Feb 12 • General discussion
Levers
The board is immaculate.
White metal. Soft light.
Everything designed to imply care
without ever offering it.
This is not a machine of denial.
It is a machine of valuation.
The first lever converts pain into numbers.
Not metaphorically—
formally.
Loss is entered.
Severity adjusted.
A range appears.
There is a table for violation.
Another for permanence.
Columns distinguishing degrees of harm
as if trauma were divisible,
as if the body kept clean ledgers.
One lever assigns value to touch taken without consent.
It does not ask who.
It does not ask how long.
It asks only whether the event qualifies,
and how narrowly it can be defined
without triggering escalation.
Another governs dismemberment.
Left ear: depreciated.
Right ear: slightly more,
due to precedent.
Hands are expensive.
Eyes fluctuate with labor demand.
Backs lose value quickly after thirty-five.
There is a lever for survival with consequence—
the long gray corridor
between alive and whole.
Chronic pain is discounted annually.
Psychological damage is capped early
to prevent abuse of the system.
Every adjustment is justified.
Benchmarked.
Defended with language like
objective,
historical,
industry standard.
A lever controls thresholds—
the precise moment suffering becomes
“catastrophic”
rather than merely unfortunate.
It is set just high enough
to avoid responsibility
and low enough
to appear humane.
Another lever handles delay.
Time erodes claims efficiently.
Memories blur.
Records vanish.
Bodies heal imperfectly.
The number shrinks on its own.
Health passes through employment,
employment through compliance,
compliance through silence.
Illness is tolerated
until it interferes with productivity.
Then it is reclassified as cost.
Choice is offered ceremonially.
Plans named after metals,
as if endurance were aesthetic.
All roads lead to the same board,
the same levers,
the same arithmetic.
Profit is never written on the faceplate.
It doesn’t need to be.
It lives in the margins—
the difference between what it costs to help
and what it costs to wait.
The machine insists it is neutral.
That it does not cause harm.
That it merely prices it.
But assigning value
is not the same as acknowledging worth.
And reducing suffering to a figure
does not make it manageable—
only acceptable.
The levers do not ask
whether you will recover.
They ask
whether your pain exceeds
its deductible.
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Levers
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