Racism, misogyny, and other forms of exclusion recur not because they are compelling, justified, or desirable, but because large-scale social systems are biased toward generating them, or things like them, under stress. Calling this structural does not mean denying choice. People do make choices, good, bad, and ugly, and they live with the consequences of those choices personally, socially, and institutionally. But the menu of available choices is not neutral. It is biased toward patterns that reproduce themselves efficiently. Under conditions of scale and strain, adaptation favours continuation over coherence, justice, or truth. Certain configurations become probable not because of what they mean, but because of how well they persist. The low-energy path is often the one that compresses uncertainty into simple distinctions, reducing local cognitive load even as it increases long-run damage.
That bias operates through communication itself. Ideas that recombine easily with other ideas spread. Narratives that are modular, emotionally charged, and quickly legible propagate faster than those that require patience, context, or self-implication. Exclusion functions as a volatile compression: it converts diffuse anxiety into a target, a role, a story. That volatility then reproduces itself by generating both agreement and opposition. Support and resistance both thicken the same signal. For and against collapse into a single distributional bulk, increasing circulation rather than cancelling it. What matters structurally is not whether an idea is endorsed or rejected, but whether it keeps moving. This is why patterns of othering are not confined to one group or one prejudice. They recur wherever isolation, mockery, vilification, or scapegoating can be made to circulate as a stable source of attention and narrative density.
The deeper dynamic is relational. Those who exclude, vilify, or mock are not simply elevating themselves. They become dependent on what they oppose. Identity coheres around the maintained distance from an object that must remain present, unresolved, and threatening. If the object were removed, another would be found, because the relation itself is doing the work. The justificatory layer arrives later. Ideologies, myths, and doctrines do not originate the behaviour so much as stabilise it after the fact, mistaking repetition for necessity and persistence for proof. Choice enters downstream, and responsibility remains, but it is exercised within a field already shaped by these dynamics. Moral obligation is therefore real, yet difficult, because sustaining fairness, care, and justice requires effort and self-disruption, while harm propagates with far less friction. Understanding this does not excuse the damage. It explains why exclusion persists even when its futility is obvious, and why interrupting it requires changing the conditions that keep reproduction easier than understanding.
Daedelus Kite 