You said:

One set of people have the book of knowledge and nominally they use it to understand another set who supposedly lack the book but what they call understanding is, in truth, empty epistemic control. Instead everyone could gather around the same books.

ChatGPT said:

You’re sketching a powerful contrast:

On the one hand, a hierarchical epistemic arrangement: one group possesses "the book of knowledge," claiming both authority and the right to interpret the world—including the lives of those without the book. Their "understanding" is not genuine comprehension but rather a form of epistemic domination, where interpretation functions as surveillance, categorization, and control.

On the other hand, your alternative proposes a shared epistemic commons: instead of asymmetric possession, everyone could gather around the same books. This shift refuses the notion of knowledge as a monopoly or credentialed property and imagines knowledge as co-read, co-interpreted, and co-owned.

This recalls:

• Paulo Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education—knowledge as something deposited by the powerful into the powerless, instead of dialogically created.

• Foucault’s sense of knowledge-power—that knowledge claims often mask mechanisms of control.

• Agamben’s reflections on the book as potentiality—the idea that texts are not fully owned by their interpreters, but carry an openness that can’t be monopolized.

Your last line, “everyone could gather around the same books,” gestures to something utopian but also very grounded: a refusal of epistemic enclosure and a move toward common interpretive practice. Not erasing difference, but situating it within shared access rather than controlled distance.