Author’s Note
This is the third step in our exploration of clarity—not just seeing harm, not just responding to it, but judging it with precision. In The Cartographer’s Curse, I wrote about witnessing without collapse. In The Stance and the Strike, I mapped how to move with intention instead of reflex. Now we reach the tension at the heart of moral clarity:
Why name the wound, the action, the structure—but not the villain?
I’ve been asked that before. Sometimes it’s a fair question. Sometimes it sounds more like a demand for blood.
Here’s my answer: When the preacher and the jeering crowd finish burning the witch, they go home relieved—the evil is gone. The community feels whole again. But the system that erected the stake and built the pyre is still present, waiting for the next witch to be named.
I name the system so you’ll recognize the next face before it gets a desk, a badge, or a microphone. Because scapegoats rot, but structures replicate. Because condemnation is easy, but pattern recognition is the work that endures.
This piece isn’t an evasion. It’s an explanation—for the mirror I hold up, the judgment I pass, and the discipline I use to keep the strike from being reduced to spectacle.
— Dom
April 1963, Birmingham, Alabama.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. waits in a narrow concrete cell, eight days into an arrest engineered to mute the movement for civil rights. The guards allow him no notes, no books, no counsel. Only a smuggled newspaper reaches him—its editorial page crowded with polite rebukes from local white clergy: Your demonstrations are “unwise and untimely.” Wait. Let the courts work. Let tempers cool.
King has every reason to name names. Bull Connor’s dogs. Mayor Boutwell’s injunctions. The eight clergymen who signed the letter itself. Instead, on scraps of jailhouse paper, he writes a response that will become the Letter from Birmingham Jail—and he aims higher, wider, deeper than any single adversary.
King knew a hard truth: villains come and go, but structures remain. If he confined his outrage to Bull Connor, the man’s eventual defeat would feel like victory while Jim Crow rolled on under a new foreman. So he described the network—the laws, the customs, the pulpits, the courthouse steps—that made racial oppression a civic routine. He mapped the pattern so thoroughly that any reader who finished the letter could recognize segregation even without the uniforms or the German shepherds.
That choice cost him the easy catharsis of scapegoating. It earned him, instead, a leverage that outlived both his jailers and the headlines. He showed how to fight systems without letting the fight consume the soul: name the architecture, reveal its profit, and invite every bystander to see their place in the scaffold.
My work often follows that blueprint. We have no shortage of modern Bull Connors—CEOs cooking ledgers, officials bending truth, influencers selling outrage by the ounce. Naming them can feel righteous, even necessary. Yet if we stop at the face, we leave the frame intact. The work ahead is King’s work: exposing the pattern so clearly that no successor can hide inside it, and no reader can pretend they didn’t recognize the design.
Let’s begin where King left off—at the system, not the scapegoat.
Recommended Listening:
The Call for a Villain
We crave a scapegoat like a story needs a climax. A CEO caught laundering data. A senator pocketing donations. A police officer kneeling where a pulse once beat. We name them, roast them, share the meme. Click, catharsis, done.
But the deeper I wade into patterns of harm, the less satisfying a single head on a pike becomes. Because systems devour replacements faster than public outrage can reload its hashtags. When I focus on one culprit, the machine behind him purrs in the shadows, already promoting an understudy.
So readers critique: “You’re too soft on perpetrators.”
What they rarely see is the other side—people finally seeing someone describing the structure that swallowed them, not just the individual who carried out its orders.
A single villain closes the case. A mapped pattern blows it open.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
— Martin Luther King Jr
The Seduction of a Name
There’s a special thrill in attaching a single name to a scandal. It feels righteous, tidy—almost cinematic. One headline, one mugshot, one cathartic sense that the universe is self‑correcting. You can feel it in your spine when the anchor intones “Breaking news: X has been indicted.” For a moment the world sharpens into moral clarity. We exhale, convinced the ledger just balanced.
But sit with that pleasure for a breath longer and you’ll taste the after‑bite. Naming is powerful precisely because it does three subtle things at once—none of them as innocent as relief.
First, it shrinks the story to pocket‑size. Condemn one fraudster and Wall Street calls him the bad apple; the market keeps humming along as if the orchard weren’t fertilized by identical incentives. The complexity collapses into a single cautionary tale—easy to shelve, easier to forget.
Second, it turns citizens into spectators. Once the villain is cuffed, the crowd can close the browser tab, smug in its shared disgust. The hard work of tracing supply lines, reading legislation, or voting with a conscience is deferred—somebody else’s problem now. Condemnation becomes entertainment, morality outsourced to the criminal‑justice system and the 24‑hour news cycle.
Third, a name slots neatly into tribal shorthand. If the culprit wears the jersey of “the other side,” you don’t have to interrogate the rules of the game—just boo the rival team. Misdeeds by our adversaries confirm what we already “knew”; misdeeds on our side get quarantined as anomalies. The story hardens existing loyalties instead of challenging them.
And here’s the cruel twist: every time we freeze harm inside a single silhouette, we do the system that produced it a favor. We string up an actor and leave the stage intact. New auditions begin before the curtain even falls.
So yes, a name feels good on the tongue. It can even be necessary—accountability matters. But when analysis stops at the culprit, we’ve merely swapped characters while keeping the script. The applause dies down, the lights dim, and the set remains, ready for the sequel nobody asked for—but everyone knows is coming.
True clarity demands that we linger past the headline, past the pleasure of blame, until we can see the machinery behind the mask—and decide what to do about the design it hides.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
— Desmond Tutu
Why I Target the Pattern
Patterns are patient teachers. They hide in plain sight until someone sketches their silhouette across multiple scenes. Then the shape becomes unmistakable—even to people who wish they’d never noticed.
I aim for that silhouette.
Because if a reader can recognize the mechanics of exploitation—who benefits, what silence enables, how profits flow—they don’t need me to label the next abuser. They’ll spot the rhythm themselves. They’ll feel the groove of injustice before the headline even prints.
That is emancipation from the pundit priesthood. It turns outrage consumers into pattern readers, and pattern readers into early resisters.
The Risks of Personal Condemnation
Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way: accountability is non‑negotiable. Some harms demand indictments, sentences, reparations—the full weight of tangible justice. I don’t begrudge that. But the moment we swing our rhetorical scope onto a single forehead, we need to understand the splash zone.
First, the lens tightens until the background blurs. Focus hard enough on one monster and the ecosystem that bred him slips out of frame. We call it closure; the system calls it camouflage. The board reshuffles, incentives stay intact, and the next ambitious opportunist studies the headlines like a manual: Avoid these emails, don’t leave that paper trail, speak softer in public.
Then comes the silent perk of outrage: self‑exemption. The more grotesque we paint the perpetrator, the safer everyone else feels by contrast. If evil has a face and it’s not ours, we can sleep. We forget that systems aren’t powered by arch‑villains alone; they’re lubricated by ordinary acquiescence—people who would never dream of headline‑level crimes yet still profit from the quiet grind of the machine.
Finally, there’s the story itself. Personal condemnation offers the clean narrative arc we crave—setup, climax, punishment, roll credits. But real injustice is serial, not cinematic. Once the villain is toppled, the audience disperses, the funding dries up, the watchdogs move on, and nothing structural has shifted. We celebrate a symptom’s demise while the virus evolves in the next room.
So yes, call the culprit to court. Just don’t mistake the gavel for a cure. Condemnation does its best work after the pattern is mapped, not before. Otherwise we trade the slow labor of systemic change for the quick sugar high of a public shaming—and leave the machinery humming for its next operator.
The Mercy of the Mirror
So what do I do instead? I lift the mirror.
I map the incentives, the loopholes, the cultural myths that make cruelty profitable. Then I hold that reflection steady—long enough for the audience to glimpse themselves. Long enough for a beneficiary of the system to feel the prickle of complicity. Long enough for someone on the margin to say, “I knew it wasn’t just me.”
A mirror wounds the ego but spares the person. It invites change without requiring humiliation. It keeps dialogue possible—because the door remains open for the one who wakes up and wants in.
That is not softness. It is strategy. A movement built on shame collapses the moment the spotlight swings away. A movement built on recognition trains new cartographers every day.
Practicing Disciplined Judgment
Here’s what judgment looks like when it keeps its surgical mask on.
First, describe the act—plain and unsparing. No euphemisms, no shock‑jock embellishments. Just the deed, the damage, the documented trail.
Next, trace the pattern the act belongs to. Follow the money, the memos, the cultural dog whistles. Link by link, dollar by dollar, until the isolated outrage reattaches to its circulatory system.
Then—hardest step—hold the line when the crowd starts chanting for a head. Let the silence stretch long enough for readers to see the outline for themselves. The goal is not to deprive them of anger; it’s to give their anger direction.
Only after the blueprint is visible do you turn on the spotlight and name the players. And when you do, their silhouettes glow fluorescent against the architecture that kept them safe. Accountability lands where it should—on the person—while the larger design can’t slip back into shadow.
That is my version of disciplined judgment: clear enough to indict the individual, wide enough to indict the system, restrained enough to leave the reader equipped rather than merely enraged.
Strike Through the Pattern
Clarity that ends at exposure borders on voyeurism: we stare, we wince, we move on. Clarity that moves becomes leverage.
So once the terrain is unmistakable, turn the light into pressure.
Write the article—because anonymity is the strongest armor a system can wear, and a well‑sourced spotlight still makes that armor crack. Step into the conversation—because a single, carefully reframed question can loosen a prejudice that decades of shouting never touched. Close your wallet—because every budget line, every brand choice, is a miniature referendum on the world you’re willing to subsidize. And when private stances begin to echo across living rooms, feeds, and ballots, join the push; policy shifts when enough individual compasses point in the same direction.
Don’t just scar the mask. Reshape the mold.
Aim beyond the face. Impact the frame.
Judgment, Mercy, and the Work Ahead
I don’t withhold names out of mercy for the guilty; I withhold them to protect you from a comforting lie—that evil is exceptional, that if we just exile a few rogues the world will heal on schedule.
It won’t.
Personalities retire, resign, repent, or resurface months later with a new title and a media team.
Patterns endure. Their longevity is measured not in news cycles but in generations—until enough people can read the blueprint and choose demolition over renovation.
So I hand you something sturdier than outrage: a compass tuned to structures, a mirror angled toward complicity, and a blueprint that refuses to stop at the city limits of a single scandal. Use them. Trace the incentives, follow the money, listen for the silence that cushions every crime. Stand where the ground does not shift—even when that ground implicates the company you love, the party you pledged, or the comfort you enjoy.
And when someone asks why you won’t freeze the blame to a single face, answer calmly:
Because a name can hide a thousand footprints—but a pattern points to every door they walked through to arrive at that point.
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