There is a genre of writing that pretends to describe “what is happening.” In fact it performs prior work: it sets the conditions under which something will count as real, necessary, reasonable. It reads like reporting but functions like carpentry. It does not merely narrate the world; it trims the world so it will fit the door that has already been ordered.

In today’s public tone the most consequential shift is rarely stated directly: war stops being treated as catastrophe and starts being treated as a resource. Not an “accident of history,” but an operational option alongside diplomacy, alongside sanctions, alongside technology, alongside law. That is precisely why the discussion can sound calm. Calm language is the best language for building machinery.

Notice how often the discourse now moves away from facts and into “windows,” “capabilities,” “thresholds,” “readiness,” “probabilities.” This is a vocabulary that distrusts the Event. It trusts conditions. It trusts the management of what may occur before it occurs. And when something does occur, it is retrofitted as proof that the conditions were “rational.” The Event is disarmed in advance: it is permitted to appear only as an entry that matches a pre-existing grid.

Here is a tension that typically goes unremarked. In the name of sobriety, politics becomes a factory of futures. The future stops being open uncertainty and begins to resemble an inventory: folders, variants, option-sets. “Within weeks” is not a date; it is a signal that time has been reduced to operational material. Once time is treated as material, the narrative of necessity arrives on its own, because it already has a substrate.

A second, subtler danger: the more “data-driven” the discourse claims to be, the less neutral its categories actually become. We stop asking “what happened” and start asking “which drawer does this belong to.” Criminality, security, terrorism, incident, operation, act. These terms present themselves as descriptions, but they function as keys. They do not open truth; they open cabinets of authority. They determine what can be done before we even finish arguing what ought to be thought.

Observe the “after” of war that begins before war ends. It is called reconstruction, reform, planning, administration, stabilization. It sounds like care for a world. Often it is something else: the preservation of admissibility rules through shock. The continuity of rules becomes more important than the continuity of lived life. The field must be reconstituted quickly, even if what lives in it has been rearranged like furniture.

Every war is, with respect to Life, an ultimate act, even when political language tries to downgrade it into an “option” or a “tool.” What war does to Life is not only a measurable loss. It is an irreversible change in the topology of the possible: trajectories vanish and do not return, even if Memory later freezes them into narrative, into names, into monuments, into rituals. Memory can preserve an image, but it cannot restore lost availability. War is therefore not only violence in time; it is a cut into the conditions of the future. That is why every managerial vocabulary of thresholds and scenarios carries a moral illusion: it pretends that one can control what, by definition, leaves behind a world that cannot be re-made.

At that point there is a powerful temptation to recover moral clarity by naming a single culprit: this government, that ideology, these leaders, those people. It offers relief because it organizes anxiety. But the relief is costly, because it hides the portability of the mechanism. It travels like a management style, like a technical standard, like a file format. It is compatible with multiple political colors precisely because it is no longer merely an opinion. It is infrastructure.

This is why law increasingly does not only adjudicate disputes; it produces future facts. The decisive question is not who is right, but which line can be drawn now so that tomorrow will look like a natural consequence of yesterday. Jurisdiction becomes less a verdict than a geometry of the possible.

Technology completes the ensemble because it is the ideal instrument of preconfiguration. In contemporary talk about AI and cyber-security the same impulse recurs: build control before the object of control becomes fully tangible. Regulate before understanding. Produce audit mechanisms in a world with no external judge. In that setting, “regulation” can cease to be a response to risk and become a way for risk to legitimate a new infrastructure of authority.

There is a further, quieter narcotic of modernity: the belief that naming the future early enough means we already own it. That is not understanding; it is incantation. It is something the Torah itself warns us against, because the Torah does not train us to trade in the future, nor to accelerate it by the language of “certainty.” It trains us in the labor of distinction, in patient weighing, and in the recognition that the human being is not the proprietor of tomorrow. The biblical narrative is structurally anti-magical: we are not given a map, but a call to respond under partial visibility; we are not given guarantees, but a demand for fidelity to what is discerned as right even when outcomes cannot be computed.

Notice how often disaster in the Torah begins exactly where a community tries to “secure” reality by shortcut, as if a sign, a formula, an object could force a result. The Golden Calf is not only idolatry; it is a panic-driven attempt to manufacture certainty when presence withdraws from the field of perception. Contemporary systems of preconfiguration can do the same thing in an elegant suit: they sell you tomorrow’s presence in exchange for today’s abdication of understanding. That is what should be disarmed, without inflating the prestige of prediction. The point is not to cast better spells. The point is to return to the work the Torah calls responsibility.

So the problem is not simply that someone lies. Something more refined is happening: everyone can speak truthfully within a topology of speech already set in advance. One can argue indefinitely and still move within the same corridor. This is the elegant trap: debate as motion that touches nothing.

If politics is relocating itself to the level of conditions, critique cannot remain at the level of commentary. Commentary describes the surface. But the work of authority is increasingly performed beneath the surface: in thresholds, categories, definitions, standards, procedures that make some futures “realistic” and others “irresponsible.”

The more the world is described as a set of options, the easier it becomes to sell necessity. “Everything is on the table” usually means the table has already been built, the chairs placed, the lighting chosen. We are invited to take a seat and perform seriousness.

That is why the Event must recover its impoliteness. The Event is not a scenario. It is not a variant. It is the moment the apparatus of prediction cracks. If every future already sits in a folder, someone has confused planning with reality, and caution with domination.

The tone of today’s discourse is smooth because smoothness is a technique. It teaches that everything has its category, its threshold, its place, and that we are to accept “the conditions.” The better movement is the opposite one: less interpretation of the world, more tracking of where the conditions of interpretation are manufactured. It is less theatrical than outrage, but more effective. Because if authority now acts through preconfiguration, the worst mistake is to answer it with mere reaction.

Otherwise we are left with the comfort of being morally correct inside a corridor whose doors were closed before the discussion began.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)