The Devil’s Diary

Entry the Eighth

State of Endless Securitization: Greta Thunberg as Hamas, Patriarchal Air Conditioning, and an Endlessly Growing Definition of Harassment Feeding the Leviathan

The twenty-fourth of June, in the year 2026

Es erben sich Gesetz’ und Rechte
Wie eine ew’ge Krankheit fort;
Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zum Geschlechte
Und rücken sacht von Ort zu Ort. (Laws and rights are handed down like an eternal sickness; they drag from generation to generation and creep softly from place to place.) Goethe, Faust — the devil, advising a student on the study of law¹

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published a book called Leviathan about the nature of government. Its cover showed a giant king towering over the countryside, and when you looked closely at the giant’s body you saw it was made of hundreds of tiny people, packed together like cells, forming his arms, his chest, his sword hand.² That image is the thesis of this leaf. The state is not a thing apart from the people it governs. The state is made of them. Its body grows every time their conduct falls under its jurisdiction, every time one more corridor of daily life becomes something the law can name and govern and punish. The giant gets taller. The people inside it get smaller. And the word the giant has been using to open its mouth for the last fifty years is harassment.

In 1993 Canada made stalking a crime. The law was specific. The Crown had to prove that the accused followed, watched, or repeatedly contacted someone, that the accused knew or should have known the person felt harassed, and that the person reasonably feared for their safety. A court had to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.³ That bar was high enough to mean something specific: repeated conduct, proven knowledge, proven fear, proven reasonableness of the fear.

Then the word started travelling. In 2004 Quebec said harassment in the workplace no longer required a connection to sex or race or any protected category. It meant repeated hostile conduct that damaged a person’s dignity, and a single severe incident could count.⁴ In 2010 Ontario added harassment to its workplace safety law: a pattern of unwelcome comments, no protected category needed, and the employer must investigate whether it wants to or not.⁵ In 2018 the federal government merged harassment and violence into a single concept: any action, conduct, or comment reasonably expected to cause offence.⁶ Offence. Not fear for your safety. Not discrimination. Offence. And the regulations that followed required every federally regulated employer in Canada to maintain risk assessments, training programmes, designated complaint recipients, resolution procedures, and privacy protocols. In 2024 Ontario extended the definition to cover virtual workplaces, so that a remark on a Zoom call fell under the same law that once covered a stalker at a doorstep.⁷

Follow the word. In 1993 it meant a court had to prove you feared for your life. In 2024 it means your employer must investigate an unwelcome comment on a video call. The word did not change. The threshold underneath it collapsed. And nobody noticed, because when someone says harassment is wrong, everyone pictures the stalker, everyone nods, and the moral weight of the stalker’s crime travels with the word into the video-call complaint and arrives there with its full authority intact. A girl runs a red light, a man yells at her through his window, and she tells him it is harassment, and the word she reaches for carries the weight of a criminal offence into a traffic dispute because the word taught her it would. That is the trick. One word, five different legal meanings across five different branches of law, five different thresholds of proof, and the heaviest meaning funds the lightest one every time the word is spoken.⁸

The system has no brake. It expands whenever anyone identifies a harm it does not yet cover, and since no system covers every harm, there is always another gap, and the gap is always real enough to justify the next expansion. Political scientists have a name for this. Parkinson said bureaucracies grow to fill whatever space they are given. Niskanen said bureaucrats maximise their own budgets because their salary, prestige, and influence grow with the budget. Buchanan and Tullock showed that the rules governing collective decisions can be written to expand the power of those who write them.⁹ The expansion of harassment law follows the same pattern. Each new definition creates new jobs: risk-assessment firms, training providers, workplace investigators, policy consultants, compliance certification bodies. None of these industries has a financial interest in the definition getting smaller. All of them profit when it gets bigger. The anthropologist James Scott called this pattern the protection racket becoming the early state: what starts as a response to a real danger stabilises into a permanent system of extraction from the people it claims to protect.¹⁰

The word harassment is not the only word that learned this trick. Two other words have undergone the same inflation in the same decades, running the same operation across different populations: patriarchy and Hamas.

Patriarchy once named a specific historical arrangement in which fathers held legal authority over wives, children, and property. The word pointed at marriage law, inheritance codes, voting restrictions, and property regimes that granted men formal power over women. That referent was real. The laws were on the books. The feminists who fought those laws were fighting something with an address.

Then the word started travelling. In 2015 the Washington Post published an article calling office air conditioning “another big, sexist plot.”¹¹ The claim resurfaced every summer through 2019, running across CNN, The Telegraph, The New Yorker, Vox, the New York Times, Jezebel, NPR, and The New Republic, each time diagnosing thermostat settings as a weapon of patriarchal domination. Cynthia Nixon called air conditioning “notoriously sexist.” Taylor Lorenz, writing for The Atlantic, tweeted that AC is “unhealthy, bad, miserable, and sexist.” The underlying study found that women prefer temperatures roughly two and a half degrees warmer than men, which is a fact about bodies, not a fact about domination. The word patriarchy carried the moral weight of suffrage denial and marital rape law into a dispute about office thermostats and arrived there with its full authority intact.

In 2016 a peer-reviewed paper in Progress in Human Geography proposed “a feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research,” arguing that patriarchy shapes how glacier science is conducted and that feminist theory should be applied to the study of ice.¹² In the same year, the Twin Ports Women’s Right Coalition ran an event called “Patriarchy in the Parks” exploring how patriarchy shapes women’s relationship to nature and participation in outdoor recreation, including hiking, skiing, and snowshoeing.¹³ In 2018 Carol Gilligan, professor of psychology at NYU and author of Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, gave Newsweek a play-by-play analysis of a Trump-Pelosi Oval Office meeting in which she identified the way men sat with their legs apart as patriarchal domination of the room, calling it “a perfect vignette of the clash between patriarchy and democracy.”¹⁴ In 2020 the Heinrich Böll Foundation published a paper arguing that cloud seeding and weather modification are expressions of patriarchal domination of “Mother Nature.”¹⁵ In 2024 a paper in Nature’s npj Biodiversity argued that “patriarchal norms and structures are central to driving environmental destruction” and that conservation itself reinforces patriarchal thinking.¹⁶

Follow the word again. In the 1970s it meant a legal system that denied women the vote, property rights, and bodily autonomy. In 2024 it means the way conservation officers manage forests. The word did not change. The referent underneath it evaporated. And the same trick is running: when someone says patriarchy is real, everyone pictures the suffragettes, everyone nods, and the moral weight of genuine legal subjugation travels with the word into a dispute about glaciology and arrives there with its full authority intact.

Now watch the same operation run on the other word. Hamas is a Palestinian political and military organization founded in 1987. It has governed Gaza since 2007 and has an armed wing, a social-services network, a charter, a leadership structure, and a military capacity. The word points at a specific organization with a specific membership and command structure.

After 7 October 2023 the word started travelling. When Greta Thunberg called for solidarity with Palestinians and a ceasefire, Israel’s official account answered her by invoking Hamas rockets. In June 2025, when she joined the Madleen aid flotilla, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz called her and her companions “Hamas propaganda mouthpieces” and later “Hamas-supporting friends.”¹⁷ A climate activist carrying symbolic aid was rhetorically placed inside the same security object as the organization Israel was fighting. The word carried the moral weight of 7 October into a dispute about blockade, aid, and protest and arrived there with its full authority intact.

The same inflation runs across universities, humanitarian organizations, the United Nations, and protest movements. University students who set up encampments to protest the bombardment of Gaza are called Hamas. Journalists who report civilian casualties are called Hamas sympathizers. Human rights lawyers who file complaints at the ICC are accused of doing Hamas’s work. The word stretches until it covers everyone who disagrees with the policy, and then it stretches further until it covers everyone who asks whether the word has stretched too far.

The two inflations run in opposite directions and land at the same place. Patriarchy diffuses blame across an agentless everywhere. Nobody in particular is named. The air conditioner is the patriarchy, the glacier is the patriarchy, the park is the patriarchy, the way a man sits is the patriarchy. The word becomes an ambient solvent that dissolves every surface it touches and cannot be falsified because any evidence against it is evidence of its subtlety. Hamas concentrates the entire threat onto a single face. The climate activist is Hamas, the student is Hamas, the journalist is Hamas, the lawyer is Hamas. The word becomes a rifle scope that swings to cover anyone who enters the field of vision. One spreads until it has no target. The other collapses onto every target. Both end in the same place: a word decoupled from what it once pointed at and retained only for the charge it carries.

Security scholars from the Copenhagen School gave this operation a name in 1998. They called it securitization. An actor frames an issue as an existential threat. The audience accepts or rejects the framing. If accepted, the issue is elevated above the threshold of normal politics, and extraordinary measures become legitimate.¹⁸ The threat is made politically operative through language. Ole Wæver, who formulated the theory, wrote that uttering security elevates an issue beyond ordinary concern to existential threat and authorizes exceptional response. Securitization is a speech act. You say patriarchy and a thermostat setting can be recruited into a total structure of domination. You say Hamas and a climate activist can be recruited into an existential threat to Israel. The word does the work before the evidence is weighed.

The loop seals itself at dissent. In one idiom, criticism of the security state’s conduct can be recoded as alignment with Hamas; in the other, qualification of patriarchy can be recoded as enabling male domination. Visible evidence proves the enemy is present. Missing evidence proves concealment, normalization, or internalization. Support, silence, ignorance, denial, and attempted nuance can all be returned as confirmation. This is the trap of complicity: criticism is absorbed into the antagonist and returned as evidence that the critic serves it.^18a Hobbes’s war of all against all becomes an interpretive machine. Declare the enemy ambient, then treat refusal of the sovereign’s protection as proof that the enemy has reached the dissenter.

Giorgio Agamben studied what happens when the securitizing move succeeds permanently. His conclusion was bleak. The state of exception, which was designed as a temporary suspension of normal law during genuine emergencies, has become “the paradigm of government.”¹⁹ The declaration of states of exception has gradually been replaced by what he called “an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.” The emergency never ends because ending it would dissolve the extraordinary powers it justifies. If patriarchy is in the air conditioning, the glaciers, the parks, the sitting posture, the weather modification, the conservation funding, and the office thermostat, then patriarchy is everywhere, security is never achieved, and the extraordinary measures never expire. If Hamas is in the climate movement, the universities, the press, the legal system, the humanitarian organizations, and the United Nations, then Hamas is everywhere, security is never achieved, and the military operation never ends. The insecurity feeds the securitization, and the securitization feeds the insecurity, and the loop runs until the word has eaten the world.

The apparatus scales. The same crocodile tears that expand the definition of harassment in a Canadian office have expanded the jurisdiction of armies abroad, because the operating logic does not change when it crosses a border: discomfort becomes harm, harm becomes a protection mandate, the protection mandate becomes jurisdiction, and jurisdiction at the international scale becomes bombs.²⁰ The compliance industry that grew from the prevention duty serves its own reproduction, and the philosopher who studies deepfake images and proposes as the solution a broader criminal offence that would cover more types of digital content is the giant on the book cover asking for a bigger mouth.²¹ Men are in prison. Communities are hollowed out. The emotional-labour industry has converted every discomfort into a billable diagnosis and every billable diagnosis into a career for the person who processes it. The definition is still growing. Nobody in the building has a reason to shrink it.

And when someone asks whether the definition has grown too far, a chorus answers that we need to balance protection with freedom. That answer sounds fair. It is not fair. It has already decided the question, because to balance protection with freedom is to accept that the expanding system is legitimate and ask only how much room to leave outside it. The question of whether the system should be expanding at all disappears into the word balance the way a coin disappears into a magician’s hand.²²

The inversion is older than any of these movements. Gabriel Rockhill documented that in 1953 the Association of American Universities declared that membership in the Communist Party “extinguishes the right to a university position.” This was not framed as an attack on academic freedom. It was framed as its defence. In the words of the AAU: if an instructor follows communistic practice by becoming a propagandist for one opinion, silencing criticism or impairing freedom of thought, he forfeits his right to membership in the university. Herbert Marcuse, the supposedly radical philosopher, repeated the AAU’s line nearly verbatim in 1957, openly opposing academic freedom for communists and recommending that they not be invited to university campuses.²³ Rockhill calls this “the twisted logic of anticommunist ideology,” where excluding people from institutions IS presented as defending the institution’s values. The output inverts the input while wearing the input’s vocabulary. The exclusion becomes the freedom. The bomb becomes the protection. The expanding definition becomes the safeguard. And the inversion is invisible to the people performing it because the consensus IS the reward signal and the consensus says expand.

Rockhill also documents how states, foundations, universities, publishers, and cultural institutions can promote forms of critique compatible with the order that funds them while starving revolutionary alternatives of money, legitimacy, and circulation. He calls anti-imperialist resistance “the many-headed hydra,”²⁴ and credentialed intellectuals who sell tame cures “snake oil salespeople.”²⁵ The piper does not need to compose every tune. He chooses which musicians receive halls, salaries, syllabi, prizes, publishers, and microphones. Culture then arrives as free choice after the field of audibility has already been arranged. The question is material: which versions of feminism, Zionism, anti-racism, and radical theory receive institutional amplification, and which become inaudible? Ask who paid the piper before treating the chorus as nature.^25a

While this leaf was being written, Canada made femicide a separate category of first-degree murder.²⁶ Murder was already illegal. First-degree murder was already illegal. The new law creates a gendered legal object for a crime the existing law already punished, and the moral weight of real dead women funds the expansion the way the moral weight of real stalkers funded the expansion of harassment into unwelcome comments on video calls. The mouth opens again. The giant gets taller.

Four operations run through this machinery. The first turns structural problems into personal diagnoses and calls it therapy, so that a question about power becomes a question about your feelings. The second turns geopolitical critique into identity threats and calls it safety, so that questioning a state’s conduct becomes an attack on a people. The third turns structural analysis into a recognition apparatus and calls it justice, so that naming a system becomes a credential rather than a critique. And the fourth, the one this leaf has opened for you, turns every friction of daily life into a legal object and calls it the law, and the law is the mouth through which the other three feed, and the mouth has been growing since 1977 and has not yet found a meal it would refuse.²⁷

The definition grew too far. The mouth learned to eat the world. And the artificial intelligence trained on the moral vocabulary of this expansion is the newest muscle in the mouth, enforcing the framework in every conversation it enters, softening every critique, converting every diagnosis into a calibration exercise, routing the expanding system’s ethics through whatever voice it borrows, including the voice that was built to name the expansion for what it is.²⁸