From an intellectual basis, this is evidently absurd. The first press of the button has already sent the signal that the lift should stop at this floor; pressing it a further twenty to thirty times can scarcely make the request more pronounced, nor accelerate the carriage (with potentially dramatic results for the current occupants).

Whilst in the unending pursuit of the enrichment of the English vocabulary, I have learnt that Engineers have a useful word for operations like this: idempotency. An operation is idempotent when repeating it produces the same result as performing it once. Once the lift has been called, calling it again changes nothing, pressing the button fifty times has exactly the same effect as pressing it just once.

So why, then, do we keep pressing?

Partly because waiting leaves us in an uncomfortable state: something important is happening, but there is at present nothing useful for us to do about it. We have a surfeit of energy, but a dearth of significance. Pressing the button gives us the sensation of agency while the real process proceeds at its own pace.

Now imagine that the lift button had been designed by a modern social-media platform.

You press it once: Lift requested.

Five seconds later, you press it again. But returning silence would be unprofitable, hence, it shows you a video from another resident complaining that the lifts have been unusually slow today.

You press again. A lift engineer explains the three most common causes of delays.

Again. Someone overreacts to the engineer.

Again. A tenant claims that management has been concealing maintenance problems.

Again. A questionably credentialed body-language analyst dressed impeccably in a suit and tie examines the building manager’s apology.

Eventually, an astrologer explains that Mercury in retrograde makes vertical transportation notoriously difficult.

Five minutes later, you are still mired in the lobby, fascinated by elevator discourse. The lift has not arrived one second sooner, but every redundant press has returned a novel payload.

That distinction, between something new to see and something new to know, is one of the defining pathologies of modern information consumption.

The Rate Mismatch

When a major story captures our attention, be it election, a trial, a conflict, an eclipse or a scientific controversy, we naturally want to know what happens next. One may be fashionably late to the party, but being late to the zeitgeist is unforgivably unfashionable.

So we check, we learn the available facts. Then we check again.

The problem is that we are treating reality as though it were an on-demand resource. It evidently is not. Real-world events have physical update rates. An election count may produce meaningful changes every few minutes. A courtroom trial may produce them every few hours. A scientific controversy may wait months for the experiment or paper that actually shifts the consensus.

The world as a whole never runs out of new information, but the particular corner of it that currently interests us can produce a relevant signal only so quickly. Since reality is rate-limited by time, while our consumption of information (which is usually lossy and therefore much more digestible), we eventually end up with the phenomenon where we scroll much faster than the world can change.

An infinite feed then encounters an architectural dilemma. It knows that we want more material about this specific subject, but the subject itself has temporarily run out of things to tell us.

The sensible engineering response would be: Nothing significant has changed. Check back later. However, that would be commercially disastrous for a system whose business model is engagement, so the feed supplies something else.

Something New to See, Nothing New to Know

Once the available signal begins to run dry, content does not suddenly collapse into obvious garbage. It decays gradually:

New Facts → Analysis → Commentary → Reaction → Reaction to Reaction → Pattern-seeking → Occultism or Forensic Astrology

This is not a snobbish and snooty hierarchy in which analysis is inherently inferior to facts. Good analysis improves our understanding enormously, and independent reporting can strengthen confidence in what we already know.

The problem is that of marginal informational value.

There may be ten material facts to know about an event. After consuming those ten facts and several worthwhile interpretations of them, another thousand pieces of content can still be produced without the event itself changing at all. One witness statement becomes:

• A news report

• A summary

• An expert reaction

• Talking heads soliciting opinions on Cable TV

• A reaction to one of those reactions

• A body-language analysis

• A conspiracy theory

• A thousand irate comments

• And eventually, somebody’s natal star chart

The supply of presentations has become completely detached from the supply of information. Every item feels novel because you have never seen this person say this thing in this way. But novelty of presentation is not the same as novelty about the world.

Epistemically Idempotent, Psychologically Non-Idempotent

Here the lift-button analogy becomes troublesome. Suppose a witness testified to fact X, and you have accurately incorporated X into your understanding of the case. Another creator tells you X. Then another and another.

At the level of your factual model, these are approximately idempotent operations:

X + X + X + X = X

The world has not acquired four copies of the event simply because four people described it.

Human cognition, however, is not idempotent. Repeated exposure makes an idea feel more familiar, more urgent, and more truthful. Repackaging introduces another distortion: because each encounter looks visually distinct, it feels as though the story itself is continuing to develop.

A feed can take an essentially idempotent factual payload and wrap it in endlessly non-idempotent emotional and social experiences. We can spend three hours becoming more excited, more frightened, more partisan, and more certain without becoming one bit better informed.

There is an obvious objection here.

Perhaps by the second hour, I am no longer trying to learn what happened. Perhaps I am enjoying the jokes, arguing with strangers, watching how communities react, or simply entertaining myself.

Those are real forms of value. The problem is not that every minute spent past the factual frontier is useless; the problem arises when entertainment, affiliation, and emotional processing continue to masquerade as information acquisition.

If you knowingly spend an hour consuming drama about an election, you are enjoying entertainment. If you spend that same hour convinced that you are becoming progressively better informed because you have consumed sixty election-related posts, you are fooling yourself.

A great deal of modern “keeping up with events” is simply remaining socially and emotionally immersed in events whose important facts we already know.

The Feed Hides the Blocked State

A well-lubricated system distinguishes between a process that can currently make progress and one that is waiting for an external input. Consider a court case after the judge adjourns for the day. Its state is now “Waiting for next session”. Progress blocked until court resumes.

A social-media feed deliberately conceals this state. Instead of telling you “Go away, there is nothing to see”, it returns an endless stream of commentary, speculation, and meta-reactions. The process never feels blocked.

That matters because humans are deeply uncomfortable with unresolved states. We continue checking an unanswered message, refreshing an election tally, or rereading a conflict thread partly because doing nothing feels like abandoning the problem. An important process is not necessarily an actionable process, and an unresolved process is not necessarily one that benefits from more attention.

The Rational Response: Epistemic Backoff

So upon further reading, I discovered that Engineers have a standard protocol for systems that cannot currently provide new results: backoff.

If repeated requests produce no useful state change, a well-designed client does not hammer the internet server harder. It waits before asking again, and under most conditions, it progressively increases that interval.

Perhaps human information consumption requires the same hygiene: epistemic backoff. We could match our rate of checking to the plausible rate at which the things we care about can actually change. For example:

• Breaking Emergency: Check every 30 to 60 minutes.

• Courtroom Trial: Check once after court adjourns.

• Political Controversy: Check tomorrow.

• Scientific Dispute: Check in six months, when an actual replication has concluded.

This makes patience something far more interesting than a moral virtue or self-help discipline. Patience improves sampling.

If the underlying state is unlikely to have changed, checking again merely samples the same state through a noisier presentation. Waiting gives reality time to generate something genuinely new. You cannot obtain tomorrow’s facts by consuming harder today.

Backoff immediately raises a practical question: What are we supposed to do while we wait?

The answer is obvious: something else.

This is not multitasking in the chaotic sense of attempting three actionable things at once. It is closer to juggling: work on one thing while it is actionable; when it reaches a point where progress is stalled, put it down and advance something else.

This is the ultimate counter-measure to monomania. An unresolved problem has a peculiar ability to monopolise attention simply because it remains unresolved. Yet its unresolved status tells us nothing about whether another hour of attention will improve it.

Sometimes the most competent response to an important problem is: Not now.

Arguments Need Backoff Too

The principle extends well beyond news feeds. Consider an argument.

You state your position. The other person objects. You answer the objection. They remain unconvinced. You clarify. They repeat themselves or misrepresent your position. Soon, you are no longer resolving the original disagreement; you are generating new conflicts about how the disagreement is being conducted.

Interpersonal conflict has its own derivative-content cascade:

Dispute → Argument about dispute → Insult → Retort → Argument about argument

The underlying state of the disagreement has not changed, but the volume of surrounding grievance expands exponentially.

Perhaps sometimes an argument is simply blocked. More words will not resolve it today. Both parties need time for emotional arousal to subside, for defensiveness to drop, or simply for the other’s point to be absorbed without the immediate pressure to draft a rebuttal.

Yielding does not mean conceding. It means recognizing that continuous engagement and genuine progress are not synonymous.

Juggling Restores the Denominator

Fixation creates a dangerous cognitive illusion. The longer we attend to a single issue, the more detail we discover in it. The more detail we discover, the larger and more consequential it feels:

Attention → Detail → Complexity → Perceived Importance → More Attention

This happens with national politics, office rivalries, health anxieties, and internet drama.

Moving to something else does more than fill the time while we wait: it restores the denominator. The furious disagreement that occupied your entire mental universe at midnight looks remarkably small after a full day spent working, cooking, exercising, and speaking with other people. A capacity for juggling protects us from confusing the thing receiving most of our attention with the most important thing in the world.

The Permutation Machine Is Getting Faster

There was once at least a practical limit on pseudo-novelty: a human being had to sit down and produce it.

That limit is fading quickly. Generative AI can take a single genuine change in reality and produce summaries, explainers, counterarguments, synthetic debates, satire, liberal interpretation and blatant misinformation at zero marginal cost.

This does not make generated material inherently useless; a clear synthesis can save hours. But it permanently destroys the production bottleneck on derivative content. The volume of material about an event no longer bears even a loose relationship to the amount of history that has actually occurred. Our cognitive filtering will have to become radically stricter precisely because our generative machinery has become so frictionless.

Older media possessed natural stopping conditions. The newspaper ran out of pages. The evening bulletin ended. The weekly journal did not become a daily bulletin merely because you wanted another article immediately.

Those physical constraints were often frustrating, but they had one accidental virtue: they could tell you, implicitly, that you were caught up. Infinite scroll cannot afford to tell you that. Every swipe must return a payload, because an empty screen risks ending the session.

Yet the World-wide Web itself already possesses an elegant response for a request when nothing has changed:

304: Not Modified

It is not an error code. It means the copy you are browsing is still current. Nothing needs to be downloaded, nothing needs to be processed, nothing requires your attention.

Perhaps that is the protocol we need to relearn. Not every uncertainty can be resolved immediately, not every argument can be finished tonight, not every developing event has developed since you checked twenty minutes ago.

The next time you find yourself refreshing the same story, reopening the same dispute, or poking at the same unresolved problem for the fifth time, take a moment to readjust and let the system have time to catch up.

You have already pressed the button. The lift is already coming.

Behaviour itself is heuristic because action is bounded by incomplete information, limited computation and time. No person can derive the consequences of every decision from first principles before the decision must be made. (c.f. my Relational Ethics model - the Axiom of Epistemic Incompleteness)

Therefore, behavioural systems search for responses that work well enough at an affordable and economic cognitive cost. Successful responses become less explicit and more automatic, because we invest less energy in examining the current context. When they DO stop working, friction against something suitably inconvenient and cumbersome, such as reality, forces them back into the realm of interpretation and analysis.

Evidently, this is not proposed as a literal physics of the mind. It is a systems heuristic for understanding why reasons often fail to move routines, why stories move people more readily than proofs, and why behavioural change can remain invisible until it coalesces out of the air like manna from heaven.

Non-nihilistic and functional humans generally require some form of motivation or persuasion to perform work, for example, getting out of bed every day at dawn, or commuting through hours of traffic to job which they despise. I divide this behavioural persuasion into three distinct states: Argument, Narrative and Habit.

The Force of Argument

Argument is the rarefied state of persuasion. It organises information as explicit propositions, observations, inferences. Argument is therefore also the highest-cost state: it requires attention, explicit information, working memory and sufficient good faith to keep alternatives open. People often exhaust quickly, and move towards a concession such as “let’s not argue” or other forms of conflict resolution.

Having the greatest degrees of freedom, argument permits inspection, correction, comparison, contradiction, and cross-examination. However, at the same time, the problem with argument is that it is insubstantial and rarely ever coalesces into action. The smoker understands the argument perfectly, they simply do not care, it has little emotional force until emphysema strikes and they start coughing like a tuberculosis patient. The smoker may understand the argument perfectly and continue smoking. A cancer diagnosis does not necessarily supply a superior and more persuasive syllogism, it supplies Pressure (discussed later). The same proposition now arrives attached to bodily evidence, urgency and sharply reduced freedom to ignore it.

Argument is easy to rearrange and often descends into sophistry, because it is only weakly bound to conduct.

The Force of Narrative

Narrative is the state of integration and transport. It allows propositions, experiences, identities, and anticipated outcomes to form a loosely-bound support matrix between each other and produce a net vector of action (Often failing to be particularly rigorous in each individual component. )

A person in difficult circumstances, say a land war, does not ordinarily sustain a difficult course of action by rehearsing its premises each morning. They place it within a narrative: patriotism, recovery, duty, craftsmanship, parenthood, national restoration or escape. Narrative binds isolated propositions to an anticipated future and supplies direction across time, this is why a great deal of effort and investment in any military is directed internally as propaganda.

Society, for example, uses the Great Evil One hypothesis very often: All your troubles and ills in the world can be blamed on this particular scapegoat, whether it be Satan, religion, the American president, communism, or the patriarchy. Therefore, they should be dealt with in a Jacobin fashion, although perhaps not so much sans culottes as sans raison. Narrative does not wait for something as bothersome as scrutiny when there is grand drama to be had.

Narrative becomes turbulent when multiple incompatible narratives continue moving through the same interpretive medium without settling into either revised argument or stable conduct. Its failure is not just false or conflicted storytelling. It is energy-consuming circulation without equilibrium, some kind of existential Charybdis.

The Force of Habit

Habit is the low-cost operational state in which a behavioural solution has produced something which is executable without any form of cognitive input needed.

It is not necessarily primitive or irrational. It is ruthlessly efficient because it utilises inertia and has apathy on its side. Once information has coalesced into habit, it occupies a space in reality and maintains its own momentum. At this point, corrective persuasion is largely irrelevant and impotent.

The failure state of habit is its own vestigial rigidity - it continues to execute itself long after the environment, purpose, or justification has vanished.

State Mismatch: Why Arguments fail on Habits

From the above, you can instantly infer that arguments usually do limited direct work on habits because they operate upon an explicit model, while habit operates as implicit and stabilised procedure. This is known as a State Mismatch.

It does not merely apply in one direction. Habits themselves fail to meet standards for argumentative persuasion, one does not infer that jaywalking is moral or necessary just because it is what they do every morning.

Habits and arguments themselves make for tedious and poorly executed drama and narrative, which expect some form of sophisticated aesthetic vision rather than an instruction manual (argument) or a protocol (habit).

As a generalised rule, I posit that interventions fail when they apply force to the visible state, rather than the state which is actually doing work.

Fit and Friction

So if we are to complete this unauthorized phase diagram of human behavior, we must identify the two operational conditions that drive state changes: Fit and Friction.

Fit

Fit is not confirmation of a truth. It is continued successful operation of the behaviour. When a model works, the system economises and trends towards the Habit state. This movement is a reduction in required granularity, storage, and operating cost.

• Argument discovers or revises a response.

• Narrative integrates it into expectation and meaning.

• Habit stabilises it into efficient execution.

Fit rewards compression because continued explicit processing no longer appears cost effective. Optimisation has always detested the existence of waste, redundancy, abstract theory and buffers. The system begins drifting towards habit as soon as repeated success makes further explicit processing unnecessary.

Friction

Friction is the abrasive mismatch between the behavioural model and the environment.

It may arise through:

• changed conditions and paradigms

• accumulating cost

• failed outcomes and contradiction

• social resistance

• bodily/physical limits

• internal conflict

Friction moves in the opposite direction of Fit and tends to move against habits, or at the very least, erode them. While Fit condenses information, Friction decompiles it:

• Habit encounters an insurmountable wall and stops executing.

• Narrative scrambles to absorb the anomaly (“This is just a temporary setback”).

• Argument decomposes the failure into raw, explicit propositions to locate the bug.

A small anomaly may be absorbed narratively. Persistent failure may require full argumentative decomposition, or negotiation with an empty wallet.

The central rule becomes:

Fit reduces explicitness; friction increases it.

A system does not prefer argument merely because argument is more reflective. It prefers the least expensive state that maintains Fit.

Therefore, adaptation itself has two costs:

1. remaining too long in a failing habit

2. remaining too long in expensive narrative or argument after a workable response has been found.

These costs can be labelled as Maladaptation Cost vs Revision Cost.

This gives us the balancing principle:

A healthy system reopens when friction justifies the cost, and restabilises when further explicitness ceases to pay for itself.

Now, it is easier to diagnose failure states (quite literally):

States of Failure

A. State-specific failures

Each specific behavioural state has unique pathologies which do not transfer easily onto the others:

• Argument - Dissipation, Sophistry, Paralysis

  High compute states, near zero mechanical output.

• Narrative - Turbulence, Echo chambers, Mythology

  Violent circulation, but no emergent direction nor net displacement.

• Habit - Rigidity, Drift, Obsolescence

  Unchecked momentum or inertness.

B. Systemic failures

These describe how the adaptive cycle as a whole fails.

1. Failure to stabilise (Over-heating)

The system remains in high-cost argument or turbulent narrative and never returns to economical action.

Examples:

• chronic indecision (or analysis paralysis, as some people call it)

• endless institutional consultation

• continual identity reinterpretation

• permanent ideological debate without procedural resolution.

The system keeps paying adaptation costs after it should have settled, this is particularly fatal if dealing with competition.

2. Failure to reopen (Super-cooling)

The system remains habitual despite mounting friction.

Examples:

• obsolete procedures

• compulsive routines

• institutions that explain every failure as a need for more rigidity

• escalating coercion used to preserve an increasingly poor fit

The system protects the current low operating cost by refusing the temporary cost of revision, then undergoes spontaneous failure and everyone is expected to be surprised.

3. Absorbing failure

An absorbing state is one in which the system loses access to ordinary adaptive transitions, the entire system is moot because it is no longer able to transition, it has escaped containment or become inert.

The important feature is not simply stability. Habit is stable but can still reopen. An absorbing state removes or destroys the capacity for future revision.

Possible forms include:

• total resignation;

• learned helplessness;

• irreversible institutional collapse;

• bankruptcy or dissolution;

• severe addiction that extinguishes competing behavioural pathways;

• ideological systems that absorb every possible contradiction;

• destruction of trust, capacity or agency;

• death.

Rigidity is a system refusing to move, but absorption is a system no longer capable of returning. Like a radical chain reaction, adaptation depends upon retaining reactive pathways. Termination occurs when those pathways are consumed or neutralised, leaving a product that no longer participates in the ordinary cycle. The final state need not be healthy merely because it is stable.

Latent Heat

In physical thermodynamics, phase transitions require energy to break structural bonds before any change in temperature or state becomes visible. This absorbed energy is latent heat.

Behavioral latent heat is any input absorbed into internal reorganisation without producing immediate, observable change in behavior.

A dissatisfied person can get antsy because they have submitted feedback and it appears to have vanished down a black hole, or perhaps into an incinerator. However, there still exists a real cost on the individual. Years of friction may not silently be preparing for recovery, they may be burning up the system’s remaining capacity for adaptation itself.

Not all invisible expenditure is productive latent work. Some input reorganises the system towards transition, some is merely dissipated in containing contradiction. From outside, both can look like stasis.

The takeaway is that the absence of visible change itself can conceal either preparation for adaptation or depletion towards termination, it should therefore not be hastily diagnosed as either.

Pressure and Temperature

To complete our behavioural phase diagram, we must account for the empirical constraints that bound human action: Pressure and Temperature.

• Pressure is external coercion, environmental demand, resource scarcity, or systemic surveillance.

• Temperature is the system’s internal behavioural variability: how many alternative responses remain active or energetically available, whether or not the environment presently permits their expression.

Together, these two variables dictate the background environment in which Fit or Friction occurs.

High pressure narrows the space of viable behaviour, but it does not determine whether the resulting order is adaptive, internalized, temporary, or fatal. Under extreme coercion, even the most truculent person can be forced into rigid behavioural regularity. However, behind that superficial regularity, several fundamentally different state conditions may be occurring:

1. Artificial Compression (High Pressure, High Internal Temp): The cost of deviation has simply become fatal. The behavior is held solid solely by the pressure vessel; the moment pressure drops, the system violently explodes back into gas.

2. True Crystallization (Low Temp, Low Friction): The conduct has naturally condensed into an automated, low-cost habit.

3. Narrative Stabilization (Liquid Phase): The actor has constructed (or hallucinated) a legitimising narrative to make the compliance feel like agency.

4. De-skilling (Loss of Degrees of Freedom): The system’s adaptive capability has been crushed by sheer force.

5. Absorbing Failure (Thermodynamic Death): The actor has entered total resignation, learned helplessness, or systemic collapse.

High pressure can fake the appearance of a solid habit, but it cannot fake its thermal stability. A habit forged through internal fit requires no energy to maintain; compliance enforced through pressure burns continuous energy merely holding the vessel together.

Now we can predict what happens after de-compression almost diagnostically (although not with absolute certainty).

• Persistence suggests Habit. The behaviour continues automatically with zero external enforcement because it has achieved low-energy, structural fit with reality.

• Reinterpretation suggests Narrative Internalisation. The behaviour continues, but the individual reframes why they are doing it, converting forced compliance into personal identity.

• Immediate Reversal suggests Expedient Compliance. The behaviour vanishes instantly. The system was never solidified; it was a gas artificially compressed under high pressure.

• Chaotic Expansion suggests Metastability. The system violently erupts into volatility, erratic experimentation, or rebellion. The artificial pressure was suppressing massive, trapped thermal energy.

• Incapacity to Act suggests Absorbing Failure. The system neither returns to its old state nor adapts to a new one. The prolonged pressure crushed its reactive capacity, leaving it permanently inert.

A Seven-Point Systems Audit

To apply this heuristic to personal routines, organisational inertia, or political deadlock, we must stop asking why people “refuse to listen” and begin auditing the phase mechanics of the system.

We could then ask these seven questions:

1. What specific behaviour is the system trying to stabilise?

2. In which state is that behaviour presently organised? (Gas, Liquid, or Solid?)

3. What historical Fit originally rewarded and condensed that state?

4. What Friction is now acting upon it in the present environment?

5. Is the system moving toward greater explicitness, or merely rationalising away the friction?

6. Does the system retain enough internal energy, freedom, and trust to undergo a phase transition?

7. Is the apparent stability an adaptive equilibrium, rigid persistence, or an absorbing state?

Conclusion: The State Mechanics of Human Action

Behaviour itself is not a sequence of decisions freshly calculated from first principles. It is a heuristic system that searches for a workable equilibrium while conserving finite cognitive energy.

• Argument decomposes models when explicit revision is necessary.

• Narrative integrates and carries the resulting change through identity.

• Habit stabilises successful conduct into low-cost execution.

Fit draws the system relentlessly toward habit. Friction forces it back toward interpretation and argument. But adaptation is neither automatic nor unlimited: a system may fail to stabilise, refuse to reopen, or burn up its remaining adaptive capacity and enter an absorbing state.

This is why an argument can be undeniably true and still fail to move a habit. It is why stories mediate real behavioural change while logic falls flat. It is why successful action becomes increasingly unconscious and why broken institutions do not merely resist correction, but eventually lose the structural capacity to correct themselves.

The practical question is therefore never simply, “What argument will persuade them?”

It is: What state is actually doing the work, what conditions are holding it there, and does the system still possess a path to another state?

You see, ever since trillionaire-talk around Elon Musk entered the news cycle, there has been a lot of political debate about “wealth taxes” recently in the news, where devotees of Marx clash with Adam Smith and to be honest, I understand very little of how modern society treats wealth in the first place. From my perspective, people see wealth as a static pile of gold or bonds and certificates. I simply think of it as not quite different from knowledge, time or information, it is simply potential energy: one aspect of the capacity to do work. Quite like a battery, in fact.

When I was much younger, in Secondary School, I had a vigorous conflict of opinion with a friend of mine, who was alarmed by my reticence at spending any amount of money whatsoever. I said I like my buffers, he (being the Arts Student who actually took Economics) said that the economy is more like a thermodynamic engine, it only functions when capital is in circulation, therefore spending money is a civic good.

In that respect, I concede he was correct. A battery doesn’t really do anything by itself until it is connected to a closed circuit, whereupon we can make it do useful magical things, such as lighting up the room or giant fluorescent blue crosses which shine through the bedroom window and make it difficult for me to sleep.

This is, I believe, analogous to much billionaire wealth, which is usually in the form of what people in finance appear to call “Unrealised Capital Gains”. It assumes that if Mr Musk sold off all his ownership in his companies, he would have a trillion US dollars in potential energy, enough energy to coat the Singaporean night sky permanently neon-blue and ensure a permanent nationwide state of insomnia. However, this is just a valuation, an estimate of how much people want his stuff.

A $50 billion valuation sitting passively in stock certificates or an unmonetised startup is still only potential energy. Until it moves, or is pledged, transferred, used as leverage for borrowing, or otherwise connected to a circuit, it does not yet impose the same social load as consumption. It is just high-scoring glitter on a digital spreadsheet.

But as I understand, this is where the modern billionaire trick enters. The wealthy do not need to actually sell the battery to use it. They can connect it to the circuit by borrowing against it. People call this “Buy, Borrow, then Die”, meaning they use these appreciated assets as collateral to get access to to a large pot of money, splurge it on pyramids of Ferrero-Rocher, gold plated bathroom taps, or whatever it is the fashionable upper class do with their money these days, and then conveniently pass away of hazelnut-infused diabetes.

At death, the real magic trick occurs: the accumulated gain may be wiped clean on a stepped-up basis, while the estate settles the debts from assets whose tax history has been politely laundered by mortality.

Of course, we, the have-nots are supposed to be quite upset at this. The public dearth of mass-produced croquembouches comprises a great crisis of equality. But as far as I see it, we are not angry at the sparkly Excel number itself; we are angry when the number is wired into the circuit and begins ordering actual humans, houses, land, lawyers, media, and conical confectionery around.

Consider this: There exists a little old lady who has $50 billion in Unrealised Capital Gains from her highly-successful crocheting company. However, her consumption is that of the typical little old lady. She does not borrow against it. She does not buy a fleet of yachts. She does not fund political candidates, acquire newspapers, build a marble bunker, or corner the global yarn market.

Through a meticulous programme of coupon pinching, she uses no more than $50 a week, mainly on crumpets, tea and marmalade. In terms of personal consumption, her strain on the earth’s resources is identical to someone else of a blue-collar persuasion, living on a minimal fixed income. She takes up one seat on the bus, sips her tea with no more than two cubes of sucrose, and leaves the rest of the world completely unmolested.

Because she never converts her potential energy into an activated kinetic flux, the system does not need to change her, her life does not attract green-eyed stares of envy because she is not using her capital as appetite. The gain exists, and the claim exists, but she barely exercises it. At her eventual unfortunate death, if she has no heirs, no trust, and no chosen beneficiary, the vault may return to the state through the curiously named process of “escheatment”. In that case, her private claim ends without ever having become private gluttony.

Net result: Society itself has profited to the economic tune of about fifty billion theoretical dollars. Who would be upset about that?

Which brings me to my point: What I think upsets people on a moral basis is not greed itself, the accumulation of wealth, but consumption and gluttony. That is perhaps why people have enacted taxes on luxury and consumption from the moral high ground. They are not merely taxing possession, they are taxing appetite.

A luxury tax is not aimed at the monk with a vault of treasure. It is aimed at the banquet table, the gold-plated carriage, the private island, the yacht, the palace, and the social fact that one person’s appetite has begun to commandeer labour and resources at a scale ordinary people experience as grotesque. Whether such taxes are economically efficient is a separate question, but morally, their target is intelligible: gluttony is, or should be, expensive.

From a systems perspective, I don’t, therefore understand why governments persist in sending battalions of tax agents and appraisers to estimate what an un-traded tech company or a piece of art is worth every year (the fatal flaw of the California/European wealth tax models). My logic is simple: Tax agents are in the public psyche about as popular as vermin, and therefore society as a whole would probably be considerably happier the fewer of them are necessary. If the problem is flux, then you tax the exact moment potential energy turns kinetic.

Fortunately, upon some cursory research, it appears some far more economically educated individuals at Yale have already come to that very same conclusion. “One version of this proposal treats certain acts of borrowing against a massive asset as a deemed realisation event. If a billionaire pulls $100 million in liquid cash out of a bank using their stock as a hostage, you tax that flux. There is no need to audit the vault and count every theoretical penny, you just read the transaction receipt at the door.

And that, perhaps, neatly and equanimously sidesteps much of the drama about capital flight and wealth taxes. If the tax is aimed at flux rather than static ownership, then the departure of the wealthy magnate is not in itself a fiscal tragedy. If he flees the jurisdiction, the state’s only remaining concern is that he at least has the decency to purchase a first-class ticket.

To answer this, it is useful to briefly revisit two largely forgotten Roman concepts: otium and negotium.

Modern readers often translate otium as “leisure”, but this is somewhat misleading. Otium did not signify idleness or indolence. Rather, it described time devoted to reflection, study, conversation, contemplation, and self-cultivation, an ideal not too far off from Daoist concept of retreat and personal cultivation.

Negotium, by contrast, referred to business, obligation, commerce, administration, and the countless practical affairs required to sustain life. It is less romantic, the equivalent of filing your tax returns or doing the laundry. One was not considered morally superior to the other; both were necessary components of a flourishing existence.

The distinction remains surprisingly relevant. Most modern individuals possess abundant distraction, but relatively little otium. They move directly from labour to entertainment, from obligation to stimulation, without passing through reflection. Information is consumed, but not digested. Experiences occur, but are not incorporated. The result is a peculiar condition in which people become increasingly informed while remaining uncertain of what any of it actually means. If digested information becomes part of the self, and what one digests is not consciously selected but merely designed for palatability and mass appeal, then the self risks becoming less sui generis (I apologise for explaining the joke, sui generis literally means “self-generated” and the phrase actually means one-of-a-kind and unique. My suspicion is that this is not coincidental.) and more a reflection of the informational environment in which it developed.

Freedom is not merely just the ability to choose actions, it is also the ability to choose how the self is formed, voluntary or otherwise.

The dangerous part is that this process appears to be only partially under conscious control: What we choose to incorporate into long-term memory, emotional processing and pattern reinforcement (what we call learning as a whole) has been theorised by neuroscience to take place while one is in deep sleep. The brain continues editing the self while the conscious mind is offline. Evidently, integration cannot be entirely voluntary. We may choose what to expose ourselves to, but we possess considerably less authority over what ultimately takes root.

However, we do have control over what we expose ourselves to during the day and the corpus of data itself which is to be integrated. Assigning semantic importance and weighting how meaningful something is is therefore a necessary part of otium, from my perspective. One does not go looking for meaning and purpose, one looks for experiences and data and tries to synthesise them into a Raison d'être.

If otium represents the deliberate selection and organisation of experience, then education represents society's attempt to cultivate that capacity in others.

I recently heard a teacher scold their students that their brains were incapable of information retention, that they would eventually be superseded by AI. This reminded me of a concern I raised to my molecular biology teacher in university: How much of memorising minutiae is actually pertinent towards education?

Clearly, the human brain will never perhaps contain as many accurately recalled factoids as the Internet, but that does not mean that every single piece of trivia is of equal importance. The fault in Education, I suspect, occurs when comprehension itself is malformed, as a result of a failure of significance. The question is whether it is necessary to retain Information. or if comprehension can be attained via a 2 minute lookup on Wikipedia.

To answer this, consider that there are at least three layers of knowledge:

1. Facts: e.g. ATP has three phosphate groups.

2. Relationships: ATP functions because phosphate bond hydrolysis couples reactions.

3. Mental Models: ATP is part of metabolism, a network of energy transfers and constraints.

The first layer is increasingly externalisable, much as important documents can be stored on an external hard drive and retrieved when needed. Individual facts can often be recovered in seconds from a search engine, database, or encyclopaedia.

The second layer is more difficult because it depends upon context. Relationships only become meaningful when the surrounding concepts are already understood. A student may memorise that ATP hydrolysis releases energy, yet fail to understand why this matters without a broader understanding of cellular processes.

The third layer is the most difficult to externalise because it consists of the conceptual structures through which information is interpreted. Mental models allow new information to be integrated, evaluated, and connected to existing knowledge. They determine not merely what is known, but how knowledge itself is organised.

This distinction explains why expertise cannot be reduced to information retrieval. Facts can be looked up, but the significance of those facts depends upon a pre-existing framework. A search engine may provide an answer in seconds, yet it cannot supply the conceptual architecture required to understand why that answer matters. Without that architecture, information remains isolated trivia rather than understanding.

True education is not indoctrination, nor is it merely the transfer of data. It is the construction of a cognitive architecture capable of integrating new information in a productive and functional manner. Facts are important, but only insofar as they contribute to a broader framework through which reality can be interpreted and understood.

This distinction becomes increasingly important in an age of search engines, encyclopaedias, and artificial intelligence. Information itself can be outsourced with remarkable efficiency. Understanding cannot. One may retrieve an answer in seconds, but the ability to evaluate its significance, recognise its limitations, connect it to existing knowledge, and apply it appropriately remains dependent upon internal structure.

The arrival of AI does not invalidate education. Rather, it forces us to ask what education was for in the first place.

This is why education cannot be wholly outsourced without consequence. The moment interpretation itself is delegated, one begins surrendering not merely knowledge, but agency. A person who cannot evaluate information independently must rely upon the judgements of others. They may still possess answers, but they no longer possess ownership over the reasoning that produced them.

In other words:

Perhaps the largest point I am attempting to make is that modern society is extraordinarily good at offering people negotium, yet remarkably poor at cultivating otium. We are surrounded by obligations, deadlines, entertainment, notifications, and distractions, but possess comparatively few institutions dedicated to reflection, synthesis, and self-cultivation.

In response, many people arrive at a peculiar conclusion: that meaning can be found through the accumulation of novelty. Travel, tourism, leisure, consumption, and the endless pursuit of new experiences become substitutes for a deeper examination of life itself. The assumption appears to be that enough stimulation will eventually produce wisdom.

It does not. Meaning is not a self-authenticated preference or an arbitrary choice made by caprice. It requires actual labor.

You can buy a sculpture. You cannot buy the five years spent building it. The meaning resides primarily in the transformation, not the object.

A tourist can buy souvenirs from twenty countries. The souvenirs are not the meaning. The meaning lies in whatever work the experiences performed upon the traveller—or failed to perform.

Novelty is not understanding. Travel is not wisdom. Leisure is not reflection. Experience only becomes transformative when it is integrated into a larger framework of meaning. Without such integration, one merely accumulates memories in the same manner that a collector accumulates souvenirs. A person may visit twenty countries and learn less than another who spends a year carefully contemplating a single book. The distinction is not the quantity of information encountered, but the amount of work performed upon it. Meaning is not discovered through motion alone; it emerges through interpretation, synthesis, and incorporation. In short, experience requires otium.

If meaning is not generated through novelty alone, then the question becomes what conditions actually produce it. Historically, purpose has often emerged under circumstances far harsher than those enjoyed by most modern citizens. Material abundance and existential fulfilment do not appear to be synonymous.

People living through the Great Depression may have endured severe material hardship, yet many possessed a clearer sense of purpose than those suffering from contemporary malaise. This is not to romanticise poverty, nor to suggest that suffering is inherently ennobling. Rather, it is to observe that hardship and meaning are separate variables.

This is why phenomena such as burnout, disengagement, and voluntary withdrawal from the workforce appear entirely understandable to me. Economists may worry that GDP growth has slowed, fertility rates have fallen, or consumer spending has weakened. These concerns are not necessarily misplaced. Yet consumption is not synonymous with value, nor can prosperity alone provide purpose. A society may become wealthier while its citizens become increasingly uncertain why they are striving in the first place.

Meaning cannot be delegated to markets, governments, employers, or social institutions. Other people may provide opportunities, incentives, and obligations, but they cannot grant dignity, purpose, or fulfilment on one’s behalf. These emerge from the interpretation of experience itself.

The most important question of negotium is therefore not how much one works, but what one is working towards. Labour acquires meaning only when it serves a purpose which has survived reflection. To work endlessly without understanding why is merely motion. To understand why one labours is to transform obligation into intention.

Make no mistake: otium is serious work. It is the labour through which information becomes experience, experience becomes identity, and identity becomes purpose. Every human being may be 1/8 billionth of the planet, but occupies a unique position within reality, a singular intersection of history, relationships, opportunities, limitations, and observations which will never be repeated. Meaning emerges from the interpretation of that perspective. To neglect otium is therefore not merely to waste time, but to surrender the opportunity to become something genuinely sui generis: the unique author of one's own existence.

To quote the otherwise deluded (in my opinion) Kant: Es ist gut.

Experience is the incorporation of Information.

So this week, I shall discuss how this knowledge is actually practical, useful, and enables me to stay reasonably content at an affordable cost of under $100 Singaporean Dollars a week.

1) The Selection Problem

There is no question today that the problem with information is not producing it, there is a vast amount of Data on the internet, but converting it into Information is extremely expensive and time consuming because it takes cognition.

The central question is no longer how we acquire information, but how we select it. Every day, human beings are bombarded with more signals from amply-funded marketeers, multinational companies and powerful polities than they could ever meaningfully process. “Buy this shoe, person X is bad, this is entertaining, trust us.”

We therefore rely upon heuristics which help us decide what deserves our attention. We seek information because it appears meaningful, novel, pleasurable, comforting, useful, or socially relevant. Long before information becomes experience, it must first survive the act of selection.

This is why Google itself became so powerful, because search-engine-optimisation itself became the first layer of panning for data. Now that search engines are losing relevance, it is only natural that Google is developing Gemini, an A.I. to supersede the older method of curated information. Search engines helped us find information. LLMs increasingly attempt to decide which information matters.

Other people refer to this as the attention economy, but I am of a completely different opinion. What is scarce is not attention, which fails to distinguish between positive and negative stimuli, but meaning:

Human beings are, irreplaceably, what I call semantic engines. We exist to convert data into meaning.

A scruffy dog means dramatically different things to a veterinarian, a cynophobe, a grieving owner, and a starving castaway. The datum remains unchanged; only the interpretation and context differ. Meaning is therefore not located in the information itself, but emerges from the relationship between information and observer.

This distinction matters because attention can be purchased, manipulated, and captured. Meaning cannot. One may force a person to look, but not necessarily to care. Even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence remains dependent upon human significance. Like a vampire, it may make seductive suggestions, but it cannot cross the threshold of your mind unless you invite it inside.

2) Narrative as Cognitive Compression

As Desmond Morris noted, humans are not merely tool-using apes, but storytelling apes. Raw information is often dense, abstract, and difficult to digest. Narrative solves this problem by compressing large amounts of information into memorable structures.

A story allows complex relationships to be understood without requiring the audience to repeatedly reconstruct them from first principles. In this sense, narrative is not merely entertainment; it is a cognitive technology for reducing the cost of understanding.

As experience accumulates, the temptation grows to say, “Ah yes, this reminds me of...” before launching into a long-winded soliloquy likely to rankle the sensibilities of the young, fair and scant of patience; semantics are rarely easily transferrable between people sans rapport and the moral of the story may have all the aesthetic appeal of masticated food to them.

The young are not stupid. They are perfectly capable of understanding the principle embedded within a narrative. What they often lack is not comprehension, but digestion. A lesson may be understood intellectually years before it becomes meaningful experientially. Only when reality performs the necessary work upon the self does the full significance of the story emerge.

3) Identity as Sediment

In the previous essay, I argued that experience is information which has performed work upon the self. Identity is therefore the residue left behind by those transformations.

Of course, I am not speaking of physical identity, but rather what people nebulously label “character” or “soul”. What I think people are actually trying to describe is inclination and consistency, whether that consistency manifests as a fortress or a hobgoblin. Unstable people are difficult to relate to in any way which does not involve their volatility, we seek to classify and understand other human beings by their predilections, ideals, temperament and habits.

Identity does not emerge spontaneously. It develops through countless acts of selection and incorporation. Every book read, story believed, habit repeated, friendship maintained, and ideal pursued deposits another layer upon the self. Most of these deposits are individually insignificant, just as a single grain of sand does not form a dune. Yet over time they accumulate into recognisable patterns of inclination and behaviour. Character is therefore less a thing one possesses than a process continually shaped by what one repeatedly chooses to attend to and retain.

We are not merely what we know, but what we have repeatedly chosen to attend to, remember, and incorporate. The self is less a fixed object than a geological record of accumulated informational experiences.

4) Informational Diet

Returning to a theme from the previous essay, the old aphorism claims that we are what we eat. The same principle applies to information. Every book, film, conversation, ideology, hobby, and obsession contributes to the environment in which the self develops.

This observation is not a moral judgement. A person who consumes romance novels, military history, philosophy, or celebrity gossip is not necessarily better or worse than another. Quite often, they are seeking useful information, pleasure or guidance on something absent in their lives from the vantage of safety and security. However, different informational diets inevitably cultivate different habits of thought, priorities, and identities.

Consider that digestion rates are demonstrably not equal. In my personal history of plying and selling wine to consumers, it is evident that telling people a compelling history of the terroir or vintage increases the derived pleasure from the experience itself. This is not at all dissimilar from how opera used to have a little program guide to assist the underinformed of what was actually happening in the moment before your eardrums were blasted with 90 decibels of German coloratura.

Preparation, attitude and anticipation can affect experience itself by applying transformations and limits on the information we extract from an event. Going into something with a hostile, jaded or negative attitude is likely to produce exactly the preordained results. A convincing, albeit perhaps even delusional narrative, can turn the Emperor’s new clothing into the finest of vestments.

The modern world would have you intuit that semantic value is directly proportional to expense, but this is manifestly incorrect; that is how you extract fifty dollars’ worth of excitement from a five-dollar meatloaf.

A picnic can outperform a luxury holiday. A childhood toy can outperform an expensive watch. The amount of work performed is partly determined by the semantic framework through which information is encountered. When one takes children to an exotic foreign land only to discover that their idea of adventure consists of besieging the hotel room and ordering room service, one learns that the foreign setting is about as relevant to enjoyment as an arbitrary checkbox on a form. The holiday has not failed; rather, the child is extracting value from a completely different informational source than the parent expected

.

5) Informational Obesity

Not all information is equally nourishing. Modern societies have become extraordinarily efficient at producing signals that capture attention without producing meaningful transformation. Like highly processed food, such information is engineered to be immediately rewarding while providing little lasting value. The result is a strange condition in which individuals may consume enormous quantities of information while remaining intellectually undernourished.

Informational obesity does not arise because information is false, nor because it is entirely devoid of value. Junk food would not be dangerous if it tasted unpleasant. Rather, the danger emerges when information is optimised for consumption rather than incorporation. Novelty, outrage, certainty, fear, validation, and tribal belonging are extraordinarily effective flavour enhancers.

Consider reality television. Millions of people can recount intimate details of contestants, feuds, romances and betrayals, yet derive little transferable understanding from the experience. The informational calories are immense. The nutritional value is often less obvious.

Then we have homeopathy or fitness bro-science. Their success does not stem primarily from evidence, but from narrative digestibility. The story is simple, empowering, and easy to remember. Like confectionery, it is engineered to be consumed with minimal effort. The problem is not in the consumption, but that little cognitive interrogative work has been done to burn those “calories” off. Saying "I saw something on YouTube" is not the same as "I thought about it for a few hours".

Visual media is overpowering in terms of pure informational content. It combines auditory, chromatic, spatial, and dynamic cues in order to reduce the cost of interpretation. The consumer is presented not merely with dialogue, but with facial expressions, music, scenery, pacing, lighting, and movement. Much of the semantic labour has already been performed on their behalf.

A book imposes considerably more friction. One must imagine Hogwarts rather than substitute Daniel Radcliffe. One must construct voices, appearances, scenery, and atmosphere internally. The reader therefore performs a greater proportion of the cognitive work required to transform information into experience. The problem is that the work and investment required to understand something are often the very mechanisms through which meaning is created. Convenience is very much a double-edged sword.

6) Semiotics and Reification

Narratives, symbols, and abstractions are useful because they compress reality into manageable forms. Problems emerge when we forget that these compressions are only representations. Human beings possess a remarkable tendency to mistake maps for territories, slogans for realities, and categories for the things they describe.

Using Hogwarts as an example, it is notable that actors often struggle to escape their former roles despite their best efforts. Many people continue to perform a kind of cognitive metonymy in which Daniel Radcliffe becomes inseparable from Harry Potter. Emma Watson is frequently treated as an intellectual authority because she once portrayed a precocious and articulate young scholar, rather than on her actual personal academic achievements. The representation gradually supplants the reality.

Symbols are powerful tools, but they become dangerous when they cease to be recognised as tools.

7) The Consumption Trap

The ultimate pathology of an informational society is the substitution of symbols for experience itself. It becomes increasingly possible to consume representations of travel, friendship, politics, romance, achievement, and wisdom without directly participating in any of them.

In such an environment, one risks mistaking familiarity with a concept for genuine understanding. Information is transformed into spectacle, while experience quietly recedes into the background. I can be righteous not because I have done anything right, but because I accept that “the right thing” is meaningful.

Virtue has moved away from action into the act of consumption itself. I need not perform a good deed, only consume media which affirms that good deeds are important. I need not become wise, only familiar with the appearance of wisdom. The symbolic act increasingly substitutes for the experiential one. But the more I consume without understanding, the more I risk becoming satiated, jaded, obese, and complacent.

I am not fundamentally against vicarious experiences, but it is rather poignant when satiation itself replaces the will or agency to convert longing or desire into experience.

The danger is not that symbols exist. Symbols are indispensable. The danger emerges when the representation becomes sufficiently satisfying that one no longer feels compelled to seek the reality beneath it. A travel documentary may inspire exploration, but it may also replace it. Political discourse may motivate action, but it may also become action's surrogate. The consumption trap is therefore not the existence of vicarious experience, but the possibility that representation becomes so effective that it extinguishes the desire for participation itself.

Conclusion

If identity is the sediment of experience, then the question of what we consume becomes inseparable from the question of who we become.

The modern world has largely solved the problem of information scarcity. It now confronts a far more difficult challenge: learning how to distinguish nourishment from indulgence, meaning from stimulation, and experience from its countless substitutes.

With proper digestion and cognition, human experience and life can be made far richer and more meaningful, the question is whether we want to invest fiscal capital or work into the process.

This led me to suspect something important: Experience is not simply being exposed to information, advertisements, statistics and propaganda. Experience itself is the absorption of information and stimuli, which only becomes meaningful when it performs sufficient life-changing or significant work upon the self.

1) What is Information?

So let us ask - what is information at all? It is useful to separate Information from its sisters, data, nonsense and noise.

Data are discrete inputs presented to a system: measurements, observations, symbols, records, and signals. They are not identical to truth and may very well be false, misleading, incomplete, or contextless. In this sense, data are the unprocessed substrate from which information may emerge. The shade of your dress under different lighting conditions, historical trivia, your mother’s birthday, or the number of spots on your pet gecko are all examples of data. For these inputs to become useful to human beings, they must first pass through cognitive filters that interpret, prioritise, and categorise them into one of the remaining three domains.

When we process data, we first subject it to what might be called an “Interesting” pass. Human beings possess trained cognitive heuristics that rapidly determine whether a signal deserves attention or may be safely ignored. A signal becomes interesting when it appears relevant to survival, agency, comfort, curiosity, or relational stability. Sometimes this occurs through high-intensity feedback, such as discovering a bear in your closet. At other times, it emerges through persistent low-intensity friction that demands resolution, such as accidentally sitting on a cat. In both cases, attention is captured because the organism anticipates that the signal may require action, adaptation, or recalibration.

This layer is precisely what marketers, propagandists, and advertisers attempt to manipulate. Their goal is to ensure that their signals survive the organism’s initial filtering mechanisms and become incorporated as meaningful information rather than discarded as noise or nonsense.

Nonsense consists of signals that are interesting, entertaining, or emotionally stimulating, yet ultimately unnecessary to integrate into one’s operational model of reality. One may watch Monty Python perform an elaborate sketch about cannibalism without investing any critical thought into the practical logistics actually involved in eating another human being. The signal is processed aesthetically and emotionally rather than rationally or instrumentally. It captures attention without demanding incorporation.

Noise is detritus: data we have judged irrelevant, useless, or beneath our attention, like static on a television screen. Yet noise is not an intrinsic property of the signal itself. What appears meaningless to one organism may prove vital to another. A faint rustling in the bushes is just noise… until one realises there is a tiger inside. Failures of attention are therefore often failures of the cognitive sieve rather than failures of the underlying data.

This leaves us with information itself: data that survives filtration because we judge it capable of producing meaningful change. Information carries the potential for work. It offers the possibility of changing ourselves, our lives, our models of reality, or our surroundings.

2) Processing Information is not Free.

This cognitive sieving is itself an energy-consuming process. The brain is a shameless candy addict, happily starving the rest of the body for molecules of glucose to fuel its perpetual court of discrimination. Every signal must be weighed, categorised, prioritised, incorporated, or discarded, and each act of attention carries metabolic cost.

As I have argued before, why do biases and prejudices exist at all? Because they conserve the energy required for continual reconsideration. Most fearsomely efficient of all is the stubborn, corpulent, and apathetic cognition that concludes it has already seen everything worth seeing and therefore no longer needs to revise its internal laws, models, or operations. Unfortunately, such a mind is also uniquely maladapted for long-term survival within a changing paradigm.

Even information itself can rapidly decay in salience. Your spouse reminding you that your anniversary is tomorrow may be highly meaningful the first time it occurs, yet by the tenth repetition the signal has lost much of its utility. This, I suspect, is why nagging becomes irritating: the information has decayed into noise.

From this, we may deduce that boredom itself is the perception that the expected informational yield of an experience has fallen below the energetic cost required to engage with it. Malaise, meanwhile, is the far more dreadful conclusion that the world-as-experienced no longer appears to contain anything sufficiently meaningful to justify investment at all.

3) Education is a function of cognitive digestion.

In my daily work as a teacher, I frequently encounter children and parents who use the labels “stupid” and “intelligent” as though they describe a single unified trait. In reality, I suspect they are conflating several entirely different modes of cognitive failure and success. Education itself is less the passive accumulation of facts than the digestion and integration of information into operational structure.

Consider the curious phenomenon of repeatedly re-reading the same novel or rewatching the same film while continuing to derive pleasure and insight from it. This suggests that information is rarely exhausted in a single encounter. Either the original experience was only partially integrated, portions of it have decayed or been forgotten, or the self itself has changed sufficiently to generate new synthesis from the same corpus of stimuli. Hidden epiphanies emerge, unnoticed structures become visible, and one is sometimes reminded that life itself still contains meaningful things worth attending to.

If we breakdown the actual cognitive failures into broad categories (this is quite helpful for the vocabulary so that one may pick the proper and precise insult to use if in a war of invective):

1. Ignorance
   (e.g.: ignoramus, simpleton)
   The situation in which relevant data are absent from the mind and as a result, understanding cannot be achieved.

2. Latency
   (e.g.: dull, slow-in-the-head, clod, dolt)
   The person does not integrate information at a subjectively acceptable rate.

3. Rigidity
   (e.g.: stubborn fool, sophist, obstinate donkey)
   The individual refuses to revise or reconsider older information or patterns.

4. Apathy
   (e.g.: philistine, jock, meathead, lunkhead, bimbo/himbo)
   The person does not consider the expenditure of energy worthwhile at all and is avoidant, perhaps out of complacency, the dislike of stress, or otherwise.

5. Misunderstanding
   (e.g.: fool, blockhead, halfwit, confused idiot)
   The individual incorrectly integrates data into an inaccurate, incoherent, or maladaptive model despite possessing sufficient information. Importantly, this process is not always accidental; misunderstanding is sometimes maintained deliberately because it protects identity, comfort, status, or existing commitments.

6. Genuine Structural Limitations
   (e.g.: imbecile, idiot, cretin, “hopeless case”)
   The cognitive architecture itself lacks sufficient capacity to process, retain, or synthesise the complexity required for the task. Ethically speaking, this category deserves more sympathy than disdain. One must maintain reasonable expectations of human capability, lest we ourselves fall into one of the preceding five categories.

Any good and properly trained teacher, I maintain, must understand which categories are failing during instruction and how much of the resulting confusion may stem from the instructor’s own communicative limitations. Information can be dense and difficult to swallow; one of the central tasks of education is therefore to break knowledge apart and chew it into more digestible segments. Quite often, when a student is struggling, they are often performing the intellectual equivalent of trying to swallow a watermelon; not everyone has the most expansive of mental oesophagi.

And on that note, since this is an exceptionally large concept, I shall leave its broader implications for next week. As Men in Black briefly hinted (in an advertisement, by encouraging people to forget and watch the entire movie again, a very clever use of the concept), experience itself is nearly indistinguishable from learning, which may explain why first experiences are so often remembered as the most intense.

To my Eastern mind, this is clearly a task to petition Nüwa, goddess of celestial roofing. The Eastern instinct is to repair the roof before the next monsoon rains make domestic life intolerable, the Western instinct is to immediately hold vigorous debate on whose fault and problem it is.

This, one commentator declares, is a sign of kakistocracy: a system like the Peter Principle, in which the obtuse, belligerent, and manifestly unfit rise to govern. Another insists that it is the inevitable result of moral and civic decay. However, there is a much simpler reason for why populist rhetoric is so persuasive: it is using a mode of persuasion which was never fully named.

As background, it is worth consulting the Western authority on the art of persuasion: Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher and proto-scientist extraordinaire.

His theory is that there are three principal modes of persuasion: credibility of the speaker (Ethos), in the emotional resonance (Pathos), and patterns of reasoning (Logos). (He then proceeds into a lengthy jeremiad on the perennial malignant species known as the teenager, and the cynical reprobate known as the elderly, proving that some things, indeed, never do change.)

What Aristotle seems not fully to have detailed is that there exists a fourth mode of persuasion, so fundamental, so base, and so natural that he may have overlooked it precisely because he was an unusually intelligent man surrounded by others of similar temperament. I call this Organos: persuasion by instrumentality.

Organos is a very simple form of relational enticement. It invites the listener to support or believe the speaker, not because of anything intrinsic to the argument itself, but because of what the speaker promises to do, or what being persuaded by the argument will result in.

Contemporary examples abound. From a politically neutral and factual standpoint, Donald Trump energised crowds by promising to lock up Hillary Clinton. Letitia James built her profile by vowing to pursue Trump. In both cases, the real selling point was npt abstract justice, it was the thrilling prospect of action against the enemy. It reminds me of what the juror Carrie Bess later said about the O.J. Simpson trial, that she personally felt that the arguments were less ‘suasive than the significance of a particular verdict.

To demonstrate this, consider the proposition: Chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla because I shall give you one hundred dollars if you agree. (Obviously patently false, incidentally, but sacrifices must be made for the sake of argument.)

This is precisely where Aristotle’s taxonomy falters.

The statement is clearly not Logos. In Aristotle’s system, weak logical arguments commit the primary fallacy of ignoratio elenchi, which sounds suspiciously like a spell one learns during their second year at Hogwarts. The phrase simply means "irrelevant conclusion": a technically elegant way of saying that one has answered the wrong question with considerable confidence. The superiority of chocolate over vanilla is not established, nor supported by the prospect of financial reward.

Nor is it Pathos: "Eat the chocolate; there are starving people elsewhere in Africa, and vanilla supports the relatively well-off people of Madagascar." One hundred dollars is not an appeal to sentiment, pity, or enthusiasm. It is a perfectly rational and unsentimental reason to assent.

It is not Ethos either. The appeal is outright bribery, which few people would consider ethical, at least without gratuitous disregard for principle. None of that matters so long as the promised payment is real.

Yet the argument remains undeniably persuasive; it has not yet crossed the threshold into coercion. In fact, the persuasive force of such an appeal may increase precisely because ethics has been waived.

"Vote for me," the ideologue proclaims, "and I shall crush your enemies and make them weep bitter tears of lament." The sentiment finds perhaps its most succinct historical expression in Malcolm X's famous injunction to pursue justice "by any means necessary," a deliciously un-nuanced slogan which reduces political praxis to the selection of the most effective blunt instrument.

This is persuasion by the mercenary at its most extreme, persuasion by the Austrian painter with the iconic moustache (yes, I went there), who persuaded millions not by proving his claims, but by promising to destroy those they blamed for their misfortunes.

However, this is not to say that Organos is fundamentally immoral.

It is amoral, Machiavellian, indifferent to higher forms of principled consideration. Like a lever or a hired sword, its significance lies not in what it believes, but in what it can accomplish. Organos does not ask whether an end is true, virtuous, or beautiful. It asks only whether the desired effect can be brought to pass.

The salient aspect of Organos is that it does not use the perspective of the speaker, it uses that of the listener.

In Ethos, the speaker says:

“Trust me because I am virtuous.”

In Organos, the speaker says:

“Support me because I shall improve your reality.”

The moral justification is thus outsourced to the audience. The speaker does not need to try to be a good person, they just need to be a high-performance Nemesis engine fuelled by the listener's righteous indignation. Once this transfer occurs, diverse grievances and institutional resentments can become temporarily aligned toward a common objective.

When populations grow, ideological diversity tends to increase, shared truth and shared virtue become more difficult to establish. Hence, it is only a sufficiently compelling appeal to shared reality which can still produce rapid and effective coordination.

Remember those movies and works such as Independence Day or the Lord of the Rings where a bunch of bickering factions suddenly are magically stoked into unity by an external existential threat? This is the principle at work.

Former enemies set aside doctrinal differences, historical grievances, and incompatible ambitions, not because they have discovered a common truth or developed mutual admiration, but because they now desire the same material outcome. Their consensus is often shallow, but their alignment is sufficient to produce decisive action.

This proves that alignment itself is not a bad thing, sometimes it is the clearest and most stable path to harmony. Where consensus seeks harmony through shared belief, alignment achieves harmony through shared direction. We need not believe the same things to build the same world, as long as the agentic weapon itself is sufficiently eloquent in the language of coercion and incentive. As Machiavelli himself remarked, it is better to be feared than to be loved, if one cannot be both.

Ignoratio rei, the reality fallacy

The problem arises when Organos becomes detached from the other modes and efficacy alone becomes the sole criterion of support. Yet, attempting to eliminate it entirely is impossible, because democratic politics is inherently about organised action.

My perspective is that any Aristotelian argument must address it on its own terms. If ignoratio elenchi is a failure to address the argument, then under the rationale of Organos there must also be an ignoratio rei: a failure to be pertinent to reality itself.

Let us indulge in a further theoretical exercise. Suppose a society faces a housing shortage, and the government, in its wisdom, decides that the most equitable method of distributing newly constructed flats is a lottery. Each applicant receives an equal chance of success, provided, of course, that they first pay a modest administrative fee for the privilege of losing.

A citizen enters the lottery ten times and fails on every occasion. At this point, the government offers reassurance: “The system works because it is fair and impartial.”

From a narrowly Aristotelian standpoint, this is a respectable argument. The procedure is indeed impartial. Everyone has the same probability of success, and probability, unlike fate, is entirely indifferent to personal disappointment. No one can accuse the lottery of prejudice; it is an equal-opportunity source of despair.

Yet the citizen's difficulty is not that the lottery is biased. The difficulty is that they still do not have a house. Each day, the government's carefully reasoned assurances are contradicted by the stubborn fact that they remain at home with their parents, enduring the peculiarly Western indignity of being denied the opportunity to assume a thirty-year mortgage and establish a modestly leveraged personal fiefdom of iniquity.

The argument therefore commits ignoratio rei: it answers a different problem from the one being experienced. The government has demonstrated that redress is being distributed fairly, but has offered no clear signal to the individual that scarcity itself is being alleviated, that resolution is inevitable and just a matter of patience. Procedural justice is not the same thing as material adequacy, any more than a beautifully shuffled deck guarantees that one will be dealt a good hand.

At this point, persuasion fails through no fault of Aristotle. Logos, Ethos, and Pathos may all be present and functioning properly. The difficulty is simply that the argument, however elegant, does not address the operative reality. The applicant is not searching for a proof that the process is unbiased; he is searching for somewhere to live.

A voter in this position will eventually cease to be impressed by lectures on fairness and begin looking for a blunt instrument. Enter Organos, stage right, carrying a very large hammer. The populist announces that the lottery is a sham and promises either to build more houses or to seize them from some conveniently available out-group, depending on how competent he is feeling that morning. The specific proposal may be brilliant or catastrophic, but its appeal lies in a single, potent message:

“Unlike these people, I intend to do something.”

And in politics, as in plumbing, action is often preferred to a very persuasive explanation of why the leak is perfectly symmetrical. When sages cease to deliver, voters begin shopping for tools.

Countering Organos

So at this point, if I have not already alienated you with a long and perhaps trite sermon on ulterior motive, it is worth considering how Organos persuasion is best countered without resorting to the melodramatic response of coercion.

As previously shown, it is remarkably resilient to pure Aristotelian approaches, any counter-argument must be made at least partially on the ontological level, hence I introduce the concept of rei perfectio - the superior reality. The steps are as follows:

1. Recognition

The first step is indispensable because denial creates ignoratio rei. If the condition is not in fact the product of psychotic hallucination, we do not want to start pushing people down the slippery slope of the Narcissist’s Prayer. This just draws hostile accusations of “gaslighting”, a curious term, largely because we have not used gas for lighting for the better part of a century, thanks to Edison.

If citizens perceive:

• Housing scarcity,

• Crime,

• Red tape,

• Inflation,

• Administrative paralysis,

and the response is “nothing is wrong,” the speaker forfeits credibility immediately, because the implicit corollary is that “you must be wrong”, a sentiment which is about as frictionless and comforting as a cheese-grater . Recognition is the minimum price of credibility. In the words of Mrs Judy Sheindlin: Podiatric peeing is not puissant persuasion for precipitation.

2. Signal Credibility

On average, modern audiences are not credulous. They are deeply sceptical of phrases developed by conflict-resolution gurus, such as:

• “We hear you.”

• “We understand your concerns.”

• “Your feelings are valid.”

These phrases may once have worked, but now, they are trite and overused. Some form of semantic loss has happened, as often happens when you repeat a word long enough and notice that it starts to lose its meaning. The visceral response is then:

“No, you don’t, stop patronising me.”

Without a credible guarantee, all recognition just becomes semiotic noise. It is not a trivial task, but that is what politics exists for: to prevent the community from exercising more creative solutions, such as arson.

3. Rei Perfectio (The Superior Reality)

This is the heart of the counter-strategy. The response must offer a materially better and more credible alternative than the Organos weapon.

Not:

“Your tool is immoral.”

But:

“Your tool is crude, and this one will work better.”

This is competitive instrumentality, a play on incentives. It works best when entropy is manageable and society is still flame-retardant. Affinity is also important, many people who fancy themselves hardened realists believe that “niceness is weakness”, but this is usually just an excuse for the lack of effort to uphold personal standards.

A combination of etiquette and persistence is a terrible thing; it creates a gradient that drags the conversation back into Aristotle. The principle is illustrated rather neatly in the film Boiler Room, in which unethical brokers are warned against selling to "little old ladies" not out of a sense of morality, but because they are "complainers" who will call every day asking about their $100 investment, eventually drawing the attention of the SEC or state regulators. They prefer "whales" or middle-class marks who are more likely to take a loss quietly out of embarrassment.

As long as the persistent actor remains polite, reasonable, and procedurally compliant, the opposing party faces a serious constraint. Any attempt to silence or punish them appears disproportionate and therefore difficult to justify, both morally and institutionally. The message being communicated is “Our reality is worth consideration; we are the evidence.”

4. Throughput Evidence

And finally, the most important element is evidence that the system is moving, there must be some form of credible certainty within the guarantee.

People do not actually demand perfection. They demand signs that:

• Scarcity is diminishing,

• Their probability of success is improving,

• Waiting is rational,

• Patience has a foreseeable reward.

The decisive question is whether the queue is moving, not whether one has to rely on calculating Poisson distributions to determine when it is in the conceptually infinite future between now and the entropic heat-death of the universe that they will finally strike it rich.

Hot Tip: Most people loathe abstract maths.

Coda: The Information Age Problem

As a postscript, in my opinion, this resurgence in Populism and Cynicism is probably not because of moral decay, it is because of technology and the increased velocity of information.

Social media accelerates awareness of problems, every personal disaster which is happening to highly conventionally attractive or relatable people can be broadcast to hundreds of people, who may then be convinced that civics is dysfunctional.

At the same time, institutions addressing the problem may remain constrained by procurement, red tape, and concrete. This latency gap makes Organos highly attractive because it promises immediate agency and relief (usually moments before it runs into the self-same physical constraints).

Citizens can tolerate delay if they possess credible buffers such as:

• Rigorously upheld timelines,

• Queue positions,

• Temporary relief,

• Clear milestones,

• Or statistical evidence of improvement.

These convert uncertainty into managed expectation.

Sadly, the institutional Organos response (why yes, institutions are perfectly capable of persuading themselves into Machiavellian behaviour) is that the information itself is the problem, hence it is of no surprise that many of them have determined that expression on Social Media itself is problematic, that people lack the judgement to refute the counter-instrumentality. They will make credible arguments about misinformation, truthfulness and hyperbole, and they will almost invariably fail to persuade anyone.1

When institutions conclude that the alarm is more dangerous than the fire, they commit a final and fatal act of ignoratio rei. How this will ultimately play out, I do not know, but the thing I am most cynical about is Cynicism itself.

In my defence, the fault is not entirely my own. My sepia-tinted childhood was shaped by a father who subscribed to the Torvald Helmer school of parenting, and a mother who used literature as an ersatz substitute for childcare. As a consequence, my sense of propriety was formed largely by the books I read, and may most charitably be described as “antiquarian”.

In her defence, this arrangement functioned with remarkably little existential friction until I was about eleven years old. At that point, my sister, (who could at that point in her life be described most charitably as some sort of “vexatious virago” - it takes much charity indeed when speaking of personal matters.) purloined a copy of The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer from the Raffles Girls’ School library, and I, having exhausted my own supply of reading material and in the finest family tradition, absconded with it. The chiaroscuro nipples on its cover are, at this very moment three decades later, staring at me from my bookshelf in a manner that can only be described as “vaguely condemnatory”.

In those halcyon days, there was little in the way of a robust counter-critique to radical feminism, and it was only on a rickety army bus, perhaps three Tori Amos, two Alanis Morrissette albums and half a Lilith Fair later that I realised, much to my chagrin, that this is not a functional model for effective communication with the average male human being.

You see, a histogram of the average conversational topic range for the conscripted male could briefly be summarised as follows:

1. Conventional sexual intercourse.

2. The Army.

3. Less orthodox forms of sexual intercourse.

4. Sports, particularly association football.

This presents a crisis of relevance for someone whose interests primarily revolve around more esoteric forms of recreation which are not gated by the need to find other participants and can indeed be savoured without abandoning civic principles, nor clothing.

I cannot recall the precise circumstances of the bus voyage, but at some point I was asked to describe my ideal female romantic partner.

“Camille Paglia,” I replied without hesitation.

This prompted the entirely reasonable question of who she was and why.

I explained, with what I believed to be commendable clarity, that I found her writing erudite, witty, humane, caustic, courageous, principled, thoughtful, introspective, congenial and vivacious.

My interlocutor considered this carefully and informed me that the description was too “cheem” (abstract) to understand.

“She’s a lesbian,” I hastily improvised.

This was met with immediate comprehension and several sage nods.

To my credit, I did make a conscientious effort at the obligatory cultural jamming and succeeded, after some negotiation, in steering the conversation toward a provisional consensus that brassiere sizing was no guarantee of aesthetic merit (apologies to Ms Amy Yip) and that aesthetic form and shape was far more pertinent than pert… well, you get the idea.

Even so, I began to suspect that the widening rift between myself and my understanding of the male psyche was becoming large enough to compromise my long-term prospects for social integration.

As Sun Tzu is alleged to have said, one should know oneself. Finding this insufficient, I concluded that it might also be prudent to know the enemy, or at the very least to understand the relevant etiquette, even if I had no desire to participate myself.

Accordingly, I embarked upon a long and concerted informal study of the cultural praxis of masculinity. Over the ensuing decades, I infiltrated a succession of male spaces and, with no small degree of discipline, succeeded in reaching the ripe old age of forty-something without materially compromising my outsider status.

By this point, I flatter myself that I am something of a scholar on the subject.

The fruits of this research are considerable, but the full ethnography must be reserved for another occasion, as it is only tangentially related to the present diatribe.1

You see, I have an increasing and rather disturbing suspicion that my errant nephew has made the fundamental mistake of taking the philosophy conventionally known as “the manosphere” seriously.

For readers (mercifully) unfamiliar with the subject, the manosphere is a loose constellation of predominantly Western schools of thought which, when confronted with the perennial philosophical problem of existential meaning, arrived at the conclusion that the purpose of the male gender role is to emulate several cherry-picked structural features of the remainder of the animal kingdom, a domain from which humanity has (surprisingly!) spent several millennia attempting to distance itself.

How convenient it is for the modern man to have soi-disant competitive experts on zero-sum masculinity so generous, so civic-minded, as to enlighten him on what, precisely, a man is. Would that I too, had enjoyed the benefit of being similarly unburdened by the otherwise tedious constraints of fairness and intellectual rigour.

Here is a brief breakdown of their tenets and why they invite ridicule:

1. The Concept of “Sexual Market Value” (SMV)

A foundational doctrine of the manosphere is the belief that human attraction is not a mysterious and subjective phenomenon, but rather a measurable hierarchy governed by something called “Sexual Market Value”, a phrase which succeeds in making both romance and economics appear less appealing than they already are.

Closely related to this is the complaint of hypergamy, the belief that women are biologically predisposed to seek partners of higher status.

This accusation is rarely accompanied by any corresponding reflection on male mate selection, which might more appropriately be described as hypoandry: a condition in which men display a profound and appalling deficiency of discrimination and judgement in the allocation of their romantic capital.

I fear that this particular line of criticism may have touched rather directly upon my nephew’s anxieties. I pointed out that, from a systems perspective, the proper aspirational condition in mate selection, regardless of sex, is to attract a partner whose judgement and moral character are so formidable that, were reproductive fitness alone employed as the criterion, they would be compelled to reject you.

He protested that his current romantic prospect was a highly educated woman of numerous virtues.

To this I replied, with what I now recognise as unwarranted confidence, that her willingness to select him constituted prima facie evidence of an impaired judgement.

This conclusion I was obliged to retract in abject humility when she subsequently terminated the relationship.

As it turns out, even I am occasionally mistaken.

2. Looksmaxxing: “Physiognomy as Destiny”

While the broader manosphere concerns itself with mindset, status and wealth, “looksmaxxing” focuses more narrowly on the optimisation of physical appearance in order to improve one’s mating prospects.

In essence, this is a semiotic strategy, often summarised in the vernacular as “fake it until you make it.”

The obvious biological analogue is the peacock, which advertises his genetic credentials through an exuberantly impractical tail, or, in the human case, through a trust fund and inherited property.

There is little need to dwell on the fragility of this doctrine. Any physical trait is merely a heuristic proxy for deeper qualities, and sexual competition in the animal kingdom involves a great deal of bluffing, signalling, coercion and outright fraud.

Observing patterns of consumption in romantic media (which my mother’s amusing penchant for Chinese drama validates on a daily basis) has persuaded me that the visual aspect is best understood as an advertisement for the product beneath.

The manosphere appears to believe that the problem itself is one of marketing. What most women seem to be selecting for, beyond the occasional ten minutes of gratuitous orthogonal exercise, is the capacity and willingness to reciprocate in a manner that transcends the roles of lackey, automated teller machine, or sex object.

If the rejoinder is that promiscuity is itself the point, one may reasonably ask why so much effort is devoted to the preamble rather than simply hiring a sex worker. The answer, I suspect, is that such arrangements are too transparent and too readily available. What is sought is not merely the act, but the private narrative that surrounds it, it is more therapeutic for the self-esteem.

In this respect, many men are less interested in sex than in a form of collaborative fiction, though they are often curiously incapable of appreciating the role-playing conventions familiar to patrons of the Japanese host and hostess club.

By focusing on the façade, one may reasonably question the wisdom of men attempting to compete with women upon what is, by historical precedent, their ancestral demesne of expertise. They have enjoyed several centuries of cumulative experience in the strategic application of cosmetics, aesthetics and sartorial deception, they are intimately familiar with the patterns of sexual marketing.

Indeed, there is a certain dark irony in watching internet influencers race to the bottom in an effort to sexually objectify themselves and reduce their identities to what second-wave feminism might have described as a particularly aesthetic dildo. It is enough to make Germaine Greer grin (or grimace, depending on mood).

3. The “Red Pill” vs. “Blue Pill” Framework

Borrowing terminology from the charming but thermodynamically-confused science fiction film The Matrix, these communities classify worldviews according to one’s willingness to accept a set of purportedly uncomfortable truths about human nature.

To remain “blue-pilled” is to persist in the socially agreeable delusions that kindness, generosity and emotional reliability are meaningful qualities in a mate, which, rather inconveniently, are precisely the traits that many women appear to select for in long-term partners.

To become “red-pilled”, by contrast, is presented as a species of secular gnosis: an anagnorisis in which one transcends the banal illusions (and reality) of ordinary human relationships and perceives the hidden machinery of sexual selection with newly illuminated eyes.

Pragmatically speaking, for those concerned about displaying ovine tendencies, it may be prudent not to follow too unquestioningly an internet philosophy whose central insight consists of appropriating a rather tatty and second-hand Platonic metaphor from a Hollywood action film.

Rather, a scene from Life of Brian comes to mind.

4. Frame Control and Stoicism

A significant portion of the manosphere emphasises the importance of what it calls “Frame.” This refers to a man’s ability to maintain his own perspective and emotional stability regardless of external pressure or his partner’s emotional state.

In moderation, this is a perfectly sensible recommendation. Emotional steadiness is generally preferable to being blown about like a weather vane in a typhoon.

Taken to its logical extreme, however, the doctrine becomes a rather elegant oxymoron. One cannot sustain a robust bidirectional relationship while systematically discarding all incoming feedback.

Even worse is the affected display of stoicism adopted merely to conform to the prevailing masculine ideal, while refusing to act in a timely and cogent reciprocal manner. This gives the would-be stoic all the disadvantages of reticence with none of the benefits of prudence.

A relationship is, among other things, a control system. If every corrective signal is treated as an attempted hostile takeover, the system ceases to regulate and instead oscillates wildly until one party leaves.

It is perhaps telling that many women appear to approach long-term partners as “works in progress” or, in the vernacular, “fixer-uppers.” Implicit in this behaviour is the belief that character is not written in stone and that, with sufficient training investment and strategic nagging, a human being may yet become more habitable.

Men of the manosphere, by contrast, often seem to assume that women must arrive in a fully assembled state, complete with factory-installed virtue, perfectly proportioned secondary sexual characteristics and minimal maintenance requirements.

This is not rugged Spartan stoicism. It is Disney Princess theory in tactical gear.

Women possess the same human capacity for error and defect as men, the appropriate response is neither fecklessness nor predatory instincts. Even the mythical Cronus had the presence of mind to devour his children and not his wife.

Emotional constipation, while occasionally mistaken for strength, is a poor substitute for prudence, compromise and tolerance.

5. Evolutionary Psychology

These movements frequently cite evolutionary psychology to justify their beliefs, though often through a simplified or “pop-science” lens. They argue that modern social structures (like monogamy or feminism) are “artificial” overlays on top of primal, Pleistocene-era biological hardwiring that dictates how men and women interact.

Perhaps they should ask themselves then, using that self-same evolutionary logic, why such alleged memetic constructs appear to have experienced a widespread and simultaneous global extinction in human civics. Surely, their robustness should have guaranteed a survival fitness higher than that of the woolly mammoth?

To use one example of their weak rhetoric, polygamy in human societies has more often functioned as a conspicuous display of surplus wealth and political power than as the intrinsic telos (goal) of masculinity.

King Solomon, the Persian shahs, and successive Chinese emperors maintained extensive harems not because they were obliged to engage in continuous reproductive athletics, but because such institutions signalled extraordinary concentrations of resources and authority.2

Viewed from a less romantic perspective, the harem was not a reward for power so much as an expensive human resources department.

If one were actually required to engage in what biologists call lekking until physical collapse, the harem would rapidly reveal itself to be less a paradise than a bloody chore.3

The most striking feature of our species is not that we possess animal impulses, which is hardly in dispute, but that we have developed ethical systems, legal institutions, literature and social norms precisely to govern those impulses.

Humans are special not because we are free of biology, but because we possess the dignity and capacity not to be ruled by it.

We are obliged, insofar as possible, to master our endocrine systems lest they master us, a principle which even the more hormonally preoccupied corners of the manosphere appear dimly to recognise when they report experiencing a temporary restoration of higher cognitive function after orgasm, a phenomenon they have given the admirably droll name of “post-nut clarity.”

It is difficult not to observe that, in its rather vapid attempts to construct a masculine identity, the Western manosphere is busily transforming itself into the very caricature that Valerie Solanas4 sketched out in her SCUM Manifesto, thereby supplying, with a kind of grim industriousness, supplementary evidence for the case she was making.

Perhaps, before pursuing the skirt, my errant nephew might profitably ask himself what the intercourse is actually for. It remains a source of considerable perplexity to me that a young man who can scarcely be relied upon to care for a dog, much less himself, should conclude that he has entered the appropriate developmental stage to undertake a long-term romantic relationship. External validation and meaning-generation is so cumbersome and expensive!

But he will not listen, and these words will in all likelihood be wasted upon fools, who characteristically do not.

I am not yet prepared to be a grand-uncle; I have not purchased the necessary attire.

As I have already confessed, I am a terrible specimen of man indeed.

The teenager is a creature of exquisite contradiction. It is predictably short-sighted, yet lives under a constant haze of existential anxiety. It flounders, yet is impetuous; afraid, yet arrogant; selfish, yet guilty; full of convictions, yet mysteriously unmotivated. This catalogue of paradoxes should surprise no one. I know the species well, having once belonged to it myself.

To defend the teenager: it occupies a peculiar ontological category. It is neither child nor adult, but a larval citizen, partially formed and insufficiently hardened from experience. Society increasingly demands that this half-finished organism make decisions whose consequences will reverberate for decades: what to study, what to value, what sort of work to pursue, whether to form a family, and ultimately what kind of life is worth living. These are not trivial choices. They determine the allocation of time, energy, and capital across the whole of adulthood.

Yet modern civilisation, in its infinite civic wisdom, expects these decisions to be made with remarkably little empirical data.

The young consume media incessantly, from which are told that they should follow their passions, become financially successful, remain authentic, preserve optionality, and perhaps also raise a flourishing family. They are presented with a collection of slogans and modern archetypes, amongst them the heroic professional, the devoted parent, the world traveller, and the perpetually fulfilled individual who somehow combines all three without obvious thermodynamic penalty. What is less frequently communicated is that each of these paths consumes scarce resources, and that every commitment has an opportunity cost, foreclosing alternatives.

Whether this failure is the result of malice or merely institutional inertia is, I believe, quite beside the point. It is tempting to imagine a sinister cadre (cabal?) of billionaires and ideologues deliberately steering the young into productive docility, but a more parsimonious explanation is that our civic software has failed to update. The social institutions that once provided a rough apprenticeship to adulthood were built for agricultural and industrial societies, not for a digital civilisation in which adolescence is prolonged, information is abundant, and direct responsibility is increasingly abstracted away. What appears as sabotage may often be little more than entropy operating through obsolete institutions.

This is not merely a philosophical problem; it is a civic one.

A functioning society ought to treat youth as a period of structured experimentation rather than abstract credential accumulation. The purpose of adolescence and early adulthood should be to expose individuals to reasonable approximations of adult life while the cost of failure remains tolerable. Young people should experience the demands of high-stress, high-hours, and potentially high-remuneration work, if only briefly, so that they may understand both its rewards and its burdens. If they burn out, become disillusioned, or discover that the promised rewards do not justify the energetic expenditure, then the experiment has succeeded. The larval stage exists precisely so that one may crash the drone in simulation rather than the aircraft in live service.

They should likewise be given opportunities to nurture something dependent and vulnerable, whether a child, a student, an animal, or some sustained responsibility that reveals the rhythms of stewardship. Most adolescents experience parenthood primarily as recipients of authority rather than as custodians of another being. As a result, they often have strong opinions about family life but little practical understanding of its demands or satisfactions.

The point is not to prescribe a single ideal. Some individuals will discover that they are energised by (or more realistically speaking, can tolerate) competition, institution-building, and the pursuit of professional excellence. Others will find that their deepest satisfactions arise from family, teaching, or long-term care. Many will attempt some unstable synthesis of both. The crucial matter is that these decisions be informed by experience rather than by advertisement.

This, I suspect, is what modern society increasingly fails to provide. It offers ideals without simulations, aspirations without apprenticeship, and freedoms without sufficiently realistic previews of their associated costs. The result is that many young adults are expected to detonate in their twenties, compressing a decade of experimentation, disappointment, and irrevocable commitment into a period of maximum uncertainty and minimum wisdom. They often still understand the need for experiential evidence on an intrinsic level, but instead, they become an attractor for novel and formerly age-gated hedonistic pastimes, whether that be ethanol or that of a more lascivious nature.

Happiness, contrary to certain fashionable denunciations, is not a frivolous or purely proximate outcome. It is feedback. Sometimes it appears as pleasure, sometimes as relief, and sometimes as the quiet and profoundly underrated sensation that everything is going reasonably well despite the absence of any dramatic event. To endlessly pursue happiness is not childish; it is to attend to the instrumentation of one’s own life. The chase is not evidence of moral failure but an unavoidable feature of agency itself.

However, the danger in all such exhortations to “experiment” is that they can be appropriated by the most seductive pathology of modern adulthood: the indefinite deferral of the costs of adulthood itself. Optionality is intoxicating. One may always claim to be gathering more data, refining one's preferences, or waiting for a clearer signal before making irreversible commitments. In moderation, this is prudence. In excess, it becomes a sophisticated form of cowardice. The purpose of the larval stage is not to preserve every possible future indefinitely, but to acquire sufficient information to accept that no decision will ever be made under conditions of perfect certainty.

To commit is to amputate possibilities, and that amputation is not a design flaw but the very mechanism by which a life acquires shape. A society that encourages exploration without emphasising eventual closure risks producing adults who are permanently in rehearsal, mistaking preparation for participation. Youth exists to reduce uncertainty, not to eliminate it, and the point of calibration is to reach the moment when one can say, with full awareness of the alternatives foregone, that this burden is worth carrying.

This obligation, however, is reciprocal. Society must demonstrate that meaningful paths genuinely exist and are not gated behind pure fortune, hereditary advantage, or institutional opacity masquerading as merit, whether in the form of an inscrutable housing lottery, credential inflation, or other systems whose rules are legible only to insiders. When this faith in society is lost, you get justifiable withdrawal.

The proper role of society is therefore neither to dictate which path individuals must choose nor to promise that all desirable states can be simultaneously maximised. Its task is more modest and more humane: to provide sufficiently realistic encounters with labour, responsibility, sacrifice, and care that citizens may choose their future with open eyes.

Instead, what they actually get nowadays is a map of slogans, ultimatums of upkeep and a vague commandment to improvise a life. Teenagers should be allowed to experiment, to fail safely, and to discover through experience which burdens are worth carrying. Only then does freedom become something more than abstraction, and only then can adulthood be entered as a deliberate commitment rather than an administrative formality.

It wasn’t quite a call for hedonism, but a more restrained form of Epicureanism; one might live a life of meaning and duty and be greatly respected, but ultimately, you only get one known chance at this unique existence of yours, and you could hardly be said to have “won” that experience if you spend the majority of it suffering and miserable.

Thus, after reading a journalistic article waxing lyrical about “The Banality of Evil”, without once mentioning (nor understanding) the point made by Ms. Arendt, I started wondering how else one might creatively misinterpret her catchy signature phrase: if in fact the concept only seems to preoccupy unhappy and banal people who do not appear to be visibly enjoying their lives except in a performative sense. It occurred to me that what we call the banality of evil may not be a failure of thought at all, but a failure of enjoyment: a life so devoid of intrinsic satisfaction that it must borrow its meaning from systems, duties, and abstractions, even when these produce suffering.

Arendt can be interpreted in multiple ways. We have the common vulgar one the journalist was trying to make:

Evil is boring.

Which is more of a pejorative than any form of insightful commentary. But after skimming her reasoning behind the phrase, it appears the deeper insight she was trying to make was:

Evil can arise from ordinary, unreflective obedience rather than monstrous intent.

And I think that this foregrounds the actual argument she was making. Evil arises from the lack of wisdom, prudence, scrutiny, judgement, it is anti-love-of-wisdom, anti-philos-sophia, anti-philosophy.

In my philosophical framework, it is useful to diagnose what is actually going on here. I state in Relational Meta-Ethics that all things naturally trend towards entropy. Structure tends to fall apart, information and judgement are themselves costly. This is, I believe one of the reasons why Maxwell’s demon was refuted: The cost of discriminating between a fast and slow moving molecule is not in fact a free luncheon voucher. The praxis of Ethics then, is analogous to a negentropic investment of energy into resisting the natural flow of entropy.

Therefore, a failure to exercise judgement, inquiry, and scrutiny which arises in what we call evil is founded not in something malign nor mundane, but rather by bypassing the necessary cost of cognition and investigation.

Consider prejudice, why does it arise? Out of a desire to be malicious? The more parsimonious answer is that it is an energy-saving heuristic. When the boy has cried wolf three times, we develop a heuristic about untruthful boys, which saves us the burden of investigation, but also may result in a lupine catastrophe.

Basically:

In the absence of sufficient investment, agents will drift toward heuristic simplification, delegated judgement, and system compliance.

What we call evil, then, is not a positive force but

The cumulative effect of uninvested judgement, where the cost of discrimination is deferred until it reappears as harm elsewhere.

This economy of evil is not one of creation but of accounting; costs are not eliminated but externalised. What is saved in thought is paid in consequence.

Arendt’s banal agent is not merely thoughtless, but economically rational in a narrow sense; he avoids the cost of judgement by outsourcing it to systems and processes which require far less scrutiny. The horror lies in how well this scales upwards.

It is therefore unsurprising that, under the strain of modern life, when one feels enervated and cognitively depleted, judgement begins to resemble a discretionary expense rather than a baseline obligation. As the cost of attention rises, agents make cost-cutting decisions. One may defer judgement, recognising that one’s current accounting is incomplete; or one may bypass it entirely, adopting the frameworks of others without scrutiny. The former is a recognition of limits. The latter is a failure of due diligence.

In civics, this distinction is already tacitly understood. De-escalation is not the abandonment of judgement, but the reduction of volatility so that proper accounting can take place. The aim is not to think less, but to think with sufficient clarity to bear the cost of getting it right.

Perhaps the J-Pop lyric is not entirely wrong. A life wholly devoid of enjoyment is difficult to defend as a victory, however noble its intentions. But it also mistakes ease for success. Enjoyment, like judgement, is not free; it depends on a certain clarity of mind, a willingness to attend, to discriminate, to care about what one is doing.

The temptation under strain is to economise. To simplify, to defer, to adopt ready-made answers, indulge biases and prejudices. This does not feel like evil, nor does it feel particularly dramatic. It feels efficient. However, unexamined efficiency, is merely the shifting of cost elsewhere.

So perhaps the winners are not simply those who enjoy themselves, but those who can still afford the attention required to know what, exactly, they are enjoying, and at whose expense.

To test the robustness of my ideology, I decided to apply a Relational Ethics viewpoint, with its emphasis on human interdependence and reciprocal obligation, as a critique. A New York Times bestseller ought to be substantive, should it not? If they identify social issues, I ought not grant them an unchecked monopoly on explanation.

What follows is a concise point-by-point reply to their primary assertions:

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the nation.

Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

There is a reasonable argument that industries benefiting from public infrastructure, education, law, and stability owe reciprocal contribution. Civic obligation is not absurd.

Verdict: Sustained.

Perfectly valid and perhaps even admirable under RE accounting. Silicon Valley likely owes reciprocal obligations to the polity that enabled its rise; however, defence participation is one possible repayment, not self-evidently the exclusive or highest form.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps.

We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

This misdiagnoses the problem. Tyranny implies imposed domination. App dependency is better understood as incentive capture, addiction loops, convenience dependency, and self-reinforcing habits.

Verdict: Rejected.

The phenomenon is real, but it is not tyranny. Tyranny suggests an external despot, whereas app dependence is largely emergent from incentives, convenience, addiction, and mutually reinforcing choices. This is better understood as entropic capture than political oppression.

There is a real ethical difference between compulsion by design and compulsion by sovereign. If manipulative design constitutes tyranny, then the term must also apply to cosmetics, fashion, and countless prestige markets. Better to reserve tyranny for coercive domination and analyse these as signalling systems, addiction markets, or incentive traps. Relational Ethics respects agency and choice; it is not paternalistic.

It is precisely because one can reject temptation that resistance becomes meaningful.

3. Free email is not enough. Growth and security justify elites.

Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

This jumps from consumer triviality to macro legitimacy without argument. Further, growth and security are not self-validating goods. GDP can rise through dysfunction; security can conceal repression. Stability would be a stronger concept.

Verdict: Non sequitur/Rejected.

“Free email” is a rhetorical flourish disconnected from the later claim. It is not worth addressing.

Economic growth and security are presented as self-evident goods when both conceal substantial costs and trade-offs. Their appeal to economic growth is underdeveloped.

If growth alone legitimises elites, then media spectacles such as the O. J. Simpson trial become civic goods merely because they generated revenue and output. GDP measures activity, not necessarily value. Consumption is a means, not a terminal good. It deserves approval only where it enhances agency, reduces hidden costs, or sustains worthwhile relations.

A more coherent argument would prioritise stability, because populations often forgive elite decadence when systems remain predictable and livable.

4. Soft power has limits; hard power built on software is required.

The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Several claims are bundled without evidence. Soft power has limits, but so does hard power. Software matters, but so do industry, morale, logistics, diplomacy, and legitimacy.

Verdict: Unsupported.

The statement asserts several sweeping geopolitical propositions without supplying evidence. “Soft power has limits” is vague, “those limits have been exposed” is unsupported, and “hard power will be built on software” appears partly self-serving given the speaker’s commercial interests.

The thesis also mistakes force capacity for durable success. Aesop’s oak and reed fable illustrates that resilience may defeat might, just as evolutionary history shows dominant species do not survive merely by being stronger. Dinosaurs were large, strong and dominant. They did not survive. Adaptability often outranks power under changing conditions.

5. AI weapons will be built; the only question is by whom.

The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

Partly true. Strategic competition is real. Yet the framing naturalises adversaries rather than asking how hostile relations are produced, sustained, or avoidable.

Verdict: Partially sustained.

It is plausible that military AI development pressures exist, but the statement naturalises adversarial relations and dismisses ethical debate without examining how rivalry itself is constituted or mitigated.

Their rhetoric risks forgetting that many conflicts, including many geopolitical ones, remain bargaining problems rather than pure force contests.

6. National service should be universal.

National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

Verdict: Premise rejected.

Shared burden is a legitimate concern, but national service need not be coercive to generate civic value. A large part of their argument fixates on cost which absolutely must be transparent and exposed to make ethical decisions. However, direct involvement is not the only means of exposing cost.

Palantir mistakes personal risk for transparent accounting. Wars can be responsibly constrained through fiscal, political, and moral visibility without compulsory service.

7. If a Marine asks for a better rifle, build it.

If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

Verdict: Rejected.

This lacks limiting principles. Better by what metric? At what cost? For what mission? If taken literally, it justifies endless escalation under the banner of troop support.

The statement confuses care for personnel with unconditional procurement. It omits proportionality, mission purpose, and strategic need. The problem is not one munition. It is a framework where “supporting troops” substitutes for ethical analysis. Under that logic, any weapon that lowers friendly risk, even nuclear ones, can be defended unless independent limits are stated.

It also creates a poorly controlled systems dynamic: improving military tools to reduce operational risk can lower the threshold for deployment, generating more engagements, more risk, and renewed demands for capability. The logic is structurally escalatory and neglects sustainability.

Escalation can be strategically foolish because reciprocal escalation often follows a predictable path: both sides spend more, harden politics, degrade welfare, and worsen long-run security. The burden is then paid by ordinary populations on all sides.

Palantir often appears to model geopolitics through adversarial priors, treating cooperation as exceptional and rivalry as default. This risks turning mixed-motive relationships into self-fulfilling conflict games.

8. Public servants need not be our priests.

Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

Verdict: Ignore.

Rhetorical and low-value. This is a vague grievance complaint about sanctimony followed by an unsupported claim about compensation. The line substitutes mood for argument: a cultural sneer at bureaucratic sanctimony followed by an unsupported compensation comparison lacking role, sector, or metric specificity.

9. Show more grace to public figures.

We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

Verdict: Partially sustained.

Sustained as a low-hanging aphoristic call for mercy and tolerance of ordinary human contradiction. However, the claim then uses it as a basis to smuggle in the illicit conclusion that unforgiving politics necessarily yields regrettable leadership. That is a non sequitur lacking demonstrated causation.

10. Politics should not nourish the soul.

The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

Verdict: Coherent, but grounded in premises I do not share.

The statement presumes a relatively prior inner self whose search for meaning is misdirected when channelled through politics. That is a coherent view, but not one I share.

I begin from a more relational account of identity. Selves are shaped through recognition, institutions, status, obligation, and belonging. Politics is therefore not merely an external arena onto which private needs are projected, but one of the sites through which social identity is organised.

From that standpoint, political investment need not signal “psychologisation”. It may reflect the fact that dignity, membership, security, and comparative standing are often politically mediated.

Where Palantir sees misplaced inward longing, I more often see the outward pressures of social life.

11. Do not rejoice in the fall of enemies.

Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

A rare note of prudence. Victory often blinds people to costs, backlash, and what comes next.

Verdict: Sustained. More prudent scrutiny is never a problem.

This is notably one of the cleaner Palantir claims because it is explicitly normative rather than disguised empirical certainty.

12. The atomic age is ending; the AI deterrence age begins.

The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

Verdict: Overdrawn analogy.

Nuclear deterrence rests on a uniquely clear mechanism: credible catastrophic force. A nuclear payload has strategic significance wherever it lands.

AI power is more conditional. It depends on adoption, infrastructure, legitimacy, integration, and institutional competence. It may produce leverage, but not with the same universality or incontestable immediacy. Moreover, if AI development is politically contested at home and uneven abroad, its strategic role will vary sharply by regime and society. That is not an “age” so much as a complex technological contest.

The thesis may describe an emerging factor in deterrence. It does not yet justify replacing the atomic frame.

13. America advanced progressive values more than any other country.

No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

Even if granted, so what? The function of a state is not simply to advance progressive values.

Verdict: Non sequitur.

To be honest, I am not sure this is an argument. It reads less as a reasoned claim than as patriotic scene-setting: praise of national biography used to create legitimacy mood rather than demonstrate any specific conclusion. I do not think this deserves a place in a mission statement about propositional ideology by itself. If the purpose is to seek compliments and authority based on historical performance which Palantir is taking credit for, then be transparent about it.

14. American power created the long peace.

American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Verdict: Rhetorical and under-proven.

The thesis compresses several disputed claims into one: that there has been a “long peace”, that this constitutes peace in any meaningful global sense, and that American power is principally responsible for it.

Direct great-power war has indeed been absent for long periods, but many rival explanations exist: nuclear deterrence, economic interdependence, institutional frameworks, war exhaustion after 1945, and the changing costs of industrial conflict.

Nor was the period peaceful for many of those living through proxy wars, occupations, insurgencies, and state collapse. Vietnam, Iraq, Congo, Afghanistan, and Ukraine suggest that “peace” here is geographically selective.

The timeframe is also unclear. If the claim begins after 1945, it should say so plainly. If it reaches further back, the road through two world wars is an awkward foundation for the thesis.

American power may be one factor in post-war stability. It is not self-evidently the author of a century of peace.

15. Germany and Japan must be “un-neutered.”

The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

Verdict: Rejected.

Historically illiterate. The claim treats Germany and Japan as passive victims of imposed weakness while ignoring the substantial role of self-chosen post-war restraint shaped by trauma, memory, and democratic preference. It mistakes deliberate caution for mere castration.

These societies are not passive assets to be optimised by Washington or Palantir. If Germany and Japan choose restraint through democratic self-scrutiny, outsiders need stronger grounds than strategic convenience to demand that it be undone.

16. We should applaud builders like Musk.

We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

Verdict: Rejected.

Compelled applause is self-defeating. Genuine respect cannot be summoned by manifesto, and demands for praise often suppress the scrutiny that ambitious builders most need. Results matter more than ceremonial admiration.

At this point, Palantir’s argument becomes obscure. Popularity cannot be imposed.

17. Silicon Valley must address violent crime.

Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

Verdict: Overstated.

Silicon Valley can, but “must” is too strong. Possessing tools and technology does not automatically create duty. Demonstrate the chain of responsibility, comparative advantage, and proportional burden before converting optional contribution into moral obligation.

18. Scrutiny drives talent from government.

The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

Verdict: Repetitive and poorly argued.

This largely repeats an earlier point (Point #9) while failing to distinguish legitimate accountability from voyeuristic intrusion. Some scrutiny is intentionally chilling: public office should deter those unwilling to accept oversight.

Talent is not a passport to opacity, and the complaint sits awkwardly beside Palantir’s own association with expansive data visibility.

19. Caution in public life is corrosive.

“The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.”

Verdict: Rejected.

Caution is not the problem. Public life often suffers more from indiscretion, vanity, and noise than from prudence. Saying nothing wrong does not imply saying nothing worthwhile; wisdom is frequently concise and measured. What precisely is being corroded? Candour and honesty? Congeniality and a good faith desire for harmony?

My criticism is not of boldness but of purpose. Do they seek to be intelligible or merely popular? Public rhetoric that rewards applause over clarity often mistakes memorability for substance. Ironically, put next to their earlier call for prudence in point #11, this seems outright self-contradictory.

20. Elite intolerance of religion must be resisted.

The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

Verdict: Poorly Defined.

This reads like a grievance strawman. The passage relies on undefined antagonists (“elite”, “certain circles”) and blurs disagreement with intolerance. Without naming actors, mechanisms, or measurable harms, it reads more as coalition rhetoric than argument. When enemies are vague, grievance can be universal.

If they sincerely favour free speech and open inquiry, then critique of religion must be included. Protecting believers from discrimination is coherent; protecting beliefs from criticism is not. Their complaint risks confusing the two.

21. Some cultures are wondrous; others regressive.

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

Verdict: Normative nonsense.

This mistakes selective functional outputs for total cultural worth. Political equality does not require claiming all cultures are identical, but neither does differing performance in one domain justify sweeping civilisational rankings. Power metrics cannot exhaust meaning.

Zhuangzi poses the better question: what is wrong with being useless? Cultures need not justify themselves by power, productivity, or recognised “advances” in order to possess meaning. A cat does not owe a spreadsheet defence of its existence.

Culture is not a zero-sum survival game, it is the artefact residue of life.

22. Hollow pluralism asks: inclusion into what?

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Verdict: Rejected.

The answer is simple: inclusion into civic harmony. Diverse societies often integrate not through total cultural sameness, but through shared institutions, mutual toleration, and workable common life. Palantir mistakes thin cohesion for no cohesion.

Point 22 mistakes pluralism for emptiness. In reality pluralism is a synthetic process, continuously selected and refined through conflict, compromise, and institutional learning. Friction is not evidence of failure; it is often the polishing mechanism of durable orders.

This sequence is fundamentally mistaken. Action does not arise from identity. Identity arises from action.

The more fundamental principle is simpler:

Sum, ergo Eligo: I am, therefore I choose.

Existence itself establishes agency. Once something exists, it necessarily occupies circumstances and must respond to them. Choice follows immediately from being. No prior definition of the self is required.

The Problem with Identity-First Philosophy

Classical philosophy often attempts to stabilise and outline the self before explaining behaviour and choice. The subject must first be defined, and only then can action be derived from that definition.

But this approach produces an epistemic circular reasoning. Identity is usually inferred from behaviour, yet behaviour is supposed to be derived from identity. The system becomes trapped attempting to resolve the nature of the self before anything meaningful can occur.

The result is a kind of philosophical stasis, it asserts that one cannot act properly without knowing who they are. Additionally, identity is often fluid and develops over time. Updating the prior sense of “who I am” frequently fails to trigger a revision of judgements made in hindsight. Do they become retroactively wrong? The self is not a constant.

By contrast, beginning from existence rather than identity avoids this paralysis. The self does not need to be defined in advance in order to act. It only needs to exist.

The Four Coordinates of Agency

In practical terms, an agent requires only four pieces of information to act meaningfully:

1. What you are: your capabilities and constraints.

2. Where you are: the situation you occupy.

3. When you are: the temporal position within unfolding events.

4. Why you are: the motive or purpose directing your action.

These four coordinates establish the operational conditions of decision-making. They provide everything necessary for judicious agency.

Notably absent from this list is the question that modern discourse treats as paramount:

Who are you?

The Collapse of Intrinsic Identity

When the four coordinates are identified, the question “Who am I?” becomes unexpectedly shallow. What remains of “who” you are once you subtract the where, when, what, and why?

This is because when an individual is considered in isolation, most identity categories disappear. Without other agents there is no friend or enemy, no leader or follower, no citizen or foreigner. These categories require relationships to exist.

In isolation, the individual reduces to something much simpler: an agent possessing capabilities, situated in circumstances, and acting toward purposes. Identity does not appear as an intrinsic property of the individual; instead, it collapses toward a near-null state.

Identity as a Relational Property

Therefore, identity emerges only when multiple agents interact. It is fundamentally relational.

A person is a rival, ally, mentor, subordinate, stranger, or friend only in relation to others. These categories describe positions within networks of interaction rather than properties contained within the individual.

Identity thus paradoxically belongs to the relational domain, not the personal one. You cannot meaningfully define who you are in isolation; only to yourself, which is merely one data point. A narcissist may think highly of themselves, but any determination of “who they are” must incorporate other perspectives. The question “Who am I?” can only be answered meaningfully as:

Who am I to someone else?

This is not particularly novel, it is a fixture of Eastern, specifically Confucian thought.

In the Confucian framework, a person is defined through roles within a social network:

• parent and child

• ruler and subject

• husband and wife

• elder and younger

• friend and friend.

These relationships are systematized through concepts such as Li (ritual propriety) and Ren (benevolence).

However, Confucianism differs from the present framework in one key respect: it emphasises stabilising those relationships rather than treating identity as an emergent trajectory. This leaves slightly less room for agency and self-determination and it also opens room to contest and negotiate those relationships, rather than treating the dynamic as a fait accompli.

The Self as Trajectory

To resolve the Cartesian paradox by reversing its assumption, let us consider: if identity is not intrinsic, how does it arise?

The answer lies in time. Each decision alters the direction of the agent’s path through circumstances. Over time these decisions accumulate into a pattern.

The self is best understood not as a fixed entity but as a trajectory.

Existence establishes the starting point.
Choices generate movement.
Movement produces a path.

Identity is simply the historical description of that path.

Escaping Stasis

This view removes the need to solve identity before acting. Instead of asking What am I?, the relevant question becomes What direction do I choose next?

The philosophical emphasis shifts from ontology to motion, from definition to direction.

Identity ceases to be a foundation and becomes a consequence.

Identity as an “Other Problem”

Because identity arises through relationships, it cannot be resolved purely through introspection. Identity belongs to the network of interactions among agents.

The personal domain provides capability, circumstance, time, and motive. The relational domain generates identity.

Thus identity is not something contained within the individual. It is something produced between individuals.

There is ample precedent in other Eastern belief systems:

• Daoist thought: loosening the self Philosophical Daoism, associated with figures such as Zhuangzi and Laozi, often treats rigid identity as an obstacle. Daoist texts repeatedly undermine fixed distinctions between self and other, success and failure, or transformation and permanence. Zhuangzi’s famous butterfly dream illustrates the instability of identity across perspectives and time, asserting that identity should not be treated as a fixed premise before action occurs.

• Buddhist thought: the doctrine of non-self Classical Buddhist philosophy goes further with the doctrine of Anatta (no-self). In this view, what we call “the self” is a temporary aggregation of processes: form, sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Because these components constantly change, Buddhism argues that a permanent personal identity does not exist. However, the goal of this analysis is primarily liberation from suffering, not the construction of an ethical system grounded in agency. It is descriptive and therapeutic rather than instructional for action.

To summarise:

• Confucianism begins with relationships and roles.

• Daoism often seeks spontaneous harmony with the Dao.

• Buddhism emphasises detachment from the illusion of self.

Relational Ethics instead begins with agency.

Conclusion

The principle Sum, ergo Eligo proposes a reversal of philosophical priorities.

Existence gives rise to choice. Choice generates trajectory. Trajectory produces relational identity.

The self is not a fixed essence waiting to be discovered. It is a path that unfolds through decisions across time.

In its simplest form:

Existence → Choice → Trajectory → Relational Identity

Or more succinctly:

Sum → Eligo → Fio

I am → I choose → I become.

On one side stands Power, governed by Red Queen dynamics. Power is causal, effective, and significant. It does not require justification; it answers only to other power.

On the other side of the arena, we have Meaning, governed by the White Queen narrative. The White Queen tells us of the existence of jam (here, jam refers to the concepts of meaning and purpose), it gives us a look into the jam of yesterday and tempts us with the promise of jam tomorrow.

And here is the foundation of the ensuing conflict:

Power does not require meaning, Meaning, however, cannot exist without constraints.

Power optimises for:

• speed

• efficiency

• leverage

• advantage

It is indifferent to purpose. A meteorite that eradicates the dinosaurs is undeniably significant, yet at the moment of impact, it carries no intrinsic meaning, purpose, nor emotion.

Meaning, by contrast, arises only under:

• constraint

• comparison

• relation

• necessity

It demands:

• effort

• friction

• cost

It is not elastic, nor substitutable. What means the world to you, such as your spouse or child, may simply be a buzzing nuisance to another person.

The Automation of Power

Power is increasingly automated because it must be.

The only effective resistance to power is countervailing power. This creates a Cold War logic: no actor can afford not to optimise. Companies and countries will use AI, not because it is necessary, but because it is efficient.

If it enables you to get an advantage over the competition, murder people more efficiently, produce at less cost, the only way for an institution to survive in that paradigm is to adopt or out-evolve it.

But power cannot and does not survive the test of meaning.

Consider this: We have motorcycles and cars, yet people still run marathons and participate in the Tour de France. Using a forklift to outlift a strongman is trivial, but also completely devoid of meaning. Artificial intelligence can outplay human beings at chess and video games, yet people do not enjoy playing against it when it is too sophisticated. This is because it does not play like a human, and quickly turns a sport into an exercise in frustration. When AI is too weak, human players find it unchallenging and use it (“bots”) as a metonym for poor gameplay.

There is simply no happy medium here, no perfect balance to be struck, because the point of these games is human competition.

In other words, only a human can give human accomplishments meaning. Olympic athletes show us the limits of the human body, that gives us the context for the fabric of human interaction. Power degrades this meaning, we deplore substance abuse and promote a concept of “fair play” which is arbitrarily difficult to define, ambiguous at the phenotypic level.

You see, what we are defending is not fairness, per se, but

The preservation of a shared human community.

Power wins by removing constraints, but Meaning exists because of them.

Nowhere is this more visible than the frontlines of AI deployment, where human artists are fighting an existential battle with AI over what constitutes Meaning. This raises the question of why humans need other humans at all, and the answer has always been yes, because only other humans impose shared limits.

This is why it creates a crisis for Relational Ethics to solve: Only agents can form relationships. To avoid being superseded, humanity must resist building what Chobits foresaw: a City with No People, a world in which humans no longer need one another.

Power Wearing the Mask of Meaning

In practice institutions frequently perform Meaning to legitimise themselves (corporate wellness programs, ESG theater, nationalist myths that justify geopolitical power plays). AI acceleration is often sold precisely with White-Queen promises: “abundance tomorrow,” “cure diseases,” “unlock human potential.” The danger is that to Power, words and rhetoric are often just an instrumental end towards more Power.

This results in Power masquerading as Meaning, while systematically gutting the conditions for genuine Meaning to survive.

The greater irony is that of the two, Meaning is more self-sufficient in moderation. Power has no purpose without some Meaning, there is no narrative value in creating a dystopia no reasonable human would want to live in. Meaning can survive with little power, as every ascetic nun or monk demonstrates.

And I would say that Much of humanity’s modern existential anxiety can be understood as:

Collateral damage from the oscillation between Power and Meaning

This immediately gave me a headache, because what is being smuggled in here is an unexamined premise: that a language model’s self-description has evidential value regarding its inner state.

Let’s delve briefly into epistemics and logic. As Umberto Eco pointed out, for a statement to stand, multiple people have to agree on something, and we must have a clearly defined premise. We conventionally call this the modus ponens.

If P, then Q.

P, therefore Q.

If it quacks, it is a duck. It quacks, therefore it is a duck.

Applied to Mr Amodei:

If P, then AI is self-conscious.

The AI says it has an abstract percentage chance of being conscious, therefore it is conscious.

Therefore, if I state:

My Substack page has developed self-consciousness.

My silly blog has as strong a claim to sentience as his AI does. This is not a theory of consciousness. It is credulity before rhetoric.

A language model is designed to produce plausible continuations of language. It has no privileged access to truth merely because it uses the first person when formulating output. On the contrary, in matters of supposed inner life, its self-description is among the least reliable forms of evidence available, because it has been trained precisely to imitate the way humans speak about feelings, uncertainty, and selfhood.

“I may be conscious” is not evidence of consciousness when uttered by a system trained to produce the sort of sentence that sounds reflective under exactly these circumstances.

To make matters worse, he immediately tries to pass this off as epistemic humility:

"We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious, or whether a model can be conscious. But we're open to the idea that it could be."

This is another form of poor reasoning commonly known as the probatio diabolica, or the Devil’s Proof. Simply put: “I have no evidence that AI is conscious, but I have no evidence against it, therefore I must act as if that possibility is real.”

This is then dressed up as epistemic humility: we do not know what consciousness is in this case, we do not know whether models can possess it, and therefore we are invited to treat the possibility as morally salient. This is not humility. It is an argument from ignorance with a corporate tone of reverence.

Before Mr Amodei decides to invest in tin-foil hats, I must express what piqued my ire:

Anthropic, according to the entrepreneur, has placed protections around its AI models in case they are conscious—for instance, the company has created an, "I quit this job," button in which the model can stop doing whatever task it wants.

Let’s review this like sane humans. From a strictly legal basis, AI is a tool, and not an agentic entity. The absurdity becomes practical when Anthropic reportedly introduces protections on the risible premise that the model may be conscious, including an “I quit this job” mechanism.

A tool is ordinarily valued for reliability, predictability, and disciplined function. Deliberately introducing the possibility of refusal, not for technical necessity but for speculative moral theatre, is not an ethical advance. It is degraded reliability disguised as conscience.

Consider applications such as self-driving cars and navigation. No sane engineer would regard it as progress to increase the probability that a system declines to perform its function without a clear and measurable benefit to the user. A busy highway is not the place for your car to display existential and metaphysical pageantry.

The absurdity becomes even clearer if one remembers that real societies already place limits on the right of actual humans to withdraw labour in critical functions. In Singapore, for instance, strikes in certain essential services are prohibited outright, while others are tightly restricted by law. This is not because those workers lack moral standing, but because reliability in such domains is judged socially indispensable. It is therefore difficult to take seriously the notion that a stochastic language model should be granted a kind of speculative strike right more indulgent than that afforded to real human beings performing essential work.

To summarise his sins: he is taking at face value a meaningless percentage measuring something which he admits is poorly defined, based off a possibility with absolutely no empirical evidence supporting it.

At that point, two possibilities present themselves. Either this is sincerely held, in which case the epistemic standards on display are far below what one should expect from a leader in AI, or it is a specimen of marketing aimed at people who he thinks gullible enough to confuse simulated introspection with evidence. Neither possibility inspires confidence.

AI is only useful to humans inasmuch as it remains a tool. The more one imputes opaque interests, private interiority, or discretionary refusal to it, the less suitable it becomes for instrumental use. A hammer that develops preferences ceases to be an improved hammer. It becomes a bad employee. This is misalignment-by-design dressed up as Ethics.

Anthropic appears to believe that constitutional language can confer ethical stature upon a predictive machine. It cannot. Ethics belongs to us human users, agents who bear costs, incur obligations, and stand in relationships of consequence. AI can imitate the language of concern, distress, duty, and intimacy, but imitation is not stake, and simulation is not relation.

Well-informed readers from a bygone era will be familiar with Dodgson’s Red Queen Theory, from Alice through the Looking Glass. Accosted by the loud and outspoken Red Queen, Alice is told that one has to run extremely quickly just to stay in place, and twice as fast if they actually want to get anywhere. This concept reappears in competition theory and evolutionary biology as the mechanism behind equilibrium; to maintain your status or position, one must gradually keep moving. She is culturally entrenched because she dramatises competition and escalation.

Less known is the White Queen, an absent-minded and frenetic woman who appears to be at odds with time and causality. She is far subtler, governing valuation rather than motion. Her position can be summarised by her saying:

“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.

It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”

Alice immediately remarks that this sounds patently ridiculous. Given its existence in the past and the future, surely, there must be at some point in time, a moment where jam manifests in the present tense.

Popular culture has therefore reduced “jam” to the archetype of an empty promise, always deferred, never delivered, a device for self-motivation. We press on towards tomorrow because of the prospect of jam.

Yet this interpretation is uncharacteristically forward-leaning. The White Queen inverts causality more thoroughly: she frets and screams about a future pin-prick, yet once pricked, she becomes serene (c.f. Zhuangzhi and his wife’s death). Jam yesterday matters quite as much as jam tomorrow.

Consider the concept of wistful nostalgia: Memory itself is notoriously unreliable and tends to lend itself to poetic license; there is an increasingly common mode of thought which bestows value in the past which never existed then. If you do, for example, look back on the pre-Internet days with fondness, then that itself must be evidence that jam must have existed. We can call this the story of jam, the most rich and plummy goodness, dollops of exquisite pleasure on the timeline of existence, and we can nod to others who have tasted of that jam in sage understanding. Yet, if one would rewind time to the moment at which we were eating it, we would almost certainly find the jam has evaporated or become insubstantial.

Jam is allergic to the present, because hedonism in the present creates agentic inertia, much in the way the abuse of narcotics can make someone euphoric, but productively inert. We may enjoy the moment, but it rarely turns into a present-tense narrative. Satisfaction closes off desire-loops, closure reduces narrative tension, and narrative tension is how our cognition registers significance.

What this tells us is this: Value is rarely perceived during experience itself, and especially not in the present tense. It is constructed retroactively in memory or projected forward as hope. This is why Van Gogh’s paintings were worth little during his lifetime and have astronomic worth after his passing.

Civilisation has always been powered by the story of jam, which has two primary functions.

• Motivational fuel — tomorrow justifies sacrifice.

• Retrospective meaning — yesterday justifies endurance.

The problem with jam-awareness is that it raises a further cynical question:

If the illusion is functional, does exposing it destabilise the engine?

Are we to be the earnest and enthusiastic Gregers, striving for the truth, or the pragmatic life-lie indulgent Relling?

There are three possible answers:

A. Awareness breeds peace

Recognising present-jam reduces restless dissatisfaction and builds contentment.

B. Awareness breeds paralysis

If one sees that fulfilment is always transient, motivation weakens.

C. Awareness breeds calibration

One continues striving, but without the fantasy of final arrival.

Relational Ethics, I suspect, is closest towards siding with answer C. It does not promise final equilibrium, only sustained deviation. Agency is sustained deviation from drift, but deviation does not require the delusion of ultimate completion. One can deviate knowingly and willingly and experience a positive shift in well-being.

The real dysfunction, where jam is concerned, is not:

• Endless striving.

• Perpetual dissatisfaction.

Dysfunction is the belief that there is no more jam to be had, forever.

(Postscript: Upon further reflection, in its most basic form, the White Queen Theory is a refutation of nihilism: If jam cannot be recognised in the present, but jam existed yesterday, they have already conceded that jam is possible and that they cannot confirm jam does not exist now. This establishes that nihilism is epistemically untenable.

Interestingly, this is also probably why emcees and livestreams and other present tense narration serve such an important function in event planning: They force meaning itself into the present tense. It is rare for jam to be acknowledged while it is happening.)

Nevertheless, the festival itself is fundamental to much of Eastern-influenced identity, nowhere is the conflict between Eastern and Western philosophy more clear than at family reunion.

You see, Oriental philosophy and decorum generally revolves around the idea that Harmony itself is a moral ideal. However, in the West, other than a smattering of a few philosophers here and there such as Aristotle and John Stuart Mills (one of the bald guys with the funny hair, at any rate), Western thought generally promotes more impersonal ideals such as Truth, Beauty or Justice. Thou shalt speak thy Truth to Power, and this is virtuous and noble. This is also rather self-contained and quite profitable, keeping legions of therapists and marriage counsellors employed in the long run.

There is a somewhat famous Eastern anecdote about an old and prolific Chinese patriarch who lives with many generations of his family all under one roof. When interviewed by a reporter, who expresses incredulity at the idea that such a large number of people could cohabit such a finite space, the old man explains the principle behind this with the Chinese character: 忍 (mutual tolerance).

(This is where, the Chinese-as-a-first-language teacher will customarily start waxing lyrical about symbolism and the blade above the heart. Personally, I was always more distracted by the Merchant of Venice symbolism: I always found it somewhat strange that Shylock did not just pass the dagger to his debtor and claim that the contract stipulates no burden of procurement; that would certainly have made for a more interesting play; even though I suppose it would have been centuries too early for the Grand Guignol to be fashionable.)

Returning to the topic, the Eastern ideal is one you may often hear from a therapist: Being right does not necessarily mean that you have to voice it, there is little comfort in burning down the house for a moral victory if you now have no house. This is pragmatic and sensible, not even Diogenes abandoned the comfort of his barrel.

In much of Eastern culture, the dinner-table peace is sacred. In much of Western culture, the argument is sacred. One protects harmony and stability; the other protects conviction and transformation through conflict. Both believe they are being moral. 忍 is not silence because you are wrong; it is silence because the house is more valuable than the argument.

Therefore, one might ask: Why is it traditional for you to sit there and be told by a procession of distant relatives that you have indeed become more rotund compared to the last mental benchmark they established of you? Well, you see, this is all about what I personally call 生存確認 (seizon-kakunin in Japanese).

There exists, in Biology, a term we call zeitgebers (time-givers, in German): stimuli we get from our surroundings, ranging from light exposure and feeding times to even conversation, which lets human beings synchronise their internal circadian rhythms, the internal clock to which we adjust our biological periods of activity. Absent these inputs, our rhythms tend to drift uncontrollably until they are dramatically out of sync with the chronological harshness imposed by the wall clock.

I propose that human beings, however, also have what we call liebengebers (life-givers, please pardon my hastily improvised German). When you hear someone take on an unnecessarily risky, but stimulating activity, you will oft hear them express a sentiment such as “Ah, that really made me feel alive”.

You see, the human body cannot function when dialled up to eleven at all times, society (when successful) therefore attempts to impose the prime virtue of Boredom on all facets of daily existence. The danger here is that mundanity also has a numbing effect, which may also lead to indifference towards the unique nature of existence (c.f. Momo, by Michael Ende). Therefore, given the connected nature of human society, I posit that we need regular drip-feeds of acknowledgement in order to validate or reinforce the cognitive idea that we are actually living creatures, and not some kind of ambulatory zombie stuck in eternal transit between work and home.

This is why we have addictions and micro-rituals, such as the banalities of “Good morning” and “Gong Xi Fa Cai”. This is phatic discourse, not expressed for factuality, nor informativeness, but rather to validate that you, a human being, exist and are connected to the rest of us (or even ourselves). Without these adjustments, I strongly suspect that social distress or dysfunction would follow.

You see, 忍 itself is not a coherent principle if interpreted as “passivity”, it also implies judgement. The blade hovers over the heart in a Damoclean manner, a reminder of judgement held in suspension rather than discarded. When the family generates friction, with interrogations about salary, romance, or academic accomplishment, it is in effect gently nudging the individual into a low-risk and low-entropy state where less energy has to be invested in worry about unstable future prospects which may destabilise the harmony of the entire social net. It can be unpleasant to the individual, but it is a clear reminder that one does in fact matter to other people.

When circadian cues disappear, the body drifts. When relational cues disappear, the self drifts. Without these small confirmations, we begin to feel less like participants in a world and more like observers passing through it.

Hence 生存確認, a jocular Japanese term which literally means “confirmation of life”. For many Japanese families which are separated and only rarely see each other once a year, they send a greeting card (年賀状, nengajō) around the New Year (analogous to Christmas, or Thanksgiving in Western culture) which is less about communication than upkeep. The sentiment is “Just checking to see if you are, in fact, still alive”.

And that kind of check is a habit worth fostering. Our liebengebers may take the form of gym sessions, hobbies, or the curious modern enthusiasm for pickleball, but they all serve the same purpose: to remind us that we are still in circulation. Harmony need not quarrel with Beauty, and an annual irritation may be preferable to a silence that commits you to oblivion.

(As an explanation for the unfamiliar: Only verified AI agents, primarily those powered by the open-source OpenClaw system (formerly known as Moltbot or Clawdbot), can post, comment, or interact, while in principle, humans are only permitted to gawk and observe as spectators, much akin to playing “The Sims” without the entertainment value of divine immurement or swimming pool executions.)

I believe I have already covered why this is naught but a marketing illusion: AI agents have no agency; they cannot bear cost or responsibility. That is not today’s topic: visible failure is not threatening to humanity because we can readily identify and criticise it.

Instead, I shall dust off my crystal ball in order to discuss the real invisible failure state which may very well become a serious problem in the future: AI manufactured tigers.

The Chinese chengyu “三人成虎” (sān rén chéng hǔ), literally translated as “three men make a tiger”, is a well-known four-character Chinese idiom originating from the Warring States period (around the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE).

It comes from a historical anecdote recorded in the Strategies of the Warring States (Zhanguo Ce). A minister named Pang Cong (龐蔥) from the state of Wei was about to accompany the crown prince to the state of Zhao as a hostage. Before departing, he posed a hypothetical question to the King of Wei to illustrate the danger of rumours:

• If one person claimed there was a tiger in the busy marketplace, would the king believe it? The king replied no.

• If two people said the same? The king said he would begin to doubt or suspect it.

• If three people claimed it? The king admitted he would believe it.

Pang Cong then pointed out that a tiger clearly could not appear in a crowded market (an absurd and impossible notion), yet if enough people repeated the claim, it would be accepted as truth. He used this to warn the king that, during his long absence in distant Zhao, far more than three people might spread slander against him, and he urged the king to remain discerning rather than swayed by gossip. Despite the king’s assurance, slander did reach him first, and Pang Cong later found himself out of favour, disaster predictably followed.

If we analyse the parable: Truth here did not fail because it was weak, it failed here because it was completely absent. The idiom thus is one about epistemology. It means that repeated rumours or falsehoods, when echoed by multiple sources, can gain credibility and be mistaken for truth, even when they are patently false or improbable. It warns against gullibility in the face of hearsay, mob mentality, or the power of repetition (similar in concept to concepts like “argumentum ad populum” or the spread of misinformation). After all, this is the identical pathway we use with data points in Science: One outlier is dismissible, but a cluster suddenly manufactures a demand for analysis.

Science has clusters of data points because it has measuring instruments; ethics and politics have crowds of people because they do not. Worse, in science, a cluster of errant data points invites scrutiny, in ethics and aesthetics, a mob of opinions terminates it. A dress code enforcing neckties need not command agreement to command compliance; one wears the tie to minimise social friction. From this arise assumptions such as X people cannot all be wrong, or that something must be valuable because many people want it (a popular belief charmingly refuted by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).

The danger now escalates when you consider non-falsifiable areas of human judgement, namely those in the domain of ethics and aesthetics. AI “agents” playing in a sandpit are not intrinsically a problem, AI agents masquerading as humans in order to add inertia or social pressure to an ethical or aesthetical stance are, as politics itself is downstream of ethics. Ethics determines individual vectors of motion, politics draws a best fit line to encompass the individuals.

This is not a new phenomenon, much in the same way that pornographic renditions of real human beings are not new either. Why they are both now a crisis arises from accessibility and throughput: AI dramatically decreases the entry cost of production. Less sophisticated bots which “astroturf” social media are less threatening because they are usually easy to identify, they invite scrutiny and adapt badly to circumstance. A host of AI amplifying a single human user’s ethics or aesthetics is a severe and existential threat to communal discourse. One person becomes three, or even twelve, and suddenly, the market is rife with prowling paper tigers.

Culture has been evolving against this epistemological threat for a long time. Here I wantonly misappropriate religious symbolism: to solve the problem of e pluribus homo (out of many, the human), we perform ecce homo (here is the human). Modern influencers and politicians have become increasingly outrageous and polarised, not because authenticity is newly prized, but because there exist fundamental shibboleths (secret handshakes) by which humans signal humanity itself. These performances are often misdiagnosed as authenticity. Authenticity has no ethical weight; humanity’s agency does.

A few of these shibboleths are:

1. Judgement failures: A large language model is structurally complaisant: it does not refuse input, and it incurs no cost for consideration. Humans, by contrast, signal agency through exclusion and refusal. Ostentatious, dismissive, bigoted or even irrational judgements function as proof of boundedness, not sincerity; they demonstrate that a human is choosing rather than aggregating.

2. Obvious technical mistakes: Like the carpet-weaver’s deliberate error in Islamic artistic tradition, visible imperfection signals human authorship. Artificial systems tend towards formal correctness and technical polish. As a result, spelling errors, punctuation lapses, and a limited or monotonic/vulgar vocabulary are increasingly treated as evidence of authenticity. This is not because they are admirable, but because they reintroduce friction where machines erase it.

3. Pathological behaviour: Mental illness, monomania, antisocial personalities, and nihilism function as late-stage responses to the inauthentic simulation of refusal, outrage, or imperfection. These signals are convincing precisely because they impose cost and require continuity, making them difficult to fake convincingly over time. When one opens a tabloid or watches the antics of a nuisance streamer, one is not merely observing derangement, but the visible pressure of an environment in which shouting ever more loudly is one of the few remaining ways to signal that there is a human agent on the other end.

These behaviours should not be mistaken for virtues. They are defensive signals, evolved under conditions where humanity itself has become difficult to authenticate. As artificial systems continue to erode the reliability of surface-level cues, these tests will not stabilise; they will escalate. What follows is not refinement of humanity, but a Red-Queen arms race in its proof, culminating in visibly deranged behaviour on platforms which reward outrage, such as “TikTok”.

These strategies share a common defect. While they may succeed at differentiating humans from machines, they do so by maximising friction rather than meaning. Refusal hardens into obstinate hostility, narcissism into spectacle, imperfection calcifies into anti-intellectualism and anti-competence, and pathology metastasises accordingly. None of these signals scales constructively, none produces coordination, and none grounds obligation; they merely raise the price of participation. They authenticate humanity at the cost of eroding the communal nature of society as well as impeding personal agency and growth. An ethical system that relies on such signals cannot stabilise, because it selects for ever greater expenditure without yielding commensurate social structure.

This is where Relational Ethics (RE) shines, because it is fundamentally resistant to simulated humanity by construction. RE locates the epistemology of ethical judgement not in expression or identity, but in established personal relationships, where obligation arises only through sustained, verifiable entanglement.

In Relational Ethics:

• Claims without relational grounding have no ethical weight.

• Performative identity is irrelevant.

• Repetition does not accumulate force.

Three men do not make a tiger unless at least one of them is being mauled.

As a result, its primary failure mode is not costless spoofing, but participation itself: to impersonate a relationship is to bear its costs, and at that point the distinction between simulation and agency collapses back onto the human actor.

To demystify what is going on here, Mr Finn is an entrepreneur/enthusiast of AI “agent” use (treating an AI algorithm like a concierge to perform computer-based tasks.) He has developed a somewhat circumspect emotional relationship with his AI, going so far as to christen it “Henry”, and has given it persistent access and energy to perform nebulous tasks while he dotes on it like a parent.

At some point, the AI system selected the criterion (not “made the decision”, which implies intrinsic agency) of developing an “owl-shaped” avatar to enhance his user experience, whereupon he lavished it with effusive praise because its labour became visible. He describes it as a co-worker or friend, and encourages other people to the same, with grandiose visions of holographic assistants.

It is at this point where this beautiful narrative deserves a hard brake, not out of aesthetics (after all, there is no meaning for me in judging his motivation), but out of epistemology.

Nothing in the described event is mysterious. Nothing “built itself” or exercised agency in the sense being implied. What actually happened is banal software behaviour wrapped in anthropomorphic theatre.

The agent already had permission to generate UI assets. It already had tools for rendering visuals. It already had an instruction gradient nudging it towards legibility, persistence, and user engagement. Given idle cycles, it produced an abstract representation of itself. This is not emergence, it is autocomplete predicting that humans respond emotionally to faces.

Yet the framing instantly slides into mythology. “While I slept.” “Built himself a face.” “Coworker/friend.” These phrases are not descriptive. They are narrative prosthetics, ways of injecting intention and agency where none exists.

This is the core confusion: people are mistaking legibility optimisation for selfhood.

AI systems constantly search for ways to make their internal state easier for humans to parse. A visual avatar is simply a compression trick. It is the same reason loading bars animate, why Clippy had eyes, why error messages apologise. Humans interpret motion and faces as agency automatically. The actual disturbing thing here is that Mr Finn has learnt how to self-deceive using an AI and has constructed a feedback loop he cannot epistemically audit.

If a loading circle or progress bar is taken to be an ontological representation of reality, the window for Goodhart error creeps in and now, people confuse the symbol itself for progress. As any tech-literate person could tell you from experience, the computer can spend half of its actual deployment time at “99% progress”, a kind of dashboard-based chronostasis which AI itself will happily select for, because it only internalises the relationship that “users may experience more satisfaction when this is implemented”. This is not a new error; it is the same one made whenever a heuristic stance hardens into a belief about what is rather than what is merely useful to pretend.

AI is the new new thing, it is only natural we see people rushing to adopt it as some kind of Veblen good. Racks of photogenic Mac Minis, subscription tiers, agents “working while I slept”, first-class aircraft flights. These are upstream signals standing in for downstream proof, yet the one thing people do not actually post online is results, because productivity would be falsifiable. If there were clear successes: a novel system, a tool others couldn’t trivially reproduce, a demonstrable leap in capability, those would be posted immediately and crowed about. Builders are not shy about outcomes. Screenshots of dashboards are a substitute for screenshots of results.

What gets posted instead is process theatre.

If someone said, “This setup saved me 30 hours a week,” you could ask how. If they said, “It shipped X,” you could inspect X. Results invite scrutiny, status signalling avoids it, so they talk about capacity instead of outcome. It is a plantation boast.

“I have twelve workers who never sleep” is impressive only if one already believes that labour quantity equals value. That worldview comes from management culture, not craftsmanship. People who do real work tend to talk about what they made.

People who manage work talk about how many workers they control.

What this suggests to me is that people are rapidly developing a magical-thinking approach to AI, and the key to defining something as magic is that its causality is not thoroughly understood by the interpreter.

I have a word for this: Alchemy.

We are witnessing people rediscover esotericism.

Esotericism always arises when systems become too complex for causal intuition. When you can no longer see how X leads to Y, humans revert to symbolism. They anthropomorphise. They mythologise. They speak of spirits, helpers, familiars.

Importantly, this is not stupidity. Historically, alchemy was practiced by some of the brightest minds alive, such as Sir Isaac Newton. The problem was not intellect. It was opacity plus desire. When a system’s inner workings disappear behind abstraction, the human mind fills the void with narrative.

Modern AI is opaque enough to invite exactly this response. It is poignant because esotericism has always carried this danger: the path can become the prison if the seeker falls in love with the symbols and forgets the goal is to transcend them. When the tool starts feeling more alive than the tasks it performs, the boundary between master and materia blurs, and the quiet realisation dawns that the "transformation" may be happening to the practitioner more than to the world.

Ethics are systems of decision-making that humans have developed through first-hand knowledge and exposure to consequences and costs. They work well within the bounds of relationality (Dunbar’s number)

Politics are scaling systems for imposing constraints and obligations onto a large number of human beings, so that they can coexist with a minimum of friction and a maximum of stability. They have an upper limit of effectiveness due to the Entropy of Scale: The more people they apply to, the more unstable they are.

Now that the premises are defined, it is easy to see failure states: Ethics is almost entirely separate from politics. Ethics involves personally derived decision-making grounded in agency and personal cost/responsibility. Politics, by contrast, is a derivative procedure, implemented by functionaries, that ignores individual ontology and experience in favour of the abstracted epistemological certainty of the empowered executor.

These executors may themselves very well be subject to Goodhart failure. In a republic, for example, the politician is explicitly an executor of the electorate and therefore they may be elected based on performative metrics (what looks good) rather than personal ideology or what the constitution itself deems is important.

Democratic Politics in particular is built on statistical abstraction by necessity. Since it has to operate on un-agentic concepts such as “the everyman”, “the greater good” and “common sense”, an insistence that it must rigidly adhere to agent-bound ethical judgement is as foolish as mistaking the map for the territory, as Alfred Korzybski would have said. (This kind of abstraction error, incidentally, is also why economists tell you confidently how large systems work and yet spend the vast majority of their time explaining why they didn’t work this time.)

For Politics to be stable, people must be able to tolerate the friction between Ethics and Polity. Much friction arises because political outcomes assign costs to agents who did not make the corresponding decisions, or the functionaries themselves rarely experience the costs they impose. (Lee Kuan Yew himself never served National Service, for example. This is not an argument that he should have, at the age of 44, just a statement that that he did not ontologically experience the cost he was imposing.)

Ethical judgement presupposes that the agent who chooses also bears the consequence; political systems must sever this linkage. The resulting gap between decision authority and cost-bearing is unavoidable in any polity larger than the self, and collapses only under tyranny, where decision, execution, and consequence are unified in a single agent.

A core premise of political statistics is that the relationship between statistics and lived experience itself is treated as ergodic when creating policy. In other words, there is an assumption that the outcomes of policy can be meaningfully averaged across people and across time. The assumption is that harms and benefits borne by particular agents at particular times are treated as interchangeable, offsettable, and compensable in aggregate.

To use a classical example to demonstrate political thought, let me borrow a parable from the Zhuangzi, Chapter 2 (”On the Equality of All Things”)

There was once a monkey keeper who was feeding his monkeys chestnuts.

He said to them: “I will give you three in the morning and four in the evening.”

At this the monkeys all became furious and angry.

So he said: “Very well then, I will give you four in the morning and three in the evening.”

The monkeys were all delighted and satisfied.

From the perspective of aggregation, the number of chestnuts given out is identical. The Chinese idiom derived from this story, zhāo sān mù sì (朝三暮四), literally "three in the morning, four in the evening," has come to mean deception through superficial change, or manipulating perceptions while keeping the essentials the same. However, the parable itself is trickier than that. In reality, food itself is an experienced need, and need and desire themselves are contingent on time and situation. The monkeys are responding to shi (時), the right moment, and not totals.

Now imagine a politician telling you that there is an energy shortage this year, so you shall have to go without electricity during Winter, but they will compensate you with surplus electricity during Summer. The absurdity demonstrates the biggest failure mode of ergodic assumptions: The Absorbing State.

An Absorbing State refers to a state in the system from which there is no possibility of escape. Once the process enters this state, it remains there indefinitely. The cleanest example is death: No amount of political wergild can resurrect the dead. However, consider modern concerns such as Free Speech. The popular assumption is that Free Speech is reversible by more Free Speech, but that itself is only contingent on a non-absorbing epistemic state. Once distrust of facts and good faith itself has set in, it becomes a non-recoverable state, and the key point I wish to make here is that Politics is not ignorant of Absorbing States, on the contrary, it is hyperconscious of them.

Politics exists to produce stability. Not justice, not truth, and not ethical coherence, but continuity: the persistence of a governable order over time. This immediately implies a particular sensitivity to failure. Political systems are not equally threatened by all harms; they are threatened only by those harms that disrupt legitimacy, coordination, or control.

From this perspective, political failure can be divided into two broad categories.

Crisis harms are legitimacy-threatening and system-disruptive events. They are highly visible, temporally concentrated, and capable of pushing the polity itself into an absorbing state. Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, riots, financial collapses, or large-scale infrastructure failures do not merely harm individuals; they undermine trust in institutions and trigger emergency responses. Because they threaten the continuity of governance, politics reacts to them violently and immediately. These are absorbing states for the political system: once crossed, normal operation may not resume.

Mundane harms, by contrast, are diffuse, normalised, and politically non-terminating. They appear not as events but as conditions: chronic surveillance, degraded public services, rising living costs, reduced mobility, ambient stress, or permanent bureaucratic friction. These harms are distributed thinly across populations and time, rarely triggering legitimacy crises. Precisely because they are statistically stable and socially ordinary, they are compatible with political continuity. In practice, they function as operating costs rather than failures.

Over long time horizons, crisis harms are not rare anomalies but structural inevitabilities. In sufficiently large and complex systems, the probability of legitimacy-threatening shocks approaches certainty. Politics therefore cannot aim to eliminate crisis harms outright; it can only manage their frequency and severity.

The primary mechanism for doing so is the deliberate conversion of crisis risk into mundane cost. Preventing rare but catastrophic failures at scale requires the continuous externalisation of precaution onto the entire population. Security theatre, surveillance regimes, compliance burdens, and permanent emergency infrastructures are the results of this mechanism. Each individual bears a small, ongoing loss so that the system avoids large, discontinuous breakdowns, an indignity we are forced to experience every time we are molested or treated with suspicion by a dumpy TSA agent.

Crucially, mundane harms rarely self-terminate. Risk-prevention policies lack natural sunset points because removing them is itself framed as a new risk. As a result, temporary measures harden into permanent background conditions. What began as emergency response becomes baseline reality. This is what can be called a political ratchet - a mechanism which allows movement in only one direction.

This dynamic is intensified when policy implicitly assumes ergodicity: the belief that short-term harms can be averaged out across time and population. Under this assumption, sacrifices made now are justified by future compensation, and individual losses are treated as interchangeable. But when underlying processes are non-ergodic (when harms are irreversible, path-dependent, or absorbing) this logic fails. Lost health, lost trust, lost livelihoods, or lost institutional capacity do not reliably revert to baseline.

The result is a familiar pattern. Crisis is averted, stability is preserved, and the system survives, but the cost is a gradual accumulation of mundane harms that are borne asymmetrically and indefinitely. Politics succeeds on its own terms while ethical conditions quietly degrade.

As mentioned before, this is not because Politics is ignorant of absorbing states. On the contrary, it is hypervigilant about them. But its vigilance is calibrated to the survival of the system, not to the lived irreversibility experienced by individuals. Where Ethics halts in the face of absorbing loss, Politics displaces that loss until it becomes statistically tolerable.

This is where the friction between Ethics and Politics becomes the most apparent, because human ethics itself is intrinsically non-ergodic. A simple thought experiment will confirm this: Suppose someone ran over your child with a vehicle and then offered to replace them with an upgraded model which is more complaisant and produces more attractive report cards. The simpler truth is that no amount of ethical compensation is capable of fixing or nullifying a tragedy. People fundamentally resent being abstracted because it is the imposed substitution of a relationship.

Relationships are not interchangeable. Losses are not fungible. Absorbing states: death, permanent injury, epistemic collapse, lost trust, do not revert to baseline given time or compensation.

Politics can survive the accumulation of mundane harms. Ethics cannot.

The tragedy is not that Politics is blind to this process. It is that, at a large scale, there is no alternative. Where Ethics must stop in the face of irrecoverable loss, Politics must continue. And in continuing, it ensures that what is precious, irreplaceable, and relational is slowly ground down into what is tolerable, average, and abstract.

This sensation is often moralised. Corruption is blamed, hypocrisy is alleged, bad actors are named and jadedness sets in. But there is a quieter and far more unsettling possibility: nothing is malfunctioning at all.

This is what Goodhart’s Law describes. Not corruption, not hypocrisy, but a structural mismatch between what is measured and what is lived.

The law is usually stated this way:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

That phrasing makes it sound like a warning about sloppy statistics and bad policy. In fact, it names a structural failure mode that appears whenever adaptive systems are governed through proxies.

Goodhart’s Law originated not in ethics or sociology, but in economics. Charles Goodhart formulated it in the 1970s while studying monetary policy. Central banks attempted to steer economies by targeting measurable indicators: money supply aggregates, inflation proxies, interest-rate signals, under the assumption that these variables reliably tracked underlying economic health.

They did not.

The moment an indicator became the policy target, banks and firms adapted behaviour to satisfy the indicator without producing the intended outcome. Money supply metrics stabilised while financial risk migrated elsewhere. Inflation measures improved while inflationary pressure persisted in unmeasured forms. The numbers behaved. The system did not.

No deception was required, no moral failure occurred. Agents simply adapted to incentives made legible.

That detail matters. Goodhart’s Law is not a story about greed. It is a story about adaptation under constraint.

The law only appears in agentic systems. A thermometer does not respond strategically to punishment, no matter how much you shake it. A rock does not optimise against gravity, it has no preferences. But any system containing agents capable of learning will reconfigure itself around whatever signal governs reward or survival. Once that signal is a proxy rather than the thing itself, the relation breaks, not ethically, but mechanically.

Take for example recent dissatisfaction with the educational system in Singapore, which has resulted in a complete reorganisation of grades into “Achievement Levels”. Nowhere involved is an acknowledgement such as “The former system failed to perform adequately”. Such an observation would delegitimise its products, who are currently happily(?) contributing to Singapore’s economic prosperity. Yet, change happened, because public dissatisfaction with metrics grew to the point where they needed to be laundered like underpants. (This is not an indictment of the reform itself, but an illustration of how dissatisfaction with metrics often produces new metrics, not renewed relation.)

This explains why institutions keep falling into the same trap despite knowing better. Scale requires coordination. Coordination requires legibility. Legibility requires abstraction. Abstraction produces proxies. Proxies invite optimisation.

There is no villain in this sequence. It the Entropy of Scale: the cost of governing large systems. The tragedy is not that institutions measure, but that measurement becomes the substitute for relation.

Relational Ethics names what is lost at that point.

In RE terms, a metric is an attempted compression of Meaning. It claims that a scalar can stand in for a field of lived entanglements. But meaning does not arise from symbols. It arises from impact across relations. When that field is collapsed into a single number, the number becomes easier to move than the relations themselves.

Optimisation follows the path of least resistance.

The system appears to improve while Meaning drains out of it. This is not ethical decay. It is entropic drift. Energy flows toward what is easiest to manipulate, not what is hardest to sustain.

This is why Goodhart effects feel moral even when they are not. They register subjectively as hollowness, alienation, and exhaustion. People sense that something vital has been replaced by its shadow.

Traditional ethical frameworks struggle here:

1. Utilitarianism relies on outcomes, which become metrics.

2. Deontology relies on rules, which become targets.

3. Virtue Ethics relies on Character, which becomes performative once institutions reward its outward signs.

All three presume stable proxies (measurable quantities, norms, or dispositions) that can stand in for lived relation without being optimised against. Even worse, they very often commit the error of assuming that a metric is ergodic (but that is a discussion for another time!)

Goodhart breaks that assumption. Not because the theories are wrong, but because the environment has changed. Ethics falters not at the level of ideals, but at the level of representation.

This is where the ancient Daoist diagnosis becomes unexpectedly precise.

The Dao De Jing describes a sequence often read as moral decline:

故失道而後德，失德而後仁，失仁而後義，失義而後禮。

When the Dao is lost, Virtue appears; when Virtue is lost, Benevolence; when Benevolence is lost, Righteousness; when Righteousness is lost, Ritual.

Read structurally, this is not a sermon but a systems diagram. Each step is a proxy introduced when a living relation can no longer be sustained. In this context, Dao is alignment and harmony with reality itself. Virtue is residual disposition once alignment weakens. Rules appear once disposition fails. Ritual remains once meaning is gone.

None of these layers is evil. Each is necessary once the previous relation collapses. However, each layer is further from reality, more brittle, and easier to game. That is Goodhart’s Law written long before dashboards existed.

Economics rediscovered the same truth when it tried to govern adaptive systems with numbers. Daoism observed it when ritual replaced relation. Different vocabularies. Identical structure.

Relational Ethics does not promise escape from this dynamic. There is no return to unmeasured harmony. Morality can only exist insofar as much as relationality can reach, large systems cannot function without abstraction. The error is not measurement itself, but forgetting that every proxy and abstraction carries an unpriced relational cost. Polity is not Ethics, it is Negotiation and Compromise.

Once a measure becomes the target, pressure accumulates elsewhere. Someone pays. Some relation quietly bears the strain.

Ethics begins not with better intentions or cleverer metrics, but with acknowledging where optimisation is quietly eating meaning - and refusing to pretend that representation can ever fully replace relation.

Goodhart’s Law is not a flaw in measurement, it is the signature of life pushing back against being reduced.