Readiness and Power: 6 Readiness Asymmetry and Structural Injustice

Power governs readiness, but it rarely does so evenly. Some populations are required to remain perpetually ready, while others enjoy slack, discretion, or selective thresholds. This asymmetry of readiness is the structural backbone of social and institutional power.

Who Must Be Ready

Certain roles, positions, and statuses demand constant preparedness. Workers on call, students under assessment, migrants awaiting decisions, or citizens under surveillance inhabit lives where thresholds arrive frequently, escalation is persistent, and release is minimal.

This is not accidental. Systems allocate readiness obligations strategically, ensuring that some populations carry the metabolic and temporal costs of preparedness while others do not.

Who May Wait

Conversely, those with authority or privilege experience temporal slack. They set thresholds, control escalation, and determine the timing of release. They may wait, delay, observe, and reflect, unconstrained by the readiness demands imposed on others.

Asymmetry is not only operational but relational: the readiness of some is conditioned by the waiting or compliance of others.

Structural Inequality Without Meaning

Readiness asymmetry does not rely on belief, ideology, or consent. Inequality emerges from the allocation of potential itself, not from who agrees with whom. Systems are structured such that some bodies, minds, and collectives bear the cost of readiness continuously, while others do so intermittently or not at all.

This shifts our understanding of injustice. Structural power is embedded in readiness flows, independent of intention, narrative, or ideology.

Chronic Readiness and Fatigue

Those subjected to constant thresholds, escalation, and minimal release experience chronic readiness. Their capacity to act, respond, or recover is consumed over time. Fatigue, stress, and precarity are not personal failures; they are systemic outcomes of the uneven distribution of readiness.

Conversely, populations with controlled readiness may appear passive or indifferent, but their potential is stored and deployable — giving them leverage over those continuously prepared.

Resistance Through Misalignment

Asymmetry also creates opportunities for resistance. Deliberate withdrawal, delayed response, refusal to escalate, or selective attention disrupt the expected flow of readiness. Resistance does not always require argument or ideology; it may emerge as structural misalignment, a recalibration of thresholds, pacing, or release.

Implications

Readiness asymmetry reframes power:

• Inequality is not only material or symbolic, but temporal and kinetic

• Control is exercised through potential, not persuasion

• Social justice entails reconfiguring thresholds, pacing, and release, not merely changing beliefs

Understanding this makes visible the hidden architecture of dominance and exploitation — the unspoken, pre-semantic choreography of social life.

Conclusion

Power is not a question of consent or ideology. It is the management of readiness, asymmetrically distributed across populations. Some must always be prepared, some may wait; some control escalation, some endure it. Thresholds, escalation, release, and temporality converge to make power operative without ever invoking meaning.

In the next post, we will examine resistance, refusal, and recalibration, showing how those subjected to these structures can disrupt them, not by argument but by altering readiness itself.