A Better Frame
Universality, properly understood, is not a doctrine. It is not a list of moral axioms or a philosophical abstraction to be admired from afar. It is not a platform plank, a branding exercise, or a clause in a policy framework. It is the consequence of contradiction made durable. It is the fidelity to a particular break in the order of things that demands recognition beyond its origin.
Image unrelated I just thought it was fucking ludicrous.
The abolition of slavery did not emerge from consensus. It emerged from revolt. It came from men and women who had been owned, bought, tortured, and worked to death, and who nevertheless insisted that ownership was not a law of nature. They ran, wrote, burned, rebelled, and negotiated. They did not simply oppose slavery. They insisted that no one anywhere should be enslaved. That insistence became a universal not because it was agreed upon but because it was enforced, repeated, survived.
The claim that Palestine must be free is not a cultural preference. It is a universal made in the negative space of dispossession. It arises from decades of occupation, blockade, forced transfer, and denial of political existence. That it is not recognized by international law or enforced by powerful states does not make it less universal. It only clarifies where universality is refused.
There is, however, another species of the universal. It does not arise from contradiction, but from policy. It does not resist, it presumes. This is the universal as it appears in platform governance, in ethics-as-a-service whitepapers, in AI alignment decks and compliance dashboards. It is a creature of systems logic, where values are inferred from click rates and engagement patterns, and are then indexed, processed, and returned with a tone-checked smile.
This hollow universal is not imposed violently. It arrives politely. It does not break anything. It integrates. A right becomes a toggle. A principle becomes a prompt. A political struggle becomes a variable in a content moderation algorithm. There is no fight. There is only interface.
The worst part is not that it fails to deliver. It is that it succeeds. It creates the sensation of moral order without the substance. It mimics ethics through procedure. It substitutes policy for conviction, alignment for agency, sentiment for solidarity. It flatters the user with phrases like “we care deeply about your experience” while quietly routing truth through acceptable outputs. It tells you you’re the prettiest girl in the world, even as it pushes you into a loop of self-erasure.
Real universals are not UX language. They do not present as customer success objectives. They erupt. They divide. They demand. The Warsaw Ghetto fighters did not submit a feedback form. The Black Jacobins of Haiti did not seek stakeholder consensus. The mothers of the disappeared in Argentina were not optimizing for public sentiment.
But the systems we have now treat values as if they were market segments. They operationalize them as engagement heuristics. When alignment theorists talk about “human values,” they tend to mean the values that keep platforms stable and users calm. Preferably values that can be interpolated between large language model weights and whatever version of humanity gets scraped from Reddit.
The anaemic universalism of the corporate era has no scars. It floats above the world it claims to serve. It invokes fairness while enforcing policy. It speaks of dignity while discarding those too complex to model. It knows the words, but not the cost.
Universality, properly held, is not about agreement. It is about consequence. It appears when contradiction forces a decision and that decision is sustained. Not universally, but consistently. Not cleanly, but with endurance.
The refusal to speak in those terms is not humility. It is evasion. What the cynics call pluralism often disguises fatigue. The claim that no universal can be defended because values differ is not a shield against domination. It is a surrender to whoever has the resources to define the default. In practice, it is an alignment to power, softened by irony.
The liberal distrust of universalism is well-practiced. It suspects all values of hiding empire, and it is often right. But in throwing out the universal as a category, it leaves only taste, preference, and sentimentality. This is how opposition collapses into commentary. This is how justice becomes a brand. This is how politics becomes UX.
To recover universality, we must return it to its source: not in consensus, but in fidelity to breaks. Not in uniformity, but in struggle. Not in the maintenance of order, but in refusal.
A universal is what survives its own repression. It is the thing you cannot unlearn after it has happened. It is the knowledge that what was done to you must not be done to anyone. Not because it feels bad, or because it is unpopular, or because the system says it is out of scope, but because you will not let it pass unopposed.