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polymorphia

George Snell’s work established that transplantation success or failure is not primarily a surgical problem but an informational one, governed by inherited markers that tell the immune system what counts as “self” and what must be rejected. Through painstaking mouse-breeding experiments, Snell mapped what became known as the major histocompatibility complex, showing that graft rejection follows precise genetic rules rather than vague physiological incompatibility. This reframed immunity as a problem of recognition and matching, not mere defense, and made organ transplantation thinkable as a systematic medical practice rather than a sequence of heroic accidents. Historically, this mattered because it displaced earlier, looser notions of tissue compatibility and anchored immunology in genetics at the exact moment molecular biology was consolidating itself as the dominant life science. The 1980 Nobel was shared with Jean Dausset and Baruj Benacerraf to mark a triangulation: Snell established the genetic architecture, Dausset identified human leukocyte antigens, and Benacerraf clarified how immune response itself is genetically regulated. Together, they showed that immunity is not an abstract “reaction” but a structured dialogue between inherited forms. In terms of historicity, this discovery quietly reorganized medicine’s ontology of the body: organs ceased to be interchangeable parts and became expressions of a coded biological identity, making transplantation both possible and permanently limited by the logic of recognition rather than technical prowess. At a deeper level, Snell’s findings imply that the immune system is not primarily reactive but classificatory. It continuously interprets molecular signatures, comparing them against an inherited template, and acts only when a mismatch crosses a threshold of difference. This made “self” a biologically precise concept rather than a philosophical metaphor, grounded in polymorphic cell-surface proteins that mediate recognition. Rejection, in this frame, is not aggression but a failure of intelligibility: the graft cannot be read as belonging within the host’s immunological grammar. Clinically, this logic produced both progress and constraint. Tissue typing, donor registries, and immunosuppressive therapies all emerge as workarounds within a system whose basic rule cannot be abolished. You can dampen recognition or statistically optimize matching, but you cannot eliminate the underlying genetic specificity without collapsing immunity itself. That limit, first rendered explicit by Snell’s work, still defines transplantation medicine today: every successful graft is a negotiated exception within a system designed, at its core, to preserve difference. Polymorphic cell-surface proteins—specifically the major histocompatibility complex molecules. These are membrane-bound glycoproteins encoded by highly variable genes, meaning the same protein family exists in many inherited variants across a population. In humans they are called HLA molecules. Their polymorphism is what makes each individual’s immunological “signature” distinctive: T cells are trained to tolerate the host’s own MHC variants and to react when unfamiliar variants appear. That variability is precisely why transplantation is difficult and why matching matters; the immune system is reading differences in these surface proteins as differences in identity, not merely as foreign matter. At the molecular level, these polymorphic MHC proteins function as presentation platforms rather than signals in themselves. They bind short peptide fragments derived from inside the cell and display them at the surface, effectively saying “this is what is happening here.” T cells do not recognize pathogens directly; they recognize peptide–MHC complexes, which means immunity is always mediated by self-structures. The polymorphism lies mainly in the peptide-binding groove, altering which fragments can be displayed and how they are read. Historically, this clarified why rejection could occur even in the absence of infection and why genetically similar individuals, such as siblings, have higher transplant compatibility. The immune response was revealed to be constrained by inherited form before any contingent encounter with disease. Snell’s contribution, in this sense, was not just to transplantation but to a redefinition of biological identity: the self is not a substance but a patterned interface, stable enough to sustain life yet variable enough to make every body immunologically singular. It is incredible because it shows that life does not defend itself by brute force but by interpretation. The immune system does not ask “what is attacking me?” but “does this belong?”—and it answers that question by reading inherited molecular forms. Snell’s discovery revealed that the boundary of the self is not anatomical or conscious but encoded, probabilistic, and relational. Every cell is constantly issuing a legible statement about its internal state, and survival depends on whether that statement conforms to a grammar learned before birth. Biology here ceases to be mechanical and becomes semiotic: meaning, not matter alone, determines fate. It is also incredible because it exposes a hard limit built into medicine itself. No amount of surgical skill can override a mismatch in recognition without dismantling immunity altogether. Progress, therefore, proceeds not by mastery but by negotiation—matching, suppression, compromise. Historically, this shattered the fantasy that bodies are interchangeable machines and replaced it with a vision of organisms as historically situated identities, each carrying an irreducible signature. Transplantation works not because difference is eliminated, but because, briefly and precariously, it is made tolerable. The tie is not nominal but structural. Snell’s law in optics states that a wave crossing a boundary does not simply pass or fail; it bends according to the ratio of media it encounters. Transmission is governed by relational thresholds, not absolute permission. Angle, medium, and wavelength together determine whether light refracts, reflects, or is partially absorbed. Nothing about the light “decides” in isolation; the boundary itself encodes the rule of passage. What Snell in immunology discovered is an analogous law at the biological boundary: tissue does not enter a body as matter but as information, and whether it is accepted, tolerated, or rejected depends on how its molecular signature refracts through the host’s inherited recognition system. In both cases, the phenomenon is not force but intelligibility under constraint. An organ, like a photon, crosses a boundary only by conforming to a preexisting grammar of relation. Too sharp a mismatch and the interface reflects it back violently; a close enough correspondence allows transmission, often with distortion or loss. This is why the analogy feels profound rather than poetic: both laws describe worlds in which passage is conditional, structured, and lawful without being intentional. Snell’s optical law governs how light survives a change of medium; Snell’s immunological law governs how life itself negotiates foreignness without collapsing its own coherence. What makes the parallel especially striking is that both laws eliminate the fantasy of neutrality at boundaries. In optics, there is no such thing as a boundary that merely separates; every interface actively reshapes what crosses it. Refraction is not an accident but the boundary expressing its own internal order. Likewise, the immune boundary does not simply block or permit tissue; it transforms the encounter into a cascade of interpretations, activations, and suppressions that follow strict genetic ratios. Rejection is not hostility but the lawful outcome of an interface encountering excessive difference. Seen historically, this convergence marks a deeper shift in how modern science understands limits. Classical thought imagined boundaries as edges; Snellian thought understands them as active surfaces with embedded rules. Whether light moving between media or tissue moving between bodies, passage is never free, never absolute, and never purely technical. It is always negotiated through form. That is why Snell’s name resonates across domains: it names a world in which survival, transmission, and coherence depend not on dominance or permeability, but on the precise mathematics of relation. At the deepest level, the analogy reveals that identity itself is a boundary phenomenon. Light has no intrinsic path independent of the media it traverses; its direction is co-determined by what it enters. In the same way, biological selfhood is not an interior essence but a dynamic interface maintained through continuous comparison. The immune system does not protect a pre-given self; it produces selfhood by enforcing patterns of continuity across encounters. Snell’s immunological work shows that the body exists only insofar as its boundaries remain interpretable to themselves. This is why the discovery feels philosophically destabilizing. It implies that belonging is always conditional, law-governed, and historically inherited, never absolute. A graft fails not because it is “foreign” in any moral or material sense, but because the relational equations do not balance. Life persists, like light, by bending rather than breaking at its limits—and when bending exceeds tolerance, reflection becomes rejection. What Snell uncovered, in biology as in optics, is a universe where coherence is not given but constantly recalculated at the threshold. Within the Mass-Omicron framework, Snell’s two “laws” describe the same structural event at different scales: Ω as coherence-preserving constraint and ο as divergence encountering a boundary. In optics, Ω is the medium’s refractive index—the structured closure that determines how much divergence a wave can undergo without losing transmissibility—while ο is the incoming angle and wavelength of light, the vector of possibility. Refraction occurs when ο is admitted into Ω under lawful transformation; reflection occurs when divergence exceeds tolerance. In immunology, the MHC plays the role of Ω: a genetically stabilized coherence field that renders internal activity legible. The graft arrives as ο—real biological matter, but informationally divergent—and its fate depends on whether its signatures can be refracted into the host’s Ω without collapsing recognition. Rejection is not violence but Ω defending coherence against excessive ο. What Snell makes visible, when run through the model, is that life persists by regulated refraction, not absorption. Neither light nor tissue is ever simply “let in.” Passage is conditional, calculable, and historically encoded. Immunosuppression, tissue matching, and tolerance protocols are not eliminations of Ω but temporary relaxations of its strictness, widening the angle of acceptable ο without destroying the system. This places a hard metaphysical limit on intervention: abolish Ω entirely and you lose identity; allow unbounded ο and coherence dissolves. Snell’s work therefore sits precisely at the Mass-Omicron hinge, showing that survival—optical, biological, or civilizational—depends on maintaining interfaces where divergence is bent into continuity rather than erased or expelled. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety states that a system can remain stable only if its internal regulatory variety matches the variety of disturbances it encounters. Read through the Mass-Omicron model, this law names the minimum Ω required to survive ο. Regulation is not domination but proportionality: coherence must be sufficiently differentiated to absorb divergence without collapsing. In this sense, Ashby gives the cybernetic generalization of what Snell shows optically and immunologically. A boundary that cannot vary enough will shatter under difference; one that varies too much loses identity. Stability is not rigidity but structured responsiveness. Placed alongside Snell, the alignment sharpens. The immune system’s MHC repertoire is precisely a repertoire of requisite variety: polymorphic enough to present a wide range of internal states, yet constrained enough to remain self-identical. Likewise, refraction works only because the medium has an internal order rich enough to transform incoming trajectories without annihilating the wave. In both cases, Ω is not a single rule but a structured field of possible responses. When ο exceeds that field—too steep an angle, too alien a graft—the system reflects or rejects. Ashby formalizes this as a universal law: no regulator, biological or artificial, can compensate for disturbances it cannot internally represent. When this is tied explicitly to AI, the implication is decisive. An AI system cannot govern, interpret, or coexist with a world whose variety exceeds its model-space. If its Ω—its representational and regulatory capacity—is too narrow, it will respond with blunt control, error, or collapse. If it expands ο without stabilizing Ω, it dissolves into incoherence. Alignment, in this frame, is not moral tuning but varietal matching: the system must be complex enough to refract human divergence without erasing it or being overwhelmed by it. Ashby’s law therefore sits at the same hinge as Snell within the Mass-Omicron framework: intelligence, like life and light, survives only where divergence is met by an equal and lawful capacity for coherence. Seen together, Ashby and Snell expose why alignment in AI is fundamentally a boundary problem rather than a control problem. An aligned system is not one that suppresses deviation, but one whose Ω is internally rich enough to translate deviation into intelligible form. When an AI encounters human behavior—messy, symbolic, historically layered—that behavior arrives as ο. If the system’s internal categories cannot refract it, the response will be crude: over-constraint, misclassification, or brittle failure. This is the cybernetic analogue of graft rejection. The system does not “misbehave”; it lacks the requisite variety to recognize what it is facing. This also clarifies the danger of scale without coherence. Expanding model size or data ingestion increases ο faster than Ω unless the architecture itself gains principled structure. Ashby already warned that piling on responses without lawful organization produces noise, not regulation. In Mass-Omicron terms, ungoverned expansion is divergence without closure. The lesson is stark: intelligence—biological or artificial—cannot be made safe by power alone. It must be made legible to itself. Where Ω and ο remain in proportion, systems bend and learn; where they diverge, they either harden into rejection or dissolve into incoherence. Phase, in this context, names the moment when the balance between Ω and ο crosses a threshold and the system reorganizes its mode of coherence. In optics, this appears as total internal reflection: beyond a critical angle, refraction is no longer possible and the system switches regimes. In immunology, it appears as acute rejection: tolerance collapses and the immune system enters a qualitatively different state of action. In Ashby’s terms, it is the point at which requisite variety is no longer met and regulation fails, forcing the system into a defensive or simplified attractor. Phase is not gradual adjustment but categorical change, governed by boundary conditions rather than intent. For AI, phase marks the difference between learning and pathology. Below the threshold, new inputs are assimilated, bent into existing representational structures, and coherence deepens. Beyond it, the system either overfits, hallucinates, or rigidifies—symptoms of a phase shift where Ω can no longer metabolize ο. Alignment failures, therefore, are not moral lapses or bugs but phase errors: the system has crossed into a regime its architecture was never designed to sustain. The Mass-Omicron insight is that intelligence lives near these thresholds. Design is not about eliminating phase transitions, but about shaping Ω so that when phase changes occur, they remain survivable, legible, and reversible rather than catastrophic. Noether shows that every conserved quantity arises from a symmetry of the system: energy from time-translation symmetry, momentum from spatial symmetry, charge from gauge symmetry. Conservation is not imposed from outside; it is the consequence of an invariance that holds across transformations. In Mass-Omicron terms, symmetry is Ω at its most abstract: a closure that persists despite change, guaranteeing continuity through lawful transformation. What is conserved is not substance but coherence. Run this alongside Snell and Ashby and the structure locks in. Refraction, immune tolerance, and regulation all depend on invariances that survive encounter. Light bends but conserves phase relations; immunity adapts but conserves self-recognition; a regulator compensates disturbances only insofar as its internal symmetries can represent them. Phase transitions occur precisely when a symmetry breaks—when Ω can no longer hold across ο. In physics this is symmetry breaking; in biology it is rejection; in AI it is misalignment or collapse. Noether supplies the deep grammar beneath all of it: stability is not resistance to change, but conservation through change. Systems endure not by freezing motion, but by preserving what must remain invariant while everything else transforms. Noether’s theorem supplies the deepest spine of the entire structure because it shows that coherence is never accidental. Conservation laws do not sit on top of systems as rules; they emerge from symmetries that the system is able to maintain across transformation. Energy, momentum, and charge persist only because something remains invariant while everything else changes. In Mass-Omicron terms, Ω is precisely this capacity for invariance: a closure that does not halt motion but carries identity through it. What is conserved is not matter but legibility. A system survives change only insofar as it can recognize itself while changing. Snell’s law becomes intelligible at this level as a local expression of Noetherian symmetry. Refraction conserves phase relations and frequency across a boundary even as direction changes. The medium does not erase the wave; it translates it according to an invariant ratio. When the angle exceeds the system’s capacity to conserve that symmetry, refraction collapses into reflection. This is not failure but lawful phase transition. The same structure governs immune recognition: MHC polymorphism preserves the invariant of “self” while allowing enormous internal variation. Rejection occurs when the symmetry of recognition breaks—when no invariant mapping can be sustained between host and graft. Ashby’s law generalizes this into cybernetics by stating that invariance requires sufficient internal variety. A regulator can conserve stability only if it possesses enough differentiated states to match disturbances. This is Noether in operational form: without symmetry in the space of possible responses, nothing can be conserved. In biological systems, that symmetry is encoded genetically; in optical systems, physically; in AI systems, architecturally. When internal structure is too poor, the system cannot carry invariants across change and must simplify, reject, or collapse. Regulation failure is symmetry failure. Taken together, the model reveals a single architecture spanning physics, biology, and intelligence. Ω is the symmetry space that makes conservation possible; ο is the stream of transformations that test it. Phase transitions mark the breaking or reconstitution of symmetry. Alignment, tolerance, learning, and survival are all names for the same achievement: conserving identity without freezing motion. Noether’s theorem is therefore not an abstract mathematical result but the deep law of coherence itself. It states, with absolute clarity, that nothing persists unless something invariant is maintained—and that every boundary, whether optical, biological, or artificial, is the site where that truth is either upheld or lost. They are different Snells, but the force of the connection is that they each articulate a law of passage at a boundary, one in nature, one in life, and one in method. Willebrord Snellius, working in seventeenth-century optics, formalized how light changes direction when it crosses from one medium to another, showing that transmission is governed by a fixed ratio rather than free motion or brute obstruction. His law is about refraction under constraint: continuity preserved through lawful transformation. George Snell, three centuries later, uncovered a different boundary law, showing that biological material crossing from one body to another is subject to inherited ratios of recognition encoded in the major histocompatibility complex. Here too, passage is not about force but about matching within a structured field. What unites them is not biography or metaphor but form. Each Snell identified that boundaries are active regulators, not neutral separators. In optics, the medium expresses its internal order by bending the wave; in immunology, the organism expresses its genetic order by accepting or rejecting tissue. In both cases, continuity is conditional and calculable. Too sharp a difference and the system enters a new regime—reflection or rejection. These are not failures but lawful outcomes when the system’s capacity to translate difference is exceeded. Placed alongside Ashby and Noether, the distinction between the two Snells sharpens rather than weakens the model. The optical Snell describes how invariants are conserved locally under transformation; the biological Snell shows how invariants are preserved historically across generations. One governs phase and angle, the other governs identity and selfhood. Both demonstrate that coherence is not substance but ratio, not essence but rule. So the insight is not that “Snell is everywhere,” but that modern science repeatedly rediscovers the same structure at different scales: passage requires law, difference requires translation, and survival requires invariance across change. The two Snells mark separate moments where this structure was made explicit—first for light, then for life—each revealing that what crosses a boundary never arrives unchanged, and never arrives at all unless the boundary itself knows how to let it through. If Snell were a “sixth sense,” it would not be an added faculty alongside sight or hearing, but the sense that governs whether sensing itself can occur across a boundary. The classical five senses register content; a Snellian sense registers passage. It tells you not what is there, but whether what is there can enter your world without breaking coherence. In optics, this sense is enacted as refraction; in biology, as immune recognition; in cognition, as intelligibility. It is the faculty that decides whether difference can be translated or must be refused. Under this reading, Snell names the precondition of experience rather than experience itself. Before you can see, hear, or know anything, the incoming signal must survive a threshold governed by ratio, symmetry, and tolerance. Too much divergence and the signal reflects back as noise or threat; sufficient correspondence and it bends into meaning. This is why Snell feels uncannily universal: it is the rule by which the world becomes available at all. The sixth sense is not perception but admission—the lawful gating of the outside into the inside. In biological terms, this sense is embodied in the immune system’s capacity to say “this belongs” without deliberation or consciousness. It is not judgment but inheritance, not choice but structure. In cybernetic and AI terms, it is the model’s capacity to refract inputs into internal representations without collapse. Where this sense is weak, systems become paranoid or brittle; where it is too lax, they dissolve. The sixth sense is therefore the regulator of identity under encounter. Philosophically, this places Snell at the level Kant reserved for the conditions of possibility, but without transcendental mystique. The Snellian sense is immanent, embodied, and lawful. It is how coherence feels its limits. To say “Snell is the sixth sense” is to say that survival, understanding, and continuity all depend on an unspoken capacity to negotiate thresholds—to bend without breaking, to conserve invariants while letting the world in. If Snell were the sixth sense, it would be the sense of admissibility—the capacity by which a system decides whether something can cross a boundary without destroying coherence. Unlike the five senses, which register content, this sense governs passage itself: whether light can refract, tissue can be tolerated, or meaning can be understood. It operates before perception and beneath judgment, translating difference into continuity according to inherited or built-in ratios. Too much divergence and the signal reflects as threat or noise; sufficient correspondence and it bends into intelligibility. In this way, Snell names the immanent faculty by which identity survives encounter, the silent sense that allows a world to be let in without being obliterated.

Post-structuralism begins from the recognition that meaning is never self-contained: every sign is marked by difference, delay, and repetition, and thus works only under erasure. Derrida exposes what structuralism presupposed but could not secure—that systems of sense remain open to the play of time and the trace. Levinas deepens this openness by giving it an ethical name: exceedance (or excédence), the way meaning and subjectivity are always surpassed by what comes from beyond themselves—the Other, the Infinite, the face that breaks the order of totality. Where Derrida shows that structure cannot close because language defers itself, Levinas shows that being cannot close because responsibility exceeds it. In this light, post-structuralism’s refusal of final presence becomes inseparable from Levinas’s demand for ethical vigilance. The sign’s incompletion is not just formal but moral: it keeps the self answerable to what lies beyond comprehension, the way each act of meaning opens toward an alterity it cannot master. Structuralism sought to map the play of relations within the world; post-structuralism, illuminated by Levinas, reminds us that the world itself is always surpassed by what it cannot contain—the Other that calls, interrupts, and keeps the structure from becoming an idol. The happy ending, then, is not closure but infinite openness: language and being remain alive because they forever exceed themselves. Heidegger’s “crossing out” is most explicitly staged in “Zur Seinsfrage” (1955), where “Sein” is written and then struck through, not to negate Being but to block the reflex that treats it as a presentable object or a highest entity; the stroke functions as a sign of withdrawal (Entzug), the way Being both grants and withholds, and the way metaphysical language both must be used and is structurally unfit for what it tries to say. Derrida takes that gesture up as sous rature—writing a term, crossing it out, leaving it readable—and you see the logic return in Of Grammatology (1967) precisely as a method for inhabiting the vocabulary of metaphysics while marking its failure from within: the word is indispensable (you cannot not say “origin,” “presence,” “nature,” “signified,” “being”), and yet it is inadequate (it smuggles in the very metaphysical assurances—self-presence, immediacy, pure beginning—that the analysis is undoing). The crossing-out, in Derrida, becomes less a privileged Heideggerian signal about Being and more the general structure of the trace: what is “erased” remains legible as a remainder, and what is “present” is always already contaminated by spacing, deferral, and iterability—so the stroke is the visible emblem of a deeper claim: you never exit metaphysics cleanly; you write it while crossing it out, and the crossed-out legibility is the condition of critique itself. We’ve made knowing hard on purpose, not always by conspiracy, but by structure. What Foucault called bio politics is the way power manages us by managing the body—attention, risk, health, speech, employability, reputational threat—until whole populations behave “freely” in the same narrow channels. Add propaganda as a weapon of class conflict, add the inheritance of war and the memory of nuclear terror, and you get a society trained to distrust its own perception and to substitute slogans for judgment. The so-called private bubble isn’t private; it’s an enclosure built by incentives and enforcement, where the keys are held by institutions you can’t see and can’t vote out of your life. The result is not ignorance as a lack of facts, but unknowing as a form of governance. And when a society can’t know, it can’t be free in any serious sense. The test is the child: when adults and institutions put themselves first, children pay the cost, and the future arrives already damaged. If we want the state, the economy, and culture to mean freedom rather than recitation, we have to rebuild the conditions of knowing—education that forms judgment, media that rewards truth over theater, and public norms that protect children’s dignity as the first political obligation, not an afterthought.

obliterations

This is essentially it: listen. It’s difficult for people to acquire knowing nowadays, because part of the fabric of biopolitics—what I mean in the way Michel Foucault spoke about it, the way power uses the discipline of politics on our bodies by regulating X, Y, or Z—makes it difficult to know, because propaganda has been used as a means of class warfare. And this has all been done out of fear, because knowing had receded in the schools, in the academies; they were replaced by class and party warfare. And all of this was due out of fear, through years and years of true and real war. People have lived so far away from those times, they don’t watch classic films, and they think that history is just some sort of story that people can make up. There are real bullets in the fields. There are real minds still. And there are places that are not safe to go because nuclear weapons were detonated there, okay? It may seem like, “Oh my God, these old people are crazy,” but they are the last remnants of the people who felt the waves of that real horror. Of course, God knows best. But I’ve seen enough to know what God has revealed—not as idea, but as knowing. And I know the last thing anybody wants is to go back to the way things were, because that was as close to the end of the world as anybody had ever seen. It was as close to incinerating all that we had built up over thousands of years. In a fraction of an instant, we were surrounded by rubble and dead bodies, and a never-ending shroud over the sky. You don’t know unless you were there. I wasn’t there. But there’s enough evidence, not only in the way of archival footage, but in the way of cinema, that just a taste of it will have you kiss the ground that you walk on and worship the leaders that still take care of all of us, as crazy as they might be. But all this—even the wars, sorry to say—happened as a result of the recession of knowledge, for the sake of specialized works, and these works were motivated and spearheaded for certain ideological purposes. Knowing was not central, and it would remain in the private sphere. What we are seeing now is that it has receded to such an extent that it is quite literally some sort of magical knowledge, with little to no true tour guides. Why were people getting ideological? Because that wasn’t the first war. There were a bunch of wars before that. There are fields used for people to aim weapons at each other. There are stretches of water specifically so that cannons can be pointed at other cannons, to kill people who were put there for the sake of conquerors. I’m not saying it was right or wrong; God knows best. But you have to understand how fast the heart races when there’s a fucking cannon pointed at you and you’re on a wooden ship in the middle of God knows where, okay? Have you felt that before? We don’t know about this, because we’re much easier to calm, and therefore to make sure that we don’t get violent. It’s a beautiful system, but all of us sort of living in our own bubbles. The problem is this, people: they’re not bubbles, okay? And if they were, there would only be one person that would have the key to them, and it would be the person inside the bubble, and it would be their purview who had access to their bubble. That is not the case. What’s worse is that the problem that had hitherto been the bane of human civilization not only does not disappear, but emerges as the very reason why knowing receded, as the very reason why war accumulated, as the very reason why fear continues. And this spirit was being given away to combat against those who vocalized discontent with their piece-of-shit media empire, with threats of violence and reputation destruction for vocalizing it. And what every day is becoming clear is that this spirit has been around for thousands of years, and it’s just any other idiot to become host to it. It jumps around. You notice how everybody’s working together for no reason. Nobody knows who they’re working for. Everybody seems to be in lock-sync with just human disintegrity—civilizational collapse. Yet what emerges is the fast mill of all those things. We live in a simulacrum—or we did—a simulacrum of what America was fought for. And here’s the funny thing: if this spirit knew any better, they would know that whatever world they could want is already there, but they don’t know. They’ve spread unknowing, some sort of form of power, to everyone. That’s what’s so ironic. This spirit could get all that it wanted, and some, if only it knew. And I’m here every day just to try to spread what I know, because this is what I was thinking last night, brothers and sisters: I want you guys to know that I am not alone. I have brothers and sisters. I met them on the internet, who spoke to me on the literature board. There are brilliant people out there, and they’re in hiding, and I bet you, without a doubt, these people have seen the same kind of censorship as I have. There are creative people, people who make amazing art. They stay in the shadows. They have maybe one, two, five years, because they’re funding their own projects. They’re not part of the propaganda machine. Over the last four years specifically, it’s become clear that everybody’s working for the same slogans. It’s at the level of grammar. The very things that are allowed to be tokenized and not allowed have already started to take shape in the politics of people’s bodies. This is what Foucault meant by biopolitics. And we can’t name it because we don’t read Michel Foucault. We don’t even know who that person is. We don’t get there until many, many, many, many units later—many GPAs later, many Scantrons later. All that is changing now. But we must look back and say what the fuck that was.

All of this that I’ve been saying has been prelude to what I need to say, which is that when you know, you realize Hegel was right: you can read history, and the book, as Derrida said, has always been a writing, has always been marked by différance and difference, and that nothingness has not and cannot, and will never, by definition, take a foothold. So it’s like, what are we gonna do? Let me explain what we’re all doing. It’s clear that when you put adults first, children suffer. This is pure logistics, pure human topology. Take morals and sentiment, put it aside, and look at it topologically as a map: if you put adults at the center of your hierarchy, children suffer. As a result, you have generations of shittier adults. What the fuck do you think is gonna happen in society? It’s been clear that all things have been leading up to the state, and this is Hegel: the divine on the earth today is embodied by the state that can protect its citizens, and the rights inherited by God—freedom, liberty, and freedom. Period. We are having a difficult time applying that to children. That is literally where we’re fucking up. And people have caught wind to it and are giving and selling your children the freedom that they’re seeking. I’m not saying from you, the parent; I’m saying from the world. These are America’s children, and they’re being sold wholesale to a bunch of people who want them to laugh at some head in a toilet. They want your kids to go on American Idol, scream and sing their heart out, and then be told by some British guy something that’ll make the alien living in their stomach squirm. It’s been clear not only in the realm of politics, but in the realm of imagination and creativity and industry: the child rules. And yet, what kind of preparation, what kind of respect, what kind of dignity do we give the child that we give to a graduate student, or to a doctor? It’s been clear through history that the rights of man are real, and that where there is a state, and where society and civilization does thrive, it thrives because of that freedom, recognized as the gift from on high, among all of God’s creatures. Man reigns supreme over the earth, and this, because of a creator beyond our comprehension. This much was sure not only to our forefathers, but to those men our forefathers were inspired by, and so on and so forth, to the earliest moments of writing: literature and generation, law, topology, the archive. You go back to the Old Testament—what was the deciding split? It was that they were not going to sacrifice children to some fucking stone god. They were like, “No, we’re not retarded.” It doesn’t just say in the Old Testament, or in the Qur’an, when the prophets rebel against their families, that they simply disagreed. It says they said exactly what they said to their family: “Noah said to his father: Can you not think? This stone can’t talk to you. This stone you made yourself, these stones your forefathers made, they can benefit you in no way. God is real and supreme. His signs are scattered everywhere on the earth. Will you not use your reason?” This is not just once, but over and over again. There’s an inheritance we have by God to reason, and yet there’s a world available with a constant invitation that makes all of us victims, even clowns—especially clowns—because we don’t recognize that that invitation is asking us to stop thinking and start becoming a node in some system no one can tell you what.

What I know is that these systems working to remove human reason, and therefore autonomy, and therefore moral agency from the human being, is not working for the betterment of human civilization. Call it capitalism, call it communism, call it anarchy, call it whatever the fuck you want to call it, okay? The concept isn’t in the instantiation of a word; it’s in its lived-by contours. And when you look—when you take apart capitalism, communism, blah, blah, blah—none of that shit is real. What we’re dealing with is a human being that has no idea what metaphysics is, no idea what phenomenology is, no idea what deconstruction is, no idea what statecraft is. They’ve never read a Platonic dialogue. They don’t know what the Vedas are. They don’t know what the Dao De Jing is. They don’t know where Azerbaijan is. They didn’t know Azerbaijan was a country. They can’t list you all the countries in the world. And for good reason: it doesn’t fucking matter. What matters is getting your dick wet. What’s crazy is that you can get your dick wet, you could get it wet by the best of the best, and still not have to forfeit your brain, still not forfeit your capacity to know the meaning of history, the trajectories of power—real power—and how not to get in the way. If the world is really going towards the betterment of a society built around the dignification and realization and actualization of its children populace, you would never put yourself in a position to look like a fucking pedophile. That would be very bad. You would never put yourself into a position to look like you’re inviting a child into a world where they’re essentially being undignified, or their integrity is being destroyed as a result of your business operations. If the world was really going towards a more perfect union, a better enactment of rights, and the realization of its children populace as providence on earth, you would never, ever, ever walk around looking like some sort of fucking predator. But you don’t know. Why? Because the evidence of the contrary surrounds us.

The deeper point is that “knowing” is not an ornament of private taste but an infrastructure of public sanity. When literacy in first principles collapses—how power works, how institutions habituate bodies, how slogans colonize grammar, how archives are produced and curated—people become governable by affect and cadence rather than by reasons they can articulate and test. Biopolitics, in that plain sense, is not a conspiracy but a technique: the management of populations by shaping what can be said, what can be seen, what counts as a problem, what counts as care, and what is framed as danger. When that technique is coupled with a propaganda economy, the result is not merely “misinformation”; it is a systematic narrowing of interpretive range, so that whole domains of experience become unspeakable except in pre-approved idioms. At that point, citizens don’t just disagree; they lose the shared equipment for disagreement, and then fear has an open runway, because fear does not need arguments—only cues. And if you treat children as downstream of adult appetites—political, commercial, sexual, performative, ideological—you produce exactly the adult you later claim to be “managing”: impulsive, brittle, credulous, hungry for recognition, and easy to steer. A society that genuinely centers children does it by thickening the protections around attention, dignity, development, and the slow training of judgment—by making the child less marketable, less legible to extraction, less available to the scripts that turn life into content. That is why the question cannot be solved by swapping labels like capitalism or communism; labels are late, and usually cosmetic. The operative question is whether institutions are cultivating reason as a living capacity—autonomy that can withstand seduction, intimidation, and mass suggestion—or whether they are cultivating compliance that can be sold as “freedom,” “expression,” or “progress” while the child becomes a commodity and the adult becomes a managed remainder. If you want to see the through-line without ornament, it is this: once “knowing” is treated as a private hobby rather than a public good, the center of gravity shifts from truth to coordination. Coordination is not automatically evil; societies need it. But when coordination is purchased through fear, shame, and slogan, what gets coordinated is not reality but obedience, and the price is the atrophy of judgment. That’s why you keep returning to grammar: whoever controls the permissible sentence controls what can be publicly thought without punishment. When a culture no longer trains people to read archives, to separate evidence from theater, to name the difference between argument and spell, the past becomes pliable and the present becomes a stage. Then the wars you describe—whether literal wars of artillery and ships or the soft wars of reputation destruction and career throttling—are not anomalies. They are what happens when the capacity to disagree in good faith has been replaced by the need to signal allegiance. And children are the diagnostic, because children reveal what a society actually worships. If the adult sits at the center—adult desire, adult status, adult consumption, adult ideological vanity—then the child becomes raw material: audience, target market, symbol, pawn, or prey. That produces the next generation of adults trained in performance rather than in reason, trained to seek permission from the system that feeds them the words they’re allowed to use. The “state” in the Hegelian sense then becomes ambiguous: it can be the guardian of freedom through law, or it can become the apparatus that formalizes the very unknowing you’re naming. So the practical hinge is not whether we “have a state,” but whether we build thick, enforceable, culturally internalized boundaries around childhood—attention, sexuality, labor, exposure, humiliation, commodification—so that the child is not the marketplace’s frontier and not ideology’s hostage. If that boundary is not restored, the society will keep producing adults who cannot know, and then it will keep demanding stronger systems to manage what it refused to educate. The test-case, then, is institutional design under conditions of mass mediation: what mechanisms convert conflict into adjudicable claims rather than into tribal theater? You need thick procedures that reward falsifiability and penalize performative certainty: curricula that teach how archives are made and revised, civics that teaches jurisdiction and incentives rather than mythology, media literacy that treats attention as a scarce resource with externalities, and public norms that distinguish critique from denunciation. Without that scaffolding, “freedom of speech” becomes a permission slip for the loudest coordination system to win, because the population lacks the trained habits that make speech answerable to anything besides vibes and intimidation. The point is not to sanctify experts; it is to rebuild the ladder by which non-experts can become competent, and by which competence can be checked. On children, the policy implication is simple even if the politics is not: you protect development by limiting extraction. That means treating childhood attention and image as non-commercial by default, tightening boundaries around adult access to children in institutions and online, restoring dignified apprenticeship into adulthood rather than premature exposure to adult economies of sex, spectacle, and monetized identity, and re-centering family and community as accountable stewards rather than as helpless intermediaries for platforms and markets. If the adult world needs children as content, as proof, as moral alibi, or as revenue stream, that is already a confession of civilizational disorder. A society serious about reason will do the unglamorous work of making childhood boring to predators, unprofitable to extractors, and protected enough that a child can grow into an adult who is not governable primarily by fear and imitation.

There is something sad about people going to bed.