I know I'm on a bit of an "abstraction" and "concrete" kick here, but hear me out. This is something I've gotten into before, but I think it bears repeating again. For all of its powers of inclusion, flexibility, universality, illumination, and so on, the process of abstraction is adding something to something that already exists. It is simplifying and organizing something so that that something can be more readily understood and anticipated, and possibly manipulated. In responsible hands, this can be a useful and powerful tool. It is a tool that can also greatly assist deception and exploitation, and much worse. Its power is all the more terrible the more compelling and comprehensive its narrative, which allows for lies to be carefully buried deep underneath its dazzling infrastructure.
Expertly placed, concrete truths whose relations are defined through abstraction can lend ever more credibility to a false structure. But those same concrete truths can be used to test the validity of their proposed relation.
