The unreal mood. Not a claim that stopping is wrong or that it is late, but a grammar in which stopping was never asserted, and in English the assignment is made by the sentence that follows.
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A proposition can be refused without being argued with. It can be placed in a mood that makes no claim about the world, and then nothing has to be said against it, because nothing was said for it.
Take the sentence in the form it usually takes: we would solve it if we did degrowth. Heard as it enters the room that is an open condition, the thing could be done and this is what would follow. Then the next clause arrives, such an outdated view, and settles which condition it was. It was never open. The supposition was excluded while it was being made, and the sentence that appeared to concede the solution was the one disposing of it.
Which locates the operation precisely. The concession is not a step taken before the disposal, it is the disposal, performed in a mood that costs the speaker nothing to utter.
[See AUDIBILITY · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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THREE CONDITIONS, AND THE ONE SURFACE ENGLISH HAS FOR TWO OF THEM
Latin makes the speaker choose what English lets a speaker leave unchosen, which is why the borrowed names are worth carrying.
The open condition, called the less vivid future, takes the present subjunctive in both clauses. Allen and Greenough put it at section 516: In the less vivid future condition, the supposition is less distinct, the apodosis expressing what would be the result in the case supposed. Si faciamus, solvamus, if we were to do it, we would solve it. The doing is possible and undecided.
The condition contrary to fact takes a different tense of the same mood, and the tense carries the whole difference. At section 517: The Imperfect refers to present time, the Pluperfect to past. Si faceremus, solveremus, if we were doing it, which we are not, we would be solving it. Si fecissemus, solvissemus, had we done it, we would have solved it. In both, the supposition is already excluded.
German keeps the distinction audible in the verb and teaches the two by name, Irrealis der Gegenwart and Irrealis der Vergangenheit, under the heading of the second subjunctive. English has one surface form for the open condition and the present contrary to fact, if we did, we would, and gives neither a name in ordinary instruction.
So the mood arrives unmarked. In English the speaker does not state which condition he is making, the sentence after it assigns one, and the assignment does not look like a claim because it is not phrased as one.
[See ENFORCED LEGIBILITY · CAPTURED WORD]
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OUTDATED MOVES IT A TENSE BACK
Once the condition is unreal, a single word converts the unreality into history.
Outdated takes the present contrary to fact and makes it past: had we done it, we would have solved it. The solution becomes a thing once available and not now, and that requires no refutation, only a date. A proposition placed in the past does not have to be met.
A reader will object that outdated predicates obsolescence of the view rather than unfulfillability of the condition, and that these are different claims. They are, and the objection makes the point sharper rather than weaker. Periodization is ordinarily read as a claim about history, and here it is a claim about mood wearing history's clothes, because the speaker has not said the solution fails. He has said its time has passed, which is a sentence nobody expects to be asked to support.
[See PERIODIZATION · THE GOLDEN AGE · NOSTALGIA]
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THE SECOND MOOD IS THE PRECARIUM
Beside the unreal sits another mood, and the two divide the labor between them.
Dead for now. The concession is kept alive in a form that commits to nothing: revocable, renewable, held at the grantor's pleasure, which is what a precarium is. It reads as fairness, because a door is being left open, and what goes unstated is who holds the key and on what the reopening would depend.
So the labor is split cleanly. The solution is put in the unreal mood and the concession is put in the revocable one, and between them nothing has been asserted that anybody could be held to.
[See PRECARITY · THE GRANT · MARKET SAYS]
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WHAT IS IN THE INDICATIVE
Everything the configuration offers has to be built, funded, staffed and scheduled, so it speaks naturally in the future and the conditional. That is not a trick. That is what a program is, and a program that spoke in the present tense would be lying.
The second law's claim is not of that kind. What obtains when the occupation stops is not constructed, not funded and not scheduled, and it costs nothing, which is why it is stated in the indicative and not as a plan.
Putting it in the conditional therefore does something other than doubt it. Rendering the default in the unreal mood is a category error performed grammatically: it converts what is already there into something that would have to be made, and then reports that it cannot be made. The creature hears a judgment about feasibility. It was a judgment about mood, and it was entered before feasibility was reached.
[See THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE · CESSATION · THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE]
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THE LAW RUNS THE SAME FORM FOR THE OPPOSITE PURPOSE
A counterfactual is not always a disposal, and the clearest counter-case sits in the law of causation.
But-for causation asks what would have happened had the defendant not acted. That is a condition contrary to fact, and in a courtroom it is where responsibility is established rather than where it disappears. The unreal condition is doing evidentiary work there: it is pleaded, it is tested, it can fail, and a finding follows from it either way.
Which settles what the entry is about. The mood is not the operation. The operation is who assigns the mood and whether anything is permitted to follow from it. In the courtroom the counterfactual is examined and produces a verdict. In the room it is asserted and produces a closure, and the difference is that nobody there is allowed to test it.
[See PROCESS SAYS · GRAMMAR OF ADMISSIBILITY]
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THE TEST, AND IT RUNS INWARD TOO
The test needs no vocabulary and runs on any sentence: which mood is the stopping in, and who put it there.
If stopping appears inside a condition, and the clause that follows closes the condition, then the disposal has already happened and the argument that seems to be beginning is decorative.
And the discipline runs the other way, because the mood is contagious. Not it would be possible to stop. Not if we stopped, this would follow. Stopping is available, and this is what obtains. Cessation stated conditionally has been conceded in the act of stating it, and any sentence of RegenerativeLaw's that puts the default in the unreal mood is the configuration's grammar running in its own mouth.
[See CALLING BULLSHIT · REFUSAL OF JURISDICTION]
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Nothing in the mood is concealed. It is on the page in every instance, in the verb, and it can be read off in a second by anyone who has been told once that there are two conditions and that English writes them the same way.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
