Socio-political philosophical musings
A longer post about my thoughts after having read the first section of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
‘woman’ is a normative identity, and like all normative identities it is striated. It is composed of putative essences, recurring structural constraints, intersectional positions, cohort-relative projections, subjective inhabitations, and external gatekeeping.
No post today, as I was drafting a long-form article that I felt was better suited for Substack.
You’ve had the argument. Everyone has. You present evidence. Your interlocutor presents counter-evidence. You cite data. They cite different data – or the same data, read differently. Eventually, someone says something like how can you possibly believe that, and the conversation is effectively over, though the words might continue for another hour.
What’s left is the quiet conviction that the other person is either ignorant, stupid, or arguing in bad faith. Perhaps all three. And you can be certain they’re extending you precisely the same courtesy.
I want to suggest that something structurally different is going on – something that none of the usual explanations (media bubbles, declining education, algorithmic polarisation) quite reach. These explanations aren’t wrong, but they’re shallow. They describe accelerants. The thing they’re accelerating is more foundational.
This essay draws on ideas developed more fully in The Architecture of Encounter, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, and the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) framework (also available in The Architecture of Encounter). Also check out When Language Fails. For the technically inclined or the morbidly curious, these provide the formal apparatus behind the claims sketched here.
The trolley problem’s borrowed ontology was already philosophically dubious in the seminar room. It becomes materially dangerous when compiled into autonomous systems, because assumptions that once guided thought experiments now govern conduct without appeal.
The first essay argued that the trolley problem is not a neutral moral test but a borrowed ontological grammar. It preformats the scene before reasoning begins, then invites us to mistake compliance with its terms for moral insight. All of that was bad enough when confined to philosophy seminars and undergraduate anguish.
It’s even worse now. Grammar has escaped the classroom. It’s been formalised, compiled, and deployed in systems that make decisions about who lives and who dies. And it wasn’t adopted because it is morally sound. It was adopted because it’s formally legible. Legibility rears its ugly head.
Autonomous systems don’t inherit trolley logic because no one’s examined it and found it adequate to the moral world. They inherit it because it’s the sort of ontology a machine can process: discretised, scalar, optimisable. Computational tractability is not a neutral filter. It selects for ontologies that can be ranked and calculated, and discards what can’t. Trolley grammar survives not on but on formatability. The philosophical problems didn’t get solved. They got encoded.
The autonomous vehicle ethics literature is, for the most part, the trolley problem with a chassis bolted on.
Public debate still poses the same stale questions in a shinier casing: one pedestrian or five, passenger or crowd, young or old, many or few. These dominate media headlines and a remarkable number of engineering white papers. They are also, without exception, trolley questions – which means they carry every presupposition the first essay indicted.
They assume:
And they assume all of this so completely that the engineering literature rarely pauses to ask whether any of it’s true. It simply proceeds as though the ontology were settled, because – and let’s be honest here – for computational purposes, it has to be.
This is the quiet scandal. The trolley grammar wasn’t scrutinised and then selected. It was convenient and so inherited. Engineers needed inputs that could be discretised, outputs that could be ranked, and an objective function that could be minimised. The trolley ontology arrived pre-packaged for exactly that specification. The fit was not philosophical. It was architectural. Funny, that.
In the trolley problem, the chooser was at least a fiction of agency – a staged human making a staged decision in real time. That fiction was already problematic. In the autonomous vehicle, even that residual theatre is over.
The ‘decision’ about who to hit, who to spare, and what to optimise isn’t made at the moment of impact. It’s made months or years before – in a design meeting, a spec document, a policy gradient, a loss function. The human chooser doesn’t disappear so much as retreat upstream, where moral judgement is converted into a spec and then forgotten as a latent judgment.
The engineer who writes the objective function is, in a meaningful sense, the person pulling the lever – though not likely culpable or legally liable. In my accounting, they should be, but they don’t experience themselves that way. They experience themselves as solving a technical problem, which it is… among other things. The moral content of their decisions is dissolved into parameters, weights, and optimisation targets, at which point it becomes invisible as moral content. The judgment is still there – baked into code, where it executes without renewed deliberation, without situational awareness, without the capacity to recognise an exception. The trolley problem’s fictional chooser has found their ideal form – not a person at all, but a function call.
This is where the original essay’s diagnosis turns actively dangerous. In the seminar room, commensurability was a presupposition one could interrogate; could refuse; could argue that lives are not the sort of thing that submit to arithmetic, and the worst that happened was a lively tutorial. In engineering, commensurability isn’t a presupposition. It’s a precondition. See James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State.
You can’t write a decision algorithm without assigning comparable values to outcomes. To optimise, you need a scalar or a ranking. To rank, you need commensurable outputs. The system can’t tolerate genuine incommensurability – not because incommensurability is philosophically wrong, but because it is computationally intractable. So what was once a dubious metaphysical assumption becomes an architectural necessity.
The same structure appears in algorithmic triage. A hospital system designed to allocate ventilators during a crisis must score patients on factors like age, comorbidities, projected survival, and so on. Each patient becomes a datum. Each datum enters a ranking, which produces an allocation, which determines who breathes. In some political circles, these might have been cast as death panels. Every step in that chain requires the commensurability that the trolley grammar simply assumed and that the first essay argued was never justified. The machine demands the ontology that the philosopher merely entertained.
And here is the cruelty of it all. In the seminar, you could resist the grammar. You could say: ‘These lives are not commensurable’, ‘this comparison is malformed’, or ‘I refuse the maths’. The system can’t refuse the ontology it was built to execute. It’ll compute within the borrowed grammar until it’s switched off or until someone it couldn’t see is killed by an assumption nobody thought to question.
Everything the first essay identified as absent from the trolley grammar – context, relationship, role, history, the embeddedness of actual moral life – is not merely missing from the autonomous system. It’s structurally excluded by the requirements of the platform.
Role and obligation. Narrative history. Situated responsibility. Relational asymmetry. Tacit social meaning. Unquantified vulnerability. The possibility that not all harms belong in one metric space at all, ad infinitum… None of these can be rendered as a tractable variable, and what can’t be rendered as a tractable variable isn’t weighed lightly…or at all. Humans bask in their hubris, the purported ability to tame complexity, but their track record tells a different story.
My first essay noted that the trolley problem’s chooser was stripped of everything that makes moral life recognisably human. The autonomous system completes that stripping and makes it permanent. The philosophy student might resist the grammar inarticulately – might feel, without quite being able to say why, that something has been left out. The machine has no such unease. It has no friction, no nagging sense that the map has omitted something important about the territory. It just acts within the ontology it’s given; and the ontology was given by people who inherited it from a thought experiment that was never adequate from the start. Compilation doesn’t merely omit moral texture; it excludes whatever can’t survive formalisation – another procrustean bed. And unlike a bad philosophical argument, which can be refuted, published against, or simply ignored, a bad ontology compiled into infrastructure governs silently. It doesn’t announce its assumptions or invite dissent. It just administers – mini Eichmanns in waiting.
The trolley problem asked what you’d do at the lever. It at least had the decency to pretend you were present for the decision. The autonomous vehicle has already been told what counts – by engineers who mistake ontology for specification, by a machine that can’t question the grammar it executes. In the trolley problem, the borrowed ontology framed the question. In the autonomous vehicle, it drives the car.
Beep, beep.
<soapbox>
I’ve never been comfortable with the term ‘peers’, not since I first encountered it as a grade schooler in a civics or social studies course. It felt like nonsense at first utterance, but much energy is expended indoctrinating children and adolescents.
Thinking about the Frege–Geach problem has trebled my interest in ontological grammars. It’s also got me thinking about the ontology of peer groups. I’ve always been an eccentric, so I never felt I had any peers. Sure, I’ve had friends, colleagues, bandmates, and acquaintances I’ve genuinely liked and respected, but none were peers. Our connexions might best be described as ‘thin’. We connected through shared work, music, interests, and so on, but peer would have been stretching it.
So, what do I feel qualifies as a peer? And what is a standard definition? I suppose we should start with the latter.
OED: A person who is associated or matched with another; a companion, a fellow, a mate.
Fair enough. This definition works fine. The devil remains in the details. What does it mean to be associated or a match?
As a moral noncognitivist, I don’t think the concept arrives trailing clouds of metaphysical glory. But it doesn’t need to. The interesting question is grammatical: what ontological conditions would have to be shared for ‘peer’ to mean something thick rather than merely administrative?
The legal system answers in the thinnest way possible. If you are recognisably human, that’s enough. Close enough for the government. Peer means person. Case closed.
When the system invokes ‘a jury of one’s peers’, it doesn’t care whether they are one’s peers in any thick or serious sense. It needs performative placeholders – tokens. Rather, it needs them to be peers of the court: those sufficiently aligned with its assumptions, procedures, and admissibility rules to reproduce its worldview in the form of judgement.
The court decides what counts as legible, what counts as relevant, what counts as rational, and what counts as legitimate. It does not discover peers. It manufactures a category of acceptable judges and then calls the result fairness. The deck is stacked before the first card is turned.
I like two examples, one historical and one fictional, to make my point.
This case should be obvious. The peers here are precisely not their peers, but adversaries. The defendants were not tried by those who shared their grammar of legitimacy, history, necessity, authority, or even the relevant category boundaries. They were tried by agents operating within a rival grammar – one that had already classified the defendants’ framework not as a competing ontology, but as criminal pathology.
The Nazi grammar was effectively annulled. Not refuted, not outargued – annulled. And as with more typical civil and criminal courts, symmetry was never the goal. The institution ruled by fiat. I call this ontological imperialism in a yet unpublished manuscript. The dominant system merely declares the adversarial grammar invalid and inadmissible.
The standard legitimation story for Nuremberg is natural law: there exist moral facts so fundamental that they transcend positive law and sovereign authority. ‘Crimes against humanity’ was coined precisely to name offences no ontological framework could render legitimate. The phrase does the work – against humanity, not against a particular legal code or polity, but against the species as such. It presupposes exactly the universal semantic accessibility that the philosophy of language has shown to be unavailable.
Now switch venues to a fictional universe. Philip K. Dick asks what would have happened had the Axis won the Second World War. The answer, structurally speaking, is: practically nothing — except that a different ontological grammar would now be dominant.
That is the value of the thought experiment. It doesn’t change the species, the cognitive architecture, or the capacity for deliberation. It changes the constitutive act – the moment at which a grammar gets installed as the world’s grammar. And everything downstream shifts with it. In Dick’s world, the inhabitants don’t experience their moral order as imposed or artificial. They navigate it as the background of intelligibility, the way things simply are. The I Ching functions for Tagomi the way human rights discourse functions for a postwar liberal – not as a choice, but as the grammar within which choices become possible.
The counterfactual is devastating because it is structurally symmetric. Had the Axis won, there would have been trials. Those trials would have applied retroactive categories – perhaps ‘crimes against racial destiny’ or ‘crimes against civilisational hygiene’. Allied leaders would have been the defendants. And the verdicts would have felt, to the inhabitants of that world, exactly as self-evidently correct as Nuremberg’s feel to us.
I don’t secretly wish the Axis had won. But the dialectic is worth consideration, and the discomfort it produces is itself the datum. Not evidence that the examination is wrong – evidence that the grammar is working.
So when modern institutions speak reverently of ‘a jury of one’s peers’, I hear not a triumph of fairness but a legitimating fiction. The phrase conceals the fact that institutions do not seek the defendant’s peers. They seek their own. They seek judges formed within the same order, obedient to the same grammar, and willing to mistake its categories for universal reason.
A peer, in any meaningful sense, would have to share enough ontological grammar with me that the same things register as real, salient, and intelligible in roughly the same way. By that standard, peers are rare. Institutions know this perfectly well. Which is why they do not look for them.
They appoint their own and call the matter settled.
</soapbox>
I’ve been working on an essay and perhaps more, but rather than reduplicate my efforts, I share the podcast and two seminal links to the Substack contents.
Note that this remains decidedly a work in progress; experience it as it unfolds.
This essay examines three mechanisms of institutional silence: the inhibition of inquiry under sacral authority, the inhibition of avowal under social consensus, and the inhibition of uptake under structural non-reception. Through the paired metaphors of the Grail (via The Fisher King), the Emperor’s New Clothes, and Cassandra, I argue that modern power often survives not by establishing truth but by organising silence across the social life of diagnosis. The result is a normatively managed gap between what subjects can perceive, what they are permitted to ask, what they are permitted to say, and what institutions are structured to hear.
This is the last of a 13-part 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
Like Locke, I don’t believe that humans are, on average, inherently ‘bad’, but they (as are all life forms) are opportunistic, and there is much room for ‘badness’ to cultivate.
Synthesized opportunism framework bridging evolutionary biology and structural power dynamics
Not “humans are good” (Rousseau’s error).
Not “humans are bad” (Hobbes’ cynicism).
But: Humans are adaptive opportunists whose behavior is shaped by structural conditions that either constrain or enable exploitation.
All organisms, including humans:
This isn’t moral or immoral. It’s ecological.
A plant will spread roots toward water. Not because it’s “greedy.” Because that’s how plants work.
A human will exploit advantages when available. Not because they’re “evil.” Because that’s how adaptive organisms work.
The key phrase: “there is much room for ‘badness’ to cultivate.”
Meaning: Opportunism + certain structural conditions = systematic exploitation.
What conditions cultivate “badness”?
Under these conditions, ordinary human opportunism becomes systematic domination.
The lake-dwellers aren’t evil.
They’re opportunistic organisms responding to conditions:
Of course they exploit. The structure rewards it.
The desert-dwellers aren’t noble victims.
They’re also opportunistic organisms:
Of course they submit. The structure demands it.
Neither side is “good” or “bad.”
Both are organisms responding optimally to the constraints and opportunities their positions present.
Most moral philosophy assumes humans have fixed natures:
Hobbes: Humans are selfish, need State to constrain them
Rousseau: Humans are cooperative, civilization corrupts them
Locke: Humans are rational, will respect property naturally
Your position: Humans are opportunistic, and structures determine what kind of opportunism emerges.
A lion killing a zebra isn’t evil. It’s opportunism within ecological constraints.
A capitalist exploiting workers isn’t (necessarily) evil. It’s opportunism within economic constraints.
We don’t moralize the lion because we accept ecological constraints as given.
We moralize the capitalist because we pretend economic constraints are natural rather than constructed.
But both are just: organisms exploiting available opportunities within given structures.
Here’s the crucial part: Opportunism + power asymmetry + weak constraints = systematic exploitation.
Small band, everyone knows everyone, resources relatively shared, power relatively equal.
Opportunism exists, but:
Opportunism constrained = relatively egalitarian.
Large population, anonymity, property enclosed, power concentrated.
Opportunism exists, and:
Opportunism unconstrained = systematic domination.
Same opportunistic humans. Different structures. Different outcomes.
“Badness” isn’t in human nature.
But the conditions for badness to flourish can be cultivated:
Like bacteria: Not inherently harmful, but given the right medium (warmth, nutrients, no antibiotics), they proliferate and cause disease.
Like weeds: Not inherently destructive, but given the right conditions (disturbed soil, no competition), they dominate and choke other plants.
Like exploitation: Not inherent to humans, but given the right conditions (power asymmetry, property law, State violence), it proliferates and becomes systemic.
The mountains created asymmetry:
Temporal priority created advantage:
The tunnel created opportunity for extraction:
Lake-dwellers, being opportunistic, exploit their positional advantage.
Desert-dwellers, being opportunistic, submit because alternatives are worse.
State, being opportunistic, sides with those who fund it.
None of this requires anyone being “bad.”
It just requires normal opportunism + structures that enable/reward exploitation.
If capitalists were evil, we could:
But if capitalists are just opportunists responding to structures:
The problem isn’t bad individuals. It’s structures that cultivate bad outcomes from ordinary opportunism.
Foucault showed: Power produces subjects.
Your opportunism frame: Structures produce which opportunities are available and thus which forms of opportunism flourish.
In a structure that rewards:
Not because they’re inherently these things.
Because structures make these behaviors optimal.
Graeber showed: Humans have created diverse political arrangements.
Your opportunism frame explains why:
Structures that constrain opportunism → egalitarian outcomes
Structures that enable opportunism → hierarchical outcomes
Same opportunistic humans. Different structural constraints. Different societies.
Why does capitalism require constant energy to maintain?
Because human opportunism would naturally exploit the system’s contradictions:
Workers would organize (opportunistically seeking better conditions)
Poor would redistribute (opportunistically accessing abundance)
Dominated would resist (opportunistically challenging power)
So the system must expend energy to:
This energy expenditure fights human opportunism that would otherwise destabilize hierarchy.
If humans were inherently bad, domination would be inevitable and universal.
But historical evidence shows:
What changed wasn’t human nature.
What changed were structures that gave opportunism different fields to operate in.
Current structures cultivate exploitation by:
Not because humans are evil.
Because structures reward these outcomes.
This is why your position is stronger than traditional left moralism:
Traditional left: Capitalists are greedy/evil, we need better people
Your position: Capitalists are opportunistic, we need different structures
Traditional left requires moral transformation.
Your position requires structural transformation.
Guess which is more realistic?
The lake-dwellers aren’t villains. They’re organisms exploiting positional advantage because:
They’re doing what opportunistic organisms do under these conditions.
The desert-dwellers aren’t saints. They’re organisms accepting subordination because:
They’re doing what opportunistic organisms do under these conditions.
No one is morally culpable. Everyone is structurally produced.
If the problem were evil people, we could:
But if the problem is structures cultivating exploitation from normal opportunism:
Change requires transforming the structures themselves.
Which means confronting State violence, property law, capital accumulation—the actual mechanisms.
You’re right that Locke was onto something: Humans aren’t inherently bad.
Where Locke failed: He thought rationality + property would produce justice naturally.
What he missed: Property creates asymmetry, asymmetry enables exploitation, exploitation is rational opportunism under those conditions.
Humans being “not bad” doesn’t prevent systematic domination.
It just means domination emerges from structure, not nature.
Humans are opportunistic (like all organisms).
Structures determine what opportunities exist.
Current structures offer opportunities for:
So ordinary human opportunism produces systematic inequality.
Not because humans are bad.
Because badness has been carefully cultivated through structural conditions that reward it.
The lake-dwellers aren’t evil for owning the lake.
The desert-dwellers aren’t good for being exploited.
Both are organisms responding to structural constraints.
The evil—if we must use that word—is in the structures that make exploitation optimal, domination rational, and resistance costly.
And those structures are:
They’re cultivated. Maintained. Enforced.
Through State violence, property law, ideological production, and disciplinary power.
Which means they could, theoretically, be transformed.
But only by changing the structures, not by improving the humans.
Because the humans are fine.
It’s the garden they’re planted in that cultivates thorns.
This post is part 12 of a series of 13 that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.
Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel
Reminds me of the Grail query, “Whom do you serve?”
Synthesized medieval allegory with modern political critique
The Fisher King lies wounded. The land is waste. The Grail appears before Parzival.
And he fails to ask the question: “Whom does the Grail serve?”
That failure—the failure to ask about function, purpose, beneficiary—keeps the wound festering and the land barren.
The knight sees the Grail procession:
But never asks: What is this FOR? Whom does it serve?
He assumes it serves… generally. Universally. The good.
His silence perpetuates the wound.
People see police:
But never ask: Whom does this serve? What is this protecting?
They assume it serves… generally. Universally. Everyone.
Their silence perpetuates the wound.
In the Grail legend: The Fisher King’s wound makes the land barren.
In the parable: The unasked question makes domination invisible, persistent, naturalized.
Why? Because no one asks the question.
Parzival was taught courtesy, manners, proper behavior.
So when he sees the Grail, he thinks: “It would be rude to ask questions.”
Politeness prevents healing.
Citizens are taught civility, respect for authority, proper behavior.
So when they see State power, they think: “It would be rude/radical/extreme to question its function.”
Politeness prevents recognition.
“Whom does the Grail serve?”
What would have been revealed:
The Grail serves the wounded king specifically, sustaining him in his suffering but not healing him.
It maintains a system that is broken.
“Whom do police serve?”
Police serve property holders specifically, sustaining current arrangements but not healing structural injustice.
They maintain a system that is broken.
In the Grail legend:
In modern politics:
Same mechanism: mystification preventing the question that would reveal function.
Not the kingdom. Not the people. Not the land (which remains waste).
Just the wounded king, keeping him in suspended suffering.
Not the people. Not the community. Not the land (which remains enclosed, exploited).
Just current owners, keeping them in secured advantage.
Fisher King’s wound: Mysterious, never explained, perpetual
Modern inequality: Rationalized, naturalized, perpetual
Both persist because the question isn’t asked.
If Parzival had asked “Whom does the Grail serve?”
If citizens asked “Whom does the State serve?”
In the Grail legend: Parzival was taught that courtesy means not asking awkward questions.
In modernity: Citizens are taught that responsibility means not questioning basic institutions.
Both are trained into silence through socialization.
Parzival’s courtesy—his refusal to ask impolite questions—keeps the kingdom wounded.
Modern civility—refusal to ask radical questions—keeps inequality naturalized.
Politeness as political technology.
Grail question asked: “Oh. The Grail serves only the king, not the kingdom. The whole system exists to maintain his suffering, not to heal the land.”
Police question asked: “Oh. Police serve property, not people. The whole system exists to maintain current arrangements, not to create justice.”
Both revelations are: Simple. Obvious once seen. Previously obscured by mystification and courtesy.
A desert-dweller, tired and thirsty, encounters the State apparatus.
Impressive. Professional. “To Protect and Serve.”
The desert-dweller asks: “Whom do you serve?”
The State: “We serve the public! Law and order! Everyone!”
The desert-dweller presses: “No—specifically. When I try to access water without payment, whom do you serve?”
Silence.
Then, if honest: “We serve property. We serve those who own the lake. We serve the system that keeps you from accessing water without purchase.”
The mystification breaks. The function becomes visible.
In the Grail legend: Asking would break the spell, end the enchantment
In modernity: Asking would reveal function, end the mystification
Both systems depend on the question NOT being asked.
In the Grail legend: It’s a story. The knight can return. The question can be asked. Healing is narratively possible.
In modernity: The system is designed to prevent return and prohibit the question.
The Grail question is an act of resistance against:
“Whom do you serve?” is the question power cannot honestly answer without revealing itself.
“We’re bombing them to bring democracy!” → Whom does this serve? (Arms manufacturers, geopolitical power)
“Austerity is necessary!” → Whom does this serve? (Creditors, capital holders)
“We must respect property rights!” → Whom does this serve? (Current owners, those with property)
“The market is efficient!” → Whom does this serve? (Those with capital to invest)
“Meritocracy rewards talent!” → Whom does this serve? (Those who inherited advantage)
Every one of these statements mystifies function through universal language.
Asking “Whom does this serve?” breaks the spell.
Some versions suggest the Fisher King COULD ask to die, but the Grail sustains him in suffering instead.
The system serves not healing, but perpetuation of current arrangements, even if those arrangements are wounded.
The system COULD redistribute, reform, transform.
But State power sustains current arrangements in their inequality instead.
The system serves not justice, but perpetuation of property relations, even when those relations create suffering.
In the legend: Until the question is asked, the land stays barren despite the Grail’s presence.
In modernity: Until the question is asked, inequality persists despite abundance.
Plenty exists. The Grail is there. The lake is full.
But the question isn’t asked, so the waste land remains waste.
The Grail legend knows: Sacred objects can serve profane functions.
The holiest, most powerful artifact can serve to maintain suffering rather than heal it.
Democracy, rights, law, police—sacred concepts of the Enlightenment—can serve to maintain domination rather than end it.
The question reveals this.
Why the Legend Persists:
The Grail story has haunted Western imagination for 800 years because it knows something:
Healing requires asking the awkward question about whom power serves.
Not assuming benevolence. Not accepting mystification. Not respecting courtesy that demands silence.
Just asking: Whom does this serve?
The desert-dwellers see:
And they’re taught not to ask: Whom does this serve?
Because asking would reveal:
The land remains waste. The desert-dwellers thirst. The lake is full but enclosed.
Until someone asks the question.
The Grail Knight’s Return:
In some versions, Parzival returns years later, wiser, and asks the question.
The Fisher King can finally die or heal.
The land renews.
Healing is possible. But only through asking the question that was initially forbidden.
Perhaps—perhaps—if enough people asked:
“Whom do police serve?” “Whom does property law serve?”
“Whom does the State serve?” “Whom does this system serve?”
The mystification might break.
The function might become visible.
The system might become changeable.
But this requires mass refusal of courtesy, civility, politeness that demands we not ask awkward questions about power.
Not “What is the Grail?” (mystification continues)
But “Whom does the Grail serve?” (function revealed)
Not “What is the State?” (political theory continues)
But “Whom does the State serve?” (class function revealed)
The Enlightenment, like the Grail procession, is:
“To Protect and Serve” is the Fisher King’s Grail: sustaining a system in its wound rather than healing it.
And the question—”Whom do you serve?”—is the one we’re trained from birth not to ask.
The abattoir became a supermarché.
The Grail became “To Protect and Serve.”
The waste land remains waste.
Because the question goes unasked.
The fog was kinder. The mountains were kinder.
But the Grail legend suggests: There is a question that could break the spell.
We just have to be willing to be impolite enough to ask it.
Whom do you serve?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not you.
Not people.
They protect:
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 lake-dwellers establish a police force.
Motto: “To Protect and Serve”
Same motto. Completely different functions depending on which side of property you’re on.
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.
Make State violence sound like:
While obscuring that it’s actually:
Look at what police actually do:
Pattern: Police protect property. People are secondary at best.
“To Protect and Serve” doesn’t specify:
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.
“State Violence Enforcement Division – We Protect Property Through Force”
Honest. Accurate. Everyone knows what police do.
“To Protect and Serve”
Clean. Benevolent. Obscures actual function.
Same violence. Much better branding.
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:
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:
But the motto makes this invisible.
Notice how this works:
Criminal = person who violates property arrangements
Not: person who harms others
Police protect against “criminals” (those who violate property), not against harm.
Desert-dweller steals water: Criminal. Arrested. Prosecuted.
Lake-dweller pays starvation wages: Legal. Protected. Enforced.
Same motto covering completely opposite relationships to State violence.
Because the motto is deliberately ambiguous.
And because most people never ask:
They hear “To Protect and Serve” and fill in: “…me, the individual citizen”
When it actually means: “…property arrangements and State apparatus”
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:
They’ve been produced as subjects who demand their own domination.
Notice the motto doesn’t say:
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.
Abattoir: “Violence Enforcement Department”
Supermarché: “To Protect and Serve”
Police forces originated from:
Their function has always been: Protect property, suppress resistance.
But “To Protect and Serve” makes it sound like: Community safety, public welfare.
Brilliant rebranding.
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:
They’ve been convinced that the mechanism oppressing them is protecting them.
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.
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.
Philosophics 