Word Continuity that Masks the Material Rupture

§ 01 · The hofje that is not a hofje

The sales brochure for a new-build project in a mid-sized Dutch city carries the name in ten tall serif letters: Het Hofje aan de Vliet — The Hofje on the Vliet. The image below shows a courtyard with an old chestnut tree, a bench, narrow-windowed gables, lit in the soft tones of a Pieter de Hooch painting. Three pages in, beneath a stylised floor plan, sit the specifications. Forty-eight apartments, average floor area of fifty-one square metres, six storeys, no courtyard but a shared first-floor balcony, owned by an institutional investor, rent of one thousand four hundred and fifty euros for a one-bedroom unit, minimum living space compliant with the Building Regulations Decree.

Everyone present at the handover, the alderman, the developer’s director, the press, the first residents collecting their keys, uses one word. A new hofje (a traditional Dutch courtyard almshouse). No-one is lying. The director of housing development who says it, thinking of his own grandmother who spent her last years in such a place, means it. The alderman who picks it up and ties it to the municipal ambition of a home for everyone means it. The brochure that staged the term means it. The residents signing the lease hope it is true. And yet what they intend when they speak the word, and what they have in fact received when the key turns in the lock, are two different things. Not because anyone has deceived. Because a word from one stratum of time has remained suspended into a quite different moment, and is performing work the present content can no longer perform.

§ 02 · What the pattern is

This is the third paper in Statecraft Series III, and the second to develop a concrete pattern after the meta-pattern of The Sincere Voice (Nº 01). The first concrete pattern, set out in The Congealed Outcome as Manifested Preference (Nº 02), addressed the official who claims that people want X, when X is in fact the outcome of a supply-side decision. The pattern of the present paper sits directly alongside it under the same roof, but engages at a different level. It is not the outcome but the word that does the work; not the choice that gets manifested but the term that wraps the choice.

The pattern is precisely this. A word remains in use. House, organic, community, sustainable, flexible, participation, and dozens more besides. The material, social, legal or functional content of the thing the word denotes has shifted, sometimes into its opposite. The cultural memory carried by the word then does the work that the present content can no longer perform. The speaker need not lie. He need only reach for the available word. The institution need not deceive. It need only retain the available word in its legislation, its contracts and its marketing. The social fabric around the word does the rest.

What the pattern is not should be made plain. Not a conspiracy. The director of housing, the minister who says flexibilisation, the welfare worker who writes community into a project memo, none of these is lying. Not stupidity. The users of these words are educated, often highly trained professionals doing their work well within the frames assigned to them. Not sudden deception. The drift unfolds across decades, in tenths of a percentage point per year, in square metres per apartment, in days to next contract termination, in slowly declining membership figures. The pattern works beneath all of that, as the philological underside of what Series I called institutional dissociation and what Series II made legible as the way that dissociation works through into the lives of citizens.

§ 03 · Three traditions that see it

The proposition that words can leave their referent without the speaker noticing is not new. Three intellectual traditions have caught a fragment of it independently. For our paper they are not ornament but tools.

The first comes from political science. Giovanni Sartori published in the American Political Science Review in 1970 a methodological essay he called Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics. His warning was technical. A concept can be moved up and down a ladder of abstraction. The more abstract, the more cases it covers, and the fewer features it defines. When a researcher enlarges the extension of a concept without correspondingly reducing its intension — what Sartori called conceptual stretching — he is left with a concept that fits everywhere and discriminates nowhere. Democracy covering both Sweden and Belarus. Welfare covering both a community centre and a visiting protocol. Hofje covering both the Bakenesserkamer of Haarlem and an investor-owned apartment block on the Vliet.¹ Sartori treated stretching as a scientific error rather than a social phenomenon. For our paper he nonetheless supplies the instrument needed to demonstrate what happens when a word is laid over something new without its defining features moving with it.

David Collier and James Mahon sharpened Sartori’s tool in 1993. Their contribution, Conceptual Stretching Revisited, imported insights from cognitive linguistics about radial categories and family resemblance.² Many concepts, they argued, lack a hard definition. They have a central, prototypical case around which secondary, related cases cluster. The central case of house is the post-war single-family dwelling with a garden. The secondary case is the studio in a high-rise block. The pull of the word emanates from the centre. The speaker draws unconsciously on the prototype while delivering, materially, something peripheral. That is precisely the structure on which our paper relies. Not words that lose their definition, but words that retain their centre in cultural memory while their application has migrated to the edge.

The second tradition is philological and morally weightier. Victor Klemperer, professor of Romance languages in Dresden, Jewish, dismissed by the Nazis, kept a diary between 1933 and 1945 of the language of the Third Reich. He recorded, word by word, how a language he had taken to be academically familiar slowly changed beneath his feet. LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, published in 1947, is not a polemic. It is a philological logbook. Klemperer’s central thesis is that Nazism scarcely created any new words. It repurposed existing ones, through millions of repetitions absorbed mechanically and unconsciously.³ Fanatisch slid in the LTI from a pejorative to a term of praise for the party. Organisch was deployed to legitimise every top-down intervention as natural growth. Volk changed from a demographic to a metaphysical category. The speaker did not notice the difference. The words, as Klemperer wrote in one celebrated passage, work like tiny doses of arsenic. Swallowed unnoticed, apparently without effect, and after a while the toxic effect is there.⁴

The Klemperer discipline, the recording of words against their referents, is the core of our paper. It demands no judgement on the speaker. It asks only registration. Which word is being used. What thing is being delivered. What is the difference. Who keeps the difference in place by continuing to speak the word.

The third tradition comes from philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) tied meaning to use. A word means what it does in a language game, and that language game is embedded in a form of life. The point for our analysis: when the form of life within which a word functioned changes or disappears, what the word does changes too, even if the sound stays the same. Family resemblance, in Wittgenstein’s term, describes how concepts such as game or community cover a set of overlapping similarities without a hard definitional core. It is possible for a word to drift toward an application that shares no property with its original use except resemblance to an intermediate one.⁵ Wittgenstein thereby supplies the philosophical warrant for the claim that word-continuity and meaning-continuity are not the same. A speaker who sincerely believes he is saying what his predecessor said may find himself inside a different language game without ever having been initiated into it.

Behind these three traditions stand smaller anchors that the footnotes will activate. Reinhart Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft (1979) supplies the diachronic schema in which a word carries an Erfahrungsraum (space of experience) and an Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectation) inherited from an earlier time-stratum.⁶ Pierre Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power (1991) supplies the sociology of the market on which legitimate speech is produced by legislator, trade body, marketing and academia.⁷ George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946), supplies the sharpest and most-cited formulation: the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.⁸ For our work that quotation is ironically apt, since this paper shows that the distortion is in fact carried by sincere speakers. Not insincerity. A far more durable fabric.

With these three veins the paper can begin its empirical work. Sartori-Collier-Mahon supplies the analytical instrument. Klemperer supplies the moral temperature and the discipline. Wittgenstein supplies the philosophical foundation. The rest is material.

§ 04 · Six Dutch dossiers

The word house in new-build

In Dutch cultural memory after 1945, house covers a single-family dwelling with land, on average one hundred to one hundred and thirty square metres of usable floor area, three to four rooms, a garden or yard, in owner-occupation or housing-association tenure, intended for lifelong or generational use. The word transported a whole social imaginary of ownership, intimacy and neighbourhood, anchored institutionally by decades of construction subsidies, mortgage interest deduction and rent regulation. The projection was not sentimental but factual. To say house was to say all those affordances at once.

The material reality of 2024-2026 is something else. The average usable floor area of a new-build dwelling has fallen from around one hundred and eighteen square metres in 2021 to ninety-nine square metres as of the first of January 2026.⁹ Since 2023 more than half of new construction has been apartments, in 2025 nearly forty thousand of a total of sixty-nine thousand permitted new dwellings. In Amsterdam ninety-six per cent of new construction in 2025 was an apartment, in Eindhoven ninety-three per cent, in Utrecht eighty-seven per cent, in Rotterdam eighty-seven per cent.¹⁰ In 2023, for the first time since the start of measurement in 2012, more rental than owner-occupied dwellings were permitted. The Building Regulations Decree (Bbl), in force since the first of January 2024, requires for a residential function only that at least one habitable space measure eleven square metres at three metres’ width; a student dwelling, with a derogation for shared accommodation, can fall to roughly eighteen square metres of private floor area.¹¹

The speech, however, persists. On the campaign site of a major construction company the organisation states that it builds a home throughout the Netherlands for everyone, and that it prefers to call itself a neighbourhood developer. Project names breathe the old imaginary. Het Hofje aan de Vliet. Nouveau Rhenen. The Village at the Zuid-As. A new-build project in Nijmegen carries the name LOYD, a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright, and contains seventy-eight apartments presented as luxury homes in a building that overlaps with no feature of the post-war repertoire of house except the word itself. Marketing operates exactly as Bourdieu described it: the market selects words with the greatest affective pull, and those are the old ones.

What the word house is doing in this constellation is exactly what Klemperer observed in another register. The sound stays. The cultural memory of the single-family dwelling with garden, with the affordance of lifelong transmission and the practical certainty that the resident is also the owner, remains in association. The actual delivery is a fifty-one square metre apartment, owned by an institutional investor, on a tenancy that legally guarantees no lifelong security. Capital Value reported that the share of international investors in the Dutch residential investment market dropped from thirty-two per cent in 2022 to one per cent in 2025, while Dutch pension funds have indicated twelve point seven billion euros available for the next three years for investment in rental dwellings.¹² The boundary of institutional investment in these figures is strict; narrower or broader definitions shift the absolute proportions but not the direction. The image of the resident-owner of a family home has become a statistical minority position in new construction. The word house carries the historical majority and the present-day minority through one and the same sound.

The distance between word and thing is not abstract here. A house-hunter who, on the basis of a new house, builds an expectation about what he is to inhabit, learns only at the viewing that the term covers something different from what it covered in his parents’ day. The parent who wishes to leave a house to his child discovers that the same word meant something other on his own dwelling than on the complex in which his child now rents. The alderman who tells the council that five hundred new houses will be delivered, delivers something different from what his predecessor in the nineteen-eighties delivered, while the political weight of the sentence still rides on the old meaning. Albert Hirschman described in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) that dissatisfaction with a supply expresses itself in exit or in voice; where exit is unavailable, voice has no purchase on the word that clothes the ill-fitting thing.¹³ The resident with no alternative continues to call his place a house, because no other word and no other dwelling are available to him. No-one speaks falsely. The word does the work.

The word organic in supermarket assortment

In Dutch cultural memory of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, organic was politically charged. It pointed to Demeter, biodynamic since 1928, to small-scale production, to local supply, to the refusal of artificial fertiliser and pesticides, often with a worldview attached. The word marked a movement. It carried the affordance of other than industrial.

The current institutional content is something else. SKAL Biocontrole certifies on behalf of the Dutch state under EU Regulation 2018/848. The standards are industry-wide and contain no requirement of small scale and no requirement of locality. An organic egg may come from a barn of twenty-four thousand laying hens, provided the feed is organic. The organic agricultural area in the Netherlands at the end of 2024 was ninety-one thousand five hundred and twenty-seven hectares, five point one per cent of total agricultural land.¹⁴ The market share of organic in the supermarket has stuck around four per cent, with a turnover of one point seven seven billion euros in 2024, against, for instance, twelve point one per cent in Denmark and nine point three per cent in Austria.¹⁵ The word organic carries the old movement; the thing delivers an industrial niche.

The pattern became visible in an interim moment in April 2024. Albert Heijn gave the Authority for Consumers and Markets a commitment in April 2024, without formal penalty, to withdraw its claims of being the most sustainable supermarket and we are working with our growers and farmers towards a more sustainable future, on the grounds that they were insufficiently substantiated.¹⁶ In the same spring the Amsterdam district court ruled that KLM claims such as Fly Responsibly, CO2ZERO Reduce your impact and the label Sustainable Aviation Fuel as a sustainability solution, in nineteen advertising statements, were misleading and unlawful; Booking.com took Travel Sustainable offline. The pattern works visibly through onto the terms honest, pure, natural, fresh, farmstead, words that drift across packaging without any legal definition. The ACM has held the Sustainability Claims Guideline since 2023. The EU Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, Directive 2024/825, came into force on twenty-six March 2024, with a transposition deadline of twenty-seven March 2026, followed by a forthcoming Green Claims Directive.¹⁷

The difference between word and thing here is not a lie told by the retailer. The certification is in order, the inspection runs, the label is technically correct. What has shifted is the cultural content. Organic in 2026 delivers an industrially certified product line within a conventional supply chain, and through that label it carries the association of a movement that has little to do with that supply chain. The consumer who thought he was buying somewhere else is buying the same with a label. The farmer who calls himself organic and meets the standard does not recognise himself in the pioneers from whom he inherited the word. The Demeter pioneers who place biodynamic on their products are revising their terminology because the word organic alone no longer distinguishes.

The word community in welfare and the social domain

In Dutch twentieth-century tradition, community was tied to association, church, guild, mutual society, neighbourhood and family. The word carried boundedness: membership, obligation, repeated encounter, a reciprocity that was not invoiced. Robert Putnam called this bonding social capital, and his diagnosis that this capital eroded in western societies in the second half of the twentieth century holds for the Netherlands no less than for the United States for which he wrote it.¹⁸

The Wmo 2015 (Wet maatschappelijke ondersteuning, Social Support Act) articulated the administrative claim. Social support is directed at the self-reliance and participation of persons with disabilities, and at the promotion of social cohesion. The Speech from the Throne by King Willem-Alexander on the seventeenth of September 2013 introduced the participation society as successor to the classical welfare state. The chair of the Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP, Netherlands Institute for Social Research), Kim Putters, described the operation as a transition from welfare state to welfare city. Welfare organisations, the support agency Movisie, municipal teams and community workers absorbed the vocabulary of community spirit, own strength, informal care. The actual provider became a contracted service.

Five years on, the SCP itself evaluated, in Sociaal domein op koers? (Social Domain on Course?, 2020), that expectations of the new policy had been pitched too high, especially regarding the self-reliance of citizens and a more caring society. Participation and engagement of people with disabilities had not increased.¹⁹ Meanwhile the loneliness figures stand. CBS (Statistics Netherlands) reports that in 2024 ten per cent of those aged fifteen and over felt severely lonely, thirty per cent felt somewhat lonely, and sixty-one per cent did not feel lonely, a shift from sixty-six per cent not lonely in 2019. The Adults and Elderly Health Monitor measures, among adults aged eighteen and over, forty-six per cent lonely in 2024, of which thirty-three per cent moderately and thirteen per cent severely lonely.²⁰ The divergence between the two instruments is methodological; the order of magnitude of the phenomenon is independent of the definitional question. Among single people fourteen per cent are severely lonely, among single-parent households eighteen per cent. Church involvement has been a minority position since 2018; volunteering is ageing rapidly, and association membership fell from seventy per cent in 2012-2014 to sixty-two per cent in 2023-2024.²¹

The word community on a Wmo decision functions in this constellation as a philological residue from a language game the neighbourhood no longer plays. The welfare organisation delivers a contracted activity, with intake, product code and procurement cycle. What it does not deliver, and cannot deliver, is what the word historically brought with it: the boundedness that generates reciprocity, the repeated encounter that, over years, builds independence from a professional provider, the social fabric that collectively absorbs the failure of any single participant. That this is not delivered is no charge against the welfare organisation. Its commissioner could not contract for it because community is not a deliverable performance in standard procurement language. The cultural memory of the word does, in the policy text, work that the operational reality cannot bear. An SCP study from 2017 brought it into focus most sharply: nearly a fifth of those who had requested Wmo support felt very lonely several months after the so-called kitchen-table conversation, and more than a quarter were not participating in society through work or association life.²² The act carries the word. The neighbourhood carries the silence.

The word sustainable in biomass subsidies

Sustainable dates, in its modern political usage, to the Brundtland Report of 1987. The definition was strict: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The word tied itself to generational justice and to ecological limits.

In Dutch implementation under the SDE+ and SDE++ subsidy schemes, sustainable acquired an operational secondary meaning. Recorded under the Renewable Energy Directive, on the basis of national sustainability requirements, woody biomass qualified as a renewable energy source. That was legally correct. Materially it meant that a biomass plant was burning wood pellets to deliver electricity and heat, with a direct emissions intensity per kWh higher than that of natural gas, and a renewability claim resting on the assumption that the forest from which the pellets came regrows over decades. The Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) issued a 2020 report, Beschikbaarheid en toepassingsmogelijkheden van duurzame biomassa (Availability and Application Possibilities of Sustainable Biomass), concluding that woody biomass does not a priori contribute to climate goals, owing to carbon debt and long payback time.²³ The Algemene Rekenkamer (Netherlands Court of Audit) had already warned in 2015 that operational SDE+ projects delivered, on average, twenty-six per cent less energy than on paper, partly because of constrained biomass availability.²⁴

The speech around these installations remained with the word. Vattenfall presented the planned biomass plant in Diemen as part of green district heating. The RWE Eemshaven plant received a subsidy decision with a maximum amount of approximately nine hundred and thirty million euros for biomass co-firing over eight years. The cabinet decided in June 2021 to issue no new subsidies for heat production from woody biomass below one hundred degrees Celsius, pending a phase-out path. The Council of State (Raad van State) annulled in late August 2023 the original 2019 permit for two hundred and twelve kilotonnes of wood pellets per year; on 16 October 2024 Vattenfall itself withdrew from the Diemen project, after years of public and legal pressure.²⁵ The word sustainable itself was not removed from communication in this episode; only the project to which it had been attached. The claim moved on, to district heating networks, to residual heat, to geothermal energy, and the word remained available for whatever was placed beneath it next.

The pattern in this dossier is precisely the Klemperer pattern. Not a word that has been retired, but a word that has been passed on to another thing without releasing its associations. To say sustainable of a biomass plant is to carry, through the word, the associations of solar power, ecosystem preservation and intergenerational justice, while the chimney emits more CO₂ than its gas-fired equivalent. The inspector who issues the label is doing his work according to the rules. The minister who awards the subsidy is complying with the law. The word does the political work the chimney cannot do.

The word flexible in the labour-market vocabulary

In post-war Dutch labour discourse, flexible never had a political charge of its own. It acquired positive associations in the nineteen-eighties: adaptability, modernisation, room for entrepreneurship, emancipation from bureaucratic rigidity. To say a flexible labour market was to say a labour market that works for the people who inhabit it.

The figures tell another story. CBS reports for 2024 two point seven million employees on a flexible employment relationship and roughly one point three million own-account self-employed (zzp’ers), together forty per cent of all working people. In the third quarter of 2024 eleven per cent of the working population were own-account self-employed; thirty-three per cent had no permanent employment. Workers on a flexible employment relationship become unemployed six times as often as permanent employees (three point zero versus zero point five per cent in 2023). One quarter of the self-employed have a single client or are largely dependent on a single client.²⁶ The Borstlap Commission, which on twenty-three January 2020 issued its final report In wat voor land willen wij werken? (In What Kind of Country Do We Want to Work?), held that earning capacity was at risk through the rise of flexible work, with as a consequence the fragmentation of business and a deficit of investment in practical training and development. The commission proposed an ordered labour market with three contractual forms and an employee, unless-presumption.²⁷

The word flexible remained intact. Employers’ associations stressed the necessity of a flexible periphery for agility. Policy documents chose flexibilisation as a manageable process. The social-scientific literature, with Guy Standing’s The Precariat (2011) as principal anchor, gave the thing its other name: precarity. Two words for one reality, with opposite charges. Whoever said flexible carried the cultural memory of emancipation and opportunity. Whoever said precarity carried the figure of a six-fold higher unemployment risk and a quarter single-client dependency. The law, in the form of the Wet Deregulering Beoordeling Arbeidsrelaties (Wet DBA, Employment Relations Deregulation Act) on enforcement moratorium and the proposed VBAR Act, attempted to bring the legal framework up to material reality without abandoning the word flexible in its structure.²⁸ Quentin Skinner would activate his classical term from rhetoric here: paradiastole, or rhetorical redescription, the technique by which the evaluative charge of a concept is shifted by synonymic substitution. Flexible and precarious are the same market reality with opposite rhetorical charges. To retain one and reject the other is to do political work without changing reality.

The word participation in the Wmo and the Participation Act

Of all the words in this paper, participation carries the sharpest contradiction between origin and present charge. In the Dutch political tradition of Nieuw Links, the participation movement and nineteen-seventies democratisation, it referred to voice, co-ownership, participation as a citizen with a say. To call for more participation was to call for influence over decisions affecting one.

In administrative practice after 2013, participation became synonymous with being held accountable for one’s own responsibility. The Participatiewet (Participation Act) of 2015 was the renamed former social assistance with intensified counter-performance and job-search obligations. The Wmo 2015 tied participation to self-reliance, with the administrative assumption that citizens were capable of a degree of self-direction that, as later research demonstrated, a substantial proportion of them were not. The Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (WRR, Scientific Council for Government Policy) report Weten is nog geen doen (2017, Knowing What to Do is Not the Same as Doing It) showed empirically that capability and capacity to act (doenvermogen) follow a normal distribution only weakly correlated with educational level, and further depressed by stress and mental load at life events such as divorce, bankruptcy and dismissal.²⁹ The Toeslagenaffaire (Childcare Benefit Affair) was the most appalling illustration. Tens of thousands of parents were forced to repay vast sums because the system assumed they could navigate without error a complex benefits regime. The administrative assumption of self-reliance coincided with the factual impossibility of supplying it.³⁰

The word participation was not seized in this process by any one person or party. It was slowly retranslated, document by document, from voice to accountability. Cultural memory of the old usage continued to inhere in the positive sound of the word, while the thing in the meantime was doing something else. A Participation Act that promises participation and executes a cut in social assistance delivers, formally, what its title says, while at the same time inverting the sense of the word. Mark Bovens, one of the authors of Knowing What to Do is Not the Same as Doing It, put it plainly in 2017. Policy had gone too far. It had taken too little account of what ordinary people can manage.³¹ It is the same diagnosis, in another register, that the present paper applies to all its dossiers. The distance between what the word promises and what the thing delivers is no detail. It is what the word does to the people who trust the word.

§ 05 · Three international parallels

The pattern is not specifically Dutch. Three foreign parallels, briefly, make clear that word-continuity with material rupture is a general linguistic-institutional structure. Two in detail, one shorter.

Klemperer on fanatisch is the exemplary case. Before 1933 the word had a negative tone in German: a fanatic was an unbalanced, blind driver. The LTI inverted the charge. Fanatisch became a term of praise for the party. Fanatisches Bekenntnis, fanatischer Wille, fanatische Treue. Klemperer noted that no speech and no school text any longer dispensed with this adjective. The old pejorative register was reserved for the opponent: a fanatical Jew, a fanatical Englishman carried the old derogatory load. The same word acquired two opposing charges depending on who carried it.³² The analogy with our dossiers is not that the Dutch policy state is a totalitarian regime. It is that fanatisch in the LTI demonstrates precisely the philological mechanism this paper identifies. The sound stays, the thing departs, and whoever lacks the discipline to record the difference carries the inversion without realising it.

The American community is the second parallel. The word is used for gated community (a guarded enclave that defines itself by excluding others), retirement community (a commercial form of housing for older people with an entry fee and a service charge) and online community (a digital platform with billable interaction and advertising revenue). Sherry Turkle in Alone Together (2011) and Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) both documented how the word remains in place as the actual bonding function recedes.³³ Eric Klinenberg in Palaces for the People (2018) showed that the social infrastructure historically carrying the old community (libraries, parks, neighbourhood centres) was replaced in urban planning by interpretative frames in which the word community still appeared but the supporting physical space did not.³⁴ The pattern is the same as in our Wmo analysis: the word community asks for something that the dismantled infrastructure can no longer supply.

Mentioned more briefly: the British care home in elderly care, which since the privatisations of the Thatcher era has kept the word care on the packaging of what is now, in its majority, private equity portfolio, with the Southern Cross collapse of 2011 and the subsequent sectoral instability as material counter-evidence.³⁵ And the French laïcité, which in the Law of 1905 regulated the separation of church and state and which in Law 2004-228 of fifteen March 2004 on religious symbols in state schools shifted from neutrality of the state to regulation of visible religious expression by citizens. The same word, a radically different material content.³⁶

§ 06 · How the mechanism works

The mechanism of word-continuity with material rupture is not a conscious lie. Anyone who lied would know he was doing so. The analytical task is to explain how sincere speakers, without ill intent, reproduce the distortion. Four interconnected layers.

Psychologically. The old word offers cognitive ease. It need not be explained; it summons a familiar image without the speaker testing that image against the thing. Daniel Kahneman would call this cognitive ease, the absence of the mental friction needed to register the distance between image and fact. The word house carries warm affects of intimacy, security and generational depth, which influence judgement of the object before the object has been examined. Klemperer called it mechanically and unconsciously absorbed repetition: the word is activated without the user realising that it is being activated. Surrendering the word is felt as the loss of something valuable, even though what stood behind it has long since been surrendered.

Organisationally. Marketing instinct selects the words with the highest affective pull, hence the old ones. A new-build brochure that speaks of a new fifty-square-metre two-room apartment for the unregulated rental segment performs worse than one that speaks of a new home. Legal definitions trail behind material change. The Bbl 2024 permits a residential function of eighteen square metres of private floor area; the same category as a post-war dwelling of one hundred. Policy speech suggests continuity in order to preserve legitimacy. The Wmo 2015 reuses community to lend the cuts operation the warm democratic aura of the old welfare state. Professional identity: the housing association director who came up under the culture of single-family dwelling construction continues to use the word house for what he produces now; for him this is consistency, not distortion.

Institutionally. Legislation supplies a legal frame to which implementation adapts. The Participatiewet carries participation in its title; the implementing officer who issues a benefits sanction formally delivers participation. The Wmo obliges the municipality to promote self-reliance and participation; the welfare organisation organising activities can without self-deception report that it is doing so. Bourdieu has the crucial point here: the institution produces legitimate speech, and the carrier need not be aware to participate in it. Ritual discourse, in Bourdieu’s sense, sustains the claim of meaning-transmission even when the transmission no longer occurs.

The difference from manipulation is essential. Conscious manipulation presumes that the speaker knows he is delivering something other than what the word promises. Word-continuity functions precisely when the speaker does not know. Pierre Bourdieu called this exact mechanism méconnaissance. The term is more precise than ideology or false consciousness for three reasons. Ideology presupposes a counterposed truth that is being veiled, and that structure is absent here; there is no consciousness prior to the distortion that could be false. False consciousness implies that someone is being deceived, and no-one is deceiving; méconnaissance is structural, non-intentional, and co-produced by speaker and listener together. The resident who says house of his apartment is a co-author of the misunderstanding that befalls him, not because he is foolish but because the social space within which he moves makes no other word available for what he has. That makes the pattern harder to correct than manipulation. There is no deceiver to expose, only a social fabric to revise. At the same time it makes the paper ethically more interesting. The sincere director of housing who says he is building houses deserves neither rebuke nor defence. He deserves exposure to a better paraphrase. Series III Nº 01, The Sincere Voice, has already set the moral temperature: the sincere are the most powerful carriers of systemic inversion, precisely through their sincerity.

§ 07 · Diagnostic questions

Operational tests for recognising the pattern in one’s own field. Material, not abstract. Six registers, six questions.

Temporal. What would the user of fifty years ago have understood by this word, and what affordances would he have expected? A house in 1975 had four or five rooms, a garden, a purchase price of two or three times an annual income, and counted as a final resting place for a family. Does the present thing still have those affordances? A fifty-square-metre studio in an institutional rental portfolio at twelve years’ minimum wage does not.

Reflexive. When I speak this word, am I carrying the material reality, or are the old associations carrying me? The difference between a speaker who says community and delivers a neighbourhood centre with activities, and a speaker who says community and thereby covers an eighteen per cent loneliness rate in the same district.

Material. Which physical, spatial or relational feature was once covered by this word and is now absent? At house: garden, generational transmission, final dwelling. At organic: small scale, local sourcing. At flexible: the worker’s freedom of choice. At participation: voice over decisions. At sustainable: direct ecological rationale, not bookkeeping renewability.

Social. Whose interest is served by the word remaining in place even when the content has changed? Marketing’s, because it sells. The legislator’s, because it secures legitimacy. The professional’s, because it protects identity. The researcher’s, because it preserves a research tradition. The question does not point to a conspiracy; it points to a constellation of functional interests that together form a fabric. That fabric is the author of the distortion, not any individual carrier.

Pattern-specific (legal). Which legal or contractual provision still presupposes the old meaning? The Bbl article defining a residential function. The Wmo provision on community-oriented support. The SDE++ criteria for sustainable energy. Studying these provisions reveals where the law still invokes cultural memory to legitimise a present practice. For word-continuity this is the pattern-specific test: the law is the locus where the old word receives its enforcement.

Linguistic. Which shorter or more precise word would I use if the old word were forbidden? Force a paraphrase. New-build two-room apartment of fifty square metres for the unregulated rental segment in place of a new house. Municipally funded daytime activity for independently-living vulnerable persons in place of community provision. Subsidised woody biomass combustion under SDE++ on the assumption of forest regrowth over fifty years in place of sustainable energy. The distance between old and new wording is a measure of the rupture.

§ 08 · What breaks the pattern

Three levels of intervention. None is intended as a heroic solution. Each works on the fabric that carries the distortion.

Institutionally, revision of legal definitions works. The EU Empowering Consumers Directive (2024/825) and the forthcoming Green Claims Directive make vague environmental claims legally enforceable in the consumer context. The ACM has held the Sustainability Claims Guideline since 2023. Albert Heijn had to withdraw its most sustainable supermarket; KLM was told by the Amsterdam district court on twenty March 2024 that Fly Responsibly was misleading; Booking.com pulled Travel Sustainable.³⁷ The same mechanism operates in other dossiers where it is activated. For organic, SKAL certification works as a hard definition, even if it no longer covers the old movement. For flexible, the Borstlap recommendation and the proposed VBAR Act, with the employee, unless-presumption, attempt to bring the legal framework into line with material reality. The capability test introduced after Knowing What to Do is Not the Same as Doing It (2017) obliges legislators to test, ex ante and materially, the practical workability of self-reliance, and is thereby an implicit correction of the word-reality distance in participation.

Materially, the affordance test works. A dwelling that does not match the old house archetype cannot, in terms of affordances, do what a house does. No room for large furniture, no garden for children, no technical scope for fifty-year refurbishment. Spatial audits by the BPD Housing Preferences Survey 2023/2024 systematically document the gap between what house-hunters want and what is being built. Demographic analysis of moving frequency and household composition supplies hard figures. Experiential signals from users in housing-preference surveys, complaints registers and residents’ associations supply a qualitative counterweight. In the biomass dossier, chimney measurement did the same work as the legal argument: direct CO₂ emissions per kWh higher than gas equivalents are a hard figure that the word sustainable cannot carry without becoming visible at its own expense.

Individually and professionally, the discipline of recording works. For high-risk words, force a wider paraphrase. Strategic naming, in the sense in which Edgar Schein and Michael Watkins use it in their work on transition leadership. Choose not the available cultural word but the term that covers present reality. Practices in Nederlandse School voor Openbaar Bestuur (NSOB) trajectories and Algemene Bestuursdienst (ABD) senior civil service trajectories around reflexive professionalism try to train managers to say, in place of participation, what they are actually doing: addressing, sanctioning, monitoring, facilitating. Naming and shaming through journalism, with Follow the Money, NRC, de Volkskrant and the Comité Schone Lucht (Clean Air Committee) in the Dutch register, demonstrably contributed in the biomass dossier to Vattenfall’s withdrawal from Diemen. The most important individual instrument is, after Klemperer, the act of recording. Philological precision in one’s own work, word by word, document by document. No-one else will do it for the professional.

In an interim assignment with a joint arrangement in youth care, in a structure of nine municipalities, we once ran an experiment that fits here. The board spoke in every meeting of the client, the community, the partner, the network. We agreed that for three months these words would have to be replaced in every decision document by what they actually covered. The client became the young person on a six-month waiting list for a residential placement funded by one of the nine municipalities at a regionally contracted provider. The community became the care chain whose composition shifts each calendar year through the procurement cycle. The effect was felt above all on the board itself. What had sounded like a series of sensible decisions about a need now sounded, in paraphrase, like what it was: a procedural manoeuvring within contracts that the old word’s intended substantive work could not cover. The decisions themselves did not change. The conversations about them did. The pattern became visible. That was where the work could begin.

Embedding (in Dutch borging, the long-term anchoring of an intervention in structure, persons and processes such that it survives without continuing attention) is the final test in each of these interventions. The question is not only whether the affordance test is performed, the paraphrase forced, the legal definition tightened. The question is what stands when the official who started the experiment leaves, when the audit cycle ends, when attention to the word ebbs away. A one-off paraphrase not anchored in the working method of a department wears out within a single staff turnover. A legal definition without an enforcement rhythm slides back, after three years, to the old meaning. What is embedded carries also in silence. That is the test that stands last in this paper too: a community still called community only by the word community is no longer a community; and a paraphrase enforced by only one speaker has, within one term of office, disappeared again.

§ 09 · What this connects

Series I described the dissociated organisation. Word-continuity is the linguistic mechanism that makes institutional dissociation socially possible. An organisation that carries a mission statement on care or community while its actual processes deliver a commercial service is presenting no lie to the outside world. Its members do not experience the dissociation from within so long as the old word remains available. The word functions as an affective buffer bridging the difference between professed mission and delivered practice. That is precisely what dissociation does functionally: keep pain away from the carrier.

Series II Doorwerking (Reverberations) made the consequences for citizens visible. The Silent Expropriation described how policy texts use the language of ownership while material ownership has been evacuated. The Frozen Zeitgeist showed how words from an earlier paradigm remain in place within a new paradigm. The Vanishing Fabric documented that the words for social fabric remain intact while the fabric itself is thinned. Series III Nº 03 supplies the philological diagnosis of why this disappearance remains beneath the radar. The word remains long after the thing has been hollowed out. It carries its affordances forward into the appearance, not into the reality.

Series III Nº 01, The Sincere Voice, set the moral temperature. Series III Nº 02, The Congealed Outcome as Manifested Preference, exposed the supply side behind the sincerity. Word-continuity is precisely what makes the carrier’s sincerity possible at the philological level. The sincere director of housing can say houses because the word is available, and the cultural memory of the word performs the work the present content can no longer perform. Sincerity and distortion do not exclude one another in this pattern. They presuppose one another. Nº 01 showed that he means it. Nº 02 showed that what he presents as consumer preference is the precipitate of a supply-side decision. Nº 03 shows that the word with which he names that preference no longer covers what cultural memory still allows to be heard.

The pamphlet The Discriminating Eye (Huibers, April 2026, published on nourishment.houseofviridian.org) runs alongside this series without being subordinate to it. It supplies, in short form, the reading discipline for which this paper provides the elaborated philological foundation. Pamphlet and paper function as the short and long forms of the same recording practice. Anyone using the pamphlet as checklist and this paper as atlas has both instruments for the same work.

Series III Nº 05, The Problem-Causer as Solution-Supplier, leans on this philological infrastructure. Whoever supplies the solution to friction that he or his chain has produced can only sell that offer credibly because the old word still works. Care, advice, transition, system: the cultural memory of the word covers the new arrangement and keeps the diachronic dependence legible as professional service. Word-continuity is in that sense a precondition for the respectability of Nº 05. Anyone who has the philological diagnosis of Nº 03 to hand recognises in Nº 05, more quickly, which provider is clinging to the old word in order to keep the rupture in his role invisible.

The forthcoming book De Richting van de Beweging (The Direction of the Movement) carries this diagnosis through three models. Mark Moore’s strategic triangle asks whether public value, operational capacity and political legitimacy are in balance. Word-continuity routinely conceals that they are not. Public value is claimed through the old word, while operational capacity (the welfare organisation that has to deliver community) and political legitimacy (the voter who reads participation as voice) no longer match. The change colours of De Caluwé and Vermaak explain why monochrome blue thinking feeds word-continuity: blue planning works with terms that suggest controllability (flexibilisation as a manageable process, participation as activatable behaviour), while the colour white, the self-organising reality of people, has no place in that vocabulary. Embedding as touchstone, the central criterion of chapter nine of the book, asks what remains standing when no-one any longer thinks of the intervention. A community still called community only by the word community is no longer a community. What is embedded continues to carry without the word.

§ 10 · Closing

Hannah Arendt, looking back on the banality of Eichmann, wrote that the longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with his inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.³⁸ She did not intend a strategic comparison with the present-day policy state. She intended a philological diagnosis of a banal, everyday form of moral collapse. Our Dutch policy state is no totalitarian apparatus. What it has nonetheless inherited is precisely that phenomenon at smaller scale and without ill intent. The inability to find a new paraphrase for the old word, and so the inability to think from the standpoint of those for whom the word delivers something other than what it promises.

The director of housing keeps building houses until the prime minister speaks of delivering houses until the alderman opens houses until the resident receives his key. After that he lives in a fifty-one square metre apartment rented from an institutional investor. The distance between those two utterances is what does the work. The distortion is not carried by a liar but by a whole chain of sincere speakers who shield one another by keeping the old word intact.

Anyone who wishes to practise the discriminating eye in this pattern is therefore not on a hunt for deceivers. He is on a hunt for words, and for the distance to what they promise. It is the shortest exercise this series offers and the hardest to sustain. Klemperer sustained it for twelve years, with only a diary and a pencil. Twelve years is longer than most interim assignments. It is precisely the time horizon over which a Dutch policy language can prise a word from its referent without anyone noticing.

---

---

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

---

Footnotes

---

Colophon

About the author

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager, author and adviser in the Dutch public sector, with assignments in the social and physical domains, in regional cooperation arrangements and in administrative recovery at municipalities of fifty thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. He is the author of De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation) and of the corpus Limbic Literacy, Allemaal Ontheemd and Decline and Revival, all published under House of Viridian.

About the series

Series III is the third Statecraft series of House of Viridian. It treats five form-patterns of cognitive distortion, carried by one meta-pattern and closed by a synthesis, that remain invisible in soft policy layers but become legible in hard materiality. It follows Series I (Gedissocieerde Organisaties, April 2026), in which the mechanism of institutional dissociation is named, and Series II (Doorwerking, April 2026 to spring 2027), in which the consequences for citizens are worked out in five forms and two signatures. Series III teaches looking. The pamphlet The Discriminating Eye (April 2026, nourishment.houseofviridian.org) is a parallel source.

Place in the series

Series III Nº 01: De oprechte stem (The Sincere Voice) — meta-pattern. Series III Nº 02: De gestolde uitkomst als gemanifesteerde voorkeur (The Congealed Outcome as Manifested Preference) — Pattern 1. Series III Nº 03: De woordcontinuïteit die de materiële breuk maskeert (Word Continuity that Masks the Material Rupture) — Pattern 2. Series III Nº 04: De optimalisatie-asymmetrie (The Optimisation Asymmetry) — Pattern 3. Series III Nº 05: De probleemveroorzaker als oplossingsleverancier (The Problem-Causer as Solution-Provider) — Pattern 4. Series III Nº 06: De vorm-laundering (Form-Laundering) — Pattern 5. Series III Nº 07: Synthese (Synthesis).

Publisher

HOUSE OF VIRIDIAN OÜ Tallinn · Lisbon

Contact

jacob@statecraft.nl statecraft.nl

Series: STATECRAFT SERIES · SERIES III Nº 03

---

Footnotes

¹ Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 4 (1970): 1033-1053. Sartori’s ladder of abstraction and his definition of conceptual stretching (an enlargement of extension without a corresponding reduction of intension) supply the analytical apparatus for the whole work of this paper. His warning was methodological and directed at comparative politics; the application to policy speech follows logically from his reasoning but was not made by Sartori himself.

² David Collier and James E. Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 4 (1993): 845-855. The supplement to Sartori with radial categories and family resemblance is, for our analysis, precisely what explains why a stretched concept retains its appeal: the central prototype remains semantically dominant even when only peripheral instances are actually delivered.

³ Victor Klemperer, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii. Notizbuch eines Philologen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1947). English translation by Martin Brady, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook (London: Athlone, 2000). The analysis of fanatisch in chapter IX and of organisch in chapter XVII is, for our paper, the core. Klemperer’s method, recording what the words say against what the facts are, is the discipline this paper invokes.

⁴ Klemperer (1947), preface Heroismus. The passage on Worte als winzige Arsendosen (words as tiny doses of arsenic) is one of the most-cited formulations of twentieth-century philology and has, in context, no rhetorical but a methodological force: the philologist as the one who recognises the toxic effect before society feels it.

⁵ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §§ 43, 65-71. The thesis the meaning of a word is its use in the language and the development of family resemblance supply the philosophical warrant for the analytical hold of this paper. Wittgenstein’s own examples (game) are structurally identical to the policy concepts addressed here.

⁶ Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979). English translation, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). The chapter “Erfahrungsraum” und “Erwartungshorizont” supplies the diachronic schema in which a word carries its temporal layers. A word from an earlier paradigm can continue to operate in a new paradigm because it transports an older horizon of expectation that its present carrier can no longer redeem.

⁷ Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. and intro. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press / Harvard University Press, 1991). The production of legitimate speech by institutions (production et reproduction du langage légitime) explains the mechanism of enforcement without conspiracy. Bourdieu’s market metaphor for language is exactly serviceable for our analysis because it explains why marketing, legislator and academia together sustain the old word without any actor explicitly deciding to do so. For the notion of méconnaissance activated in the cognitive section of this paper, see also Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 191, and Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

⁸ George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon (April 1946). The proposition that the great enemy of clear language is insincerity holds for our paper with one crucial qualification: the pattern described here works through sincere speakers. Insincerity in Orwell’s sense is the visible tip of a far broader iceberg of unconscious word-continuity.

⁹ Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS, Statistics Netherlands), Voorraad woningen; gemiddeld oppervlak; woningtype, bouwjaarklasse, regio (Housing Stock; Average Floor Area; Type, Construction Year, Region), table 82550NED, 2026. Reported in Vastgoed Actueel, “Meer appartementen gebouwd: nieuwbouwwoning steeds kleiner” (More apartments built: new-build dwelling ever smaller, 2026). The average usable floor area of a new-build dwelling fell from one hundred and eighteen square metres in 2021 to ninety-nine square metres as of 1 January 2026.

¹⁰ CBS, ibid. Distribution by municipality: Amsterdam 96 per cent apartment, Eindhoven 93 per cent, Utrecht 87 per cent, Rotterdam 87 per cent. In 2025 nearly forty thousand apartments out of a total of sixty-nine thousand new-build dwellings. The shift in the rental-owner ratio dates from 2023, the first year since the start of measurement in 2012 in which more rental than owner-occupied dwellings were permitted. See CBS, “Minder vergunde nieuwbouwwoningen in 2023,” press release 15 February 2024.

¹¹ Besluit bouwwerken leefomgeving (Bbl, Building Regulations Decree), in force 1 January 2024, articles 4.162-4.164. For the legal definitions and the specific derogation for student housing through shared accommodation, see Helpdesk Bouwregelgeving, question 516, and the Explanatory Memorandum to § 4.5.2 Verblijfsgebied en verblijfsruimte.

¹² Capital Value, WBIB - Tijd voor impact, annual report 2024 and annual report 2025, with tables on institutional investors in the Dutch housing market. Answers to parliamentary questions, reference 2026-0000125655, and Capital Value/ABF Research De woning(beleggings)markt in beeld 2025 quantify the decline in the international investor share from thirty-two per cent (2022) to one per cent (2025) and the pension fund pipeline of twelve point seven billion euros for the next three years. Alongside pension funds, private and international investors reserved a combined six point one billion euros. The boundary of institutional investment in these figures is strict (pension funds, insurers and regulated fund structures); broader definitions that include family offices, housing associations or buy-to-let private investors shift the absolute proportions but not the direction of the trend.

¹³ Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), particularly p. 17 and following. The applicability of the schema to lexical choice (the resident with no alternative lacks the structural ground on which to force a new paraphrase) follows logically from Hirschman’s reasoning and connects to the development in Series III Nº 02, The Congealed Outcome as Manifested Preference.

¹⁴ Bionext and Skal Biocontrole, “Biologische omzet groeit met 9,6% naar €1,77 miljard (2024),” press release 2024. Acreage 91,527 hectares, 5.1 per cent of Dutch agricultural land.

¹⁵ Bionext, Trendrapport 2023 and CPS GfK 2024 figures; FiBL and Bionext for the international comparison. Organic share of supermarket turnover in the Netherlands four per cent; Denmark twelve point one per cent, Austria nine point three per cent.

¹⁶ Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM, Authority for Consumers and Markets), press release on Albert Heijn claims, April 2024 (commitment without formal penalty); analysis in Maverick Advocaten, “ACM intensifies supervision of greenwashing and stricter EU rules on environmental claims and carbon offsetting” (2024). The claims most sustainable supermarket and we are working with our growers and farmers towards a more sustainable future were judged insufficiently substantiated and were withdrawn.

¹⁷ Directive (EU) 2024/825 (Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive), in force 26 March 2024, with a transposition deadline for Member States of 27 March 2026. The proposal for a complementary Green Claims Directive (COM/2023/166) was in 2026 in the final stages of negotiation. For the Dutch enforcement framework, ACM, Leidraad Duurzaamheidsclaims (revised version July 2023). Rechtbank Amsterdam (District Court Amsterdam), judgment in the KLM case, 20 March 2024 (ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2024:1512).

¹⁸ Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). The distinction between bonding and bridging social capital is fertile for our analysis because it explains why the welfare organisation can organise bridging (intake, target group definition) while it cannot deliver bonding (boundedness, reciprocity).

¹⁹ Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP, Netherlands Institute for Social Research), Sociaal domein op koers? Verwachtingen en resultaten van vijf jaar decentraal beleid (The Hague: SCP, 2020). Principal finding: expectations of the new policy were pitched too high, especially regarding self-reliance and a more caring society; participation and engagement of people with disabilities had not increased.

²⁰ CBS, “10 procent van de 15-plussers sterk eenzaam in 2024,” Sociale samenhang en welzijn 2024. RIVM, GGD and CBS, Adults and Elderly Health Monitor 2024, with forty-six per cent somewhat or severely lonely and thirteen per cent severely lonely. The divergence between the two measurement instruments (CBS Social Cohesion versus the Health Monitor) is methodological (cut-points on the De Jong Gierveld scale, age categories, question wording) and must be flagged when used; the order of magnitude of the phenomenon is independent of the definitional question.

²¹ René Bekkers, Secularisering en veranderende motieven voor vrijwilligerswerk (on the basis of SCP data); Knulst and Van Eijck (2002) on the ageing of the volunteer base; SCP, Sociale en Culturele Ontwikkelingen 2023 en 2024, for the secularisation figures; CBS, Ontwikkelingen in het verenigingsleven, statistical trends 2025 (published 11 December 2025), and CBS press release Vooral minder mensen met een laag inkomen lid van vereniging (December 2025) for the fall in association membership from 70 per cent (2012-2014) to 62 per cent (2023-2024), based on the Sociale samenhang en welzijn survey.

²² Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP), Zicht op de Wmo 2015. Ervaringen van melders, mantelzorgers en gespreksvoerders (The Hague: SCP, 2017), in particular p. 7 and the table on participation in society after the kitchen-table conversation.

²³ Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency), Beschikbaarheid en toepassingsmogelijkheden van duurzame biomassa: verslag van een zoektocht naar gedeelde feiten en opvattingen (The Hague: PBL, 2020). Chapter 4 for the SDE++ link and the carbon-debt analysis.

²⁴ Algemene Rekenkamer (Netherlands Court of Audit), Stimulering van duurzame energieproductie (SDE+). Haalbaarheid en betaalbaarheid van beleidsdoelen (The Hague: Algemene Rekenkamer, 2015). The finding that operational projects deliver, on average, twenty-six per cent less energy than on paper, partly through restricted biomass availability.

²⁵ Answers to parliamentary questions, Aanhangsel Handelingen II 2020-2021, no. 2515, on RWE Eemshaven and the co-firing subsidy. Government of the Netherlands, “Tijdelijk geen nieuwe subsidie voor biomassa,” press release 9 June 2021, in execution of the motions Sienot et al. (Parliamentary Document 32 813, no. 537) and Van Esch (Parliamentary Document 30 175, no. 372). The original 2019 permit for the Diemen installation covered two hundred and twelve kilotonnes of wood pellets per year and was annulled by the Council of State (Raad van State) in late August 2023. On 16 October 2024 Vattenfall announced that it was definitively abandoning the biothermal installation in Diemen. See also Comité Schone Lucht, “Ambtenaren ministerie hielpen heimelijk mee aan nieuwe biomassasubsidie Vattenfall” (2024).

²⁶ CBS-TNO, “Minder flexibele en meer vaste werknemers” (May 2024); CBS Flexible Work Dossier and Self-Employment Dossier 2024. Two point seven million employees on a flexible employment relationship, one point three million own-account self-employed, together forty per cent of all workers. CBS, “Werkzekerheid van flexwerkers” (2024) for the unemployment ratio and single-client dependency.

²⁷ Commissie Regulering van Werk (Borstlap Commission), In wat voor land willen wij werken? Naar een nieuw ontwerp voor de regulering van werk, final report (The Hague, 23 January 2020). The report contains forty-seven recommendations including the employee, unless-presumption and the three contractual forms.

²⁸ Wet Deregulering Beoordeling Arbeidsrelaties (Wet DBA), in force since 2016 with an enforcement moratorium; the proposed Wet Verduidelijking Beoordeling Arbeidsrelaties en Rechtsvermoeden (VBAR) was in 2025-2026 under parliamentary consideration. For the social-scientific counter-term see Guy Standing, The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). For the paradiastole analysis see Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes. Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chapter 5.

²⁹ Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (WRR, Scientific Council for Government Policy), Weten is nog geen doen. Een realistisch perspectief op redzaamheid, WRR Report no. 97 (The Hague: WRR, 2017). The central concept of doenvermogen from this report has, since 2018, been worked out as the doenvermogentoets (capability test), incorporated as an ex ante instrument in the Integraal Afwegingskader for policy and legislation and in successive cabinet letters on the quality of legislation. Doenvermogen is therefore in this paper not a separate WRR publication but the reverberation of Report 97 into policy testing and implementation.

³⁰ Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on the Childcare Benefit Affair (Toeslagenaffaire), Ongekend onrecht (The Hague, 2020). For the administrative-law analysis and the relationship to self-reliance, see the work of Albert Jan Kruiter (Instituut voor Publieke Waarden), Sadik Harchaoui and Andries Baart on presence and existential security; Tim ‘S Jongers, Tussen veel en te weinig (2024); Pieter Omtzigt, Een nieuw sociaal contract (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2021).

³¹ Mark Bovens, quoted in the WRR podcast and presentation accompanying Report 97, 24 April 2017, transcripts published on wrr.nl. The observation that policy had gone too far and had taken too little account of what ordinary people can manage is one of the most quotable formulations in the Dutch public administration register of the last ten years.

³² Klemperer (1947), chapter IX Fanatisch. The analysis of the inversion of the evaluative charge of the word and the reservation of the older pejorative register for the opponent is a philological model for what this paper calls word-continuity with material rupture.

³³ Sherry Turkle, Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (2000). The independent analysis of the word community in the Anglophone register runs parallel to our Wmo analysis: the word remains in place as the actually functioning bonding recedes.

³⁴ Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (New York: Crown, 2018). Klinenberg’s concept of social infrastructure supplies a material counter-evidence for the community claim that this paper makes for the Dutch equivalent.

³⁵ Allyson M. Pollock, NHS plc. The Privatisation of Our Health Care (London: Verso, 2004); plus the subsequent sectoral instability illustrated by the Southern Cross Healthcare collapse (2011) and the financial stress at HC-One and Four Seasons Health Care. The word care on the packaging of portfolio institutions is the British equivalent of what this paper diagnoses for Dutch policy discourse.

³⁶ Loi n° 2004-228 du 15 mars 2004 (Code de l’éducation, art. L.141-5-1); interpretative circular of 18 May 2004; Stasi Report (Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, 2003). For the historical development, the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration and the collected literature on the Loi sur les signes religieux dans les écoles publiques françaises.

³⁷ Maverick Advocaten, “ACM intensifies supervision of greenwashing” (2024); ICTRecht, “Green and compliant: responsible sustainability claims” (2024); Rechtbank Amsterdam, KLM judgment 20 March 2024 (ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2024:1512); ACM communications March-April 2024 on Booking.com and Albert Heijn.

³⁸ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963; revised edition Penguin, 1964), pp. 48-49. Arendt’s diagnosis of the link between inability to speak and inability to take another’s standpoint is, for the closing movement of this paper, the moral anchor.