Maintenance in Ruin

Society does not merely exclude surplus populations; it needs them, manages them, and extracts value from their ongoing damage. Disposal is too crude. What we have instead is maintenance-in-ruin. Slow death is not a bug; it’s a business model. “Surplus” here doesn’t mean unused. It means non-reproductive of value in the officially sanctioned way, i.e. not smoothly convertible into wage labor or social reproduction that conforms to Adolphe Quetelet’s l’homme moyen. Those who don’t fit the empire of normality aren’t always eliminated outright (that’s politically messy); they’re maimed, exhausted, surveilled, warehoused, studied, maintained in states of injury, and then blamed for the condition that was engineered around them.

Jaspir Puar’s point lands especially hard: maiming is more profitable than killing. Dead bodies don’t generate sufficient data, dependency, compliance industries, or moral theater. It is important to think historically about liberal and social-democratic flirtations with eugenics because doing so punctures the bedtime story that eliminationism belongs only to the obvious villains. G.K. Chesterton noticing it early is almost funny in a cosmic way—history’s least fashionable Catholic occasionally being the adult in the room. The point is that biopolitical sorting has always been bipartisan, just differently branded.

Emil Cioran’s line about the “seal on your nothingness”[1] is the emotional core, what is called work doesn’t redeem; it absolves. It launders harm. It allows the systematic conversion of living beings into resources to appear as moral contribution. Derrick Jensen’s bluntness is useful here because it strips away the euphemisms: objectification is not metaphorical. It’s literal. Fish, forests, laborers, colonized peoples—same grammar, different supply chains.

Where this dovetails with Habermas and Achille Mbembe is in diagnosing ethical inversion. What passes for communicative competence is often ritualized moral incompetence: the performance of care without obligation, reason without reciprocity, sympathy fused to bureaucracy (and hierarchy and segregationist praxis) until it becomes organized abandonment or psychopolitical torture. Systems colonize the lifeworld, yes—but more precisely, they occupy it while insisting they are kindness. Hence the saccharine managerial tone: domination that sounds like HR onboarding.

Here the maxim “no victims, no crimes” speaks to the fact that injury is redescribed as individual failure, illness, or unfortunate circumstance precisely so it can be administrated rather than confronted. Asking “how do you plead?” only makes sense among equals, and equality is the one condition the system cannot allow without collapsing its alibi. Law, morality, and reason become internal conversations among those already insulated from consequence.

Modern power governs less by killing than by calibrating damage, and it relies on language, care, reason, and normality to make that traumatic stress feel either deserved or invisible.

This is a diagnosis. No cure provided, obviously. If there were one, it would already be patented, monetized, and denied to the people it was meant for.

[1] In his book A Short History of Decay Corian writes: "You are forgiven everything, provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness".