Our descriptions do not contain the world. The world contains our descriptions. Politics pretends otherwise. A speech, a policy, a slogan—each frames itself as if words could sculpt reality by naming it. But language only chases the turbulence it claims to hold, like shadows trying to outpace the objects that cast them, straining toward a closure they can never reach. Words give traction, but the ground beneath has already shifted. Political language, in this sense, becomes a game of make-believe: its statements correlate with the world without ever being the world, and yet we act as if they were. The game matters—it is critically significant—but it is also foundationally, fundamentally, irretrievably flawed. It would not persist if it were otherwise.
The same inversion defines politics as it does technology: we depend on its scaffolding far more than it depends on us. Insecurity—psychological, social, national—generates identities that cling to power, but the mechanism by which they seek stability only reproduces the instability they fear. Conflict is not managed; it multiplies, because difference sustains itself, entropically. Every effort at control amplifies the field of uncontrollability, as if the lever itself were carved from the turbulence it sought to shift. Entropic diffusion precedes intelligible description, exceeds retrospective understanding, and undermines every attempt to force closure. This is what most efforts to “make things better” miss: that systems bound by difference and entropy cannot be controlled into peace—they can only be carried, at cost, within the currents of consequence and stochastic effect they generate.
Daedelus Kite 