with sincere emotional engagement.

However, what works as an artistic sensibility fails as a comprehensive philosophical framework or moral compass. The oscillation that enriches art becomes paralysing when applied to ethics or ontology. A moral framework requires some stable reference points; constantly shifting between believing in objective moral truths and viewing morality as entirely constructed provides no reliable guide for actual decision-making.

Insider vs. Outsider Perspectives

Like religious frameworks that balance literal and metaphorical interpretations, metamodernism may function as a lived experience for those who embrace it, even if it doesn’t hold up to external philosophical scrutiny. The cognitive manoeuvres that appear as tricks or inconsistencies to outsiders often feel like natural, intuitive ways of navigating complexity to those within the system.

This insider/outsider divide recalls Thomas Nagel’s famous “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (PDF) thought experiment—there may be experiential aspects of inhabiting a metamodern worldview that aren’t fully comprehensible from the outside. Yet this doesn’t invalidate external critique; inconsistencies and contradictions still matter philosophically.

Conclusion: Beyond Labels

Perhaps the most postmodern insight is recognising that we cannot escape having an ideology—even a position of having no ideology is itself an ideology. What distinguishes various approaches isn’t whether they have ideologies but how explicitly they acknowledge them, how consistently they apply them, and how willing they are to subject them to revision.

Metamodernism, for all its aspirations to transcend earlier frameworks, ultimately reveals more about our contemporary psychological condition than it offers as a coherent philosophical position. It captures our desire to maintain meaning in a world where we’ve recognised its contingency—a desire that may be fundamentally human, even if philosophically untenable.

Rather than seeking yet another “-ism” to resolve our existential and philosophical tensions, perhaps we might more honestly confront the limitations and partialities of all our frameworks, recognising that the search for a perfect synthesis may itself be a modernist fantasy.