ABSTRACT
‘Pure’ epistemology and a rigorous procedure provide a strategical withdrawal and cover against serious onslaughts, and a cover too for ‘operations’ whereby problems are distributed according to personal values and interests that are best left unaired if protests and disputes would be avoided. ‘Values’ that preserve an apparent substantiality are intended to forbid what they conceal; thus the ideal of every state bureaucracy is moral rectitude, and the more corrupt and corrupting it is, the more it will stress this ideal. Everyday life weighs heaviest on women. It is highly probable that they also get something out of it by reversing the situation, but the weight is none the less on their shoulders. ‘Social security’ even when it is unquestionably bureaucratic may be better than neglect and abandonment to a world of misery; indeed it is, and we have no intention of denying ‘progress’, but only of understanding its obverse, the price that has to be paid for it.
