I've been working on a structural framework in political philosophy that I'd like to submit for adversarial testing. I'm posting here because the argument requires engagement that treats uncomfortable conclusions as analytical problems rather than moral threats — and because the kind of rigorous, non-tribal structural engagement this demands is what this community exists to do.
The core question is simple: Why has enforcement of foundational civic principles become politically costly in liberal democracies — and can you explain that without referencing identity-level commitments that have been elevated to sacred status?
The framework — which I'm calling the Sacralisation Trap (full document is linked) — identifies a recurring structural mechanism:
Political systems produce byproducts through their normal operation (expansion, trade, demographic change). Over time, these byproducts are elevated from contingent facts into foundational principles — absorbed into the legitimacy narrative the system tells about itself. Once elevated, they become sacralised: questioning them is processed as an attack on the system's moral authority rather than as analysis. When the sacralised byproduct comes into conflict with the system's functional prerequisites — say, equal enforcement of law — a structural trap forms. The system cannot enforce its own foundations without violating its legitimacy narrative. And it cannot maintain the narrative without allowing those foundations to erode.
One well-documented case study is the British grooming gangs scandal. The Jay Report (2014) and subsequent investigations found that institutions had the information, the legal authority, and the operational capacity to act — and specifically did not act because the discursive environment around race and multiculturalism made enforcement politically fatal. This is not my interpretation; it is the state's own finding about itself.
The framework was stress-tested against multiple adversarial challenges, including systematic attempts to construct rival explanations (incentive gradient drift, legal-juridical overcorrection, administrative complexity saturation). Each rival model explains behaviour downstream of the political cost — risk aversion, bureaucratic delay, legal caution — but none, as far as I have been able to determine, can explain why enforcement became morally dangerous rather than merely difficult. They all collapse at the same point: the moment you ask why the cost takes a specifically moral form, you must import the sacralisation dynamic or something functionally identical to it.
Key refinements that emerged through testing:
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The trap does not produce total paralysis. Liberal democracies retain diagnostic capacity — the system can commission honest reports about its own failures (the Jay Report is proof). What the trap prevents is the translation of diagnosis into systemic change. The diagnosis is absorbed as evidence of the system's transparency while the structural condition persists.
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The system's response to specific catastrophes is real but domain-specific. Procedural bypasses (mandatory reporting duties, institutional restructuring) hard-code enforcement in narrow areas without addressing the general mechanism. The sacralised narrative remains intact, ready to produce new enforcement failures in new contexts.
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The trap's stable endpoint is not collapse but terminal adaptation: a state that permanently maintains a public legitimacy narrative it knows to be operationally false while governing through procedural shadow mechanisms that quietly contradict it. Functional hypocrisy as permanent governance strategy.
The framework also has an epilogue that I consider essential to the argument in an optional or interpretive sense. It identifies what I believe is the deepest sacralisation of all — not multiculturalism or any specific narrative, but the Enlightenment faith that rational systems, properly designed, can substitute for individual human virtue. The framework itself is built on this assumption. The grooming gangs scandal was not ultimately a systems failure; it was a failure of individual people to do the right thing at personal cost. Mandatory reporting duties are the system admitting it cannot trust people to be good, so it will make it illegal to be bad. That works narrowly. It says nothing about the next time courage is required and no legislation exists to compel it.
The full framework document (including the epilogue) is attached. It runs to ten sections. I'm posting it here because I want it broken, and I haven't found anyone who can break it. If it's wrong, I want to know where. If it's right, I want to understand what that means.
The single falsification criterion: demonstrate a case where enforcement of foundational civic principles became morally costly without any elevation of a byproduct into the system's identity or legitimacy narrative. Not rhetorically. Not emotionally. Structurally.
I'll engage with any response that engages with the argument rather than categorising the person making it. That distinction, as it happens, is one of the framework's testable predictions. Please take the time to read the full document as well, as it contains much more detail on this framework.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
I find this argument generally compelling - although there's never a single determining factor in this stuff, you've done a good job isolating and naming a concept most people have trouble discussing. It does remind me of Nietzsche, who discusses this process extensively in The Genealogy of Morals, and shares an emphasis on individual character over rationalizing moral systems. I'd recommend taking a look at it for inspiration (Kaufmann or Del Caro translations).
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