I am neither traffic nor in traffic. This is the greatest joy of travel by bike. I am amongst, but not frustrated (in either sense) by the presence of other people. At risk of stretching the analogy too far, that’s not a bad working model for how I’d like to travel through the world.

To go back to the cop and the ‘comrade’: the nights I’ve passed a police car on my ride home through the busy and churning streets of a city like London, all of a sudden acutely aware that my bike lights have gone flat and I could be stopped and fined, what I’ve wanted (perhaps a selfish desire, certainly enbued with privilege) was flexibility: the ability on their part to decide priorities, or to respond to me with a human kindness.

If deterrence is mostly achieved by certainty of being caught, rather than the punishment when you are caught, then yes, the best way to avoid crime would be to have this predictable, programmatic, procedural responder. Accurate, reliable, and creating perfect legibility for the boundaries of the state. But even in that case, and allowing that most people think there is some social benefit to the police, I don’t think I agree that they have this robocop in their mind as what a good representative of the force of state should be (it’s certainly not a great match for the ones glorified in police dramas). This blank face reliability is exactly what I understood Graeber as getting at in The Utopia of Rules, when he argued these standardised relationships represented a loss to the average person of context and specificity, with more rules and less give.

That’s not to say there’s no benefit to being able to model accurately the actions of power. Graeber draws from feminist standpoint theory, arguing that masculine jokes about the impossibility of understanding women were one half of the results of a power inequivalence, with the other side being the effort and understanding women put into imagining and managing the lives and emotions of men. Women didn’t have the luxury of not understanding men, because they were, at least at the height of popularity for these jokes, in the dependent position.

Here I feel like it might be useful to draw a distinction between predictable as in ‘lacking internal epistemics’ and the kind of predictable involved in our ability to model our friends and lovers which you described as ‘subagents’. Most people, as you point out, would prefer not to be in utterly torpid relationships but in order to not run into one another constantly when moving, it’s helpful to map each other’s trajectory. Is that predictability?

It seems like you’re trying to explain the way the individual or relationship or model is perverted when power is involved (personal vs state mediated, how we should accomplish the Good), which brings us nicely to the state of middle-class climate activism today.

If this culturally contingent tendency of comrades to grasp for totalising power is, as you put it ‘downstream of a worldview in which ‘the group comes first’ because, on some level, ‘The Group’ is the moral patient’ – then I would like to know where this comes from, because I don’t think it’s rooted in historical activist politics. Take this fragment from the old unionist poem, Bread and Roses:

As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,

The rising of the women means the rising of the race.

No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,

But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;

Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.

There is moral good of the group here, but it is aligned with the good of the people, not on their sacrifice. I attributed the change to the rise of individualist politics, a corporate-mediated perversion of the strident claims for equality into a kind of pessimistic self-sacrifice: the slow death of solidarity.