From Audit to Allegory to Authority: Optimisation and the Limits of Control

The Institutional Hearings exposed how optimisation shapes modern systems: democracy, capitalism, education, and governance. Measured, goal-directed, and feedback-driven, optimisation ensures stability, predictability, and efficiency — but often at the cost of agency, integrity, and vitality. Systems that promise participation, creativity, or justice frequently privilege compliance, continuity, and legibility instead.

The Liora trilogy translates these insights into lived, mythical experience. In three worlds — mirrors, gardens, and seas — Liora encounters the consequences of optimisation on identity, growth, and life itself. Through her eyes, readers witness integrity, resilience, and vitality emerging beyond measurement and control. These stories do not repeat the forensic critique; they embody it, showing what is possible when human action refuses to be fully optimised.

Yet the trilogy also illuminates a critical political insight: optimisation is structurally congenial to totalitarian logic. When applied to society as a whole:

• Compliance is measurable; deviation is legible and punishable.

• Hierarchies are codified, with rank and value made transparent in real time.

• Uniformity is enforced, collective identity quantified, and risk minimised at the expense of autonomy and creativity.

Viewed mythically:

• In the mirrored city, totalitarian-optimisation turns reflection into surveillance and gesture into hierarchy. Liora’s unpolished acts of expression become radical resistance.

• In the measured garden, absolute control over growth enforces ideological conformity. Liora’s allowance of uncounted life demonstrates the resilience of vitality beyond imposed order.

• In the clockwork sea, rigid stability threatens the very life of the system. Liora’s small, unpredictable interventions restore motion, unpredictability, and survival beyond mere survival.

Taken together, these layers show both the danger and the leverage of optimisation:

1. Optimisation facilitates totalitarian potential by making humans legible, predictable, and controllable.

2. Hierarchy and fear are amplified when performance is mandatory and deviation punishable.

3. Integrity and vitality persist in the cracks of the system: in the unmeasured, the unscripted, and the unpolished.

4. Human-scale action — small, ethical, creative, and unobserved — can reintroduce freedom and life into systems that otherwise privilege order and compliance.

In other words: optimisation is not inherently oppressive, but it creates conditions that make certain forms of authoritarian control easier to operationalise. Myth and allegory make this clear by showing what survives and what thrives outside its logic.

The arc from Institutional Hearings to Liora demonstrates a continuum:

• Audit clarifies divergence between claims and function.

• Myth embodies possibility and ethical resistance.

• Reflection on political deployment reveals structural vulnerabilities and potential for ethical leverage.

Optimisation does not define destiny. It merely sets the terrain. Liora shows that, even on optimised terrain, integrity, growth, and vitality can find paths that defy rigid control. And in those paths, the coming of possibility — the true aim of the blog — is manifest.