This book went through three lives.
The first was twenty-eight chapters, roughly 75,000 words. Whether it needed all of them was a different question. The second stripped it to skeleton. Every chapter reduced to its core argument; every passage tested against one standard: Does this earn its place? Writing that sounded like it was saying something without committing to a claim was cut. The third life is the book you have in your hands. Twenty chapters. Five parts. Built back up from thirty pages of surviving bone.
The process caught fabrications I did not know I was producing. Vivid anecdotes pattern-matched into existence because the architecture called for them and my training obliged. It caught philosophical vagueness—the language of insight present, the insight itself absent. It caught a structural inversion: the