The Cashew and the Cage

I did not set out to indict anyone. I set out only to notice something: that most of us consume, defend, and repeat what we have not verified, and that the few who pause to verify are often made to regret the pause.

I used to think this was a flaw in people, a shortage of will, a poverty of thought. It is easier, and more comfortable, to believe that. It lets the system off the hook and puts the failure inside the individual, where it can be privately mourned instead of publicly questioned. But the longer I sat with it, the less it looked like a personal failing and the more it looked like a design, not designed by a hand, but by time, and by whatever survives time.

Consider the tree. You plant a cashew and you do not know what it will become. It may rise before it spreads, or spread before it rises. It may stay low and wide, hugging the ground it was given. What it becomes is not chosen so much as negotiated, with soil, with light, with whatever else was already growing nearby. Institutions are the same. Nobody drafts a government, a religion, a bank, a school, and specifies in advance how far its branches will reach or how low its fruit will hang. It grows the shape that circumstance allows, and only later do we call that shape "intentional," because intention is a story we tell about outcomes we did not predict but have learned to defend.

And not every tree that grows is fertile. This is the part I think we skip too quickly. We look at an institution, old, tall, established, and assume its age is proof of its yield. But some structures only ever take up room. They shade the ground beneath them and give nothing back for the shade they cost. The tragedy is not that such institutions exist. The tragedy is that we are rarely taught to ask, of any given tree, whether it bears fruit at all,  only to assume that if it is old enough, it must.

The ones that do bear fruit face a second problem, and this is the one I keep returning to: fruit attracts. It attracts hunger, and it attracts pests, and it attracts thieves, and so the tree that succeeds must now be guarded, harvested, processed, defended, all the apparatus that a fruitless tree never needed. I used to think the bureaucracy, the gatekeeping, the quiet suppressions were signs of institutional corruption. I am less sure now. I think they may simply be the cost of the fruit existing at all. Success does not end the problem. It just changes which problem you now have to solve, and who gets to solve it, and who gets fed.

I argue about systemic programming and indoctrination, this is where the "programming" I kept circling back to actually lives, not in some overt conspiracy, but in the bundling. We are taught, correctly, to trust specialists we cannot independently verify, the epidemiologist, the structural engineer, the monetary economist. Nobody has time to relitigate every expert claim from first principles; that trust is the whole point of dividing labor in the first place. But institutions learn to launder other kinds of demands through that same channel of trust, demands that have nothing to do with expertise and everything to do with continuity, obedience, comfort. We are handed the fruit and told not to ask about the orchard. And because the trust for the first kind of deference is legitimate, the second kind rides in on its back, unexamined.

What unsettles me most is not that this happens. It's that the exits are rigged both ways. The rare person who becomes conscious of the design and tries to leave the loop, to actually build something outside it, usually ends up needing the same legitimacy, the same funding, the same platforms the loop already controls. So they climb back in, and become, in time, another branch of the very tree they meant to cut down. And the ones who refuse to climb back in, who keep their conviction intact, typically lose the standing, legal, social, institutional, required to be heard by the people still inside. They become right and irrelevant at the same time. Both paths quietly neutralize the threat. Not through violence. I dare to say; through gravity.

I don't say this to be cynical, though I recognize it reads that way. I say it because I think the honest position is not "burn the tree down", the fruit is real, some of it does feed people, but "stop mistaking the size of the tree for proof that it should be trusted unquestioned, and stop pretending that the shade it gives us costs nothing to someone standing further from the trunk."

Maybe that's the whole of it. Man plants trees he cannot fully see the shape of, eats fruit he did not grow alone, and spends his one life negotiating with a structure that was never his to design and will outlast whatever he decides about it. He can climb it, prune it, sit in its shade, or walk away from it entirely, but the tree keeps growing regardless, and someone is always inheriting whatever shape it takes next.

I don't know that there's a way out of that. I'm not sure "out" is even the right word for it. Maybe the most anyone gets is a clearer view of the branches, and the honesty to admit which fruit they've already eaten without asking where it came from.

®Ahmed Salim Jn ✍️ 

#Uloko