Systematic exclusion and the origin of evil
Reading | Psychology
Drs. H. C. J. Stolting | 2026-05-01
Harry Stolting argues that, while nature automatically excludes all that is unsustainable within its own natural dynamic, the human mind can create and maintain within itself maladaptive ideas that, if expressed in nature, would quickly be driven out. This leads to a mismatch between our inner concepts and the reality whereupon we believe we can apply those concepts. This schism between nature and our mental models, Stolting argues, is not only the origin of evil, but of many other ills.
Cats have accompanied me for most of my life, quietly shaping the rhythm of my days. My current companion, Max, recently rekindled a question that first occurred to me in childhood: is a cat capable of knowing evil? His behaviour is expressive enough to tempt interpretation—affection, irritation, mischief, even something that resembles guilt. Yet, whenever I try to imagine what Max himself experiences, the question collapses. The concepts I apply belong to me, not to him.
Thomas Nagel’s classic essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ makes this point with philosophical precision. Nagel argued that the inner life of another being is not merely inaccessible, but structured in ways fundamentally foreign to our own conceptual system. To ask whether a bat is ashamed or curious is to project categories that have no place in its experiential world. The same applies to Max. My question—“does he know evil?”—reveals the structure of my own interpretative frame more than the structure of his reality —that is, of nature itself.
This observation points toward the central claim of this essay. Here I explore the possibility that what humans call ‘evil’ does not originate in nature itself, but emerges within the symbolic structures of human cognition. And the reason lies not in biology, nor in intention, but in a structural divergence between reality and the human world. Nature eliminates what cannot endure. The human mind can preserve what nature would exclude. To understand the origin of evil, we must examine the boundary between these two modes of order.
Systematic Exclusion
When we step back from our moral assumptions, the coherence of nature becomes surprisingly clear. Nature does not operate through judgment or intention. It sustains itself through viability. Patterns that cannot exist dissolve as quickly as they emerge. Nothing endures unless it fits the conditions of its environment. The Principle of Systematic Exclusion (PSE) refers to this natural ordering principle: nature sustains only those configurations that can remain coherent under its conditions. Anything that cannot do so— whether physical, biological, informational, or conceptual—simply disappears. PSE is therefore not a mechanism, intention, or evolutionary strategy, but the underlying ‘grammar’ through which nature maintains coherence.
In this respect, nature mirrors the structural grammar of logic or mathematics. A configuration holds or collapses because the system itself allows only certain arrangements. The same is true of classical mechanics, quantum behavior, and the non-equilibrium dynamics described by Prigogine. Reality behaves according to constraints that are intrinsic to itself. This principle governs star formation, metabolic stability, ecological relations, and the emergence of complex structures. Because it is natural rather than intentional, PSE applies not only to physical phenomena but also—at least in principle—to conceptual ones.
Ideas that lack coherence should disappear. Yet the human mind complicates this: it can maintain concepts even when reality would eliminate them. Nature produces only what it can sustain. The human mind can preserve what has no grounding in reality. The divergence between natural exclusion and symbolic persistence marks the threshold where subversion by logic becomes possible.
The Holoscript
If nature eliminates what cannot endure, the human mind often performs the opposite operation. Through language, reflective memory and abstraction, the mind constructs a symbolic world in which concepts can survive independently of reality.
One may think of this symbolic domain as a ‘holo-script’: a script-like structure through which reality is rendered intelligible. It is not merely an interpretive filter but a self- sustaining symbolic domain, sustained by distinctions, narratives, categories and culturally transmitted frames. Within this script, a concept can persist even when it has no correlate in nature. What matters is not viability in reality, but coherence within a network of symbols. Stored in thought and endlessly recombinable, symbols acquire a durability nature itself would never grant.
This capacity makes imagination, planning and reflection possible, yet it also opens the door to misalignment. Concepts that nature would eliminate can be preserved, circulated, idealized and applied far beyond their legitimate domain.
A category born within a specific historical or cultural context can detach from its origin and assume universal authority. In this detachment lies the structural seed of error. In this way, the Holoscript sustains what reality would naturally dissolve. Its symbolic persistence allows non‑viable concepts to reappear in domains that cannot support them.
This is the opening through which subversion by logic enters. Understanding the artificial, human origin of this frame—the Holoscript—is essential for grasping how subversion by logic, and thus the specifically human experience of evil, becomes possible.
Subversion by Logic
If symbols that reality would exclude can persist within the framework of the Holoscript, the crucial question becomes what happens when they cross back into reality. The moment a concept is applied as if it belonged to the structure of the world, a subtle but decisive shift occurs. A symbol viable only within a closed, emergent frame enters a domain where it has no grounding. It becomes foreign to the structure into which it is introduced. This is what I refer to as Subversion by Logic (SBL).
SBL is not an intellectual mistake but a structural incompatibility. Reality would eliminate incompatible symbols immediately. Yet, within the human reflective framework of the Holoscript, such symbols can survive indefinitely. When they are projected back onto reality, their persistence generates distortions: perception becomes filtered through a category that does not belong to reality; judgement follows; practices and institutions may form around these misplaced concepts.
Subversion by Logic refers precisely to this moment in which a concept that exists only within the symbolic world of the Holoscript is applied as if it belonged to the structure of reality. In nature, such a concept would dissolve under the Principle of Systematic Exclusion (PSE). In the Holoscript, it persists because it remains symbolically coherent within that closed frame.
When such a concept crosses into reality, it becomes a foreign element. Its presence distorts perception and disrupts judgement—not through malice but through incommensurability with the domain it enters. This structural misalignment marks the point where the specifically human experience of evil begins. In this context, ‘evil’ must be understood as a human-constructed category sustained within the Holoscript.
Many rigid and destructive cultural patterns owe their power to this mechanism. Their coherence is internal—maintained within the Holoscript—not validated by reality. Harm arises not from intention but from misalignment. It is the outcome of symbolic persistence overriding natural coherence. As such, evil in this perspective is a secondary effect. It emerges when symbols cross into reality where they cannot properly function.
Examples
The structural nature of Subversion by Logic becomes especially clear when we observe how it unfolds in contemporary contexts. These situations do not exemplify wrongdoing, but illustrate the consequences of symbolic forms being applied beyond the domains for which they are suited.
Ecological management provides a telling example. Simplified models function well within the Holoscript, where clarity depends on abstraction. Yet, when such a model is treated as if it accurately represents the ecosystem itself, the concept exceeds its legitimate domain. Nature does not conform to reduction; it follows its own, natural logic of coherence. The collapse of monocultures reflects this mismatch: uniformity may appear coherent symbolically, but it is structurally incompatible with the dynamics of living systems.
Artificial intelligence offers another illustration. Within a closed dataset, patterns may appear meaningful and internally coherent. But when the system applies these patterns to the open, unpredictable world beyond its training environment, their grounding dissolves. The logic is not faulty; it is simply unsupported by reality.
A third example arises from evolutionary mismatch. As Donald Hoffman argues, evolution favors fitness-enhancing interfaces, not truth. In modern symbolic environments, behavioral tendencies shaped under earlier conditions may no longer align with natural structures. The Holoscript amplifies this divergence, enabling concepts and expectations to influence behaviour in contexts where they lack any real grounding.
Across these domains, the same pattern appears: a symbolic form crosses into reality, and reality cannot sustain it. That’s why Darwin’s Dragons only exist in our imagination.
Concluding remarks
To understand evil, we must understand the structural conditions under which it becomes possible. Nature, governed by systematic exclusion, contains no evil. It contains only those configurations that can remain coherent within its conditions. Patterns that cannot endure simply dissolve; nothing persists unless reality itself sustains it. In this domain, exclusion is not punitive or moral, but natural and unavoidable.
Human beings inhabit an additional domain: the Holoscript. Through language, memory and reflective abstraction, we can preserve concepts that reality would eliminate. These symbolic structures can survive indefinitely, detached from the natural conditions that would otherwise dissolve them. This capacity enables imagination, culture, and historical continuity—but it also opens the door to profound misalignment.
Subversion by Logic arises when symbolically coherent but naturally non-viable concepts migrate from the Holoscript into reality. Once projected outward as if they belonged to the structure of the world, these concepts distort perception, shape judgement, and can accumulate in social, institutional, or ideological systems. Their coherence lies not in reality, but in the closed symbolic frame that preserves them.
Evil, in this framework, is not a force, essence or innate human property. It is a secondary phenomenon: the cumulative consequence of applying non-viable symbolic forms to domains that cannot sustain them. It emerges not from intention, but from structural incompatibility: when the Holoscript overrides the coherence of reality.
This perspective does not diminish the value of the symbolic domain; it clarifies its limits. Reflection, narrative and conceptual abstraction remain essential to human life. But recognizing the boundary between natural coherence and symbolic persistence is crucial. Evil originates at the moment this boundary is crossed—when a symbol enters a reality that cannot support it. Understanding this boundary is not an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for seeing where our concepts cease to describe the world and begin to obscure it. Only by discerning this limit can we hope to mitigate the distortions that arise when the Holoscript overextends its reach.
In this light, the study of evil becomes the study of misalignment itself—and the path toward reducing harm lies in restoring coherence between the symbolic worlds we construct and the unfathomable reality—our nature—in which we live.
Epilogue: Matthias and the Riddle
To close this analysis and ground its abstract structure in an accessible image, one final reflection may help bridge the conceptual and the concrete. A brief interlude can clarify how the structural distinction between reality and the Holoscript becomes visible in ordinary experience. It also illustrates something essential: that art—and especially narrative art—often reveals truths that cannot be stated directly, by presenting them in metaphorical form. Such metaphor is in itself a mode of insight; not decorative.
In a short story by Anton Koolhaas, a rooster named Matthias behaves in ways humans readily interpret through categories such as courage, folly, or pride. Yet these categories do not exist in the rooster’s reality. Matthias responds only to immediate ecological cues; the meanings we attach arise not from the animal’s world but from our own symbolic framework.
This gap between natural reality, governed by exclusion, and the interpretative world generated by the Holoscript reveals the essence of the “riddle” that inspired the name RoosterRiddle.com. When human categories are projected onto domains to which they do not belong, distortion is
inevitable. The story of Matthias illustrates, in miniature, how Subversion by Logic begins: not through malice, but through the misapplication of symbols to a reality they cannot describe.
And perhaps that is the final lesson Matthias offers: that clarity returns the moment we recognize the limits of our metaphors and allow reality, once again, to speak for itself.
Bibliography
Hoffman, Donald D. The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. Penguin Random House, UK, 2020.
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–450.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
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