Superficial Expertise

I have spent a long time studying the language of communication: signalling, framing, coupling, recursion, delay. The way meaning moves, mutates, collapses, and reconstitutes itself inside complex systems. That work remains endlessly compelling. What was deeply disappointing was my brief entanglement with the university. Not simply because of what I myself was going through at the time, though that mattered, but because of the closed, defensive, status-obsessed mentality that dominates education institutions at their highest levels. Managers. Gatekeepers. Compliant sycophants. Career tacticians. People structurally incentivised to pursue personal gain over collective insight. This is often explained away as capitalism, as though that settles the matter. It does not. When too few benefit too much, the entire system becomes brittle. Extreme inequality is not merely unjust. It is mechanically fragile. We can watch this fragility unfolding in real time in the United States. And while it might appear that universities operate in a different domain, they do not. Context changes. Incentives do not.

These are not moral failures. They are structural pathologies. They arise wherever hierarchical concentration outruns distributed intelligence, wherever power accumulates faster than accountability, wherever control systems mistake stability for truth. At that level, institutional domain becomes irrelevant. Politics, universities, media, corporations, bureaucracies all obey the same deep logic. Complex systems collapse when internal feedback becomes dominated by self-preservation rather than adaptive truth-seeking. This is not ideological. It is thermodynamic, informational, cybernetic. And beneath even this lies a deeper asymmetry that technocratically overreaching hierarchies cannot acknowledge without invalidating themselves: meaning precedes structure because relation precedes form. Orientation comes before architecture. Coupling before control. Structure is the residue of repeated interpretation, not its origin. What we experience as material order is frozen dialogue, history compressed into geometry. When systems forget this, they mistake their own scaffolding for reality. At that point, hierarchy detaches from the living field that produced it, and collapse becomes not a moral reckoning but a mechanical inevitability.