Political conflicts are frequently framed as natural antagonisms between opposing social actors—law enforcers and protesters, rulers and ruled. This paper argues that such hostility is largely artificial. The true adversary is not the opposing group, but the structural system that manufactures and sustains antagonism in order to extract compliance, labor, and time.
By conceptualizing power as a system of cognitive engineering rather than mere coercion, this paper introduces the idea of a “Minsky Moment of Rule”: the point at which manufactured legitimacy collapses once its underlying illusion is collectively recognized.

Across political systems, both dissenters and enforcers derive their material existence from the same source: collective social production.

• Enforcement wages, equipment, training, and institutional infrastructure are financed through surplus generated by productive society.

• The resulting loop is paradoxical but stable—until examined: society is compelled to finance the mechanisms used to discipline itself.

This antagonism obscures a structural unity: both sides are downstream of the same productive base, differentiated not by origin but by assigned function.

The tools of coercion—surveillance systems, weapons, data infrastructures—are themselves produced by workers, engineers, and knowledge laborers.

What is monopolized is not production, but direction.
Those tasked with executing coercion are typically drawn from the same social strata as those subjected to it, yet are reconstituted through institutional narrative as guardians of order, severing perceived solidarity with their own structural position.

In modern governance, power functions as a productive asset:

• It is institutionalized, replicable, inheritable, and tradable.

• It converts collective time, labor, and obedience into elite insulation, regime continuity, and concentrated privilege.

Power does not merely regulate production—it extracts value directly from social existence.

The system survives through asymmetric allocation:

• Economic, moral, and psychological costs of repression are dispersed across society.

• The gains—extended extraction time, political stability, narrative control—are internalized by a narrow core.

Diffuse harm reduces resistance; concentrated reward sustains loyalty.

Horizontal hostility is not incidental—it is efficient.

By redirecting structural conflict into peer antagonism, governance:

• Decentralizes enforcement

• Transfers monitoring and discipline into society itself

• Reduces the need for constant vertical coercion

Manufactured antagonism is not a moral failure of politics, but a cost-minimization strategy of rule.

Structural contradictions are reframed as moral binaries:

• Order vs. chaos

• Loyalty vs. subversion

• Stability vs. threat

Dissent is personalized, pathologized, or externalized, while systemic extraction remains abstract and invisible.
The illusion persists only as long as participants mistake assigned roles for natural identities.

Despite apparent strength, the system depends on fragile mechanisms:

1. Cost Concealment
   When coercive costs become visible—through fiscal strain, transparency, or social exposure—sustainability erodes.

2. Execution Chain Misalignment
   When enforcers recognize their shared economic fate with those they discipline, compliance weakens.

3. Narrative Dependence
   Authority relies on belief. Competing interpretations destabilize rule more efficiently than confrontation.

4. Time as Extractable Energy
   Organized withdrawal of time—strikes, work-to-rule, refusal of unpaid compliance—directly interrupts the system’s fuel supply.

Rule is sustained by layered obedience:

• Routine obedience (habit and inertia)

• Instrumental obedience (cost-benefit calculation)

• Normative obedience (belief in legitimacy)

The Minsky Moment of Rule begins when normative obedience collapses.
Once belief is withdrawn, routine and instrumental obedience do not disappear—but their price rises exponentially.

Rule functions much like a stage illusion.

Its effectiveness depends not on the invisibility of the mechanism, but on the audience’s willingness not to look.
Once the method is recognized, the illusion cannot be restored—only repeated with diminishing effect.

A Minsky Moment of Rule occurs when:

• Legitimacy narratives are widely recognized as constructed rather than natural.

• The “us versus them” divide loses credibility.

• Actors perceive themselves as participants in a system, not moral opposites.

Power, like magic, is strongest before it is understood.

Governance requires a continuous supply of low-cost compliance.

When obedience shifts from default behavior to a negotiable resource:

• Commands require justification, incentives, surveillance, or force.

• Transaction costs escalate.

• Rule becomes brittle, expensive, and reactive.

Violence may enforce obedience temporarily, but it cannot restore belief—and belief is the cheapest form of rule.

Awareness reduces compliance →
Reduced compliance necessitates intensified coercion or deception →
Intensification exposes structural reality →
Exposure accelerates awareness.

This is a negative feedback spiral that drains the system of its most vital resource: unthinking consent.

The Minsky Moment is a threshold, not a destiny:

1. Violent Reset
   Collapse followed by reconstruction that often reproduces prior hierarchies.

2. Negotiated Transformation
   Elites concede structural limits before total breakdown.

3. Chronic Dysfunction
   Rule persists but loses coherence, efficiency, and trust.

4. Paradigmatic Shift
   The rarest outcome: society abandons the search for better rulers in favor of minimizing rule itself—rendering power transparent, revocable, and strictly functional.

Technological amplification may postpone this moment, but it cannot eliminate the system’s dependence on human compliance.

The ultimate foundation of authority is neither weaponry nor wealth, but a cognitive condition:
the belief that rule is legitimate, natural, and unavoidable.

When individuals across production, enforcement, and knowledge transmission recognize that their antagonism is engineered—and that the true conflict lies in the architecture of extraction—authority loses its mystique.

At that point, governance becomes a mechanical question:

How long can a rule that no one truly believes in be sustained by force alone?

The Minsky Moment of Rule marks the end of a particular political illusion.
It does not promise utopia—but it reliably terminates a specific form of domination.

History turns not when people become violent,
but when they arrive at a simple and dangerous realization:

This arrangement is optional.

Political conflicts are frequently framed as natural antagonisms between opposing social actors—law enforcers and protesters, rulers and ruled. This paper argues that such hostility is largely artificial. The true adversary is not the opposing group, but the structural system that manufactures and sustains antagonism in order to extract compliance, labor, and time.
By conceptualizing power as a system of cognitive engineering rather than mere coercion, this paper introduces the idea of a “Minsky Moment of Rule”: the point at which manufactured legitimacy collapses once its underlying illusion is collectively recognized.

Across political systems, both dissenters and enforcers derive their material existence from the same source: collective social production.

• Enforcement wages, equipment, training, and institutional infrastructure are financed through surplus generated by productive society.

• The resulting loop is paradoxical but stable—until examined: society is compelled to finance the mechanisms used to discipline itself.

This antagonism obscures a structural unity: both sides are downstream of the same productive base, differentiated not by origin but by assigned function.

The tools of coercion—surveillance systems, weapons, data infrastructures—are themselves produced by workers, engineers, and knowledge laborers.

What is monopolized is not production, but direction.
Those tasked with executing coercion are typically drawn from the same social strata as those subjected to it, yet are reconstituted through institutional narrative as guardians of order, severing perceived solidarity with their own structural position.

In modern governance, power functions as a productive asset:

• It is institutionalized, replicable, inheritable, and tradable.

• It converts collective time, labor, and obedience into elite insulation, regime continuity, and concentrated privilege.

Power does not merely regulate production—it extracts value directly from social existence.

The system survives through asymmetric allocation:

• Economic, moral, and psychological costs of repression are dispersed across society.

• The gains—extended extraction time, political stability, narrative control—are internalized by a narrow core.

Diffuse harm reduces resistance; concentrated reward sustains loyalty.

Horizontal hostility is not incidental—it is efficient.

By redirecting structural conflict into peer antagonism, governance:

• Decentralizes enforcement

• Transfers monitoring and discipline into society itself

• Reduces the need for constant vertical coercion

Manufactured antagonism is not a moral failure of politics, but a cost-minimization strategy of rule.

Structural contradictions are reframed as moral binaries:

• Order vs. chaos

• Loyalty vs. subversion

• Stability vs. threat

Dissent is personalized, pathologized, or externalized, while systemic extraction remains abstract and invisible.
The illusion persists only as long as participants mistake assigned roles for natural identities.

Despite apparent strength, the system depends on fragile mechanisms:

1. Cost Concealment
   When coercive costs become visible—through fiscal strain, transparency, or social exposure—sustainability erodes.

2. Execution Chain Misalignment
   When enforcers recognize their shared economic fate with those they discipline, compliance weakens.

3. Narrative Dependence
   Authority relies on belief. Competing interpretations destabilize rule more efficiently than confrontation.

4. Time as Extractable Energy
   Organized withdrawal of time—strikes, work-to-rule, refusal of unpaid compliance—directly interrupts the system’s fuel supply.

Rule is sustained by layered obedience:

• Routine obedience (habit and inertia)

• Instrumental obedience (cost-benefit calculation)

• Normative obedience (belief in legitimacy)

The Minsky Moment of Rule begins when normative obedience collapses.
Once belief is withdrawn, routine and instrumental obedience do not disappear—but their price rises exponentially.

Rule functions much like a stage illusion.

Its effectiveness depends not on the invisibility of the mechanism, but on the audience’s willingness not to look.
Once the method is recognized, the illusion cannot be restored—only repeated with diminishing effect.

A Minsky Moment of Rule occurs when:

• Legitimacy narratives are widely recognized as constructed rather than natural.

• The “us versus them” divide loses credibility.

• Actors perceive themselves as participants in a system, not moral opposites.

Power, like magic, is strongest before it is understood.

Governance requires a continuous supply of low-cost compliance.

When obedience shifts from default behavior to a negotiable resource:

• Commands require justification, incentives, surveillance, or force.

• Transaction costs escalate.

• Rule becomes brittle, expensive, and reactive.

Violence may enforce obedience temporarily, but it cannot restore belief—and belief is the cheapest form of rule.

Awareness reduces compliance →
Reduced compliance necessitates intensified coercion or deception →
Intensification exposes structural reality →
Exposure accelerates awareness.

This is a negative feedback spiral that drains the system of its most vital resource: unthinking consent.

The Minsky Moment is a threshold, not a destiny:

1. Violent Reset
   Collapse followed by reconstruction that often reproduces prior hierarchies.

2. Negotiated Transformation
   Elites concede structural limits before total breakdown.

3. Chronic Dysfunction
   Rule persists but loses coherence, efficiency, and trust.

4. Paradigmatic Shift
   The rarest outcome: society abandons the search for better rulers in favor of minimizing rule itself—rendering power transparent, revocable, and strictly functional.

Technological amplification may postpone this moment, but it cannot eliminate the system’s dependence on human compliance.

The ultimate foundation of authority is neither weaponry nor wealth, but a cognitive condition:
the belief that rule is legitimate, natural, and unavoidable.

When individuals across production, enforcement, and knowledge transmission recognize that their antagonism is engineered—and that the true conflict lies in the architecture of extraction—authority loses its mystique.

At that point, governance becomes a mechanical question:

How long can a rule that no one truly believes in be sustained by force alone?

The Minsky Moment of Rule marks the end of a particular political illusion.
It does not promise utopia—but it reliably terminates a specific form of domination.

History turns not when people become violent,
but when they arrive at a simple and dangerous realization:

This arrangement is optional.