Complicity Recognition

Observation · institutions · personal_truth · visibility: publishable

Recognizing yourself in the institution you critique. Sitting with the Harley volumes, thinking about information control and spatial epistemology, and realizing: ‘Wait, I would absolutely thrive in that system. I understand the appeal. I might even be good at it.’ The institutional bind: to critique them you must engage them; to engage them you must play by their rules; playing by their rules means you’re already inside the system. The resolution: become the Jesuit scientist who knows it’s about information control but does the astronomy anyway — because someone should know about the stars. ‘The question isn’t how to avoid the bind. It’s what you do inside it.‘

Connections

source: Catholic church’s control over historical records (2026-02-12) · extraction: hand (schema v3.1)