When Abstraction Collides With Consequence

When Ideology Meets Consequence (and Quietly Loses)

I’ve been noticing a shift in my sister, and it’s forced me to revisit a bunch of things I thought were settled—about feminism, liberalism, institutions, and the kind of ideas you can afford to have when your life isn’t forced to cash them out.

Back in college—around 2012—my sister had the kind of hardline feminist opinions that were common in certain campus ecosystems. Not “equal pay for equal work” feminism. I mean full abstraction, spreadsheet-morality feminism. The kind where you can say, with a straight face, that imprisoning innocent men is acceptable because “statistically” women are disadvantaged, so the injustice is justified at the aggregate level.

That sounds grotesque when you repeat it outside the room it was said in. But inside the room, it functioned as a moral flex: if you can override individual fairness for the sake of “the system,” you signal how committed you are. And I resented her for it. Not in a debate-club way, but in a personal way—because it wasn’t a theory. It was a declaration that specific people don’t matter if the chart says so.

Now it’s been 12 or 13 years. She worked at McKinsey, worked in various corporations. I don’t even know her views anymore in a neat ideological sense. But I noticed something: she recently took the side of Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal during one of those online moments that went viral and got framed as controversy. Whether it was “controversial” or just made controversial isn’t the point. The point is: her instinct surprised me.

It didn’t look like the old “punch the powerful” autopilot. It looked like judgment.

And that difference is the real story.

The College-Era Trap: Abstract Morality With No Human Cost

A lot of campus politics runs on a particular kind of intellectual shortcut:

• reduce humans to categories
• reduce categories to statistics
• reduce ethics to outcomes
• then call it “rigor”

Once you’re in that mode, you can justify almost anything as long as it’s aimed at the “right” group, or serves the “right” historical correction. Individual innocence becomes negotiable. Context becomes irrelevant. Intent becomes irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether the ideology is internally consistent and morally aligned with the tribe.

That’s how you end up with statements like “it’s okay if innocent men suffer.” Not because the speaker is necessarily evil, but because the environment rewards a kind of moral extremity that would collapse instantly if it had to be applied to a real person’s face.

And those frameworks don’t just float around as opinions. They seep into how you judge people close to you.

“Cold Approach” as a Moral Crime (Until It Isn’t)

During my “gaming days,” I had a long conversation with my sister where she strongly condemned the entire concept of cold approach—approaching women in public, on the street. She framed it as creepy and as part of a broader power differential: men having disproportionate sexual control, men imposing, women being pressured.

At the time, it wasn’t a discussion about me. It was a discussion about men as a class and women as a vulnerable category. Under that lens, you don’t need to ask whether the approach was respectful, whether the woman had agency, or whether two adults might actually like each other. The conclusion is preloaded.

But here’s the awkward part: I married a woman I met like that.

Which raises an interesting question: did her view soften? Did she adjust her model? Or does she keep the model and quietly classify my situation as an exception that doesn’t count?

I don’t know. People almost never announce “I was wrong” when an ideology fails in real life. They just stop applying it with the same confidence. They change their tone. They grow allergic to absolutism. They start sounding like adults.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes the shift is visible only in moments like “siding with the CEO” when the crowd expects the opposite.

The Broader Pattern: Who Gets to Believe What

This is where my thinking widened. Because the sister story isn’t just a family story. It’s a pattern.

There’s something about liberal (and especially ultra-liberal) ideology that often originates in places where people are… bankrolled. Universities. NGOs. Think tanks. Grant-funded research ecosystems. Tenured environments. Spaces where you’re insulated from hard constraints.

It’s not that every liberal idea is fake, or that every professor is useless, or that research never produces anything valuable. That would be a lazy overcorrection.

It’s that insulation changes what kinds of ideas survive.

In bankrolled environments:

• you can afford antagonistic frameworks because you don’t have to run them through reality
• you can afford purity politics because your incentives reward alignment, not results
• you can afford to treat society like an argument because no one makes you ship a product, balance a budget, or handle consequences

A market environment punishes wrongness quickly. An insulated environment can reward wrongness indefinitely if it’s fashionable and rhetorically strong.

That doesn’t mean “liberals are wrong.” It means certain institutions are structurally biased toward producing ideas that are untethered from lived trade-offs.

Why Corporate Life Moderates People Without “Flipping” Them

This is where corporate work matters. Not because corporations are moral, but because corporations force contact with consequences.

A corporate environment introduces:

• trade-offs you can’t hand-wave
• accountability to real humans
• reputational and financial risk
• constant exposure to second-order effects

You can’t just say “some people will be harmed but the aggregate will improve” without someone immediately asking: Which people? How harmed? For how long? Can we survive the blowback?

This pressure doesn’t necessarily make someone less compassionate. It makes them less theatrical. It de-romanticizes ideology.

So when I see my sister defending someone like Deepinder Goyal against a wave of online moralizing, I don’t interpret it as “she became anti-feminist.” I interpret it as: she may have become anti-dogma. She may have learned proportionality.

And proportionality is basically kryptonite to campus-era absolutism.

The Missing Public Framework: Procedural vs Systemic Legitimacy

This “consequence vs purity” tension shows up in politics too, and it’s getting harder to ignore.

I remember when the Government of India cracked down on protests and arrested figures like Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. At the time, the dominant public lens was simple: free speech versus state overreach. Constitutionality. Civil liberties. A government acting like it’s allergic to dissent.

And honestly, it felt like that. Even when people defended it, the justification often sounded clumsy in legal or moral language.

But later, watching how quickly governments in nearby countries can be destabilized—how mobs can overwhelm institutions, how legitimacy can collapse suddenly—changes how earlier “overreactions” are perceived. Actions that seemed indefensible at t = now begin to look like preemptive containment at t + risk.

This is where a lot of public debate fails, because we pretend legitimacy is one thing. It isn’t. There are at least two kinds:

• Procedural legitimacy: rights, law, due process, constitutional ideals
• Systemic legitimacy: stability, continuity, preventing cascade failure

Liberal discourse tends to speak almost entirely in procedural language. States responsible for survival often act in systemic logic. And when systemic logic can’t be justified procedurally, you get that uncanny gap: actions that feel “intuitively justified” to some people while still sounding legally strained or rhetorically ugly.

The gap isn’t imaginary. It’s a real mismatch between public morality and operational statecraft.

“Epistemic” Is the Word for What Institutions Know (and Don’t)

In the middle of all this, I ran into a word that gets thrown around a lot: epistemic (or epistemically).

Here’s the plain meaning: it has to do with knowledge—how it’s formed, what it’s based on, and how reliable it is.

So when someone says an institution is “epistemically insulated,” they mean:

• it doesn’t get fast feedback when it’s wrong
• it doesn’t pay real costs for bad predictions
• its ideas can drift away from reality without being punished

That’s the core critique of bankrolled ideological ecosystems. Not that they’re always malicious—just that they’re often structurally blind to certain kinds of risk and consequence, because they don’t live inside those consequences.

And once you start seeing the world through that lens, a lot of things click into place: campus politics, NGO incentive structures, online outrage economies, even why some people “mature” ideologically the moment they have to manage real systems.

What I’m Actually Left With

I’m not trying to build a new anti-liberal ideology out of all this. I’m trying to name a failure mode: ideas produced without constraints tend to become morally intense, socially combative, and weirdly indifferent to collateral damage.

My sister’s shift—whether she would describe it that way or not—looks like what happens when abstraction runs into consequence. It’s not a betrayal. It’s contact with reality.

The only frustrating part is that society still doesn’t have a widely shared framework for discounting consequence-free certainty. We keep treating bankrolled moral confidence as expertise, and then acting shocked when it breaks under stress.

Conclusion

The arc I’m watching—my sister’s, and maybe mine—isn’t “left to right” or “feminist to anti-feminist.” It’s “abstract to grounded.” Institutions that don’t pay for being wrong are great at producing certainty, but terrible at producing wisdom. And the older I get, the more I trust people who’ve been forced to replace purity with judgment.