It is a mistake to imagine that cruelty or deception arise from the rare brilliance of tyrants or the careful engineering of conspirators. The truth is flatter, colder: given time, scale, and opportunity, suffering emerges almost as a default outcome, an entropic drift in human systems. Power does not require genius to become exploitative; it requires only neglect, only the ordinary unfolding of choices deferred, truths displaced, and responsibilities abandoned. Wickedness, far from being extraordinary, is statistical: it is what happens when the ensemble of human action is left to its metastable equilibrium, forever tending toward balance but never reaching it, continually producing suffering as a byproduct of its own inertia.
Statistics may not lie, but statisticians certainly do, and the ontologies by which we parse the world bend truth in ways that ensure their own reproduction. This is not an exception but a property of language itself, where representation deceives in the very act of naming. Tyranny thrives in that gap: doing wrong under its rule is simpler than doing right, because the field is tilted by the logic of entropy, by the statistical favoring of shortcuts and silence. Lies become not anomalies but the connective tissue of order sustained by power, the very medium in which it breathes. Physics, mathematics, statistics—none escape the inevitability that suffering and wickedness rise, not as aberrations, but as logical outcomes of systems left to their own devices.
Daedelus Kite 