It started in the barber’s chair, which is one of the only places I’m forced to sit still. I’m blind as a bat on account of my nearsightedness and astigmatism, so once I sit down and take my glasses off, I have no idea what’s happening above my shoulders. Lacking any and all other options, I surrender.

There’s a small relief in that — in being handled by someone who knows what they’re doing. Someone else takes over the details you can’t see, and you walk out reborn with marginally shorter hair. 

I felt something similar when I travelled to Delhi, India, where the street traffic is its own world wonder. Rickshaws slid through intersections without signals that I could read. It looked chaotic from the outside, but it worked: no one seemed to crash, and people got where they were going. 

Like with my barber, I didn’t need to understand the system for it to function; I just needed to trust that everyone else did. That trust eventually settles into the background. When things run smoothly, you don’t stop to ask how or why. 

An architect named Louis Kahn had a word for what happens next: monumentality. He called monumentality “a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys the feeling of perpetuity.” A monument, then, is what competence looks like when it’s coordinated at scale — thousands of small, correct actions repeated for years, arranged into permanence. That’s why my mind keeps drifting from the barber’s chair to monuments: they’re what trust looks like after it hardens.

When I stood in front of the Taj Mahal last month, with Kahn in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about the hands that built it — the workers whose lives rarely make it into the story. Historians can name only a small handful of figures tied to the project, even though the site employed hundreds of teams of workers. Most of the people doing this work won’t be remembered. 

That’s the nature of monuments — they erase the labor that made them. That much is true at home — just look at the construction of the U.S. Capitol, built on the backs of slaves.

It took thousands of stonecutters, bricklayers and lapidaries — along with merchants, caravaneers and architects — whose work spanned generations to construct the Taj Mahal, which admittedly embodies Kahn’s spirit of perpetuity. For them, it was just a vocation. Whatever grandeur Shah Jahan imagined may have governed the specifications, but it probably didn’t govern their inner lives: for most builders, it was a day of skilled, supervised labor.

My gripe is that the Taj Mahal is, fundamentally, a vanity project. It’s an announcement that Jahan could turn private grief into public permanence and have the world remember on his terms.

What it means today is beside the point. It doesn’t matter that it’s been romanticized into a love story, turned into a tourist engine or canonized as a wonder. The original fact is the allocation: labor, caravans, materials and time mobilized for a structure that didn’t have to exist. We neglect the foregone resources that could have fed people, built wells or repaired roads. That’s monumentality in practice: power insisting its feelings deserve a budget.

After 400 years, not much has changed: labor is still performed under conditions of incomplete information, where workers cannot see the full system their work sustains. The famous “free market” example is Milton Friedman’s pencil: that the many hands that go into creating a pencil from the graphite to the wood to its assembly are inherently unknowable, maybe a little mystical.

Or you could call it “knowledge monopoly” — a system that inherently can capitalize on its superior access to knowledge compared to a worker, a participant in the system. From a phenomenological perspective — from the standpoint of lived experience — not knowing the full extent of a system is simply what work feels like from the inside.

There’s a comforting way to sit with that. Most people aren’t waking up in the morning thrilled to be cogs in history; they’re trying to do something well, get through the day and go home. Maybe they teach their children the craft, at least in the case of the 16th-century stonemasons we’re thinking about. Today, power doesn’t need marble — it can build permanence out of that same mundanity.

I see today’s monuments as purely administrative, complete with all the frills of 21st-century technocracy like budgets, staffing charts and procedures. Power still seeks out Kahn’s perpetuity; it just achieves it differently, by hiring employees and routinizing force until it feels like ordinary work.

Right now, the project being built in this manner has a name: United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Since President Donald Trump took office a year ago, his administration has deported roughly 230,000 people arrested inside the country and another 270,000 at the border. The number of interior deportations in one year has already exceeded the total from former President Joe Biden’s entire four-year term, according to The New York Times.

ICE is rapidly expanding. The agency is offering $50,000 signing bonuses, student loan forgiveness and has drastically reduced training time from 22 weeks down to roughly six weeks, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Over 12,000 agents have been hired since Trump took office to do grunt work: smashing car windows during arrests, detaining U.S. citizens based on how they look or sound and using 5-year-olds as “bait” to arrest family members — a style of enforcement that feels less like due process and more like a raid.

What compels people to willingly tear families apart and terrorize communities? To wear the same badge as those who killed Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti or those 32 people who died while in ICE custody last year? Perhaps for some ICE agents, it feels purposeful or righteous — like this is the prerequisite for building their ideal country. Maybe for others, it’s just a means to an end, justice in exchange for signing bonuses and student loan forgiveness. 

This is what monumentality looks like in a modern state: capacity turned inward. 

The individual job of an ICE agent is carefully designed to break cruelty into tasks small enough to complete without ever naming what they add up to: an address, a van, a handoff, a form, an intake and a number — and the sick satisfaction of being part of something coordinated.

But we have what the stonecutters didn’t: foresight. They couldn’t see the Taj Mahal until it was finished; we’re watching this one go up in real time. We can see the raids, the separations, the detentions and the deaths in custody. History will manipulate present happenings into either a monument or a warning. For now, we assume what’s being built.

Here’s the thing: the machine can be competent — recruiting, logistics — while being morally and tactically reckless on the ground. The stonecutters built something that lasted over 400 years; ICE is gutting training time, and at least one journalist reported being offered a job after a six-minute interview. The consequences are clear as day.

The barber knows their craft. The traffic in Delhi works because people are skilled at navigation. The stonecutters knew how to transform stone. What’s happening with ICE isn’t the quiet dignity of competent labor; it’s the exact opposite — sloppy and violent. The Taj Mahal was built well, enshrined in perpetuity, even if it served an emperor’s ego. The legacy ICE is building will — if we’re lucky — be dismantled in shame. 

So why does any of this matter? I’m writing this, and families are still being separated. The atrocities are happening whether or not we understand the phenomenology of the people carrying them out. People are suffering, and I’m standing on my soapbox philosophizing about work.

It matters because the engine of cruelty runs on painfully ordinary things: schedules, payroll and spreadsheets. You don’t have to be a fanatic to help build a monster. You just have to be useful.

But clarity isn’t the same as control. We can see what’s being built while allowing it to rise.

Put another way, we can watch and commentate on the creation of monuments to our heart’s content. But until we start building transformative institutions of our own, nothing will change. If the left — or the movement or whatever — wants something different, it can’t just be the side with better arguments and worse logistics. It needs real competence. 

Not the sloppy violence of undertrained agents with badges, but the actual craft: people who keep the spreadsheets clean, run the meetings and show up on time.

Shakespeare promised that monuments would eventually crumble, and only words would remain. But in this complex society we’ve constructed, empires are built with paperwork and banality; they are under construction in broad daylight.

If we want to live in the ruins of this — instead of under its shadow — we’ll need our own stonecutters: people willing to do decent, unglamorous work until fascism and empires have nothing left to stand on but air.

Raphael is a senior in ACES; look on his Works, ye Mighty and despair!

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