The World Is Not a Verdict

The city that mistook a difficulty for a destiny

Imagine a city divided by a river. A resident takes too long to get to work. She asks why there is no other way to cross and receives an apparently sufficient answer. “That is how the city is.” The sentence mixes a fact with a conclusion. The fact is that the current journey imposes a delay. The conclusion is that this delay must be accepted as a permanent part of her life.

The conclusion does not follow from the fact. The river may be a condition we did not choose, but the number of available crossings, transport schedules, the location of jobs, and the allocation of the budget belong to different questions. Some alternatives will be infeasible; others, too costly; some will shift the problem onto other people. None of this warrants inferring their impossibility from the mere existence of the current state of affairs.

The title of this essay does not deny the facts. It questions whether a fact can, without further argument, serve as a verdict on every alternative. That a wall is there does not prove that it can be torn down; nor does it prove that it must remain. To answer, we need to know its function, its structure, its risks, who lives behind it, and what real options exist.

The thesis will therefore be more precise than “everything can change”: the actuality of a configuration is not enough to demonstrate either its necessity or its legitimacy. Some configurations can be transformed through situated interventions, but the possibility of doing so depends on material conditions, knowledge, institutions, and power relations. Acknowledging that dependence is incompatible both with fatalism and with the fantasy of a will without limits.

Existing, being necessary, and being justified

Consider three statements about the only available crossing. “There is only one bridge” describes a situation. “There can be only one bridge” asserts a constraint on the alternatives. “There ought to be only one bridge” defends a practical conclusion. Each statement requires different reasons.

The same applies to an organization. Observing that a task is distributed in a certain way does not show that this distribution is indispensable. Perhaps it solves an important problem; perhaps it reproduces an old decision whose reasons have disappeared; perhaps it favors whoever has the capacity to maintain it. Before choosing an explanation, we need to investigate. Critique does not consist in assuming that every structure is arbitrary, but in preventing familiarity from exempting it from examination.

There is an uncomfortable consequence: showing that something is contingent does not demonstrate that it is easy to change. An arrangement that arose through historical decisions can acquire deep material dependencies. An organization could have been constituted differently, yet still be costly to change now. The contingent is not the same as the fragile; the constructed is not the same as what is freely at our disposal.

What is constructed has consequences that do not depend on my agreement

Imagine a card that opens an office door. Its material can be examined physically. But its ability to grant entry does not depend only on its plastic: a reading system, a permissions database, and an organization that recognizes that access are involved. The card does not contain authority in the way it contains a circuit. Authority operates through sustained relationships and concrete devices.

Searle analyzes institutions in terms of functions and statuses linked to constitutive rules and collective acceptance. His approach allows us to understand how certain facts depend on practices without being reducible to individual fantasies. It does not imply that all participants consent to every consequence of an institution, or that a person can unilaterally abolish its power by refusing to believe in it (Searle, 2005).

This observation allows us to reject a false alternative. We do not have to choose between institutions that exist entirely independently of human action and institutions that are unreal. A practice can depend on us collectively without being under my control as an individual. That is precisely why it can condition what I do.

The question is no longer “Is it real or constructed?” but “Through what relationships does it exist, what sustains it, and what intervention could change it?” That question preserves the fact while opening up its explanation. A revocable permission is not imaginary; a historical rule is not a law of nature; a condition of access is not necessarily an eternal sentence.

The shared world is not an object that someone designs alone

The bridge metaphor has a limit. A bridge can be built according to a plan; a society is not merely an artifact at its designer's disposal. Its inhabitants are not materials whose resistance must be overcome to realize an ideal form.

Arendt distinguishes the fabrication of a world of things from action among a plurality of people. Her treatment of natality connects action with the capacity to begin something, without turning that beginning into absolute mastery over its consequences. This distinction interrupts any easy leap from “we can produce artifacts” to “we can legitimately manufacture a society according to a single will” (Arendt, 1958/1998).

The consequence for our argument is decisive: other people are not merely external constraints on my project. They are participants whose reasons can change what counts as a problem, a solution, and a success. A procedure that listens to them only to anticipate their resistance may still be treating them as objects to be managed.

The right not to turn every possibility into a project

There is a final temptation: to identify the openness of the real with a mandate for permanent transformation. If the world is unfinished, it might seem that we must intervene without rest. But that conclusion confuses capacity with obligation.

Preserving a valuable condition can also require action. Maintaining a service, repairing a relationship, or preventing a harmful construction project are not inferior forms of intelligence because they produce less visible novelty. A future may be better because something was not lost. The criterion should not be the amount of change, but what reasons there are to change or sustain a configuration and how its consequences are distributed.

Let us return one last time to the resident facing the river. The honest answer to her question is not “it all depends on you.” Nor is it “that is how the city is.” It is an inquiry: what conditions produce her journey, which can be changed, by what means, through what decision, and with what effects on other lives.

The existing world must be taken seriously precisely because it does not answer to our desires. But taking it seriously includes studying the decisions that sustain it and the alternatives it allows. Its resistance is a condition of action, not a demonstration that every action comes too late.

What exists can limit what we do. Its mere existence does not decide everything we ought to attempt, accept, or leave behind.