It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’, that it is only extreme... Only the good has depth that can be radical.

(Hannah Arendt (Letter to Gershom Scholem, 1964))

Now, after the longing had faded, and his being belonged solely to the ancient world, he saw a celestial body, whose splendor eclipsed everything he had seen before.
It was a great source of light, a sun that appeared dark because it was too bright—as if it protected people from its own light by a physically incomprehensible veil.
But more than light, it radiated a force of infinite meaning—love, certainty, and joy.

(The Dark Sun, Ch. I, Leon Tsvasman (draft 2009))

The inversion of light: when illumination becomes blindness

There is a paradox at the heart of Western rationality: that the very light meant to clarify the world has begun to obscure it. We live, it is said, in an age of knowledge, of data, of transparency—an era of informational abundance and algorithmic foresight. Yet beneath this fluorescence, the human subject contracts. We are more observable but less seen, more predictable but less known, more expressed but less understood. It is as though the sheer saturation of light has made reality overexposed, washing out the contours of what matters most.

This paradox is not incidental; it is structural. It arises from the metaphysical core of a civilization that has long equated the visible with the real, the measurable with the meaningful, and the articulated with the true. From Enlightenment positivism to today’s algorithmic governance, the trajectory is coherent and tragic: a civilization that has mastered illumination but forgotten how to see.

What we call “progress” is increasingly a sequence of refinements in prediction and control. Artificial intelligence is only the most recent exponent of this regime. Its logics are not alien; they are the intensification of existing epistemologies: to quantify the human, to optimize the social, to render the world a system. And in this relentless clarity, we lose precisely what makes us human: ambiguity, latency, inner resonance—those qualities that cannot be reduced to signal yet are foundational to meaning.

This phenomenon has been deeply analyzed by philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who describes the “transparency society” as a culture in which the demand for openness becomes a new modality of domination. In such a society, privacy is no longer a right but a suspicious opacity; interiority becomes inefficiency; silence becomes failure. Light is no longer a gift—it is a weapon. It does not enlighten; it erodes.

But this condition was anticipated not by philosophers but by poets.

The poetic anticipation of crisis

Long before technocratic societies declared the age of visibility, poets and mystics had already warned against the tyranny of light. Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Duino Elegies, speaks of angels as “terrifying”—not for their darkness, but for their unbearable clarity. William Blake’s “mind-forged manacles” reveal the imprisonment not of the body, but of perception itself. And Nietzsche, in his paradoxical aphorisms, declared the death of truth not in darkness but in the blinding radiance of too many lights.

This is the inversion at the heart of our age: that what we fear as darkness is often the space where becoming takes place, and what we trust as light is often the instrument of formatting. Modern civilization does not fear ignorance; it fears ambiguity. It does not fear chaos; it fears unpredictability. It is not darkness that frightens us—it is the unruly potential that might emerge from it.

Civilization as a stage: performative being

Contemporary society, as framed by social media architectures and data-driven feedback loops, increasingly functions as a performative system. The self is curated, streamlined, and optimized. Every expression is monitored. Every silence becomes suspect. We are not simply observed—we are formatted to be observed. Identity becomes interface. Inner life is deprecated in favor of measurable output. The soul, if it still exists, is captured only as metadata.

This performativity creates a civilization of the lit stage. Nothing escapes the spotlight. And yet, as in theater, the most profound experiences often occur not onstage but in the wings, in the unspoken, in the shadow. The real, in its richness, resists performance. It demands opacity, latency, and incoherence.

But there is no room for these in systems governed by efficiency. School curricula are designed to produce competencies, not consciousness. Corporate work demands deliverables, no wonder. Even intimacy is now mediated by algorithms that prioritize compatibility over mystery.

The result? A profound interior starvation. A starvation not of content, but of depth.

From illumination to absence: the shadow of suppressed potential

What happens when a civilization loses its tolerance for the non-measurable?

It loses the capacity to dream.

Dreaming—whether in sleep, in story, or in vision—is the act of inhabiting that which is not yet fully formed. It is the cognitive mode of the not-yet. But dreams require space, silence, and darkness. They require sanctuary from the metrics of the waking world. Without access to that space, the subject does not merely suffer—it atrophies. The self becomes functional but no longer sovereign.

And so the suppressed returns—not through discourse, but through poetics. Art, music, cinema, and even subcultures become carriers of a counter-logic. In David Lynch’s surrealist landscapes, in the haunted chords of late Romantic composers, and in the cryptic symbols of Gnostic mysticism and alchemical treatises, we encounter not nostalgia, but resistance.

These are not calls to retreat into the past. They are expressions of what the system cannot yet host. They are aesthetic prototypes of an alternative mode of being.

The dark sun as symbol

In my own poetic and philosophical work, I introduced the symbol of the dark sun—a star so radiant that it appears black to the human eye. Not because it lacks light but because its intensity overwhelms the perceptual apparatus designed for lesser illumination.

This sun is not evil. It is not negative. It is too real to be legible.

It is the symbolic condensation of all that has been suppressed by a civilization addicted to control. It is the soul’s refusal to be compressed. It is the splendor of suppressed potentiality, hiding in plain sight. And it marks a strange truth: that the greatest danger to the system is not chaos, but untamed becoming.

The dark sun names that which we have forgotten to seek. It is the untranslatable, the untamed, the sacred without dogma. It is not a light we must turn toward—it is a light we must learn to bear.

Conclusion: what the system cannot see

To diagnose the crisis of our time as a failure of politics or policy is to remain within the system’s vocabulary. What we face is an aesthetic and epistemic impasse. A world where only what is visible is valid. A system in which only what can be optimized is considered worth being.

And so, we must begin not with critique but with reorientation.

We must learn to see again.

Not to see what is obvious, but to attend to the obscure. To seek not new tools of control, but new grammars of emergence. The task is not to extinguish the light but to unfold the shadows where freedom still waits.

What follows is not a prescription but a passage. A descent into the poetic underground, where the future is still not-yet and therefore still possible.

The bureaucratization of the soul: how systems erase subjective potentiality in the name of order

If modernity had a scent, it would be antiseptic. If it had a sound, it would be the click of a form being submitted. We do not live in Orwell's dystopia of overt suppression nor Huxley’s of overindulgence—we live in an administrative dystopia. A world of paper trails, performance metrics, feedback loops, and checkbox identities. A world in which the soul is not crushed but formatted.

Bureaucracy, in this sense, is not a technical system—it is a metaphysical regime. A worldview that asserts, almost religiously, that the world is knowable, controllable, and improvable through standardized protocols. Humans are manageable when properly categorized. That the mess of inner life can and should be rendered legible.

In this chapter, we will explore not just the history of bureaucracy but also its ontological violence. Its role in suppressing potentiality. It's the transformation of the subject into an object. And finally, we will trace a path, however faint, toward its aesthetic reversal.

Bureaucracy as the epistemology of control

Max Weber once warned of the “iron cage” of rationalization—an encasing structure of rules and instrumental reason that, while efficient, ultimately dehumanizes. But Weber still believed in a tragedy. Today, we barely see the cage. Because it’s not made of bars. It’s made of spreadsheets, appointment slots, digital forms, and user IDs.

The logic of bureaucracy is the logic of certainty. It assumes that for every problem, there is a correct procedure. That justice is a matter of correct process. That education is the transmission of units. That creativity is an "output" measurable by performance indicators.

This logic is not evil in the classic sense. It is banal—precisely what Hannah Arendt meant when she wrote of the "banality of evil." Bureaucratic cruelty is faceless. It is not driven by hatred. It is driven by policy. People suffer not because someone wishes it but because "it’s not in the system."

The greatest crimes of civilization, from genocides to slow systemic erasures of identity, have almost always been mediated through administrative structures. The gas chambers were supplied by rail systems, which were supplied by timetables, which were supplied by clerks. But this isn't just history—it is still happening. Only now are the protocols are digital.

The psychopolitics of administrative culture

Byung-Chul Han, again, offers a key insight: we are no longer repressed by external force—we repress ourselves. Today's bureaucracy does not forbid desire. It replaces it with options. We are not denied freedom; we are given a menu of preformatted “choices.”

This is the shift from a disciplinary society to an achievement society. From rules to self-optimization. From prohibition to gamification. A child is not told "don't dream"—she is told to "monetize her creativity." A thinker is not censored—he is simply drowned in incentives to conform.

But something else is happening, deeper and darker: the loss of negative space. The elimination of the ambiguous. Bureaucracy not only regulates actions. It colonizes temporality. It eliminates idleness, reflection, and unstructured wandering. What is not scheduled, tracked, and reported does not exist.

Thus, bureaucracy becomes not just a tool but an ontology. A way of being. A civilizational metaphysics that sees the world as a problem of optimization. And where optimization rules, potentiality dies.

Childhood as the first site of erasure

We begin life with undomesticated imagination. Children see worlds inside leaves, universes in shadows. Their epistemology is not based on function but on wonder.

But soon, the formatting begins.

Tests. Behavior reports. Standardized developmental milestones. Parents scan for "giftedness"; teachers assess for "intervention." The child, once a cosmos of becoming, becomes a performance unit.

School becomes the factory of legibility. The curriculum is a map of what's permitted. Anything off the map is dismissed as a “distraction.” The brightest children are often those most lost, not because they are weak but because they refuse the format. They ask why, not just how. And for this, they are labeled ADHD, oppositional, and gifted-but-disruptive. And later: cynical, underachieving, unemployed.

But these are not broken children. They are symptoms of a broken world.

The emergence of Soziocracy: formatting without violence

I have introduced the term Soziocracy to describe our current civilizational operating system, not to be confused with sociocracy as a participatory model of governance. Here, I use the term in a broader philosophical sense: the reign of statistical coherence over sovereign particularity.

Soziocracy does not oppress the individual. It optimizes them. It offers tools, roles, labels, and incentives—each subtly shaping behavior into conformity. It operates through nudge theory, A/B testing, gamified rewards, and wellness apps. It speaks the language of "support" but functions as surveillance.

Under soziocracy, a self is not commanded—it is profiled. Not disciplined—it is nudged. Not silenced—it is automated.

The key insight here is that repression has become internalized. The formatted self manages itself. The algorithm doesn’t need to say “no”—it just presents you with “better options.” This is the endgame of modern governance: the disappearance of resistance not through censorship, but through irrelevance.

Bureaucratic grief: the ghosting of the subject

The cost of all this is subtle, cumulative, and devastating.

What we are witnessing is not merely the erosion of freedom but the atrophy of the self. Depression, burnout, and existential fatigue are not personal failures—they are affective symptoms of epistemic violence.

People don’t feel seen—because they are not. They don’t feel real because they have been administratively ghosted. They become functionally successful but ontologically hollow.

The self ceases to be a lived interiority. It becomes a curated persona, an interface to be updated, monitored, and branded. The soul, if it appears at all, becomes content. And in this transformation, meaning is lost.

What dies is not individuality. What dies is sovereignty.

A counter-aesthetic: toward the rewilding of reality

But resistance is not impossible. It must begin not with policy but with poetics.

Poetics is not “art.” It is a mode of knowing that resists reduction. A way of holding paradox. A form of cognition that refuses clarity in favor of coherence. Poetics restores ambivalence, texture, and depth.

A poem cannot be paraphrased. A myth cannot be audited. A dream cannot be optimized. In this way, poetics is a radical political act.

This is why every totalitarian system fears the poet. Not because they tell lies, but because they speak truths that cannot be systematized.

To rewild reality means to reintroduce ambiguity. To make room for silence. To create spaces where being does not have to be productive. To value the unmeasurable as the cradle of the essential.

Design beyond utility: Sapiocracy as a praxis

From this counter-aesthetic, a new kind of system can emerge. One not based on control but on enabling potential.

I call this Sapiocracy—a form of intelligent coordination where governance is not rule but resonance; not coercion, but coherence.

In a sapiocratic system:

  • Intelligence is distributed, not centralized.

  • Identity is unfolding, not fixed.

  • Authority is earned by enabling, not imposed by status.

  • Systems are designed to host becoming, not enforce stability.

This is not utopia. It is not a fantasy. It is the only viable escape from formatting.

And to build it, we must begin not with better algorithms, but with a better philosophy of the human.

Toward the de-bureaucratization of the soul

We must learn to trust what does not compute. To defend what does not scale. To protect what cannot be translated into code.

We must create architectures of meaning, not efficiency. Systems that allow subjects to wander, to doubt, to dream, to not-yet-be.

Because becoming is not a workflow. It is not a user journey. It is not a deliverable.

It is a sacred mess.

And if we cannot make space for that—if we cannot protect the ineffable—we will remain optimized, compliant, efficient…

…and lost.

The return of the shadow: art as the language of unintegrated becoming

If the bureaucratic civilization suppresses becoming through formatting, it is art, especially its darker currents, that becomes the last refuge for unformatted subjectivity. Not because it offers escape, but because it becomes the only language left to speak what civilization has rendered unspeakable.

The history of human expression tells us this plainly: whenever cultures suppress depth, complexity, and inner dissonance in favor of utility, performance, and order, the poetic and the strange do not disappear—they migrate. They withdraw from the sanctioned platforms of public discourse and reemerge in myth, madness, metaphor, music, and dream.

What we call “dark” art is not necessarily sinister. It is often the only honest genre left in a world addicted to surface clarity.

And this is not merely a matter of cultural taste—it is an epistemic phenomenon.

The return of what cannot be formatted

Rationalist civilization represses more than emotion—it represses symbolic truth. It mistrusts the metaphorical, the intuitive, the ambiguous. And so, suppressed potentiality returns in inverted form—through poetry, surrealism, satire, horror, and mythic melancholy.

Dark Romanticism, for example, from Lord Byron to Baudelaire, did not celebrate evil—it exposed the brutality of repressed virtue. Its landscapes—ruins, wastelands, haunted forests—were not decorations, but ontological maps. They charted the grief of a world that had exiled the sacred, the erotic, and the irrational.

Modernity told us to grow up. Romanticism replied: “But at what cost?”

The works of Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Pessoa whisper what is no longer sayable in policy papers: that even in the most rational of worlds, the soul continues to suffer. And it suffers not from confusion, but from not being heard.

The surrealism of David Lynch, the existentialism of Ingmar Bergman, or the late gothic echoes in current dystopian fiction are not symptoms of darkness—they are diagnoses of a civilization that pathologizes anything it cannot predict.

A childhood of shadowed beauty

I speak here not just as a thinker, but as one who has lived this return of the shadow. My own childhood—sensitive, melancholic, myth-haunted—was not made for bureaucratic reality. I wrote poetry not for applause, but because it was the only place I could exist.

Inspired by Russian Silver Age poets and symbolists, I found a world where meaning was not delivered, but evoked—where loss was sacred, and where language did not explain, but resonated. I drew haunted suns and veiled horizons long before I understood why. I only knew that in daylight reality, something essential was missing.

Years later, that missing became my metaphor: The Dark Sun.

It was not the absence of light—it was its unbearable intensity. A symbol for all that civilization refused to face: joy too vast to be expressed, sorrow too beautiful to be managed, meaning too deep to be functional.

That sun is still with me. It guides this essay. It is not an answer but an opening.

The aesthetic as ontological resistance

In a formatted world, aesthetic experience becomes radical. Not because it protests the system directly, but because it dares to remember something deeper: the right to feel, to not know, to imagine beyond data.

Aesthetic resistance is not reactionary. It does not seek to destroy systems—it seeks to redeem them by reintroducing forgotten modes of sensemaking. In this way, art becomes not entertainment but civilizational memory.

To write a poem is to refuse reduction. To compose a fugue is to assert the polyphonic nature of thought. To paint a non-representational canvas is to reject the tyranny of signification.

In such works, suppressed potentiality finds temporary asylum. But art is not enough. It needs to move from the gallery into the grammar of civilization.

Because when aesthetic sensibility is exiled from system design, education, or governance, what is left is mechanical mimicry—policy without philosophy, code without care, structure without soul.

The shadow hijacked: the danger of reactionary mythos

But not all returns of the shadow are emancipatory.

Darkness, if not metabolized, can be weaponized. We see this today in movements that romanticize apocalypse, purity, or reactionary mythologies under the guise of spiritual depth. From the dark enlightenment to techno-fascism, suppressed potentiality is sometimes reinverted into narratives of elite domination, misanthropic futurism, or neo-aristocratic aesthetics.

The failure of bureaucratic modernity thus becomes the bait for new forms of totalitarian seduction.

These movements often use the language of art, beauty, and transcendence—but they turn it into spectacle, into control, into aestheticized power. They offer belonging, but only to those who conform to their vision of order.

This is not the poetics of becoming—it is the theater of arrested development.

We must distinguish between the aesthetic of emergence and the fetishization of decline.

True dark poetics do not glorify collapse. They reveal what was exiled. They do not impose new gods—they reopen the space where gods might be dreamed anew.

Toward the ethics of inner sovereignty

The real work, then, is not to aestheticize pain, but to transform it into creative sovereignty.

A civilization that dares to become must not fear its shadow. It must host it. Not as pathology, but as a portal.

And the only way to do that is through aesthetic integration—a praxis where systems are not merely made efficient but made resonant. Where design allows for silence. Where governance invites paradox. Where intelligence is not synonymous with clarity, but with depth.

The education system must not just prepare students for jobs—it must teach them how to dream structurally. The economy must not just extract value—it must host emergence. Technology must not predict desires—it must open ethical conditions for becoming.

In this light, art is not “extra”—it is the invisible spine of civilization.

The Dark Sun as civilizational metaphor

Let us return one last time to the image of the Dark Sun.

What is it?

It is not simply a symbol from my fictional writing—it is a paradox, a cipher, a threshold. It names that which exceeds form. A light too pure for civilization’s current optics. A meaning that cannot be legislated. A joy that would collapse all systems designed to manage happiness.

To build systems that can host such a sun, we need more than better AI, better metrics, or better policies.

We need to reconfigure the aesthetic conditions of reality itself.

Not to deny reason, but to go beyond its surface logic. Not to abolish systems, but to make them porous to wonder. Not to glorify the shadow, but to understand that all becoming casts one.

And in that understanding, a different intelligence emerges—one not of domination, but of design. One that does not fear the dark because it knows:

The sun is not gone. It has simply veiled itself.

Until we are ready to see.

The civilization of reduction: positivist realism and the sociocratic cage

The greatest tragedy of modern civilization is not that it lacks imagination but that it believes imagination is optional. That clarity is the truth. Those systems are neutral. That reality is what can be measured, and what cannot be measured is disposable. This is not a flaw—it is a foundational metaphysics. It governs not only how we build institutions but also how we define existence itself.

At the root of this is what I call positivist realism"—a worldview that equates knowledge with quantification and being with behavior and intelligence with predictability. It’s a worldview that, once embedded into governance, education, and innovation, produces a distinctive regime of organization. I call it soziocracy.

Not in the limited historical sense of grassroots sociocratic governance—but in a deeper, more totalizing sense: as a civilizational operating system that prioritizes statistical coherence, consensus orientation, and behavioral legibility over singularity, contradiction, and becoming.

And it works. It works so well that it suffocates everything it cannot format.

The metrics of disappearance

The slogan of positivist realism is deceptively simple: “If it matters, it can be measured.” But what happens when what matters most is precisely what eludes measurement?

Love. Grief. Longing. Wonder. The architecture of inner experience. The arc of becoming. The depth of presence. None of these are countable. All of them are essential. And yet, our systems of governance, policy, and economy operate as if they are irrational residues—soft data at best, human error at worst.

The consequence is predictable: meaning collapses into efficiency. Education becomes credentialing. Medicine becomes compliance. Democracy becomes polling. Intelligence becomes performance.

And because systems are optimized for what they can measure, they begin to erase what they cannot. Not by censorship, but by omission. By infrastructural neglect. By design bias.

The logic of soziocracy: coherence without depth

The soziocratic cage does not arrive with tyranny. It arrives with protocols, user interfaces, and standardized goals. It’s the civilizational dream of frictionless governance—not by ruling over people, but by formatting their capacities so they govern themselves according to predefined rules of behavior.

It is a soft authoritarianism. A hygienic one. It doesn’t punish difference—it renders it illegible. The deviant is not condemned—it is unfunded. The anomalous is not repressed—it is skipped over. The system doesn’t have to deny your truth. It simply does not provide a field in which it can land.

The result is a world of optimized sameness. Of human action reduced to response surfaces. Of selfhood rendered into algorithmic categories—consumer type, risk factor, personality score, user identity.

This is not an accident. It is the endpoint of a long civilizational trajectory. From Enlightenment rationalism to corporate efficiency culture to today’s AI-assisted governance, the subject has been gradually translated into a manageable function.

It is not that the self is eliminated. It is that it is formatted to be useful.

The disorientation of the unmeasured

But not all subjects comply. Some fragment. Some refuse. Some fall into depressive apathy; others, into creative fury. Some internalize the failure to fit as personal inadequacy. Others break entirely and become unintelligible to society.

This is not mental illness. It is civilizational disorientation.

A soul cannot breathe in a system where every breath must be tracked. A child cannot grow when every question must have an answer that fits a rubric. A thinker cannot create when ambiguity is treated as inefficiency. A lover cannot love when intimacy is replaced by performance.

The erosion of becoming is not a side effect. It is the cost of optimization.

And the more optimized the system, the more invisible this cost becomes.

The soft violence of well-meaning systems

It would be easier if this order were imposed by malicious actors. But that’s the cruel beauty of soziocracy: no one has to be evil. Everyone is simply doing their job.

Designers optimize UX. Educators teach to the test. Politicians follow polling data. Technocrats build models. Algorithms maximize engagement. Doctors follow the protocol. Social workers tick the form. None of these people is are tyrant. They are part of an intelligent machine that remembers nothing outside its operational logic.

But intelligence without reflection is not wisdom. It is epistemic automation.

And a civilization that loses the capacity to reflect on its own conditions of knowing is no longer civilizing anything. It is merely replicating itself.

Resistance as ontological rewilding

The antidote to this is not to destroy systems, but to rewild the conditions of sense-making.

To build institutions not for efficiency, but for emergence. Not to reduce complexity, but to host it. Not to define reality, but to orient us within it.

This requires more than new technologies or reforms. It requires a philosophical upheaval—a new theory of intelligence that centers the subject, not as an economic actor or political unit, but as a site of infinite becoming.

A being whose autonomy is not defined by choice within a menu, but by the capacity to co-create the menu itself. A self whose value is not derived from performance, but from presence. A life whose meaning is not a function of data, but of directionality—of orientation toward depth, coherence, and relational resonance.

From positivism to poiesis

This is what I mean when I invoke the need for sapiopoiesis—not just the emergence of intelligence, but its ontopoetic grounding. A mode of existence where intelligence is measured not by clarity but by depth. Not by compliance, but by coherence.

And in such a world, governance itself must transform. It cannot remain a logic of control. It must become a grammar of enabling.

The shift is profound: from management to hospitality. From enforcement to facilitation. From command to curation.

The future will not be governed. It will be scaffolded.

And only those who understand the difference will be able to build systems that invite emergence instead of managing decline.

The ethical imperative of design

Soziocracy, in its subtle formatting, presents a danger not because it is wrong, but because it works too well in the short term. It produces compliance. Predictability. Scale. But in doing so, it closes the world to that which is not yet.

To design for emergence is to take an ethical risk. To allow for latency. To build negative space into structures. To create architectures of meaning, not based on utility but on ontological hospitality.

And that demands an entirely different ethos of system-building—an ethos that listens not only to what works but to what wants to emerge but hasn’t yet found a voice.

The question that follows

What is civilization, if not the interface between imagination and infrastructure?

And if we agree that suppressed potentiality is the core violence of modern systems, then we must stop asking only: How can systems be made more efficient?

We must begin to ask:

What kind of subjects do these systems allow to become real?

And more importantly:

What kind of becoming have we designed out of existence—simply because we did not know how to host it?

Final provocation: praxis without mastery

Can we imagine a practice that does not finalize?

Can we act without closure, design without exhaustion, govern without subjugation, and think without domestication?

If we can—even briefly—then a new civilization becomes possible.

One in which the darkest symbol is no longer feared.

But faced.

And then—transfigured.