Aristotle vs Marx
Archē, telos, and the integrity of public institutions
Can you tell the difference between a judge who is passing bad law and one who has repudiated law altogether?
What is the difference between poor journalism and anti-journalism?
How do you detect Marxist infiltration of institutions that masquerades as business as usual?
These may sound like different questions. I have come to believe they are all variants of the same question.
Two independent lines of my own investigation—one into justice, the other into journalism—recently converged on the same underlying problem. In searching for an answer, I encountered an ancient philosophical distinction that gave me the vocabulary I had been missing. Once seen, it is difficult to unsee.
This essay is about that distinction. It is not merely another critique of institutional corruption. It proposes a way to distinguish an institution that is failing at its proper function from one that has silently become something else while retaining its name, rituals, and public legitimacy.
It is tempting to present ideas in essays as if they arrive fully formed, and that the writer somehow has access to higher knowledge that they have deigned to relay onwards to the public. That, you will be relieved to hear, is not how the world works. This is as much a retelling of my own bumbling about and stumbling across a useful idea as it is an explanation of the idea itself.
Like everyone else, I have spent the last few years struggling with the fractures created by the exposure of mass criminality, and the schisms that have opened up in families, institutions, and society. I spend hours with AI trying to make sense of it all, and to deal with the consequences of rigged courts, rigged media, rigged medicine, and so on. Writing is not the work. It is merely the exhaust from doing the work.
The specific issue I was trying to resolve was where judicial immunity ends. At what point does a judge cease administering law and begin merely simulating it? This is not a hypothetical question for me. I am dealing with a family-law case in North Carolina where two judges, despite lacking jurisdiction, rewarded the unlawful taking of a child and penalised the mother for her association with me, using politics and protected speech as the pretext.
In a previous article I floated a thought experiment. Suppose an American judge openly adopted Italian constitutional law as the governing standard, wrote orders in Italian, and consistently favoured Italian litigants. Would that judge still be acting judicially, and therefore retain judicial immunity?
My first instinct was an unequivocal “no”. They had abandoned the function of administering American constitutional law.
On reflection, however, that thought experiment was too crude.
It forced me to distinguish between exceptionally bad law and anti-law. Italian constitutional law is still law embodying universal principles of justice. Writing an order in Italian is still writing an order, even if it is unreadable without technological aid. Even gross bias is generally understood to fall within the protective envelope of judicial immunity.
The boundary was not as clear-cut as I assumed.
It may be profound injustice and un-American, yet my intuition was that it still was not anti-justice and anti-American. Something more fundamental had to change before a judge unequivocally ceased acting judicially and became opposed to law itself.
Then, last week, came President Trump’s widely reported speech announcing the declassification of material relating to election fraud. I do not intend to argue the underlying facts here. What interested me instead was the BBC’s reporting of the event. I found myself asking exactly the same question.
Is this simply terrible journalism—in breach of the BBC’s own editorial standards and guidelines on accuracy, impartiality, and public interest?
Or is it anti-journalism—in the sense that it actively frustrates the legitimate purpose of journalism while continuing to present itself as journalism?
That was the moment the two lines of inquiry merged.
It is easy enough to think about the ultimate purpose of law, journalism, medicine, or any other institution, and ask whether it remains aligned with that purpose. Aristotle had a word for this: telos—the end or purpose toward which something is directed. The telos of medicine, for example, is healing.
But that is only half of the puzzle.
The breakthrough came when I asked AI the opposite question. If telos describes ultimate ends, is there a corresponding word for ultimate origins? Is there a name for the governing principle from which an institution derives its identity?
There is.
Aristotle gave us that word, too: archē.
And yes, you have to learn a new long-press code on your keyboard to type it.
Telos describes the end toward which something is directed: its purpose, fulfilment, or proper function.
Archē describes the originating principle from which it arises: the governing source that gives it its identity and authority.
Another way of putting it is this:
telos answers “What is this for?”
archē answers “What makes this what it is?”
Consider law. Its telos is justice. Yet justice does not arise spontaneously wherever people live together. Human beings wrong one another, disputes arise, and remedies are sought. The archē of law is the exercise of public authority to adjudicate those disputes according to ascertainable norms, in order to keep the peace.
A court can make mistakes—even grave constitutional mistakes—and still be recognisably acting within that governing principle.
Journalism has a different archē and telos. Its telos is an informed public, able to orient itself truthfully in the world and make sound judgements. Its archē is faithful public inquiry: observing, verifying, and honestly reconstructing events so that they can be shared with others.
The distinction between origins and ends turns out to be extraordinarily powerful.
We naturally ask whether an institution is achieving its purpose—its telos.
We ask much less often whether it still derives its identity from the same governing principle—its archē.
Yet it is entirely possible for an institution to continue proclaiming the same telos while quietly replacing its archē. When that happens, it may retain its name, rituals, and public legitimacy, even as it ceases to belong to the category it claims to occupy.
Suddenly, I had something to conceptually bracket any observable institutional runtime, including:
the court filings, transcripts, hearings, and judicial orders in the legal case; and
the speech, the declassified documents, and the breaking-news reporting in the political one.
In both cases the runtime was littered with defects:
The court ignored the mandatory duty to decline jurisdiction when it had been manufactured through unjustifiable conduct, and instead treated the stolen custody as the factual baseline rather than the previous court order.
The BBC omitted the official institutions making the declassification, and substituted its established anti-Trump narrative for investigation of the event itself.
None of that, however, proves we have left the domain of law or journalism. Courts make mistakes. Judges are biased. Journalists are sloppy, selective, and occasionally dishonest. Those are all failures within the category.
The interesting question is not how institutions fail. We already know they do. The interesting question is how an institution can continue to look authentic while no longer serving the thing that made it authentic in the first place.
The whole point of successful subversion is not to smash an institution, but to inhabit it.
Our notional Marxist infiltrator does not throw away centuries of accumulated legitimacy. They exploit it. They preserve the conventional runtime surface as far as possible, changing only the smallest number of deep load-bearing assumptions needed to reverse the institution’s actual function.
The ideal seditious judge keeps the robes, the courtroom, the procedures, the citations, and the solemn language of constitutional government. Only the governing principle changes. The Constitution ceases to constrain power and instead becomes a rhetorical device by which corrupted power legitimises itself.
The ideal seditious journalist keeps the headlines, interviews, style guide, editorial process, and appearance of professional neutrality. Only the governing principle changes. Reporting no longer begins with reality and works towards a story. It begins with the approved story and works backwards to a false reality.
That is why anti-justice still looks like justice.
That is why anti-journalism still looks like journalism.
And that is why looking only at the runtime document and event trace alone can never tell you what the institution actually is.
The archē and telos are not, of course, directly encoded in the artefacts we observe. No judge openly asserts, “I am aiding a criminal enterprise.” No journalist writes, “This is a behavioural influence operation.” They are reconstructed—tracing backwards towards the plausible space of candidate archai, and forwards into the possible teloi.
Until the advent of AI, this was an extraordinarily difficult task.
Readers familiar with my earlier AI-assisted work on the General Prolegomena may notice a family resemblance. There is one—but there is also an important difference.
The General Prolegomena asks:
Does this symbolic system still belongs to the category it claims to occupy?
It tests attribution, reconstructability, continuity, corrigibility, and category integrity. It is primarily concerned with whether representation remains attached to reality at all.
In other words, it tells us whether a boundary has been crossed. It does not, by itself, explain why or how.
The archē–telos framework asks different question:
If the category has been breached, what governing principle(s) and ultimate goal(s) replaced the original legitimate ones?
Rather than merely detecting detachment, it reconstructs substitution.
That distinction matters because successful institutional capture — as with Marxist infiltration — is not random corruption. It is purposeful, as with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
The runtime remains superficially judicial or journalistic precisely because the replacement archē preserves as much of the visible system as possible, changing only those principles necessary to redirect the institution towards a different telos.
The General Prolegomena tells us that something no longer truly belongs to the category it claims.
The archē–telos analysis explains how it can continue looking like that category while systematically serving another.
Detailed application of this framework to my case studies in law and journalism deserves separate essays. Here I will merely sketch the conclusions that emerged from my own reconstruction.
In the family-law case, I concluded that…
The court’s operative archē was no longer constitutional adjudication under due process, but preservation and legitimisation of an unlawfully created custodial status quo.
The telos was therefore not justice between the parties, but stabilisation of the already-achieved outcome, regardless of the constitutional defects by which it had been obtained.
In the BBC article, I concluded that…
The governing archē was no longer faithful inquiry into a newsworthy event, but management of public perception through narrative continuity.
Its telos was therefore not to maximise the reader’s understanding of what had occurred, but to minimise the disruptive consequences of the event by filtering it through an already-established interpretive frame.
Whether those reconstructions are ultimately correct is less important here than the method by which they were reached.
The point is that once archē and telos become explicit objects of inquiry, it becomes possible to distinguish between ordinary institutional failure and systematic inversion.
That, I believe, is the real contribution of the framework.
I have deliberately avoided trying to settle where the boundary lies in general. That requires careful application to particular cases, not abstract argument. I have developed AI tools to assist with that reconstruction, but they are a subject for another time.
The important point is that there are two distinct observations:
First, archē (source of authority) and telos (direction of purpose) are distinct variables.
Second, each has its own polarity: it may be aligned with its proper function or antagonistic to it.
These two questions provide a way of bracketing any defective runtime that suggests an institution may have degenerated. Rather than arguing endlessly over observable failures, we can ask:
What governing principle (archē) best explains this, and is it aligned with the institution’s proper identity?
What end (telos) does it actually serve, and is it aligned with the institution’s proper purpose?
Only by reconstructing both can we distinguish justice (including grave constitutional error), perverted justice, pseudo-justice, and anti-justice.
This is perhaps best understood via the parallel field of medicine.
Consider four different situations.
1. Medicine (Archē: medicine · Telos: healing)
A competent surgeon follows accepted standards of medical practice, obtains informed consent, and performs an indicated procedure. A recognised statistical complication occurs and the patient is harmed.
The governing principle remains medicine, and the operative end remains the patient’s good. This is medicine practised under conditions of uncertainty and fallibility.
2. Perverted medicine (Archē: medicine · Telos: institutional or political convenience)
A licensed physician, acting with full medical authority and using recognised techniques, performs or authorises irreversible interventions—historical lobotomies, certain sterilisation programmes—whose primary purpose is to make patients more manageable for an institution or the state rather than to restore their health.
Medical knowledge, authority, and outward form are retained, but the operative end has been redirected.
3. Pseudo-medicine (Archē: imitation or personal authority · Telos: healing)
An individual, having studied medicine independently, opens an unofficial clinic and sincerely attempts to cure patients using the best knowledge available. His aim is genuinely therapeutic, but his authority derives solely from personal judgment rather than from the constitutive standards and institutions of medicine.
The end is healing, but the governing principle is no longer medicine itself. It resembles medicine without being an instance of it.
4. Anti-medicine (Archē: organised crime or predation · Telos: profit or domination)
A medically trained surgeon removes healthy organs from non-consenting victims for sale, or performs procedures to facilitate torture, trafficking, or political persecution. Medical skill is used purely as a tool and a disguise.
Neither the governing principle nor the operative end belongs to medicine. Medicine survives only as an outward appearance.
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These examples illustrate why defective runtime alone is insufficient. Harm to a patient tells us remarkably little about the nature of the practice itself.
Only by reconstructing both the governing principle (archē) and the operative end (telos) can we distinguish medicine from perverted medicine, pseudo-medicine, and anti-medicine.
The same questions can now be applied to law. They do not predetermine the answers, but they allow us to distinguish constitutional error from institutional substitution.
⁂
Our Italian thought experiment illustrates substitution of archē without automatic substitution of telos. The judge continues to occupy an American bench, but American constitutional law no longer governs the decision. It has become merely the language through which another legal order is expressed.
Crucially, that other legal order need not itself be unjust. It may sincerely pursue the rule of law according to its own principles and even reach outcomes that are morally admirable. A particular Italian litigant may deserve to prevail; that is beside the point.
The point is not that justice has disappeared, but that the judicial function has changed. The court is no longer exercising American constitutional authority. It is exercising another authority while retaining the outward appearance of the first.
What has been displaced is the constitutive archē of the office. The judge remains a judge in appearance, but no longer in function. Any justification for judicial immunity correspondingly weakens, because the office has already detached from the governing principle that gives its authority legitimacy.
⁂
Korematsu v. United States (1944) illustrates a different possibility. Today, almost everyone agrees that the exclusion and internment of Japanese Americans was a grave injustice. The harder question is whether the Supreme Court merely produced exceptionally bad constitutional law, or whether it had, however temporarily, abandoned the constitutional archē itself.
My own view leans towards the former interpretation. Preservation of the nation remained a constitutionally recognisable telos of government in wartime, even though its pursuit produced a profound injustice to individual citizens. The constitutional archē remained intact. The Court committed a grave constitutional wrong, but it did not replace constitutional law with another governing principle.
Korematsu therefore represents catastrophic failure within constitutional law rather than the substitution of constitutional law.
⁂
By contrast, my family-law case exhibits antagonism in both dimensions:
The court did not merely reach the wrong conclusion; it treated an unlawful act of self-help, rather than an existing court order, as the effective source of legal authority, allowing judicial process to ratify rather than remedy the breach.
It then deployed an explicit political classifier—“QAnon”—to overcome constitutional limits on state power by reducing protected speech and association into grounds for differential treatment.
If that reconstruction is correct, both the governing archē and the operative telos became antagonistic to their constitutional counterparts. The question is no longer whether the law was applied badly, but whether the institution continued to function as law at all.
The same challenge can be put to journalism, science, medicine, education, finance, policing, and government.
The question is always the same:
are we witnessing failure within the category, or
the replacement of the category’s governing archē and telos?
Those questions cannot be answered by inspecting the runtime (“what observably happened”) alone. They require us to reconstruct both the governing archē and the operative telos.
That, I believe, is what Aristotle has quietly been waiting more than two thousand years to teach us. Just he lacked AI tools to instantiate reconstruction at scale and low cost. As a byproduct, the same technology equips us to detect when Marxists — or their functional equivalent — have been installed in our institutions.
The next step is to formalise these insights, and operationalise them, so we can more readily detect subversion of the constitutional order from within.
Watch this space!