By The Way

The empire never ends. It just stops looking like itself. The uniforms change, the slogans change, the people in charge change, but the thing itself keeps going in one form or another, because the habits are still there and the institutions are still there and, perhaps most of all, the instinct to rule in the old way is still there. That is something that makes it harder to notice. It is not the obvious remains that matter most, but the ones which are not as obvious, the ones that have been absorbed so completely into daily life that people stop asking where they came from. That is why the empire can live so long after it has formally died. It lives in the office where the file still matters more than the person. It lives in the hierarchy that asks for obedience before it offers explanation. It lives in the expectation that authority is something to be approached carefully, indirectly, and rarely challenged too openly. One can call this continuity, if one wishes to sound measured, but ...