It takes me days to index one of my books. Longer when the technology decides to become sentient in the worst possible way, such as the time InDesign corrupted the index file and swallowed days of work whole. A charming little reminder that software is often just bureaucracy with buttons.
Audio: Not the best NotebookLM summary podcast, but it’s mercifully under 5 minutes.
Today, while chatting with Claude (Opus 4.6), I mentioned that I should probably create an index for my current project. The manuscript is not fully reviewed and revised, but it is getting close. At this stage, I do not expect to add much of substance. I am more likely to subtract than expand.
Claude asked whether I wanted help generating a list of candidate terms from the manuscript.
Dois-je rédiger une liste de termes candidats à partir du manuscrit ?
I said yes, and it produced an embedded PDF: Index Term List – Architecture of Encounter. On first scan, it looks remarkably close to what I need. It is not merely a term list, either. It also proposes candidates for glossary entries, which is useful, even if I am not yet convinced I want to add a glossary. The book is already sitting at around 256 pages, and print production costs do not exactly reward philosophical generosity. The draft organises terms into five sections, including framework-specific technical vocabulary, inherited philosophical terms, proper names, traditions and programmes, and application domains and diagnostics. It also marks some entries as glossary candidates and notes likely cross-references.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
One amusing detail is that some of the suggested references relate to epigraphs. I had not really considered indexing those. My inclination is still not to include them, but I admit the temptation is there.
The categorisation itself is also interesting. It makes a good deal of sense as a conceptual map or discovery tool, especially for a larger work. But it does not quite align with what most readers expect from an index, which is, bluntly, alphabetical and easy to raid.
Still, as a starting point, this is rather better than staring into the manuscript and pretending I enjoy this sort of thing.
Some people like to badmouth or trash-talk AI. I’m here to say that these people need to discover nuance and use cases.
Wait for it… This parodies the use of language to sidestep Constitutional inconveniences. In the game show format, we learn what is and isn’t a war. Wittgenstein would be proud.
Video: Short parody asks the question, Is it war?
Watch this and build up your English language vocabulary.
There is a vulgar little myth still circulating among the managerial classes that capitalism, for all its blemishes, is at least good at ‘unlocking human potential’. It is not. It is very good at monetising human potential, disciplining it, redirecting it, and, where necessary, grinding it into forms useful to administration and exchange. This is not quite the same thing.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
One of capitalism’s less discussed achievements is its ability to rob society not merely of comfort, leisure, health, and life, but of minds. Not always by censorship. Not always by prison or direct prohibition. More often by something duller and therefore more effective: fatigue, schedules, rent, invoices, commuting, institutional obedience, and the constant low-grade humiliation of having to sell the best hours of one’s life in order to remain housed and fed.
Franz Kafka is the obvious mascot for this arrangement, which is precisely why he matters. He worked in insurance. The office consumed the day; the writing had to happen in the ruins of the night. His bureaucratic life helped furnish the atmosphere of his fiction, certainly. Human beings do enjoy confusing damage with justification. But the point is not that the office was somehow good for Kafka because it gave him material. A prison may furnish one with subject matter, too. That does not make incarceration a residency programme. Kafka’s employment constrained the very work for which he is remembered. The miracle is not the arrangement. The miracle is that anything survived it. And Kafka was not unusual in kind. He was merely famous enough to make the violence legible.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Capitalism’s defenders like to point to the artists and thinkers who produced great work while employed, underpaid, exhausted, or cornered by necessity. Fine. Let us grant them their exhibit. Bukowski had the post office. Pessoa had commercial correspondence. Einstein had the patent office. One can add a hundred more names with minimal effort and maximal melancholy. Yet this proves the opposite of what the defenders want it to prove. It shows that some people managed to create despite the arrangement, not because of it.
This is the first confusion worth clearing away. There is no symbiosis here. At best, there is a kind of reverse symbiosis, a parasitic bargain. The job steals the time and energy required for serious work, while art scavenges from the psychic wreckage whatever it can still use. The worker is depleted; the artwork is composed from depletion. Critics then arrive later, pince-nez trembling, to tell us how fruitful this tension was. Fruitful for whom? Certainly not for the unwritten books, the undeveloped theories, the unfinished scores, or the painter dead too early to become collectible.
That, in fact, is the real question. Not which celebrated figures managed to drag a masterpiece out of economic adversity, but which works never appeared at all.
We are asked, constantly, to admire the canon. We are less often asked to consider the anti-canon: the archive of the unmade. The novel that never got written because its author spent thirty years in clerical work. The philosophy never developed because its possible author was too busy meeting payroll. The music that belonged to a particular age, a particular voice, a particular historical moment, could not simply be written forty years later by a different self under improved circumstances.
This is one of capitalism’s cleverest vanishing acts. It leaves behind no body when it kills a possibility. The unwritten book does not appear in mortality statistics. The lost symphony produces no coroner’s report. The poem abandoned in favour of stable employment is not entered into the national accounts as a dead thing. GDP ticks on, cheerful and imbecilic, while whole modes of life are silently foreclosed.
Some will object that artists have always depended on subsidy. Quite right. That objection destroys rather more than it saves. Van Gogh depended on Theo. Marx depended for years on Engels. Tchaikovsky had patronage. Virginia Woolf, unlike millions of women before her, had both money and a room of her own, and had the clarity to state the matter plainly. The lesson is not that genius floats free of material conditions. The lesson is the reverse: culture has always depended heavily on someone, somewhere, being shielded from the full stupidity of economic necessity.
This means the canon is not a clean record of merit. It is also a record of subsidy, exemption, accident, family money, patrons, tolerant spouses, sinecures, inherited cushion, and occasional institutional slack. In short, it is partly a record of who had enough protection from the market to do something other than kneel before it. The rest, meanwhile, are told a moral fable about hard work.
This is where the sentimental cliché about the ‘starving artist’ should be discarded with force. There is nothing noble about preventable exhaustion. There is nothing spiritually elevating about watching one’s better projects dry out from lack of time. There is certainly nothing socially rational about a civilisation organised in such a way that its most reflective, gifted, or aesthetically sensitive members must defer their work until retirement, ill health, or redundancy grants them a little stolen air.
One might respond that practical life gives artists experience. True enough. So does grief. So does war. So does prison. Experience is not the issue. The issue is the conversion rate. If one must surrender decades of one’s most fertile attention in exchange for a modest accumulation of usable material, the return is abysmal. The economist might call this poor ROI. The philosopher might call it structural stupidity. The artist, if still awake, may call it theft. And the theft is not merely personal. It is civilisational.
A society that forces most of its creative and intellectual life into the margins should not flatter itself for the masterpieces that occasionally emerge. It should be haunted by the scale of what never did. For every Kafka who wrote at night, how many did not? For every theorist supported by patronage or inheritance, how many more were processed into middle management, consultancy, administration, compliance, sales, logistics, and the thousand dead dialects of modern necessity? How many minds were not defeated in argument, but merely preoccupied into silence?
The answer, of course, is unknowable. Which is convenient for the system because what cannot be counted can be dismissed, and what can be dismissed can be repeated indefinitely.
Capitalism’s admirers are fond of innovation. They should spend less time praising the gadgets that reached market and more time mourning the consciousness that never reached form. Not every loss is a corpse. Some losses are libraries that never came into being. Some are paintings that remained latent in the hands of the overworked. Some are ideas that would have altered the climate of a discipline had their author not been busy earning a living.
The old accusation that capitalism exploits labour is true enough, but it is no longer adequate. It exploits labour, yes. It also colonises attention, cannibalises vocation, and narrows the range of what a culture is permitted to become. It does not merely take from workers. It takes from history. And then it calls the remainder efficiency.
I’m a philosopher of language, which sometimes veers off the reservation into philosophies of science and even metaphilosophy, but I am not a physicist. I don’t pretend to be. I do try to remain abreast of the goings-on in physics and science just because. Still, I view most affairs first through a philosophical lens.
I watch a decent amount of science videos on YouTube, and I’ve been following Rovelli for years, but I hadn’t engaged with his work directly until I was researching for my current book, The Architect of Encounter. First, I read The Order of Time, followed by Reality Is Not What It Seems.
Rovelli published these books around 2017, but I am only reading them now. We are travelling in the same neighbourhood, but we occupy different residences and have different orientations.
Surveying the marketplace, quite a few physicists and science educators make some of the same points I and Rovelli make. In fact, these things appear to occur as trends. When I wanted to write about agency and free will over five years ago, I noticed a slew of books on the topics, and I had nothing more to add, so I shelved the idea.
In this case, the trend appears to have been between 2017 and 2018. I’m sure this is where I absorbed some of my knowledge, opinions, and grammar, but my thesis goes further and comes from a different perspective, so I feel this manuscript is worth publishing.
Getting back to Rovelli, his books are very well written – very approachable and light on the academics. I hope mine lands somewhere in the middle. As I continue to write my book, I will lean on Rovelli for the perspective on quantum theory. If he’s wrong or it’s wrong, then we fall together. That’s what happens when you borrow a foundational commitment. It’s a risk I am willing to take.
As much as I want to share more of what I am working on, it turns out I still need to work on it if I want to complete it. I am aiming for April this year, if not sooner. At least I’ve got some of the administrative stuff out of the way. Here’s a quick glimpse, title and copyright pages.
How Modern Thought Mistakes Its Own Grid for Reality
Modern thought has a peculiar habit.
It builds a measuring device, forces the world through it, and then congratulates itself for discovering what the world is really like.
This is not always called scientism. Sometimes it is called rigour, precision, formalism, standardisation, operationalisation, modelling, or progress. The names vary. The structure does not. First comes the instrument. Then comes the simplification. Then comes the quiet metaphysical sleight of hand by which the simplification is promoted into reality itself.
Consider music.
A drummer lays down a part with slight drag, push, looseness, tension. It breathes. It leans. It resists the metronome just enough to sound alive. Then someone opens Pro Tools and quantises it. The notes snap to grid. The beat is now ‘correct’. It is also, very often, dead.
This is usually treated as an aesthetic dispute between old romantics and modern technicians. It is more than that. It is a parable.
Quantisation is not evil because it imposes structure. Every recording process imposes structure. The problem is what happens next. Once the grid has done its work, people begin to hear the grid not as a tool, but as truth. Timing that exceeds it is heard as error. The metric scaffold becomes the criterion of reality.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
A civilisation can live like this.
It can begin with a convenience and end with an ontology.
Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time is useful here precisely because it unsettles the fantasy that time is a single smooth substance flowing uniformly everywhere like some celestial click-track. It is not. Time frays. It dilates. It varies by frame, relation, and condition. Space, too, loses its old role as passive container. The world begins to look less like a neat box of coordinates and more like an unruly field of relations that only reluctantly tolerates our diagrams.
This ought to induce some modesty. Instead, modern disciplines often respond by doubling down on the diagram.
That is where James C. Scott arrives, carrying the whole argument in a wheelbarrow. Seeing Like a State is not merely about states. It is about the administrative desire to make the world legible by reducing it to formats that can be counted, organised, compared, and controlled. Forests become timber reserves. People become census entries. Places become parcels. Lives become cases. The simplification is not wholly false. It is simply tailored to the needs of governance rather than to the fullness of what is governed.
That’s the key.
The state does not need the world in its density. It needs the world in a format it can read.
And modern disciplines are often no different. They require stable units, repeatable measures, abstract comparability, portable standards. Fair enough. No one is conducting physics with incense and pastoral reverie. But then comes the familiar conceit: what was required for the practice quietly becomes what reality is said to be. The discipline first builds the bed for its own survival, then condemns the world for failing to lie down properly.
Cut off what exceeds the frame. Stretch what falls short. Call the result necessity.
Many supposed paradoxes begin here. Not in reality itself, but in the overreach of a measuring grammar.
I use a ruler to measure temperature, and I am surprised when it does not comport.
The example is absurd, which is why it is helpful. The absurdity is not in the temperature. It’s in the category mistake. Yet much of modern thought survives by committing more sophisticated versions of precisely this error. We use tools built for extension to interpret process. We use spatial metaphors to capture time. We use statistical flattening to speak of persons. We use administrative categories to speak of communities. We use computational tractability to speak of mind. Then the thing resists, and we call the resistance mysterious.
Sometimes it is not mysterious at all. Sometimes it is merely refusal.
The world declines to be exhausted by the terms under which we can most easily manage it.
That refusal then returns to us under grander names: paradox, irrationality, inconsistency, noise, anomaly. But what if the anomaly is only the residue of what our instruments were built to exclude? What if paradox is often the bruise left by an ill-fitted measure?
This is where realism, at least in its chest-thumping modern form, begins to look suspicious. Not because there is no world. There is clearly something that resists us, constrains us, embarrasses us, punishes bad maps, and ruins bad theories. The issue is not whether there is a real. The issue is whether what we call “the real” is too often just what our current apparatus can stabilise.
That is not realism.
That is successful compression mistaken for ontology.
Space and time, in this light, begin to look less like the universe’s native grammar and more like the interface through which a certain kind of finite creature renders the world tractable. Useful, yes. Necessary for us, perhaps. Final? hardly.
The same applies everywhere. We do not merely measure the world. We reshape it, conceptually and institutionally, until it better fits our preferred methods of seeing. Then we forget we did this.
Scott’s lesson is that states fail when they confuse legibility with understanding. Our broader civilisational lesson may be that disciplines fail in much the same way. They flatten in order to know, and then mistake the flattening for disclosure. What exceeds the frame is dismissed until it returns as contradiction.
None of this requires anti-scientific melodrama. Science is powerful. Measurement is indispensable. Standardisation is often the price of cumulative knowledge. The problem is not the existence of the grid. The problem is the promotion of the grid into metaphysics. A tool required for a practice is not therefore the native structure of the world. That should be obvious. It rarely is.
Scientism, in its most irritating form, begins precisely where this obviousness ends. It is not disciplined inquiry but disciplinary inflation: the belief that whatever can be rendered formally legible is most real, and whatever resists is merely awaiting capture by better instruments, finer models, sharper equations, more obedient categories. It is the provincial fantasy that the universe must ultimately speak in the accent of our methods.
Perhaps it doesn’t.
Perhaps our great achievement is not that we have discovered reality’s final language, but that we have become unusually good at mistaking our translations for the original.
I’ve been writing. In fact, I’ve been clarifying A Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and expanding and extending it into a book with a broader remit. This might well be the cover, following the monograph layout for Philosophics Press.
Image: Mockup of cover art.
As shown, the working title is The Architecture of Encounter: A Mediate Encounter Ontology. I’ve swapped the slate cover for a magenta in this volume.
So what’s it all about?
I’m not going to summarise the book here, but I’ll share some tidbits. I’ve settled on these chapter names:
The Mediated Encounter Ontology
Ontology
Subjecthood
Logic
Epistemology
Perception and Affordances
Language
Social Ontology
Realism
Application
The Normativity Frontier
Conclusion
Chapter 1, The Mediated Encounter Ontology, is a summary and update of the original essay, which will be included in full as an appendix item for reference, but this update will become canonical.
Chapter 2, Ontology: Interaction, Constraint, and the Rejection of Substance, will describe what I mean by ontology and what my proposed ontology looks like.
Chapter 3, Subjecthood: Modal Differentiation Within the Field, will explain how the subject-object relationship changes, and what a subject is in the first place.
Chapter 4, Logic: Coherence Grammar Under Constraint, will explain what logic is and how it operates in this paradigm.
Chapter 5, Epistemology: Convergence, Error, and the Structure of Justification, will describe what knowledge looks like. IYKYK.
Chapter 6, Perception and Affordances: Encounter as Orientation, extends Gibson’s work to comport with MEOW 2.0 (or 1.1).
Chapter 7, Language: Synchronisation, Ontological Grammar, and Structural Limits, explains how language works and how it limits our perception. We’re not talking Sapir-Whorf here, but what respectable language philosopher wouldn’t reserve a chapter for language?
Chapter 8, Social Ontology: Second-Order Constraint Systems. MEOW has a lot to say about first-order constraints, but there are higher-order considerations. I discuss them here.
Chapter 9, Realism: Cross-Perspectival Convergence and the Invariant Anchor, talks about the real elephant in the room. Since MEOW challenges both realism and idealism, we need to talk about it.
Chapter 10, Application: The Apophatic Mind, is mostly an observation on artificial intelligence as it relates to the mind-consciousness debate, primarily scoped around LLMs and similar machine processes.
Chapter 11. The Normativity Frontier, doesn’t yet have a subtitle, but this is where I discuss issues like normative ethics and morality.
I probably don’t need to tell you how Conclusion chapters work.
I expect to have 3 appendices.
Summary of commitments, which will summarise and distil key topics – so like a cheat sheet for reference – a bit more robust than a glossary.
Bibliography of reference material. As this is not an essay, it won’t be chock-full of citations – only a few, where I feel they are necessary. Much of this work represents years of thinking, and in many cases, the attribution has been lost; I remember the contents and not necessarily the attribution. I will prompt AI to fill in some missing pieces, but that’s that. The bibliography attempts to capture the general flavour.
The original MEOW essay. This is already freely available on several platforms, including Zenodo. Download it here if you haven’t already – or wait for the book.
The rest of the story
This book not only extends MEOW, but it also ties in concepts from A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and other of my already published and yet unpublished work.
I expect to produce a decent amount of explanatory and support material, though to be fair, I tell myself that every time until I get distracted by the next project. I need a producer to manage these affairs.
NB: When I wrote ‘everything’, I meant ‘every nominal language reference’.
Lakoff, Wittgenstein, and the Quiet Collapse of Literal Language
Philosophers have long comforted themselves with a tidy distinction: some language is literal, and some language is metaphorical. Literal language names things as they are; metaphor merely dresses thought in rhetorical clothing.
The trouble begins when one looks more closely at how language actually works.
Two very different thinkers – George Lakoff and Ludwig Wittgenstein – approach the problem from opposite directions. Yet taken together, their ideas produce a rather awkward conclusion: the category of metaphor may collapse under its own success.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
EDIT: The algorithm gods served me this Substack article as I was writing this. I share it now because the author and I exchanged thoughts. Check it out.
Lakoff’s Problem: Metaphor All the Way Down
George Lakoff’s work on conceptual metaphor starts with a deceptively simple claim: metaphor is not merely a stylistic flourish. It is part of the structure of thought itself. We do not merely speak metaphorically. We think metaphorically.
Consider a few familiar examples:
ARGUMENT IS WAR: We attack positions, defend claims, demolish arguments.
TIME IS MONEY: We spend time, waste time, invest time.
LOVE IS A JOURNEY: Relationships stall, partners move forward together, or reach dead ends.
Lakoff’s point is not that these are poetic expressions. Rather, these metaphors organise how we reason about abstract domains. They structure cognition itself. So far, so interesting.
But once one notices how pervasive such mappings are, a problem begins to appear. If abstract reasoning depends on metaphorical projection from embodied experience, then metaphor is not a special case of language. It is the normal case. Literal language starts to look suspiciously rare.
The miracle is not that language fails sometimes. The miracle is that it works at all.
Wittgenstein’s Problem: Words Without Essences
Wittgenstein arrives at a similar discomfort by a different route.
In the Philosophical Investigations, he dismantles the idea that words gain meaning by pointing to fixed essences. Instead, meaning arises from use within human practices.
His famous example is the word game. Board games, sports, children’s play, gambling, solitary puzzles. Try to identify the essence shared by all games and the category dissolves. What remains are overlapping similarities – what he calls family resemblances.
The word functions perfectly well in practice, yet no clean boundary defines its referent.
The implication is unsettling: even apparently straightforward nouns do not correspond to neat natural categories. They operate as practical shortcuts within forms of life.
Language works not because it mirrors the world precisely, but because communities stabilise usage long enough to get through the day.
The Awkward Intersection
Place Lakoff beside Wittgenstein and something odd happens. Lakoff shows that abstract reasoning depends on metaphorical structure. Wittgenstein shows that even ordinary categories lack fixed essences. The combined result is difficult to ignore: the supposedly literal core of language begins to evaporate.
Take a simple word like cat. It seems literal enough. Yet the world does not present us with tidy metaphysical units labelled CAT. What we encounter are patterns of behaviour, morphology, and recognition. The word compresses a complex set of experiences into a convenient symbol.
In practice, cat functions as a stand-in for a stabilised pattern within human life. It is a conceptual shortcut — a linguistic token that represents a distributed cluster of features. In other words, even the most ordinary noun already behaves suspiciously like a metaphor.
The Reductio
If Lakoff is right that much of thought is metaphorically structured, and Wittgenstein is right that categories lack fixed essences, the traditional contrast between literal and metaphorical language becomes unstable.
Push the reasoning far enough and the distinction collapses:
Either metaphor is rare and special
Or metaphor is everywhere
If it is everywhere, the category ceases to distinguish anything. It becomes like describing fish as “wet creatures.” Accurate, but not especially illuminating. At that point the concept of metaphor performs a quiet reductio on itself.
What Survives the Collapse
Fortunately, the collapse of the literal–metaphorical boundary does not render language useless. It merely changes how we understand it.
Words are not mirrors of reality. They are tools for coordinating experience. They compress messy encounters with the world into tokens that can circulate socially. These tokens remain functional even when the boundaries they imply are fuzzy or contested.
Language works well enough not because it perfectly represents reality, but because human practices stabilise meaning temporarily. Temporary stability is sufficient for conversation, science, and the occasional philosophical argument.
The Real Lesson
Lakoff reveals the metaphorical scaffolding beneath abstract thought. Wittgenstein shows that even ordinary categories rest on shifting ground. Together they suggest something rather humbling.
Language is not a system of precise mirrors reflecting the world. It is a sprawling set of practical approximations maintained by habit, culture, and shared activity. The miracle is not that language fails sometimes. The miracle is that it works at all.
Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis
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)
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”
Supermarché: “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 supermarché 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.
Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis
This is the part where I announce my latest book, When Language Fails. I anticipate publishing more content related to the ideas put forth presently.
Marketing Blurb
Some conflicts persist not because we refuse to listen, but because we inhabit different worlds.
Why do some arguments never resolve? Why do intelligent people talk past one another, armed with the same words but reaching incompatible conclusions?
In When Language Fails, philosopher Bry Willis argues that these impasses are not simply the result of poor reasoning or bad faith. They are structural. Building on his earlier work, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Willis contends that certain concepts fail to converge because they arise from different ontological grammars—distinct, historically sedimented frameworks that shape what counts as real, coherent, and meaningful.
What appears to be irrationality is often misalignment. What feels like moral failure may be ontological divergence.
Moving beneath surface disagreement, When Language Fails explores the limits of translation between conceptual worlds. Drawing on philosophy of language, hermeneutics, and social theory, Willis challenges the assumption that clearer definitions or better arguments will always bridge divides.
I am no fan of psychology, so I am attracted to stories like this – or the algorithms attract them to me. This article lays out the evidence that psychopathy doesn’t exist. By extension, sociopathy shouldn’t exist, since it’s effectively an extension of psychopathy. If unicorns don’t exist, neither do unicorn horns. In fact, one might look backwards to note that the psychopathy of unicorns doesn’t exist, nor does psychology (unicorn farms). Of course, this is faulty logic, but I’m running with it.
Philosophics 