Goodhart's Law states that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

Goodhart's law applied to political power gives us a corollary: Any useful concept eventually becomes a cudgel for authority.

Concepts are tools and tools give us power.

Power structures outside of a regime are threats and must be either crushed or assimilated.

It's a waste to throw away a good tool, so regimes co-opt them if they can.

Let's look at some examples.

Science: Scientific inquiry is a very powerful force. It does not have an exclusive claim to knowledge, but its fruits are indisputably powerful, particularly in their technological applications.

Authority naturally wants to claim science as its own.

We see numerous examples of naked regime narrative presented as "Science" whether in support of abortion, protests, preferential racial vaccination...The list goes on.

Political power uses "Scientific" authority as a shield for its own ends.

These may be nonscientific moral judgments, scientifically disputable claims, or even outright lies.

It doesn't matter because people inevitably conflate *signifiers* (the word "Science", the right degrees, lab coats) with *the signified* (authority of the Scientific Method)

None of this is to say that the actual process of science isn't valuable.

Indeed, it is only because it *is* valuable that its language and symbols are hijacked to bolster meretricious claims elsewhere.

Credibility, once minted, can purchase nearly anything.

Religion: What is a religion?

Well we all know what a religion is. It's an item on a big list of religions.

You know, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Judaism.

Maybe you've even heard of Shintoism if you're a real globalist.

This is a useful list because it means that when we take people to court for Establishment Clause violations, the judges can look at the Big List Of Religions and ask whether the government is institutionalizing any of them with taxpayer money.

Sure, government-sponsored ecstatic confession of the invisible force called white supremacy that created our world and defines our lives may *look* a bit like prayer...

But hey, it's not on the Big List Of Religions. Maybe we can even base Supreme Court decisions off of it!

Media reliability: It is genuinely useful to know whether you can trust a given source of information - not all sources are equally reliable. https://twitter.com/kwamurai/status/1281248066453020676?s=20

It's possible to evaluate this for yourself - and you should.

If you do, you'll find that on certain topics - weather reporting, for instance - you can trust what most "reliable sources" have to say.

But this credit is used to purchase your trust in pure narrative elsewhere.

Compare how many people hear reports about alleged hate crimes to reports of when they're revealed as hoaxes.

An analysis of media reliability on hate-crime reporting might find that @MrAndyNgo is a more credible source than NYT.

But we all know which one is "Reliable"

Racism:

You get the idea at this point.

Definitions can be "Top-down" or "Bottom-up"

"Top-down" definitions are lists of meaning promulgated by and for authority

"Bottom-up" definitions are the intuited rules that make a category valuable/authoritative in the first place

Taking the #clearpill means, among other things, journeying out of the Conceptual Prison of Language and intuiting things for what they are.

Few manage this. Those who don't, we call "NPCs"

On some level, we're all NPCs.

Every human needs concepts to act in the world. And every society - which is human action at scale - needs useful fictions to cohere and thrive.

The path to power lies through memes. Through owning, quite literally, the memes of production.