# Epistemic or Environmental Cruelty **Epistemic or environmental cruelty** is Bryant McGill's term for a form of harm in which an agent with superior knowledge deliberately manipulates another organism's informational environment so the second organism cannot construct an adequately accurate model of circumstances affecting its welfare, while the first gains advantage from that inability. The defining feature is **manufactured illegibility for asymmetric advantage**. Uncertainty is inherent in every environment; the harm arises when causal structure is deliberately hidden or falsified so another person cannot orient, learn contingencies, or understand which actions alter outcomes. ## Relationships - **defined in:** [[thoughts/The Right to Understand Your World|The Right to Understand Your World]]. - **depends on:** [[wiki/Environmental Legibility|Environmental Legibility]] and [[wiki/Information Asymmetry|Information Asymmetry]]. - **produces:** [[wiki/Informational Domination|Informational Domination]] and may contribute to [[wiki/Learned Helplessness|Learned Helplessness]]. - **institutional context:** [[wiki/Surveillance|Surveillance]] and [[wiki/Machine-Readable Environment|Machine-Readable Environment]]. ## Sources / Provenance - [[thoughts/The Right to Understand Your World|The Right to Understand Your World]] - [Maier and Seligman — Learned helplessness at fifty, 2016](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4920136/) **As of:** 2026-09-23