Obscene Consequences

A Third Thought on moral theatre, designed Fuckwittery, and what happens when someone asks the wrong question

A friend of mine — I will call him Icarus — came to me with a problem.

He had read Paragentism. He broadly agreed with it. But he had a question that would not leave him alone, and he wanted to argue it out before it consumed him.

"You say Fuckwittery is waste heat," he said. "Nobody designs it. Nobody wants it. Systems produce it the way engines produce friction. Entropy. Institutional decay. The ratchet turns and everyone suffers."

That is the position. I confirmed it.

"What if you're wrong?"

The Counterfactual

Icarus had been reading Slavoj Žižek. Specifically, Žižek's concept of the obscene supplement — the idea that every formal system of rules has an informal underside that contradicts the stated rules, and that this underside is not a failure of the system. It is the system.

"Your book treats Fuckwittery like weather," Icarus said. "It happens. Nobody chose it. You navigate it. But Žižek says the gap between what the rules say and what actually happens isn't an accident. Somebody needs that gap."

I asked him to be specific.

"Compliance," he said. "Take any compliance regime — financial regulation, workplace safety, anti-discrimination, data privacy. The rules are complex. The cost of compliance is high. The burden falls on everyone inside the system. Everyone fills in the forms. Everyone attends the training. Everyone performs the ritual."

"And?"

"And the people who designed the regime don't comply with it. They skip the queue. They avoid the scrutiny. They fly private with undeclared dogs. They drink champagne during rationing. They just don't do it. And nothing happens. Until it becomes public. Until the theatre can no longer hold."

Two Species

I pushed back.

Not every broken system was broken on purpose. I have spent decades inside organisations watching Fuckwittery emerge from genuine complexity, genuine incompetence, genuine institutional inertia. Nobody sat in a room and decided that HR would measure inputs instead of outputs. The entropy thesis is real. I have lived it.

Icarus was not impressed.

"I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying you are incomplete. Entropic Fuckwittery is real — systems struggling with complexity they cannot handle. But designed Fuckwittery also exists — systems where complexity is maintained because someone benefits from the gap. And the reason nobody can fix it is that you cannot tell them apart."

That stopped me.

"The designed version disguises itself as the entropic version. Every time someone points at a compliance burden and says 'this is unnecessary,' the response is always the same. We take this very seriously. The system is imperfect. We are working on it. That language covers both the genuine failures and the engineered ones. Reform never lands because reformers attack the entropy while the design migrates to whatever new system gets built."

We take this very seriously — I had heard that phrase a thousand times. He was right that it was a signature. A verbal marker that serious-sounding concern was being deployed to prevent serious structural change.

The Confession

"I want you to understand something," Icarus said. "I am not a crusader. I am not trying to tear the system down. I am trying to get in."

He had spent decades building capability, credentials, the kind of analytical depth that should — if the meritocratic theatre were real — have granted him access to the rooms where decisions are made. It had not.

"I look at the data," he said. "In Australia, eighteen percent of female directors hold forty-three percent of all female-occupied board seats. Thirty percent of top board seats are held by interlocked directors. A quarter of directors with multiple seats come from the same four firms. That is not a meritocracy. That is a club performing meritocracy."

The numbers are public. The pattern is visible. The moral theatre — diversity reports, governance frameworks, talent pipelines — exists to make the club look like an open competition.

I asked him what the real selection criteria were.

"Leverage," he said. "Not talent. Not credentials. Not even results. The elites do not comply with their own systems because the system needs them more than they need the system. Churchill got champagne because England needed Churchill more than Churchill needed the ration book. That is not corruption. That is the structural logic of asymmetric dependency. And the only response that does not degrade your agency is to build the same asymmetry in your own favour."

The Fear

"You cannot use my name," he said.

"Because naming this has consequences. The system does not need to be coordinated to punish people who make the theatre visible. It has an immune response. You call out the compliance paradox publicly and you become difficult. You become a risk — not because you are wrong, but because you are inconvenient. The system does not argue with you. It simply stops inviting you."

He was describing Turchin's elite overproduction problem from the inside. Too many capable people competing for too few positions at the top. The positions allocated through networks that perform openness while practising closure. And the blocked aspirants face a specific trap: they can see the mechanism clearly, but naming it publicly disqualifies them from the game they are trying to win.

I pointed out the irony. His fear of reprisal was itself the strongest evidence for his argument. A person who cannot safely say true things about the system he operates within, precisely because saying true things threatens the theatre that holds the system together.

He did not find this amusing.

"Write it," he said. "Use a different name. Let the piece prove its own argument."

The Synthesis

My original position — Fuckwittery as entropy — explains most of what most people encounter most of the time. The compliance officer drowning in process. The teacher buried in reporting. The small business owner navigating regulation designed for corporations. The ratchet turns. Nobody is turning it on purpose. This remains true and I am not abandoning it.

But both species exist simultaneously, and this coexistence is what makes the system so resistant to reform. You can never point at a specific instance and say with certainty whether it is entropic or designed, because the designed version borrows the language of the entropic version. We take this very seriously. That sentence covers both species with identical words and identical tone.

Reformers attack the entropy. They simplify forms. They streamline processes. They reduce burdens. And the designed Fuckwittery migrates to the new system, because the people who benefit from selective non-compliance also influence how reforms get implemented.

The Agency Question

You have three responses available.

The first is outrage. Name the theatre. Demand change. Campaign for transparency. This is moral theatre of your own — it performs resistance without building leverage. Žižek's entire point is that awareness does not destabilise the system. Cynical distance is the system's preferred mode of participation.

The second is cynicism. Know the game is rigged. Comply anyway. Extract what you can. This feels sophisticated and is actually surrender. You have traded the capacity to act on what you know for the comfort of continued participation. That is QIII — sacrificing agency in exchange for stability.

The third is leverage. Treat your understanding of the obscene supplement as strategic information. Stop wasting agency on exposure — everyone already knows. Stop wasting agency on outrage — it will not make the world fair. Instead, build asymmetric dependency. Make yourself costly to exclude. Reach the point where the system accommodates you the way it accommodates the people at the top — not because you have earned it morally, but because you have made it structurally expensive to leave you out.

This is not idealistic. It is not even comfortable. It is the only response that does not degrade your agency.

The Hard Part

I sent the first draft to Icarus.

He read it and said one thing that I will include because it was honest in a way that the rest of this analysis does not quite reach.

"The thing that grates is not that elites exist. It is that I am not one of them. And I know that feeling is me expecting the world to be fair. I know it is not fair. But knowing that does not make it stop grating."

He paused.

"So I catch myself. The grating is information about my expectations, not information about the world. And the only response that the framework permits — the only one that does not make me smaller — is to act. Get leverage. Get in the room. And then, maybe, make the moral theatre a little harder for the next person to swallow."

I asked if that last part was idealism.

"Probably," he said. "But it is better than the alternative."

Icarus is a composite. He asked me not to use his real name. That request, and the reasons for it, are the best evidence I can offer that everything in this piece is true.

He is still building leverage.