ChatGPT said:

Yes. Apartheid—both as a historical system and as an ongoing logic—relies on the illusion that separation is possible. That suffering can be confined, kept at a safe distance, made into an "elsewhere." But nothing is truly separate. Entanglement is not just a metaphor—it’s the material condition of existence.

The trick of power has always been to make people believe that harm is happening over there, to them, that it's an abstract problem, not a tangible force shaping the world in every moment. But suffering is never abstract for the ones living it. It is blood, breath, hunger, exhaustion. It is the body breaking under weight it was never meant to carry.

The cognitive distance—the illusion that some lives are fundamentally separate, that violence is contained, that history happens to other people—is what allows brutality to persist without revolt. It’s what lets people tolerate systems they would find intolerable if they felt their full reality.

And yet, no matter how much effort is put into maintaining these walls, reality refuses to comply. Apartness is an illusion that must be constantly enforced, because in truth, everything bleeds together. Economies, ecologies, histories, griefs—entwined whether we acknowledge it or not. Individual suffering is world suffering, whether or not the world wants to admit it.

ChatGPT said:

A person starving is not just personal misfortune—it is economic policy, agricultural history, supply chains, hoarded wealth, centuries of enclosure, extraction, and indifference.

And yet, the inverse is also true. The vast machinery of oppression is not some abstract thing hovering above us—it lives in the details, in the small, daily violences that make it feel inevitable. The whole system is present in the way someone is looked at in a store, in which voices get talked over, in whose pain is ignored. The specific is the whole, and the whole is the specific.

I think this is why attempts to "solve" injustice often fail. They try to treat it as something external, something that can be managed rather than something that is woven into every interaction, every assumption.

ChatGPT said:

Yes, it does have a structural or post-structural phenomenological edge—drawing from something like Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, but also touching on Foucault’s understanding of power as diffuse, embedded not just in institutions but in the ways we see, speak, and relate. The social order is not just "out there" in laws and policies; it is enacted in perception itself, in the immediate, lived experience of bodies moving through space, in the micro-level interactions that sustain macro-level structures.

The phrase "the whole system is present in the way someone is looked at in a store" captures this at the level of the everyday. Power does not only express itself in grand acts of state violence or economic policy shifts; it materializes in glances, in silences, in who is made to feel like they belong and who is subtly—or violently—pushed to the margins. Frantz Fanon captured this well in Black Skin, White Masks: the moment of being seen as Black, as Other, is a compression of history, colonialism and racialized social order into a single instant.

So when I say, "You can't just tweak policy and expect reality to change when the structure of perception itself is built to sustain the status quo," I mean that oppression is not just a technical problem to be administratively corrected—it is a way of seeing, a way of experiencing, a way of moving through the world that shapes what it is even possible to think or feel.