Duplicity

What is striking is not simply how difficult it is for people with genuine insight, intellectual range, and openness to rise through status hierarchies, but that those hierarchies stabilise themselves by filtering out precisely the signals that would correct them. This is not accidental. Systems that persist must dampen information that threatens coherence, even when that information is true. Novelty is therefore permitted only when it reinforces the existing shape of power. Anything else is treated as noise.

Once this pattern is noticed, it becomes hard to unsee. When institutions act in ways that cause harm, behaviour converges rapidly toward minimising local cost rather than global consequence. People follow instructions, replicate precedent, and preserve workflow because this is the lowest-energy route through the system. Responsibility does not disappear; it phase-shifts. It moves upward, sideways, or into procedure, where it becomes statistically invisible. Harm accumulates elsewhere, displaced onto those least able to absorb it.

The revealing moment comes after the fact. When damage is undeniable, authority does not resolve into accountability. It fragments. Delay replaces decision. Language softens. Processes multiply. What were once choices become “issues,” “complexities,” or “lessons learned.” This is not mainly about moral failure. It is about structural incompetence: systems that cannot acknowledge error without threatening their own continuity.

A system capable of integrity would allow those with power to say, without hedging, this was wrong, I authorised it, and here is how the harm will be repaired. When that statement cannot be made, endlessly deferred, or dissolved into process, the signal is clear. The hierarchy is optimised for self-preservation, not stewardship. What appears as duplicity is not an exception. It is the equilibrium state.

Read this not as accusation, but as pattern recognition. Once the pattern is seen, it propagates on its own.