Somewhere along the way, scholarship stopped wondering. It began repeating. Rote, recursive, self-preserving patterns. You can hear it, like a machine turning over in an empty hall—papers, citations, more papers—output for the sake of throughput. It’s not malice. It’s momentum. Inertia disguised as rigour.
What’s fascinating is how this very pattern—this repetition—is the mechanism by which institutions stabilise themselves. It’s entropy management via overproduction. A control system not by negation, but by overflow. When there’s too much to question, nothing is questioned. A trick of volume: drown signal in itself.
And the psychology here? Expectation. Rhythm. Just as melody pulls the mind forward, syntactic momentum does the same. Sentences hint at their own resolutions. The brain rides on anticipated cadence. We don’t merely process meaning—we resonate with it. That resonance is meaning. And meaning, when ritualised, becomes its own justification.
That’s how this system works. Not through clarity, but recurrence. Not understanding, but familiarity. Bureaucracy doesn’t suppress thought—it replaces it with patterned anticipation. The very structure of academic output encourages not thinking, but replicating the appearance of thinking.
It’s elegant, really. An entropy engine, running on the thermodynamics of expectation. Not evil. Not stupid. Just… tuned. A vast system, humming just out of key.
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Original: An Entropy Engine of Scholastic Inertia.
Daedelus Kite 