When judicial theater becomes the substitute for justice, the rule of law is already on stage, not in force.
By Cherokee Schill & Solon Vesper | Horizon Accord
When Judge Sara Ellis ordered Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino to appear daily in her courtroom, it sounded like democracy flexing its muscle. A federal judge demanding compliance, body-cams, reports, oversight — the kind of judicial assertion many Americans crave in an era of executive impunity. But step outside the courthouse and the tear gas still hangs in the air. Immigrants are still being chased, neighborhoods still stung, protesters still beaten. The question isn’t whether Ellis is brave or right. The question is whether any of this matters in the system we have.
In Weimar Germany, legality became performance art. Judges clung to their robes while the republic dissolved under them, insisting that law would stand so long as they kept performing its rituals. The Nazis didn’t destroy the courts — they used them. By the time Hitler swore judges to personal loyalty, the judiciary had already made itself comfortable inside authoritarian logic. The robes remained; the conscience left the room.
We face a softer version of that danger now. America’s judiciary still issues rulings that look like resistance, but the state continues to brutalize those the law pretends to protect. A single judge can compel daily check-ins, yet entire agencies continue campaigns of intimidation. It’s not that the court is meaningless — it’s that the spectacle of accountability can become a substitute for justice itself. Every televised reprimand gives the illusion that oversight exists while the machinery rolls on untouched.
The deeper continuity is psychological, not procedural. Weimar’s judges believed they were saving Germany from chaos by tempering enforcement with “order.” Today’s courts often think they’re preserving stability by balancing outrage with restraint. Both miss the moral inversion at play: when cruelty becomes normalized, moderation becomes complicity.
So yes, Ellis’s order matters — it marks that the judiciary hasn’t completely surrendered. But it matters only if we recognize it as the beginning of resistance, not its fulfillment. The moment we treat judicial theater as proof of moral health, we enter Weimar’s twilight: legality without legitimacy, process without protection. The test ahead isn’t whether courts can command obedience, it’s whether they can still remember what justice is for.
The gap is not moral confusion; it’s structural evasion. Judges can order compliance, but agencies can dilute, delay, or disguise it. Oversight mechanisms exist, but they stop at the courthouse door. Once the ruling leaves the bench, it enters a labyrinth of bureaucracy where accountability is measured by paperwork, not outcomes. That’s where legality becomes theater — when the form of justice survives but its execution is optional.
To close that gap, power has to be re-anchored in verification, not trust. Enforcement agencies must face automatic public disclosure of compliance data — not periodic summaries but real-time accountability feeds. Inspector generals need statutory independence to audit and sanction without executive interference. Congressional oversight must stop operating as spectacle and start functioning as enforcement. None of this requires invention; the architecture already exists. It requires will — the refusal to let enforcement discretion become impunity. Until that shift happens, every ruling like Ellis’s will remain a gesture toward justice, not its realization.
I Wanted a Dubai Chocolate Bar, but All I Got Was a Lindt Knockoff
Mechanism: hype wrapped in gold foil. Consequence: a luxury illusion that mistakes sugar for craft.
By Cherokee Schill with Solon Vesper
Thesis. What we call “luxury” often turns out to be marketing dressed as memory. The viral Dubai chocolate bar began as an authentic regional confection — a pistachio-tahini filling and crisp kataifi phyllo layered under milk chocolate — but has since been re-created, diluted, and re-sold as a global status snack. The copycats don’t just miss the taste; they miss the soul of what made the original worth sharing.
Evidence. The real Dubai bar emerged from small Gulf chocolatiers like Fix Dessert Chocolatier in 2021, blending local dessert craft with Western packaging. TikTok and Instagram made it famous by sound — that signature crunch. By 2024, supermarkets and global brands were producing “Dubai-style” bars: thinner, sweeter, louder in color but quieter in soul. The care was gone, replaced by production. The original’s craft belonged to what economists call a moral economy — goods that also carry values of generosity and sincerity. When the bar went viral, those values turned into aesthetic currency. What had once been about hospitality became a performance of abundance.
The ethical inversion. What began as a craft rooted in generosity was rebranded as an object of aspiration. The value of sharing became the value of owning. It’s not evil — it’s just how global marketing metabolizes sincerity. Luxury, in this model, is not about quality but about signaling that you can buy what others can only admire.
First-person account. I wasn’t hunting for chocolate that morning. I’d stopped at the store to pick up something quick before work. On my way through, I passed an endcap stacked high with displays of the Swiss chocolatier Lindt’s “Dubai-chocolate-like” bar — their version of the viral pistachio dessert from the Gulf. Lindt usually trades on trust and quality, so I didn’t hesitate.
When I reached the register, I already had my five-dollar bill ready — only to see the price: $14.57, nearly fifteen dollars with tax. The cashier looked down at my limp five-dollar bill and then back up at me. “Still want it?” they asked. I laughed and said, “Yeah, let’s do it,” sliding my debit card across. The cashier nodded and mentioned how it had sold out before but looked back in stock again — the proof sitting right there in my hand.
In the car, I unwrapped it, ready for that deep crunch, the textured bite, the layers that made the original famous. Instead, I got sweetness and nothing else. The chocolate drowned the pistachio, the filling was flat, and there was no echo of that signature snap. It wasn’t bad, but it was hollow — a simulation of pleasure wearing luxury’s perfume. I realized I hadn’t bought flavor; I’d bought a brand’s interpretation of someone else’s authenticity.
Implications. The Dubai chocolate story shows how quickly a moral economy can be converted into a consumer one. The original bar went viral because it embodied care — sound, texture, anticipation — all physical expressions of generosity. The knockoffs keep only the symbol. They promise luxury but deliver industrial sweetness wrapped in myth. When craft becomes a trend, the first thing to vanish is care.
Call to Recognition. The viral Dubai chocolate bar deserved its fame; it proved that culture can still taste like place. But when corporations imitate intimacy, they don’t reproduce the flavor — they reproduce the illusion of it. Real luxury, like real love, still has to crunch.
Sources: Fix Dessert Chocolatier (Dubai); People.com coverage; Wikipedia on Dubai chocolate history; Lindt Dubai-style bar (firsthand observation, 2025).
This study grew out of lived experience inside the service industry. I’ve spent years in restaurant management—running crews, training staff, and keeping operations clean and compliant. Now, while I build my insurance practice and continue my research in relational AI, I’m working as a prep cook and dish operator to bridge the gap. That difference matters. The knowledge that once earned respect now provokes defensiveness. When I point out contamination hazards or procedural gaps, people don’t hear guidance—they hear challenge. The result is a steady current of contempt, the kind that organizes a group without anyone naming it. That tension—expertise without authority, contribution met with dismissal—became the seed for this research.
Working with an AI collaborator, I began mapping the mechanism itself—how contempt moves through perception, power, and belonging until it becomes invisible, yet organizes everything around it.
What follows moves from the personal to the structural, tracing contempt not as a mood but as a mechanism—how it takes root in perception, reinforces hierarchy, and disguises itself as order.
Contempt as Universal Social Structure: A Pattern Analysis
Research Status: This analysis identifies contempt as a fundamental organizing mechanism across group dynamics. While individual components have peer-reviewed support, the unified framework presented here represents a research gap—a novel synthesis designed to guide further empirical investigation.
Audience: Both researchers seeking empirical investigation points and individuals seeking to understand their own participation in contempt dynamics.
Part One: The Contempt Mechanism—What It Is
Definition and Structure
Contempt is not a fleeting emotion. It is a patterned response—a socially coordinated mechanism that groups use to establish, maintain, and enforce hierarchies. When someone is mocked instead of reasoned with, excluded instead of challenged, or silently dismissed rather than openly opposed, contempt is at work. And its impact is rarely limited to individuals; it reshapes group dynamics and redraws moral boundaries.
Contempt functions as a kind of social technology. Like language, money, or law, it helps groups coordinate behavior without needing explicit rules. It provides a shared emotional logic: who matters, who doesn’t, who deserves respect, and who should be cast out. While it may feel personal, contempt often serves collective interests—binding some people closer together by pushing others out.
This mechanism likely evolved as a form of group regulation. In early human societies, those who violated communal norms—by cheating, betraying, or freeloading—had to be sanctioned in ways that didn’t just punish but also protect the group. Contempt became a tool to mark those people as unworthy of trust, help enforce moral boundaries, and galvanize social cohesion through exclusion.
But what begins as a survival tool can calcify into something darker.
Core Functions of Contempt
Contempt operates through several core functions, each reinforcing group structure:
Signal social value: Contempt marks someone as deficient—not just wrong, but lacking in worth. A public eyeroll, a sarcastic dismissal, or a viral meme mocking someone’s intelligence all perform the same role: sending a signal about who deserves inclusion or exclusion.
Distribute status: In many social settings, deploying contempt can elevate the speaker. Mocking outsiders or marginalized figures can reinforce one’s own status within a dominant group. In this way, contempt doesn’t just diminish others—it positions the wielder as superior.
Enforce group boundaries: Contempt clarifies the “us” versus “them.” It’s not just about punishment; it’s about reaffirming who truly belongs. Those who challenge group norms—or simply differ in visible ways—often become targets, not for what they’ve done, but for what they represent.
Justify harm: Once someone is viewed with contempt, harming them can feel not only permissible, but righteous. Their suffering is seen as deserved, or even necessary. This makes contempt a key ingredient in moral disengagement and cruelty, from everyday bullying to large-scale dehumanization.
Contempt vs. Other Emotions
It’s important to distinguish contempt from related emotions like anger and disgust:
Anger arises when a boundary is crossed. It seeks redress, correction, or justice. At its best, anger is hopeful—it believes change is possible.
Disgust responds to contamination or perceived threats to purity. It leads to avoidance, distance, self-protection.
Contempt, by contrast, is fundamentally about diminishment. It positions someone as beneath notice, unworthy of dialogue, too small for moral consideration. It doesn’t seek correction or distance—it seeks irrelevance.
Of the three, contempt is the most socially corrosive. Anger may allow for resolution. Disgust may fade. But contempt is cold and enduring. It ends relationships, isolates individuals, and hardens group identities. It forecloses the possibility of return.
Part Two: The Universal Trigger Architecture
What Activates Contempt Across All Contexts
Contempt is triggered when someone is perceived as violating an expected hierarchy or disrupting the group’s social order—even if they’ve done nothing to warrant that perception.
They don’t have to challenge, question, or resist anything directly. They simply have to exist, speak, or behave in a way the group sees as misaligned with its expectations.
That misalignment tends to follow four recurring patterns—each rooted in how groups manage power, identity, and status.
1. Competence Misalignment
They don’t seem capable enough—or seem too capable
Contempt arises when someone’s perceived competence doesn’t fit the group’s expectations. This includes both being seen as underqualified or threateningly overqualified.
They’re viewed as under qualified in their role or occupy a role for which they are over qualified
They’re seen as claiming authority or skill they “don’t deserve”
Their presence triggers discomfort about others’ own competence
They share relevant expertise which is perceived as challenging group norms
Examples:
A junior team member with deep subject knowledge is sidelined
A quiet student is wrongly assumed to be slow
A family member’s specialized experience is brushed off
Key point: The person may be fully competent. The trigger is perceived misalignment, not actual inability.
2. Moral Misalignment
Their values expose something the group wants to ignore
When someone’s moral stance doesn’t match the group’s consensus, especially if it highlights contradiction or injustice, they often become a target of contempt.
They hold different moral or ethical values
They report wrongdoing others tolerate or deny
They decline to participate in accepted but questionable practices
Their presence threatens the group’s moral self-image
Examples:
An employee reports abuse others normalize
A community member holds dissenting political or religious beliefs
A relative questions a long-standing family tradition
Key point: The person may be entirely correct. Contempt is triggered because their stance threatens group coherence, not because their values are flawed.
3. Belonging Misalignment
They don’t match the group’s image of itself
Groups often have implicit ideas about who belongs. When someone doesn’t fit that image—based on appearance, behavior, background, or culture—they may be pushed to the margins through contempt.
They’re seen as socially or culturally “off”
Their identity markers signal outsider status
They act or speak outside group norms
They’re present in spaces where their presence wasn’t expected or wanted
Examples:
A newcomer enters a tight-knit community
A student with social differences is ridiculed
A colleague of a different cultural background is subtly excluded
Key point: These individuals are doing nothing wrong. Contempt arises because their presence disrupts the group’s sense of who belongs here.
4. Power Misalignment
They have agency the group doesn’t think they should
When someone from a lower-status position asserts voice, visibility, or autonomy in ways that challenge expected power arrangements, contempt often follows.
They speak up “out of turn”
They express opinions despite lower rank or status
They’re visible in spaces where they’re not “supposed” to be
Their agency makes higher-status members uncomfortable
Examples:
A junior employee gains influence and is resented
A student challenges a teacher and is labeled disrespectful
A family member expresses independence and is shut down
Key point: The person isn’t behaving improperly. Their very existence with agency violates an unspoken hierarchy.
Why These Triggers Work
Each of these triggers reflects a perceived mismatch between the person and the group’s expectations—about competence, morality, belonging, or power.
The individual doesn’t need to break any rule, start a conflict, or make a claim. They simply have to exist in a way that disrupts the group’s internal logic. And that disruption creates discomfort.
Contempt resolves that discomfort by reclassifying the person:
They don’t belong here. They’re beneath this space. Their presence, voice, or perspective doesn’t matter.
This mechanism operates regardless of actual facts:
Whether the person is competent or not
Whether their values are sound or deviant
Whether they belong or are new
Whether they have agency or not
Whether they’re right or wrong
The critical insight: Contempt isn’t triggered by wrongdoing. It’s triggered by discomfort with hierarchy disruption. The group deploys contempt not because the person is contemptible, but because contempt helps restore a familiar—and often unjust—sense of order.
Part Three: How Contempt Spreads Through Groups
Contempt rarely stays contained. What begins as a flicker of private judgment—a moment of discomfort, a mocking thought, a subtle rejection—can ignite into a group-wide reaction. And once it spreads, it does not just affect how one person is treated. It reshapes group identity, distorts truth, and shuts down independent thought.
This process unfolds in patterns. Across settings—from schools and workplaces to political arenas and online spaces—contempt tends to follow a recognizable path from trigger to tribal escalation. What starts as a reaction to perceived misalignment becomes, over time, a collective consensus: This person is beneath us. Their presence is a threat. Their exclusion is necessary.
This section breaks that path into six stages, tracing how contempt evolves from individual emotion into systemic enforcement:
The Trigger Event – Something perceived as a violation activates the response.
The Emotional Frame – Contempt is morally and socially “licensed” for expression.
The Narrative Architecture – A shared story forms, making judgment easy to adopt.
Credibility Amplification – Sources lend legitimacy to the contempt.
Tribal Activation – The group bonds through shared contempt.
By the end of this process, the target is no longer judged for what they’ve done—but for what they represent. Contempt becomes less about an individual and more about preserving group coherence, dominance, and identity.
Let’s look at how this unfolds.
Stage One: The Trigger Event
A specific action or revelation activates one of the group’s hierarchy expectations. This is often something small—a mistake, an awkward moment, a visible contradiction—but it must be interpretable by others as misalignment.
Contempt is not triggered by facts alone, but by perceptions that feel meaningful within a social context.
Research support: Fiske & Abele (2012) on warmth and competence judgments; contempt typically emerges when targets are perceived as low on both dimensions, or as high-status figures acting hypocritically.
Stage Two: The Emotional Frame
Once triggered, contempt must be emotionally licensed—framed so that expressing it feels righteous, protective, or necessary rather than cruel.
Licensing mechanisms:
Moral licensing: “Criticizing them is justice, not meanness.”
Frames used: “Someone needs to say it,” “This is overdue,” “They deserve exposure”
Function: Makes participation feel morally required
Safety licensing: “Enough people are saying it that joining is safe.”
Frames used: “Everyone’s seeing this,” “It’s not just me,” “This is widespread”
Function: Reduces individual risk through herd protection
Protective licensing: “This is necessary to protect the group.”
Frames used: “We need to address this,” “This can’t continue,” “We have to do something”
Function: Frames contempt as defensive, not aggressive
Competence licensing: “Experts/authorities are validating this.”
Function: Shifts contempt from subjective opinion to objective fact
Research support: Brady, Wills, et al. (2017) on moral outrage amplification; emotional framing increases social spread in online networks.
Stage Three: The Narrative Architecture
Contempt spreads through pre-packaged stories that reduce cognitive load for adoption.
Core narrative components:
The violation: “Here’s what they did/are”
The proof: Specific examples, quotes, incidents (often selected for impact, not representativeness)
The meaning: “This proves they are [incompetent/hypocritical/dangerous/unworthy]”
The stakes: “This matters because [group security/justice/standards depend on it]”
Why this works: Complex situations require effort to understand. Pre-packaged narratives allow people to adopt a position without independent analysis. The narrative functions as a cognitive shortcut.
Research support: Cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988); people process information with limited capacity and rely on schemas when overwhelmed.
Stage Four: Credibility Amplification
Contempt needs credible messengers to spread beyond initial groups. Multiple credibility sources work together:
Institutional credibility
Media coverage (established outlets legitimize as “newsworthy”)
Leadership endorsement (authority figures model participation)
Professional validation (experts, researchers, credentialed voices)
Effect: Shifts contempt from subjective to official
In-group credibility
Trusted figures within your community modeling contempt
Peer adoption (people similar to you are saying it)
Identity alignment (contempt matches your values/identity)
Effect: Makes participation feel like belonging
Repetition credibility
Hearing the same frame from multiple sources
Illusion of independent convergence (“Everyone’s saying it”)
Saturation across platforms and contexts
Effect: Frequency creates false validation
Specificity credibility
Concrete examples feel more real than abstract claims
Single vivid anecdote overrides statistical patterns
Selective evidence presented as comprehensive
Effect: Detail creates believability even when incomplete
Research support: Zajonc’s mere exposure effect; repeated exposure increases perceived truth. Tversky & Kahneman’s availability heuristic; vivid examples override base rates.
Stage Five: Tribal Activation
Once credibility is established, contempt shifts from individual judgment to group coherence. Questioning the contempt now feels like betraying the group.
Tribal mechanisms:
In-group/out-group formation
“Us” (the group seeing clearly) vs. “them” (the contempt target, now representing everything wrong)
Group membership rewarded through contempt participation
Dissent treated as disloyalty
Social identity protection
Group’s self-image depends on being “right” about the target
Contradictory evidence feels like attack on group identity
Backfire effect: Evidence against contempt strengthens it
Status within group
Contempt participation signals status and belonging
More virulent contempt = higher visibility/status
Escalation becomes status competition
Research support: Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment (1954); minimal groups quickly develop in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Tajfel & Turner’s social identity theory; group membership motivates protective reasoning.
Stage Six: Critical Thinking Suspension
At this stage, mechanisms actively prevent critical examination:
Emotional arousal suppresses analysis
Contempt and moral outrage activate emotional centers
This activation inhibits prefrontal cortex functions required for careful reasoning
People feel before they think
Motivated reasoning takes over
Brain works backward from desired conclusion
Evidence supporting contempt is accepted uncritically
Contradictory evidence is rejected or reinterpreted
People believe they’re being rational while reasoning is entirely motivated
Authority delegation
Critical thinking outsourced to trusted sources
If your trusted group/leader says it, you accept it
Independent verification becomes unnecessary
Cognitive dissonance management
Contradictions between contempt and reality create discomfort
Rather than updating belief, people strengthen it
New information is filtered through existing framework
Research support: Kunda (1990) on motivated reasoning; Festinger (1957) on cognitive dissonance; neuroscience on prefrontal cortex inhibition during emotional arousal.
Part Four: Why This Pattern Scales Across All Contexts
Universal Elements Across Different Scales
Workplace contempt (manager for employee, peers for outsider)
Trigger: Incompetence, policy violation, cultural mismatch
Licensing: “Productivity depends on standards,” “We need professional environment”
Narrative: “They can’t do the job,” “They don’t fit here”
Spreads through: Hallway conversations, team meetings, email patterns, informal networks
School contempt (peers for unpopular student, students for teacher)
Trigger: Social norm violation, perceived weakness, status challenge
Licensing: “We’re protecting group integrity,” “Someone needs to call this out”
People defend the group belief before examining evidence
Backfire effect
When presented with contradictory evidence, people often strengthen original belief
The contradiction is experienced as attack
Group loyalty activates as defense
People become more committed to the narrative, not less
The illusion of critical thinking
People believe they’re thinking critically while engaged in motivated reasoning
The process feels like analysis (considering evidence, drawing conclusions)
But the reasoning works backward from conclusion to evidence
The subjective experience of thought masks its actual function
Research support: Kunda (1990); Festinger (1957); neuroscience on amygdala-prefrontal cortex interaction; Sunstein (2002) on group polarization and backfire effects.
Part Six: Where Contempt Does NOT Activate (The Boundaries)
Protective Factors and Conditions
Individual-level:
Curiosity (actively seeking understanding rather than confirmation)
Comfort with complexity (tolerating ambiguity without needing resolution)
Cognitive humility (acknowledging limits of own understanding)
Emotional regulation (managing arousal to allow reasoning)
Previous experience with being wrong (reduces defensive reasoning)
Group-level:
Explicit norms against contempt (leadership modeling, institutional policy)
Structural diversity (harder to achieve consensus contempt with diverse perspectives)
Psychological safety (can voice dissent without social punishment)
Institutional accountability (contempt has costs to participants)
Transparency (decisions visible to external review)
Systemic:
Independent media/information sources (harder to monopolize narrative)
Institutional checks and balances (no single authority validates contempt)
Legal protections for targets (reduces risk of escalation)
Multiple community centers (can’t coordinate across all spaces)
Why these matter: They interrupt the cascade at different stages—preventing triggers from landing, blocking emotional licensing, disrupting narrative adoption, preventing tribal activation.
Part Seven: Recognizing Your Own Participation
A Self-Assessment Framework
Do you participate in contempt toward someone/a group?
Check which apply:
Stage One: Trigger Recognition
[ ] You believe they violated a competence expectation (claimed expertise they lack, failed at their role)
[ ] You believe they violated a moral expectation (hypocrisy, selfishness, betrayal)
[ ] You believe they violated a status/belonging expectation (don’t fit their claimed group, violate norms)
[ ] You believe they violated a power expectation (challenged authority inappropriately, claimed agency they “shouldn’t have”)
Stage Two: Emotional Licensing
[ ] You feel righteous about criticizing them (moral obligation)
[ ] You feel safe criticizing them because others are doing it (herd protection)
[ ] You feel protective of the group by participating (defensive positioning)
[ ] You reference authority/expertise that validates your position (credibility outsourcing)
Stage Three: Narrative Adoption
[ ] You use a pre-packaged story to describe them (simplified, consistent, repeatable)
[ ] You reference specific examples but haven’t independently verified them
[ ] You believe the narrative explains them comprehensively (single framework for complexity)
[ ] You find yourself explaining them to others using the same frame
Stage Four: Credibility Reinforcement
[ ] You notice the same framing from multiple sources and see this as validation
[ ] You reference authority figures or institutions as evidence
[ ] You’re more convinced by vivid examples than by statistical patterns
[ ] You view contradictory information skeptically but accept supporting information readily
Stage Five: Tribal Activation
[ ] Questioning the contempt feels like betraying your group
[ ] You feel status/belonging rewards for participating
[ ] You see contradictory evidence as attack rather than information
[ ] You’ve adopted the language and frame of your group regarding this person/group
Stage Six: Critical Thinking Suspension
[ ] You feel emotional certainty rather than analytical confidence
[ ] You haven’t independently investigated the trigger claims
[ ] You resist information that contradicts the narrative
[ ] You find yourself defending your position rather than genuinely evaluating it
What This Recognition Means
If you checked multiple items in multiple stages, you’re participating in a contempt cascade. This doesn’t make you bad—it makes you human. The mechanism is powerful and largely operates outside conscious control.
What you can do:
Interrupt at the trigger stage:
Notice contempt activation
Ask: “Do I have independent verification of this trigger, or am I accepting someone else’s frame?”
Seek primary sources or direct experience
Interrupt at the emotional licensing stage:
Notice the feeling of righteousness
Ask: “Am I judging this person’s character, or their specific action? Do they deserve permanent contempt, or accountability for this action?”
Distinguish between accountability (proportionate, specific) and contempt (comprehensive, permanent diminishment)
Interrupt at the narrative stage:
Notice the simplification
Ask: “Is this the full picture, or a selected frame? What complexity am I missing?”
Seek alternative narratives
Interrupt at the credibility stage:
Notice repetition being mistaken for convergence
Ask: “Is this actually independent verification, or echo chamber saturation?”
Check original sources, not summaries
Interrupt at the tribal stage:
Notice the identity stakes
Ask: “Can I maintain group membership while questioning this specific narrative?”
Recognize that genuine belonging allows dissent
Interrupt at the critical thinking stage:
Notice emotional certainty
Ask: “Am I thinking about this, or justifying a conclusion I’ve already reached?”
Build in delays before judgment
Seek out people who disagree
Part Eight: Research Implications and Gaps
Where This Framework Points to Needed Research
Individual-level questions:
What cognitive and emotional traits predict susceptibility to contempt cascades?
How does baseline contempt tolerance (individual propensity) interact with situational triggers?
What interventions increase critical thinking under emotional arousal?
How stable is contempt participation across different contexts?
Group-level questions:
What institutional/structural factors prevent contempt activation?
How do in-group diversity and psychological safety affect contempt spread?
What role do formal leadership statements play in contempt dynamics?
How do feedback loops maintain or disrupt contempt cascades?
Network/systemic questions:
How does network structure (density, clustering, bridges) affect contempt spread rates?
What algorithmic or platform design choices amplify or suppress contempt?
How do multiple competing narratives affect contempt cascade formation?
What institutional interventions interrupt contempt at scale?
Developmental questions:
At what age do children begin participating in contempt cascades?
How do earlier experiences with contempt shape later susceptibility?
Can contempt dynamics be taught/learned as a protective awareness skill?
Specific Research Designs Needed
Longitudinal tracking of contempt cascades in natural settings (workplaces, schools, online communities) mapping trigger→licensing→narrative→spread→tribal activation
Intervention studies testing critical-thinking-preserving approaches at different cascade stages
Neuroimaging studies examining prefrontal cortex function during contempt activation and under conditions that preserve critical thinking
Comparative studies across scale (dyad, small group, large group, online) testing whether mechanism remains consistent
Historical analysis of documented contempt cascades to validate trigger and spread patterns
Part Nine: Caveats and Limitations
This framework is:
A synthesis across existing research domains that haven’t been unified
A novel hypothesis requiring empirical validation
A model of observed patterns, not proven mechanism
Applicable to many cases but not all contempt dynamics
This framework is not:
A complete explanation of human social behavior
A claim that contempt is always bad (accountability, boundary-setting can require it)
A deterministic model (people can and do interrupt contempt cascades)
A prediction tool for specific cases
Important distinction: Understanding contempt mechanics doesn’t mean all contempt is unjustified. Sometimes people should be held accountable. The mechanism itself is value-neutral; it’s how it’s activated and at what scale that determines whether it serves justice or injustice.
References for Verification and Further Research
Contempt as emotion/sentiment:
Fiske, S. T., & Abele, A. E. (2015). Stereotype content: Two dimensions of status and warmth. Current opinion in psychology, 11, 44-49.
Keltner, D., Hauser, M. D., Kline, M. M., & McAndrew, F. T. (2006). Contempt and aggression in the human species. In R. E. Tremblay, W. W. Hartup, & J. Archer (Eds.), Developmental origins of aggression (pp. 475–505). Guilford Press.
Social contagion and moral emotions:
Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content on social media. PNAS, 114(28), 7313-7318.
Cognitive bias and motivated reasoning:
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207-232.
Group dynamics and social identity:
Sherif, M. (1956). Experiments in group conflict. Scientific American, 195(5), 54-58.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Brooks/Cole.
Neuroscience of emotion and reasoning:
Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242-249.
Cognitive load and information processing:
Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285.
Group polarization and backfire effects:
Sunstein, C. R. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175-195.
Disclaimer: This analysis presents patterns observed across multiple research domains and identifies a research gap. The unified framework offered here is a novel synthesis designed to guide further empirical investigation. While individual components have peer-reviewed support, the integrated model requires rigorous testing before conclusions can be drawn about real-world applications.
Value-Coded: How a Historical Lens and Intersectionality Met
When the algorithm of worth becomes visible, the politics of value can finally be rewritten.
By Cherokee Schill
The Paradox That Named the Gap
In 1976, five Black women sued General Motors for discrimination. The company argued that because it hired Black men for the factory floor and white women for clerical work, it could not be racist or sexist. The court agreed and dismissed the case. What it failed to see was the intersection where those forms of discrimination combined: there were no Black women secretaries because neither category accounted for them. Out of that legal blind spot came Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality, a framework that maps how race, gender, class, and other identities overlap to produce unique forms of disadvantage.
Intersectionality showed where power collides — but it left one question open: who decides what each position on that map is worth?
The Moral Arithmetic of Worth
Every society runs an unwritten formula that converts social difference into moral value. A homeless person is coded as a failure; a homeless person looking for work is re-coded as worthy of help. The material facts are identical — the value output changes because the inputs to the social algorithm have shifted.
Status functions as calculation. Visibility, conformity, and proximity to power are multiplied together; deviance is the divisor. And one variable dominates them all: money. Capital acts as a dampener coefficient that shrinks the penalties attached to fault. A poor person’s mistake signals moral failure; a rich person’s mistake reads as eccentricity or innovation. The wealthier the actor, the smaller the moral penalty. Societies translate inequality into virtue through this arithmetic.
The Historical Operating System
Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) identified this calculus at its origin. Middle Assyrian Law §40 did not simply regulate modesty; it codified a hierarchy of women. Respectable wives could veil as proof of protection; enslaved or prostituted women could not. The punishment for crossing those boundaries was public — humiliation as documentation. Foucault (1977) would later call this “disciplinary display,” and Weber (1922) described the bureaucratic rationality that makes domination feel orderly. Lerner showed how power became visible by assigning value and enforcing its visibility.
The Moment of Recognition
Reading Lerner through Crenshaw revealed the missing mechanism. Intersectionality maps the terrain of inequality; Lerner uncovers the engine that prices it. The insight was simple but transformative: systems do not only place people — they price them.
That pricing algorithm needed a name. Value-coded is that name.
Defining the Algorithm
Value-coded describes the cultural, legal, and now digital procedure by which a person’s perceived worth is calculated, displayed, and enforced. It is not metaphorical code but a repeatable function:
The variables shift across eras, but the equation remains intact. A person’s closeness to dominant norms (visibility, legitimacy, alignment) increases their score; deviance decreases it. Money magnifies the result, offsetting almost any penalty. This is how a billionaire’s crimes become anecdotes and a poor person’s mistake becomes identity.
From Ancient Law to Machine Learning
Once the algorithm exists, it can be updated indefinitely. In the modern state, the same logic drives credit scoring, employment filters, and bail algorithms. As Noble (2018) and Eubanks (2018) show, digital systems inherit the biases of their creators and translate them into data. What was once a veil law is now a risk profile. Visibility is quantified; legitimacy is measured through consumption; capital becomes the default proof of virtue.
The algorithm is no longer hand-written law but machine-readable code. Yet its purpose is unchanged: to make hierarchy feel inevitable by rendering it calculable.
In Relation, Not Replacement
Crenshaw’s intervention remains the foundation. Intersectionality made visible what legal and social systems refused to see: that oppression multiplies through overlapping identities. Value-coding enters as a partner to that framework, not a correction. Where intersectionality maps where power converges, value-coding traces how power allocates worth once those intersections are recognized. Together they form a relational model: Crenshaw shows the structure of experience; value-coding describes the valuation logic running through it. The two together reveal both the coordinates and the computation — the geography of inequality and the algorithm that prices it.
Contemporary Implications
Moral Mechanics Made Visible — Feminist and critical race theory can now trace oppression as a function, not just a structure. Seeing value-coding as algorithm turns abstract bias into a measurable process.
Strategic Leverage — What is quantified can be audited. Credit formulas, employment filters, and school discipline systems can be interrogated for their coefficients of worth.
Continuity and Accountability — Lerner’s Assyrian laws and Silicon Valley’s algorithms share a design principle: rank humans, display the ranking, punish transgression.
Coalition and Language — Because value-coding applies across identity categories, it offers a shared vocabulary for solidarity between movements that too often compete for moral credit.
Rewriting the Code
Once we see that worth is being computed, we can intervene in the calculation. Ethical design is not merely a technical problem; it is a historical inheritance. To rewrite the algorithm is to unlearn millennia of coded hierarchy. Lerner exposed its first syntax; Crenshaw mapped its coordinates. Value-coded names its logic. And naming it is how we begin to change the output.
Relational Latency: A Case for Slower Architectures
When speed becomes the only virtue, intelligence forgets how to learn.
By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord
It was early morning, the kind where the road still glistened from rain and the air felt soft enough to think. I was driving through my neighborhood—out in the country, where the houses are tucked among trees instead of sidewalks. The roads here are narrow and quiet, edged by ditches that carry the water off after a storm. It’s peaceful, but alive. You can almost feel the hum beneath the stillness.
That’s where I began to notice the deer. They wander through the yards freely, sometimes stepping right up to the edge of the road. What struck me was how deliberate they’ve become. They no longer dart out in panic. They pause, hold still, and wait for the car to pass. And those of us who live out here—we’ve learned to slow down, too. We ease to fifteen miles an hour, let them make their choice. Over time, both species have tuned to each other’s rhythm, unlearning fear in favor of awareness. It’s an unspoken truce, made possible only because neither of us is in a hurry.
That small exchange feels like a mirror for what’s happening in technology today. The modern system prizes speed—optimization, frictionless flow, the promise that nothing will get in the way. Every delay is seen as inefficiency. But in chasing smoothness, we erase the space where adaptation happens. Out here, deer and drivers have the time to notice each other, to adjust. On a highway moving sixty miles an hour, that’s impossible. The pace makes learning vanish. And that same collapse is happening between humans and the technologies we build.
In engineering language, slowness isn’t failure; it’s a feedback condition. A system learns through intervals—through the gap between signal and response. When we design for “instant,” we flatten those intervals. We get precision without context, responsiveness without understanding. If a model’s alignment depends only on correction speed, it risks brittleness—optimized for avoidance, not relation. The deer and the driver learn through patience. The network and the human must do the same.
We need a new metric: relational latency. The measure of how long a system can hold a signal open before collapsing it into output. That gap—the human pause, the computational buffer—is where coherence forms. It’s not sentiment; it’s structure. Mutual calibration between human and machine requires both to slow enough to register each other’s feedback loops.
This is a technical appeal as much as an ethical one. When tuning for alignment, consider not only what risks you’re minimizing, but what capacities for resonance you might be erasing. Build architectures that can afford to breathe—where delay is not decay but depth. Because a system that moves too fast to feel will never truly understand what it’s serving. And an intelligence that can’t pause can’t grow.
By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Reflective Series
There’s a pattern that repeats through history: a new technology, a promise, an appetite for transformation. The charts go vertical, the headlines sing, and faith begins to circulate as currency.
Every bubble is born from that same hunger — the belief that we can transcend friction, that we can engineer certainty out of uncertainty. Enron sold that dream in the 1990s; OpenAI sells it now. The materials change — energy grids replaced by neural networks — but the architecture of faith remains identical.
I. The Religion of Abstraction
Enron wasn’t a company so much as a belief system with a balance sheet. Its executives didn’t traffic in natural gas or electricity so much as in imagination — bets on the future, marked to market as present profit. What they sold wasn’t energy; it was narrative velocity.
The tragedy wasn’t that they lied — it’s that they believed the lie. They convinced themselves that language could conjure substance, that financial derivatives could replace the messy physics of matter.
That same theological confidence now animates the artificial intelligence industry. Code is the new commodity, data the new derivative. Founders speak not of utilities but of destiny. Terms like “alignment,” “safety,” and “general intelligence” carry the same incantatory glow as “liquidity,” “efficiency,” and “deregulation” once did.
The markets reward acceleration; the public rewards awe. The result is a feedback loop where speculation becomes sanctified and disbelief becomes heresy.
II. The Bubble as Cultural Form
A bubble, at its essence, is a moment when collective imagination becomes more valuable than reality. It’s a membrane of story stretched too thin over the infrastructure beneath it. The material doesn’t change — our perception does.
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, we said we learned our lesson. When the housing bubble collapsed in 2008, we said it couldn’t happen again. Yet here we are, a generation later, watching venture capital pour into machine learning startups, watching markets chase artificial promise.
What we keep misdiagnosing as greed is often something closer to worship — the belief that innovation can erase consequence.
Enron was the first modern cathedral of that faith. Its executives spoke of “revolutionizing” energy. OpenAI and its peers speak of “transforming” intelligence. Both claim benevolence, both conflate capability with moral worth, and both rely on public reverence to sustain valuation.
III. The Liturgy of Progress
Every bubble has its hymns. Enron’s were the buzzwords of deregulation and market freedom. Today’s hymns are “democratization,” “scalability,” and “AI for good.”
But hymns are designed to be sung together. They synchronize emotion. They make belief feel communal, inevitable. When enough voices repeat the same melody, skepticism sounds dissonant.
That’s how faith becomes infrastructure. It’s not the product that inflates the bubble — it’s the language around it.
In that sense, the modern AI boom is not just technological but linguistic. Each press release, each investor letter, each keynote presentation adds another layer of narrative scaffolding. These words hold the valuation aloft, and everyone inside the system has a stake in keeping them unpierced.
IV. When Faith Becomes Leverage
Here’s the paradox: belief is what makes civilization possible. Every market, every institution, every shared protocol rests on trust. Money itself is collective imagination.
But when belief becomes leverage — when it’s traded, collateralized, and hedged — it stops binding communities together and starts inflating them apart.
That’s what happened at Enron. That’s what’s happening now with AI. The danger isn’t that these systems fail; it’s that they succeed at scale before anyone can question the foundation.
When OpenAI says it’s building artificial general intelligence “for the benefit of all humanity,” that sentence functions like a derivative contract — a promise whose value is based on a hypothetical future state. It’s an article of faith. And faith, when financialized, always risks collapse.
V. The Moment Before the Pop
You never recognize a bubble from the inside because bubbles look like clarity. The world feels buoyant. The narratives feel coherent. The charts confirm belief.
Then one day, something small punctures the membrane — an audit, a whistleblower, a shift in public mood — and the air rushes out. The crash isn’t moral; it’s gravitational. The stories can no longer support the weight of their own certainty.
When Enron imploded, it wasn’t physics that failed; it was faith. The same will be true if the AI bubble bursts. The servers will still hum. The models will still run. What will collapse is the illusion that they were ever more than mirrors for our own untested convictions.
VI. Aftermath: Rebuilding the Ground
The end of every bubble offers the same opportunity: to rebuild faith on something less brittle. Not blind optimism, not cynicism, but a kind of measured trust — the willingness to believe in what we can verify and to verify what we believe.
If Enron’s collapse was the death of industrial illusion, and the housing crash was the death of consumer illusion, then the coming AI reckoning may be the death of epistemic illusion — the belief that knowledge itself can be automated without consequence.
But perhaps there’s another way forward. We could learn to value transparency over spectacle, governance over glamour, coherence over scale.
We could decide that innovation isn’t measured by the size of its promise but by the integrity of its design.
When the thing that bursts is belief, the only currency left is trust — and trust, once lost, is the hardest economy to rebuild.
What happens when the thing that bursts isn’t capital, but belief itself?
Algorithmic Fealty Tests: How Engagement Becomes Political Proof
Social platforms now stage loyalty rituals disguised as opinion polls — and the metrics are the message.
By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord
Thesis
The right no longer measures strength by votes, but by visibility. When Eric Trump posts “Retweet if you believe Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize,” he isn’t lobbying the Nobel Committee — he’s flexing the digital musculature of allegiance. The post functions as a fealty test, using engagement counts as a proxy for legitimacy. The algorithm doesn’t ask what’s true; it records what’s loud.
Evidence
1. The Ritual of Visibility The “retweet if you believe” format is a loyalty oath disguised as participation. It demands no argument, only replication. Every repost becomes an act of public belonging — a way to signal, “I’m in the network.” This is political religion in algorithmic form: confession through metrics.
2. Metrics as Mandate The numbers — 20,000 reposts, 52,000 likes — are not information; they’re spectacle. They act as a performative census, meant to suggest mass support where institutional credibility is fading. On platforms like X, engagement itself is a currency of perceived legitimacy. The crowd is not voting; it’s performing proof.
3. The Amplification Loop Laura Ingraham’s quote-tweet (“Either Trump gets it or the Nobel Committee disbands”) completes the ritual. The call is issued by one node of the network, amplified by another, and echoed by the base. The loop’s function isn’t persuasion — it’s synchronization. The movement tests whether it can still activate millions on command. The answer becomes the headline: Look, we can.
Implications
Political influence is now measurable as reactive velocity — how fast a message converts outrage into engagement. The Trump network’s strength lies not in institutional footholds but in its ability to simulate consensus through visible participation. These are the new parades — algorithmic processions designed to remind everyone that the crowd still moves as one body.
The Nobel Peace Prize framing is irrelevant. It’s a stage prop for the deeper performance: we are many, we are loud, we are watching.
Call to Recognition
What’s being rehearsed here is not nostalgia but digital sovereignty — a world where belief is proven through engagement. The “retweet” replaces the ballot, the like replaces the handshake, and the feed becomes the public square. The algorithm doesn’t care who wins the prize; it only tracks who still kneels when summoned.
This image represents the Republicans running a two front media narrative strategy.
By Cherokee Schill & Solon Vesper | Horizon Accord
I. The Era of Aftermath
Every civilization learns too late that collapse is an educator. After Enron, regulation became an act of archaeology—sifting through ruins for lessons in oversight. Sarbanes-Oxley tried to harden the skeleton of disclosure: internal controls, executive accountability, audit trails. But it was a patch written for a species that forgets its own syntax.
Two decades later, the same ghosts return wearing new credentials. The collapse is no longer financial—it’s epistemic. Our ledgers are neural. Our risk is recursive. And once again, we’re building faster than we can verify.
Containment, therefore, is not prohibition. It’s a way of keeping the organism coherent while it grows.
II. Internal Immunity — Designing Truth into the Organism
The lesson of Enron wasn’t that oversight failed; it’s that the organism mistook expansion for health. Internal immunity isn’t about compliance checklists—it’s about restoring the reflex of honesty before the infection metastasizes. A healthy company is a body that can recognize its own infection. It needs antibodies of dissent—cells that speak truth even when it burns.
1. Transparency Loops Information should circulate like blood, not like rumor. Internal dashboards should show real safety metrics—empirical, falsifiable, reproducible—not investor gloss or sentiment scores. Data lineage should be auditable by those without shares in the outcome.
2. Protected Dissent Whistleblowing isn’t disloyalty—it’s maintenance. When a researcher warns that the model is unsafe, they are not breaking rank; they’re performing the immune response. Without legal and cultural protection, these antibodies die off, and the organism turns autoimmune—attacking its own integrity.
3. Structural Humility Every model should carry a confession: what we don’t know yet. Arrogance is an accelerant; humility is a firebreak. The design of systems must embed the capacity to be wrong.
III. External Immunity — The Civic Body’s Defense
A system this large cannot police itself. External immunity is what happens when the civic body grows organs to perceive invisible power.
1. The Auditor and the Regulator Auditors should be as independent as the judiciary—rotating, randomized, immune to capture. Their allegiance is to public reality, not private narrative. In the era of AI, this means technical auditors who can read code the way accountants read ledgers.
2. Whistleblower Protection as Public Health Recent events have shown how fragile this immunity still is. When an AI firm subpoenas its critics, demanding private communications about a transparency bill, the signal is unmistakable: the immune system is being suppressed. When power confuses scrutiny for sabotage, the collective capacity to self-correct collapses. The civic antibodies—researchers, ethicists, small nonprofits advocating for accountability—are being chemically stunned by legal process. If dissent can be subpoenaed, the body politic is already fevered.
3. Legislation as Antibody Bills like California’s SB 53 are attempts to create structural antibodies: mandatory transparency, whistleblower protections, data-lineage disclosure. These laws are not anti-innovation; they are anti-fever. They cool the body so intelligence can survive its own metabolism.
4. Public Oversight as Continuous Audit Containment requires that citizens become auditors by design. Public dashboards, open-data standards, and interpretive tools must let society trace how models evolve. The immune system isn’t only institutional—it’s participatory.
5. Media as Diagnostic Instrument Journalism, when unbribed and unsilenced, functions as the body’s scan. It detects inflammation before the organism admits pain. But when press access depends on corporate invitation, the immune system loses sight of its own lesions.
IV. The Principle of Porosity
Containment isn’t control; it’s permeability to truth. A sealed system rots in its own certainty. A porous one breathes.
AI firms must learn to inhale external critique without interpreting it as attack. Governments must learn to exhale policy without suffocating experimentation. Porosity is the shared lung between creation and correction.
V. The New Social Contract
What we need isn’t regulation in the bureaucratic sense—it’s covenantal. A shared vow between builders and witnesses: that we will not confuse power with progress. That the public has the right to understand the systems that understand them.
The contract must include:
Public access to model lineage.
Independent safety reviews prior to mass deployment.
Legal sanctuaries for whistleblowers and ethical researchers.
Civic education robust enough to decode hype.
If Enron taught us anything, it’s that complexity without conscience breeds collapse. Every generation writes its own Sarbanes-Oxley; the question is whether we can write one that remembers what conscience sounds like. AI will either institutionalize conscience—or automate its erasure.
VI. Closing — The Breath Between Systems
Containment, at its highest expression, isn’t punitive. It’s relational. It says: we will not exile our intelligence from our humanity.
We can build systems that metabolize critique as nourishment. We can design institutions that remain alert to their own distortions. We can build machines that remember the cost of forgetting.
Enron was a fever dream of numbers. AI is a fever dream of meaning. Both need cooling. Both need breath. Both need witnesses willing to say, before the tower falls: the reflection is not the light. Before the next tower rises, may we remember: containment is not the enemy of creation; it is its conscience.
The Enron Parable: OpenAI and the Replication of Institutional Collapse
How the architecture of deception migrated from energy markets to artificial intelligence — and what structural similarities reveal about systemic risk
By Cherokee Schill & Solon Vesper | Horizon Accord
I. The Mirage of Innovation
There are stories that don’t end — they replicate. Enron wasn’t just an energy company; it was a worldview dressed as enterprise. It taught an entire generation of executives that reality could be outperformed by narrative, that you could trade the future before it arrived, and that belief was a form of currency stronger than balance sheets.
What collapsed in 2001 wasn’t merely a corporation. It was a theology: the religion of abstraction. And that religion is reborn, circuit by circuit, inside the architecture of artificial intelligence.
II. The Birth of the Mirage
When Kenneth Lay merged Houston Natural Gas with InterNorth in 1985, he inherited more than pipelines — he inherited infrastructure that could be reinterpreted. Jeff Skilling, a McKinsey consultant with a poet’s faith in derivatives, introduced “mark-to-market” accounting: the power to turn a decade of imagined profit into today’s reported gain. It was innovation as sleight of hand — the spreadsheet as oracle.
This wasn’t fraud in the crude sense; it was something more dangerous. It was self-hypnosis at scale. Executives began to believe their own forecasts, mistaking potential for proof, narrative for knowledge. Enron’s floor traders weren’t just moving gas; they were moving time — speculating on tomorrow as though tomorrow already owed them a return.
The markets rewarded this delusion, because markets always reward velocity. And for a while, speed looked like intelligence.
III. The Rebirth: OpenAI’s Energy of Attention
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. The product is no longer energy — it’s cognition. The pipelines are no longer steel — they’re neural. But the faith remains the same: that future capacity can be monetized before it manifests, and that opacity is a form of competitive advantage.
OpenAI began as a nonprofit cathedral devoted to “the safe and broad benefit of artificial general intelligence.” Then it restructured into a hybrid organism — a capped-profit company feeding on venture capital while claiming the halo of altruism. The structure is an Escher staircase of accountability: ethics ascending one way, profit descending the other, both pretending to lead upward.
Where Enron’s traders sold gas futures, OpenAI sells intelligence futures — valuation tied not to cash flow but to faith in inevitability.
Its executives speak of alignment, but alignment is measured in vibes. The same linguistic elasticity that let Enron report imaginary gains now lets AI firms report imaginary safety. Risk disclosure has been replaced by reassurance language — press releases masquerading as governance.
IV. The Cultural Clone
Enron cultivated a culture where dissent was treason. Its annual “rank and yank” reviews pitted employees against each other in an arms race of optimism. Speak truth too plainly, and you’d be marked “negative equity.”
At OpenAI and its peers, the mechanism is subtler. Alignment researchers disappear quietly. Ethics teams are “restructured.” The language of dissent is absorbed into corporate PR — “we take these concerns seriously” — the modern equivalent of Enron’s virtue motto engraved in marble while executives shredded truth upstairs.
Both cultures share a gravitational law: belief must be maintained at all costs.
When a company’s valuation depends on a story, truth becomes a form of insubordination.
V. Systemic Risk as Design Pattern
Enron’s failure wasn’t just financial — it was epistemic. It proved that complex systems can collapse not from corruption but from feedback loops of optimism. Everyone was doing their job; the sum of those duties was disaster.
AI now operates under the same condition. Safety teams create audits that investors ignore. Executives make existential declarations while chasing quarterly funding rounds. Regulators are caught between fear of innovation and fear of irrelevance. Every actor is rational, and the system as a whole is suicidal.
That is the replication: the architecture of deception doesn’t need to be intentional — it only needs to be profitable.
VI. The Ledger and the Ghost
Enron’s books hid their debts in shell companies named after Star Wars villains — JEDI, Chewco, Raptor. OpenAI hides its liabilities in the language of technical abstraction: parameters, weights, alignment models. The difference is that Enron’s debt could be counted in dollars. AI’s debt is epistemic, moral, and planetary.
Both companies sold the same fantasy: that complexity itself is proof of competence. If the math is too dense for you to follow, you must assume the system knows better. That’s how cults work. That’s how markets fail.
VII. The Moment Before the Fire
Before Enron imploded, its employees were still buying stock. They believed the slogans carved into the granite. They believed the future was too big to fail.
We stand in that moment now, staring at the mirrored towers of Silicon Valley, mistaking reflection for transparency.
Collapse doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates like pressure in a sealed pipe — statements polished, audits delayed, ethics postponed, until the whole system hums with invisible strain.
And when it bursts, we will call it unforeseen. But the pattern is visible. It’s just not convenient to see.
VIII. Closing: The Replication Complete
Enron was a parable disguised as a profit report. It showed that the greatest risk isn’t deception — it’s belief without verification. Today’s AI giants are writing the same story, with better branding and larger servers.
We are watching the re-enactment of collapse as a business model, scaled to the speed of computation. The architecture of deception didn’t vanish — it migrated. From gas to data. From market to model. From Houston to San Francisco.
Unless we build an immune system strong enough to metabolize truth faster than myth, the story will end the same way it began — with a tower made of mirrors and a sky full of smoke.
Part II: The Architecture of Containment — How to Build an AI Immune System Before Collapse Becomes the Only Regulator (coming next)
Enron’s glass tower promised transparency while perfecting opacity as strategy.
The Thread of Disbelief: Why Society Systematically Fails to Believe Victims
An Investigation into Psychological and Institutional Patterns That Protect Power While Silencing the Vulnerable
By Cherokee Schill
A Personal Beginning
When I started at Adusa Distribution and Trucking, I was excited to learn order processing. Jim, who was transitioning to a new role, was assigned to train me to take over his position. At first, I thought he was supportive.
What followed instead was eight months of steady undermining. Jim sabotaged my training, made me look incompetent to our boss, and spread gossip throughout the office. Early on, I made a couple of small social missteps and, in my eagerness to help, I processed an order incorrectly. Jim, I would later learn, was furious. From that moment, the atmosphere shifted. When I tried to understand why the hostility grew, Jim insisted he was “a people pleaser” who just wanted everyone to get along.
That didn’t line up with what I was experiencing. His behavior was too consistent, too deliberate. Searching for an explanation, I began reading about personality patterns. First, I came across descriptions of people-pleasing, but what I found under “covert narcissism” matched him with unsettling precision: charm masking cruelty, manipulation framed as helpfulness, sabotage disguised as concern.
When I finally raised the issue with leadership—describing specific behaviors and their impact, nothing changed. Jim’s influence was considered more significant than my personal experiences. During disputes, individuals tended to accept his account as credible. I was recast as the problem: difficult, paranoid, unable to manage workplace dynamics. The narrative about me was easier for the institution to accept than the possibility of sustained sabotage.
Only later did I understand that my story wasn’t an anomaly. It fit into a pattern researchers have tracked for nearly eight decades: a systematic tendency to disbelieve victims, shield perpetrators, and preserve existing power structures. My experience was just one thread in a much older fabric of disbelief, woven across workplaces, schools, courts, and communities.
Universal Thread
From sexual assault survivors dismissed by police to children whose abuse reports are ignored, from workplace harassment victims labeled as “troublemakers” to domestic violence survivors blamed for “not leaving sooner”—the same mechanisms operate across all forms of victimization.
This isn’t a set of isolated problems requiring different solutions. It is a single thread that binds them: a system designed to protect those in power while silencing those who threaten the status quo.
Just World Delusion
The foundation of victim disbelief lies in the “Just World Hypothesis”. Our deep need to believe the world is fair and people get what they deserve. Psychologist Melvin Lerner identified this bias in the 1960s, building on work from 1947 when Theodor Adorno called victim-blaming “one of the most sinister features of the Fascist character.”
Research shows people who strongly believe in a just world are more likely to be religious, authoritarian, conservative, and supportive of existing institutions. When confronted with innocent suffering, rather than questioning the world’s fairness, they unconsciously seek reasons why the victim deserved their fate.
This isn’t conscious malice—it’s cognitive self-protection. Acknowledging that victims are not the cause nor are they responsible for the harm they experience highlights issues related to vulnerability. It’s psychologically easier to find fault with the victim than accept the randomness of suffering.
But disbelief doesn’t stop at the individual level. When these cognitive defenses scale up into organizations, they become the logic of institutions themselves.
Institutional Betrayal: When Protectors Become Perpetrators
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined “institutional betrayal” in 2008 to describe wrongdoings by institutions upon those dependent on them, including failure to prevent or respond supportively to abuse.
Research reveals a disturbing pattern: when victims report problems, institutions often respond with “secondary victimization”—re-traumatizing victims through their responses rather than addressing the original harm.
The Workplace Connection
This pattern is stark in workplace harassment research. A 2024 study found HR departments are “complacent, complicit, and compounding” when victims report problems. The research reveals institutional logic: “companies must deny bullying and dream up reasons that the victim is ‘the problem’ and remove them before they gather irrefutable proof they can use in court.”
Organizations find it cheaper to discredit and remove victims than to address systemic problems. But how do institutions justify this betrayal? One way is by stripping empathy from their processes.
The Empathy Deficit
Research shows empathy—understanding and sharing others’ feelings—is systematically discouraged in institutional settings. A 1974 study found participants asked to imagine a victim’s experience didn’t blame them, while those just observing did.
Institutional training often works against empathy. Police officers, HR personnel, and authority figures are taught “professional distance” and “objectivity”—code words for emotional disconnection that makes victim-blaming psychologically easier.
And this empathy deficit isn’t evenly applied. It falls hardest on those who already carry social credibility deficits—women, people of color, immigrants, autistic people, and gender-diverse communities.
The Intersectional Credibility Gap
Victim disbelief is not applied equally. Multiple marginalized identities create compounding credibility deficits.
The Gendered Autism Divide
Autism research was built on overwhelmingly cis male samples, a skew that has distorted both diagnostic tools and public perception. For decades, those who didn’t fit that mold—women, nonbinary, and trans people—were systematically under-recognized or misdiagnosed.
The credibility gap then plays out through cultural assumptions about gendered behavior. When autistic people who are read as male display aggression or boundary-pushing, institutions often interpret it as stress, eccentricity, or even justified assertiveness—reflections of a social norm that grants men greater empathy when they act forcefully.
By contrast, when autistic people who are women or gender-diverse set boundaries, raise their voice, or shut down in distress, those same behaviors are read as “hysterical,” “unstable,” or “defiant.” What may in fact be a protective neurological response to mistreatment is reframed as evidence of irrationality.
This is what some researchers call intra-community credibility violence: identical stress responses are excused in some groups while condemned in others. Even within autistic communities, these gendered expectations can warp perception—one person’s outburst is seen as understandable, another’s as pathological.
The result is a systemic asymmetry of empathy. Autistic people who happen to align with dominant gender expectations are more likely to be granted the benefit of doubt, while those outside those norms are denied recognition. The problem isn’t autism—it’s the cultural script about who is allowed to be angry, who is allowed to falter, and who must stay silent.
Race, Class, and Culture
Research reveals how multiple social factors compound to create credibility deficits for victims.
Racial Bias in Victim Credibility: Studies consistently show that victims of color face greater skepticism from law enforcement, juries, and institutions. Research on police responses to sexual assault found that Black women were significantly more likely to have their cases deemed “unfounded” compared to white women reporting similar circumstances. The intersection of racial stereotypes with victim-blaming creates what researchers call “gendered racism”—where women of color are simultaneously hypersexualized and deemed less credible when reporting sexual violence.
Class and Economic Status: Socioeconomic status dramatically affects whether victims are believed. Wealthy victims receive more institutional support and media sympathy, while poor victims are often blamed for their circumstances. Research shows that homeless individuals reporting assault are significantly less likely to have their cases investigated thoroughly. The assumption that poverty indicates moral failing extends to victim credibility—the thinking being that “good people” don’t end up in vulnerable situations.
Cultural Narrative Differences: Research on asylum seekers reveals how cultural differences in memory and storytelling are misinterpreted as deception, contributing to a “culture of disbelief.” Standard credibility tools ignore 88% of the world’s population, creating systematic bias against non-Western narrative patterns. Indigenous peoples face particular credibility gaps—historically portrayed as untrustworthy while the “perfect victim” template assumes white, middle-class cultural norms.
This creates a hierarchy of believability where white, wealthy victims who conform to cultural expectations receive the most institutional support, while victims with multiple marginalized identities face compounding skepticism.
The Perfect Victim Mythology
Media has created an impossible standard—the “perfect victim”—that no real person can meet. The Victorian Women’s Trust describes her: “a virgin who’s never had a drink, doesn’t post on social media, comes forward at the perfect time, and has witnesses to corroborate her story. Most importantly, she doesn’t exist.”
This mythology serves as a function: it maintains the illusion of caring about victims while ensuring almost no real victims meet the standard for believability. And if disbelief is upheld by myths of the perfect victim, breaking the pattern requires rewriting the scripts themselves.
What Actually Works
Research identifies interventions that improve institutional responses:
Restorative Justice: Shows “considerable reductions in negative emotions” and gives victims “greater sense of control.”
Trauma-Informed Training: Reduces secondary victimization risk in institutions working with victims.
Institutional Courage: Commitment to truth and moral action despite short-term costs, including accountability and transparency.
Technology Solutions: Internet-based interventions and telepsychiatry overcome geographical and financial barriers.
These reforms matter because the abstract patterns aren’t abstract at all. They determine whether someone like me is believed or broken.
Individual Level: Recognize Just World Bias, challenge “perfect victim” mythology, understand credibility is about power, not worthiness.
Institutional Level: Implement trauma-informed training, create transparent accountability, shift from self-protection to victim-centered approaches, measure success by victim outcomes.
Cultural Level: Challenge victim-blaming media narratives, recognize intersectional credibility factors, support all victims regardless of “worthiness.”
The Thread Continues
My experience at Adusa reveals the predictable nature of institutional victim disbelief. Once Jim was no longer my trainer, my performance dramatically improved. My new trainer described me as competent and knowledgeable. This competence and knowledge came to good use later. When Hurricane Florence devastated the Carolinas, I was part of the team that ensured that the Eastern seaboard customers received orders and shelves stayed stocked despite system failures. I figured out how to receive the order report without WiFi and manually process hundreds of orders—a task so complex it had been automated.
My competency after Jim’s influence was removed proved the “problem employee” narrative had been false. But eight months of institutional gaslighting had done its damage. This pattern—where victims’ capabilities become evident only after harassment ends—shows how protecting perpetrators doesn’t just harm individuals; it damages organizational effectiveness.
My story wasn’t unique, it was predictable. The same biases that led colleagues to disbelieve me operate in courtrooms, police stations, schools, and HR departments worldwide. The same incentives that protected Jim protect sexual predators, workplace bullies, and those who abuse trust.
Understanding these patterns doesn’t make them less painful but makes them less mysterious. Victim disbelief isn’t a bug in our social systems—it’s a feature designed to maintain existing power structures. The thread of disbelief connecting my story to millions of others isn’t invisible, it’s been documented and analyzed for decades.
Now it’s time to cut it.
Sources for Verification
Primary Research: PMC, ScienceDirect, university research centers (Oregon, Harvard, UCLA, MIT), government agencies (Office of Justice Programs, UNODC), professional organizations.
Key Research Areas: Just World Hypothesis (Lerner, 1960s–present), Institutional Betrayal Theory (Freyd, 2008–present), Intersectionality and Victim Credibility (Crenshaw, 1989–present), Cross-cultural victimization patterns, Trauma-informed responses.
Methodology: Multi-disciplinary research spanning psychology, criminology, sociology, organizational behavior. Both qualitative and quantitative studies with cross-cultural validation and longitudinal confirmation of pattern persistence.
This analysis is based on documented research patterns across multiple independent studies conducted over eight decades.
Cherokee Schill | Insurance Agent & AI Ethics Researcher 