Structure: What Cannot Be Wished Away

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Structure defines the boundaries of possibility, not the content of belief.

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Challenging structure is a little like commanding it to stop raining. Structure is often mistaken for oppression, as if limits exist only because someone decided to impose them. This is flattering to human importance, but inaccurate. Gravity, scarcity, time, weather, and human cognition are not moral positions. They are simply present. Structure, in this sense, is not a rulebook—it is the shape of the field in which action occurs.

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Although structure is best understood as a field, I’ll use a metaphor. Imagine a set of bowls nested inside one another. Each bowl is shaped differently, yet each fits within the next. The bowls are banded—not decorative bands, but structural ones, the kind added to strengthen a vessel under load. The shapes are asymmetrical but stable.

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The idea of nested asymmetrical banded bowls (NABB) is a way of visualizing this. Reality is not flat; it is layered. Each bowl represents a domain with real limits—biological, psychological, institutional, cultural—and those limits are not evenly distributed. What is possible at one level may be impossible at another. A child can violate social norms with limited consequence; a nation-state cannot violate economic arithmetic without eventually paying interest.

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NABB are banded because they hold patterns that work. They are asymmetrical because those patterns are not fair in the moral sense—only stable in the structural one. Pretending otherwise does not make them disappear; it only delays contact.

This is where the distinction between constraint and restraint matters. Constraint refers to limits that exist regardless of intention. Restraint is a choice made within those limits. Confusing the two is one of the great generators of coercion. When restraint is treated as constraint (“this must be done because reality demands it”), choice disappears. When constraint is treated as restraint (“this only exists because someone chose it”), fantasy replaces realism.

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Flattening reality—denying asymmetry, hierarchy, or constraint—forces systems to compensate elsewhere. Pressure does not vanish when denied. It migrates. The result is usually bureaucratic enforcement of what could have been voluntary, and moralization of what should have been structural.

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Structure is not oppression. It is what allows freedom to exist without self-destruction. A world with no NABB does not produce agency—it produces chaos, followed quickly by force.

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Structure does not tell us what to believe.

It tells us what will break.

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Suggested Sources:
Aristotle; Herbert Simon; Elinor Ostrom; Nassim Nicholas Taleb