The Reality of Physics vs. The Maze of Language

I am currently hanging 47 feet above the asphalt, suspended by a safety harness that smells faintly of old sweat and copper. My wrench is positioned against a bolt that hasn’t been turned since 2007, and the metal is screaming. This is what I do. I’m Blake K., and as a carnival ride inspector, my entire life is built on the cold, hard reality of physics. If a bolt shears, people fall. There is no nuance in a structural failure. Gravity doesn’t use metaphors, and centrifugal force doesn’t require a notary public to exercise its will upon the human body.

Yet, when I climb down from these skeletal steel structures and try to navigate the paperwork required to keep them legal, I enter a world far more terrifying and unstable than a rusted Ferris wheel in a thunderstorm. I enter the world of ‘attestation’ and ‘requisite’ and ‘competent authorities.’

Bureaucracy as Liturgy: The Power of the Arcane

This realization hit me hardest last month at my uncle’s funeral. It was a somber affair, filled with the kind of heavy, liturgical language that felt like it’s been damp-pressed for a century. The priest spoke using words like ‘propitiation’ and ‘eschatological.’ In the middle of a particularly dense sentence about the ‘transubstantiation of memory,’ I thought about a broken bumper car. The absurdity of using such massive, clunky words to describe the simple, devastating fact of a dead relative suddenly felt like a cosmic joke. I laughed.

“

But I wasn’t laughing at the dead; I was laughing at the fence we build out of words to keep ourselves from actually touching the reality of things.

Bureaucracy is just a secular religion, and jargon is its Latin. Take the word ‘Apostille.’ It sounds like something you’d order at a high-end French bakery, perhaps a flaky pastry filled with almond cream. In reality, it is a $77 stamp that tells a foreign government that the person who signed your document is actually allowed to sign documents. It’s a recursive loop of validation that serves no purpose other than to create a barrier.

I’ve spent 37 hours this year alone trying to decipher what a ‘Gazetted Officer’ is. It’s a relic of colonial rule, a way to ensure that only the ‘right’ kind of people-those already enmeshed in the system-have the power to verify the existence of others. If you are a common laborer, a carnival worker, or someone just trying to move across a border to find a better life, the requirement for a Gazetted Officer is a wall you cannot climb.

Stripping the Mask: Returning Power to the Individual

This is why I find the work of Visament so quietly revolutionary. They act as the demolition crew for these linguistic moats. When the system says ‘submit your credentials for verification via the appropriate diplomatic channels,’ someone needs to be there to say, ‘Hey, just give us your passport and we’ll handle the guys in the suits.’

Language is a tool, but it is also a weapon of social engineering. When an agency uses terms like ‘information asymmetry’ or ‘procedural irregularities,’ they are intentionally muddying the water. I see this in my own industry, too. We have inspectors who love to talk about ‘non-destructive ultrasonic testing protocols’ when they could just say ‘we’re checking for cracks with sound waves.’ They do it because they want to justify their $207-an-hour fee.

Jargon is the ultimate protection for the mediocre and the gatekeeper for the elite.

Hierarchy Through Vocabulary

I remember once, I was trying to get a permit for a new roller coaster in a small county. The clerk behind the window looked at my application for 7 seconds before sliding it back. ‘This is missing the supplemental addendum regarding the mitigation of noise pollution,’ she said. I asked her what that meant. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and annoyance.

We see this in every facet of life. The legal system is perhaps the worst offender. A ‘tort’ is just a wrong. ‘Pro se’ just means you’re doing it yourself. ‘Amicus curiae’ is just a friend of the court. Why can’t we use the simple versions? Because if the law were written in plain English, we wouldn’t need a priesthood of lawyers to interpret it for us.

Complexity is a Shroud, Not a Solution

I’ve seen 27-page safety reports that failed to mention a visible crack in a support column because the inspector was too busy using words like ‘structural integrity’ to actually describe the metal. This isn’t just about frustration; it’s about justice. When you hide the path to citizenship, or the path to a business license, or the path to a visa behind a wall of jargon, you are effectively disenfranchising anyone who hasn’t had the privilege of an elite education.

It’s a form of soft authoritarianism. It doesn’t use clubs or guns; it uses commas and Latin roots. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to laugh at a funeral again, because the gap between the words and the reality is so vast it becomes a parody.