The Gravity of Siloisation: Introducing Principle 21 of the Desilo Principles
Why does fragmented thinking remain so attractive? Why do we retreat into narrow specialisations, convenient explanations, and measurable achievements, even when we recognise that reality is more complex? What draws us towards the fragment and discourages us from recovering the whole?
These questions underpin Principle 21, the latest proposed addition to the Desilo Principles. It extends the framework’s examination of fragmentation, severance, and reduction by considering the human dispositions that encourage these processes and make them persist.
The proposition is that lower human tendencies, particularly intellectual laziness and greed, can act as a gravitational pull towards siloisation. The proposed principle reads:
Principle 21: Lower Human Traits as the Gravity of Siloisation
Lower human tendencies, particularly intellectual laziness and greed, exert a gravitational pull towards fragmented and siloised understanding. They encourage the avoidance of complexity, the severance of inconvenient relationships, and the reduction of meaning to what serves immediate interests. Resisting this pull requires intellectual effort, moral cultivation, and a coherent worldview that connects human knowledge and action to higher, transcendent purposes.
Gravity is a metaphor here. Principle 21 is a philosophical synthesis, not an empirically established law. The scholarship discussed below supports particular aspects of its argument; it does not establish the entire proposition or its theological conclusions.
To appreciate the proposition, we must distinguish the necessity of dividing knowledge from the temptation to remain confined within those divisions.
We cannot comprehend everything simultaneously. Specialisation, abstraction, and simplification help us work with a reality that exceeds our individual capacities. Experimental research by Kool et al. (2010) found that participants tended to avoid options imposing greater cognitive demands. This provides evidence for a tendency to economise mental effort, although such economy should not automatically be equated with moral laziness. Conserving cognitive resources can be reasonable and useful.
Within the Desilo framework (Zaky Jaafar, 2026), the difficulty begins when we forget that our divisions are provisional: what we have separated for convenience remains connected in reality. Intellectual laziness, as proposed here, arises when we resist examining those connections despite having sufficient reason and opportunity to do so.
A person can work tirelessly within a narrow boundary. Long hours and technical competence do not necessarily entail a willingness to question the purposes being served. The relevant distinction is between the effort invested in performing a task and the effort invested in understanding its place within a larger whole.
This is not grounds for labelling every specialist intellectually lazy. Exhaustion, limited resources, restricted authority, and institutional pressure can constrain inquiry. Principle 21 concerns avoidable unwillingness to pursue a wider understanding, rather than every instance of limited understanding.
Greed supplies a second pull. The argument proposed here is that greed encourages attention to what can be acquired while discouraging attention to relationships that might constrain acquisition.
Kunda’s (1990) account of motivated reasoning provides a relevant psychological connection. Her review explains how the desire to reach a particular conclusion can influence the beliefs and reasoning strategies people employ. People may construct apparently reasonable justifications for conclusions they already wish to accept. This does not establish greed as the cause of siloisation, but it helps explain how interests can shape what people recognise as a convincing account of reality.
Consider a hypothetical enterprise that evaluates its success exclusively through profit. Workers appear principally as labour costs, forests as available resources, and communities as markets. Each description captures an aspect of reality. Reduction occurs when that aspect is allowed to exhaust what those people, places, or relationships mean.
The worker’s dignity, the forest’s ecological relationships, and the community’s ways of life then become inconvenient additions to an otherwise manageable calculation. In the interpretation offered by Principle 21, greed has an affinity with this narrowing because a diminished account of reality can make appropriation easier to justify.
Through the Law of Meaningicide, the proposed mechanism becomes clearer. Fragmentation divides the situation into separate components. Severance obscures the relationships connecting those components to wider responsibilities. Reduction permits a selected attribute—price, output, profitability, or rank—to stand for the value of the whole.
Bandura’s (1999) analysis of moral disengagement offers a closely related account of how responsibility can be weakened. He identifies mechanisms including the displacement and diffusion of responsibility, the minimisation of harmful consequences, and the dehumanisation of those affected. He also describes how otherwise considerate people can contribute to destructive activities through disconnected functions within legitimate organisations.
The deSilo interpretation is that such arrangements can separate competent task performance from awareness of, and responsibility for, the consequences of the whole. Principle 21 adds that human dispositions may make these separations attractive and help sustain them.
A further complication follows. Someone driven by greed need not possess a fragmented understanding personally. A controlling actor may understand a system extensively while restricting the understanding available to others operating within it.
Imagine an organisation whose leadership sees the relationships between production, finance, resources, and markets, while its workers know only their individual functions. The whole is coordinated, yet participation remains siloised. Those carrying out the work may lack the information and authority needed to question its collective consequences.
This hypothetical situation reveals an important limit to integration as a remedy. The capacity to connect things does not establish the goodness of the purpose connecting them. An integrated system can serve exploitation. A coherent worldview can organise domination.
Meadows (1999) provides a useful systems perspective on this distinction. She identifies information flows, system goals, and underlying paradigms as significant points of intervention. Her analysis emphasises that the purpose governing a system influences the operation of its subordinate structures. Applied to deSilo, this suggests that improving connections without examining governing purposes may leave the deeper problem intact. This application is an interpretation of her argument, rather than her endorsement of Principle 21.
The remedial question must therefore extend beyond whether knowledge is connected. We must ask what holds it together, towards what ends, and under whose conception of the good.
Within the deSilo position proposed here, this is where the vertical connection with transcendence becomes necessary. It situates human knowledge and power within a higher horizon of meaning and accountability. In a theistic formulation, accountability to God means that appetite, wealth, institutional authority, and political success cannot possess final authority over what is right.
This position has an intellectual affinity with Nasr’s (1981) critique of the desacralisation of knowledge. In Knowledge and the Sacred, Nasr argues for recovering the relationship between knowledge and the sacred, locating understanding within a metaphysical and spiritual order. His work provides a philosophical precedent for questioning the separation of knowledge from transcendent meaning.
The necessity of transcendence remains a philosophical and theological claim of the proposed principle. It is not a conclusion established by the psychological studies cited above. Those studies illuminate particular mechanisms of cognition and moral disengagement; the deSilo argument connects these concerns to a broader account of human purpose.
Nor does invoking God guarantee that such obligations will be honoured. Within the framework’s own terms, religious understanding can become siloised when ritual is separated from justice, belief from conduct, or communal identity from responsibility towards others. Transcendence must shape judgement and action if it is to exercise the cohesive role claimed for it.
Principle 21 therefore points towards three connected remedial commitments: widening and reconnecting understanding; cultivating the moral capacity to resist convenient ignorance and greed; and critically examining the worldview that gives integration its direction.
These commitments must also influence institutional arrangements. Asking individuals to recognise the whole while rewarding them solely for optimising their fragment creates a contradiction. A deSilo response would make room for questioning purposes, tracing consequences, and accepting shared responsibility, alongside the cultivation of individual character.
The significance of this latest addition to the deSilo Principles lies in bringing moral disposition into the diagnosis of knowledge disorder. Fragmentation is examined as something that may be sustained by what we find convenient, what we desire, and what we prefer not to see.
Its deepest challenge is personal as well as institutional. Reconnecting the fragments may reveal obligations we had managed to avoid. The work of deSilo requires the willingness to understand those relationships—and the moral courage to live by what they disclose.
By Zaky Jaafar
References
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.
Kool, W., McGuire, J. T., Rosen, Z. B., & Botvinick, M. M. (2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive demand. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(4), 665–682. "https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020198" (https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020198)
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498. "https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480" (https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480)
Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. Sustainability Institute. "https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/" (https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/)
Nasr, S. H. (1981). Knowledge and the sacred. Crossroad.
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