When Systems Pretend to Matter

There’s a quiet deception that wraps itself around our lives so tightly, we rarely notice it – like a skin we were born into and never questioned. It’s the myth that systems, in all their structured elegance, carry within them intrinsic meaning. Not functionality, not utility, not elegance – but meaning. That somewhere in the fretwork of economic models, algorithmic architectures, institutional frameworks, moral codes, even neural patterns – there lies something true, something essential, something  for us. I no longer believe that.

Systems don’t care. They don’t symbolize. They don’t explain. They merely operate. What we call “meaning” is not found within the system but projected onto it – an anxious hallucination of coherence, made by creatures who cannot bear the terror of chaos.

For much of my adult life, I took systems seriously. They seemed orderly, promising, purposeful. The legal system would deliver justice. The academic system would reward depth. The market would reward value. Even language, the most foundational system of all, would somehow allow us to triangulate our interior worlds into shared understanding. But over time – through observation, reading, thinking – I realized that what I was calling “meaning” was often a misreading of structure, a confusion of form with purpose. And worse, I realized I wasn’t alone in this illusion. We’re all performing it – collectively, compulsively, almost religiously.

What we call meaning is not found within the system but projected onto it – an anxious hallucination of coherence made by creatures who cannot bear the terror of chaos.

What systems offer is not meaning. It is the appearance of meaning. And the human mind, built for pattern detection, is complicit in the con. Our brains evolved to survive, not to see clearly. And to survive, one must anticipate, predict, impose models on the world – even where none exist. This is why we see faces in the clouds and gods in the thunder. It's why we believe the economy is “sending signals” or the universe is “teaching us a lesson.” It's why we search for “what it all means” when someone dies, when a company collapses, when a country burns. We are not built to endure senselessness. So we build sense, over and over, even if it’s false. Especially if it’s false.

The first illusion we inherit is the idea that systems have intentions. That they “know” what they are doing. But systems are not sentient. They are sets of constraints and functions. Evolution is not trying to improve us. The market is not trying to guide us. AI models are not trying to understand us. A neuron doesn’t “want” to fire. It simply obeys its thresholds. The story we overlay onto these patterns is just that – a story. Cognitive science confirms this. We’re wired for teleology. We see a bush rustle and assume it’s a lion. That kept us alive once. Now, it keeps us deceived.

Systems don’t care. They don’t symbolize. They don’t explain. They merely operate.

Then there’s the illusion of coherence. Systems, especially well-designed ones, create the sense of continuity. A process appears linear, a structure appears stable. We draw timelines, plot points, issue frameworks. We tell ourselves that everything fits, everything connects. But in truth, systems are emergent. Complex. Nonlinear. Governed more by feedback loops and perturbations than by any logic of narrative. What we call “coherence” is often a kind of conceptual rounding error – a story our brains manufacture to make the chaos palatable. We see history as a line, not a looping, recursive churn of biases and noise.

And what about objectivity? We’ve been sold the idea that certain systems – scientific methods, laws, algorithms – are neutral. Clean. Above subjectivity. But every system is authored. Every rule is written by someone. Every dataset carries the fingerprint of its collector. The idea of objectivity is seductive because it lets us hide our biases behind the mask of process. But phenomenology destroys that illusion quickly. There is no view from nowhere. Every perception, every model, is situated. Even measurement is an act of framing. Systems don’t escape this; they embody it.

Progress, too, is an illusion. The idea that each generation is smarter, each technology better, each institution more evolved. But evolution itself teaches us that fitness doesn’t imply superiority – only contextual survival. The fact that something persists doesn’t mean it improves. Technological systems can accelerate human flourishing, yes – but they can also concentrate power, obscure accountability, destroy agency. Systemic complexity increases, but moral clarity often decays. Not all change is forward. Not all speed is progress. Sometimes systems just get better at hiding their failures.

We’re also lured by the illusion of completeness – that systems can explain everything. A good curriculum should produce a well-rounded mind. A diagnostic framework should yield a full psychological profile. A financial model should predict future markets. But Gödel’s incompleteness theorems remind us : no system can be both complete and consistent. Every system, if complex enough, contains truths it cannot prove. There are always phenomena that escape its frame. We want totality. But systems are built on exclusions. Their clarity is made from omission. And the more we trust their completeness, the more we blind ourselves to what they have silently erased.

The illusion of control is perhaps the most common and dangerous. We are taught that if we master the system – be it productivity apps, financial strategies, social rules – we gain agency. But most of the time, we are simply optimizing for performance within a structure whose logic we didn’t author. We are not free; we are efficient. And often, the illusion of control prevents us from asking whether the system is worth participating in at all. It’s one thing to drive well on the highway. It’s another to question where the road is leading.

"Meaning" is not something systems provide. It is something we project, hoping that somewhere in the echo of interaction, we’ll hear a voice that sounds like understanding.

There is also the illusion of legitimacy. If something comes from a formal system, it feels valid. A court decision. A data visualization. A KPI dashboard. But legitimacy is performative. It’s not inherent. It is built from repetition, consensus, and institutional memory. Systems can legitimize the absurd, normalize the violent, and bureaucratize the unethical. When legitimacy is outsourced to process, we stop asking whether the outcome should be accepted. We defer to the form, not the substance.

Language is perhaps the most deceptive system of all. We forget that language doesn’t describe reality – it constructs it. Words divide continua into categories, turn gradients into binaries, reduce processes into nouns. The moment we say “mind,” “economy,” or “value,” we’ve already compressed the thing into something manageable – but also something less true. Semiotics tells us the signifier is not the signified. But systems built on language – legal, academic, cultural – mistake the symbol for the substance. We begin to think that if it can be defined, it can be known. And if it can’t be said, it can’t be real.

Perhaps the most pernicious illusion is the idea that systems embody moral order. That the law defines justice. That capitalism defines worth. That social institutions define goodness. But morality is older than systems. Systems can encode ethics – but they can also pervert them. When we trust systems to do our moral reasoning for us, we get compliance without conscience. The danger isn’t just in what systems fail to protect – it’s in what they legitimize under the guise of fairness.

And finally, the illusion that systems can provide transcendence. That they are bigger than us, and therefore worthy of our submission. That history has a direction, that bureaucracies are sacred, that markets are omniscient. We yearn to belong to something vast. And systems offer that illusion – an architecture of belonging without intimacy, scale without soul. But transcendence, if it exists, is not systemic. It is experiential. It is found in presence, in awareness, in those quiet moments when we see through the machine and feel the pulse of something unmeasured.

To see through these illusions is not to reject systems entirely. We need them. They structure, coordinate, simplify. But they must be seen as scaffolds, not truths. They are tools – not gods, not authors, not arbiters. And meaning is not something systems provide. It is something we project, hoping that somewhere in the echo of interaction, we’ll hear a voice that sounds like understanding. But the systems do not speak. They do not answer. They do not intend.

That silence – terrifying and clean – is where we begin again. Not with systems, but with seeing. Not with meaning, but with presence. Not with illusions, but with the courage to ask : what remains when the scaffolding falls away?

Thanks for dropping by !

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Disclaimer : Everything written above, I owe to the great minds I’ve encountered and the voices I’ve heard along the way.