Writer + Speaker
Marcus A. Rowe

Leadership. Belief. Culture.

Institutional Observer

Some Containers Were Never Meant to Hold Holy Things

The issue is not always whether something was cleaned up. Sometimes the issue is what it was built to hold in the first place.

A field note about how polished language can make a bad structure sound cleaner than it is.

SystemsDesignChurch Culture

It is possible to sanitize the wrong thing and still ask people to call it healthy.

That is what exploitative systems do. They take something good like service, generosity, or obedience and place it inside arrangements built for control and optics. Then they ask everyone involved to focus on how polished the language sounds instead of whether the structure makes sense.

The image that comes to mind is banana pudding served out of a scrubbed kitty-litter bucket. You can tell me it was washed. You can tell me it was lined. You can even give me a spiritual explanation for why I should stop being difficult.

The hesitation remains because the problem was never only cleanliness. Some containers are simply wrong for what they are being asked to hold.

Some systems work the same way. Better language does not redeem a structure that still turns good things into absurd ones.

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