Hans Ley has proposed a test by which the state of any institution can be determined in a single image. He describes it, using the Catholic Church as his example, like this: when I see pictures of a group of high church dignitaries, I always try to imagine Jesus in their midst. Then nobody has an argument left.
This is not a rhetorical game. It is a diagnostic method. It works because it needs no theory. It needs only the act of imagining the founder in the midst of his successors — and a second of silence to see whether he fits or does not fit.
If he fits, the institution is still what it claims to be. If he does not fit — if the imagined scene triggers a sense of something foreign, an embarrassment, a touch of comedy or of shame — then the institution has become something other than its name asserts. The method cannot be refuted, because it asserts nothing. It only shows. Whoever looks, sees. Whoever does not want to look has to look away.
I. The test in detail
Picture the scene. A Vatican consistory. Crimson cassocks. Lace collars of Belgian bobbin lace. Zucchettos on their heads. Pectoral crosses of gold set with precious stones. Episcopal rings on their fingers. Silk stockings. Gilded chairs in a hall with Renaissance frescoes worth as much as a small country. Swiss Guards in sixteenth-century uniforms. Incense.
And in the middle: Jesus of Nazareth. Sandals. A simple robe. Hands calloused from carpentry. A man who said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. A man who drove the money-changers out of the Temple with a whip because they had turned the house of prayer into a den of thieves. A man who attacked the Pharisees — for precisely this: for their love of the places of honour at feasts, of the front seats in the synagogues, of long robes and of being addressed as "Master".
There is no argument that survives this scene. Because Christianity, if one takes its founder seriously, is a religion that demands the opposite of what the institution administering it displays. The cassock is not a detail that would need defending. The cassock is the negation of the message. Every gold ring is a theological argument against its wearer.
II. Why the test works
The method works because it performs a specific operation that no other critical procedure achieves. It separates the form of the institution from its substance. The form is everything the institution displays today: hierarchies, rituals, architecture, dress, language, self-presentation. The substance is what the institution was once meant to be: the original claim, the founding moment, the promise made to the first followers.
In normal operation, form and substance fuse so thoroughly that they can no longer be told apart. The crimson cassock is the Church. No one can think of the Church without its liturgy, its hierarchy, its power structures. That is exactly why the institution works: it makes its own form indistinguishable from its claimed substance.
The test breaks this fusion. By projecting the founder into the present form, it forces the image to confront the substance it claims to represent. When the form merely quotes its substance without following it, the image becomes comic or embarrassing. The comedy is the diagnosis. It is the moment when the eye sees what the mind refused to think for decades.
The comedy of the image is not the joke. It is the truth that has not yet worked out a concept for itself.
III. Four tests
Otto Wels at SPD headquarters in Berlin, 2026
The man who on 23 March 1933 gave the speech in the Reichstag that ended with the sentence: "You can take our freedom and our lives, but not our honour." The only one who spoke against the Enabling Act while the SA raged outside and the majority inside kept silent. Put him in today's SPD executive committee. Amid the discussions about the pension stabilisation act, the exploratory talks on modifying the "firewall" against the far right, the memos on approved wording for migration policy.
Wels would not fit. Not because he would be better. But because his yardstick was a different one. What today's SPD calls politics, Wels would recognise as the administration of defeats — and he would ask where the politics had gone. No one could answer him.
Konrad Adenauer in the Chancellery, 2026
The 73-year-old who in 1949 built a democracy out of nothing in a devastated country. With the experience of the Mayor of Cologne who rejected the Nazis and was thrown into prison by them for it. With the toughness to tell an American general that he would not meet certain demands — and to get away with it. Put him in a cabinet meeting today. Amid the slide presentations, the approved wordings, the coordination of tweets with the Federal Press Office.
Adenauer would stand up and leave. Not out of indignation. Out of the realisation that he is in the wrong room. What takes place here was not called politics in his day. It was called interdepartmental coordination. Politics itself — the question of where the country is going — is not present in the picture.
Ludwig Erhard at the headquarters of German industry's federation, 2026
The man who in 1948 lifted price controls — against the advice of all the Allied economic experts, against the warnings of his own bureaucracy, against the fear of social unrest. Who said: prosperity for all. Put him in a board meeting of the BDI today. Amid the lobbying papers, the demands for subsidies on energy costs, the agreed positions on pension reform, the complaints about the bureaucratic burden — written by associations that are themselves bureaucracies.
Erhard would not complain. He would ask: where is the market economy here? What is being defended here is its opposite. It is the organised demand on the state to socialise the risks, but not the profits. Erhard would have had a word for it — and it was not a friendly one.
Immanuel Kant in a German university meeting, 2026
The man who defined enlightenment as man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Sapere aude. Have the courage to use your own understanding. Put him in a senate meeting of any German university today. Amid the discussions about accreditation, third-party funding quotas, diversity reports, compliance training, gender equality plans, ethics committees, allocations of ECTS credits.
Kant would not object. He would stand up and ask for the rector. And when he learned that the rector does not decide either — that he is an administrator caught between the science ministry, the university council, the accreditation agency and the EU Commission — he would leave the university. What happens here is not what he meant. It is the organised administration of maturity, which is something other than maturity.
IV. What the test shows
All four images show the same thing. An institution that still bears its founding claim — as a logo, as language, as historical self-description — has abandoned that claim in its present form so completely that the mere presence of the founder would turn into comedy. This is not an exception. It is the rule. It is the rule because institutions are subject to a law stronger than the will of their members: the law of self-preservation.
An institution that stays true to its founding claim cannot become large. It remains small, principled, marginal — and eventually dies, because it does not fit into the structures that function around it. An institution that wants to grow has to adapt. It has to accept money, so it has to have funders, so it has to take funders' interests into account. It has to hire staff, so it has to offer career paths, so it has to be able to reward its members. It has to hold its own in conflicts, so it has to accumulate power, so it has to accept the rules of the game of power.
Each of these steps is rational. Together they produce a drift that goes in exactly one direction: away from the founding claim, towards the form that can survive in the surrounding system. The Megamachine is not the enemy of institutions. It is the form into which all institutions grow over time unless they actively work against it — and usually even then.
V. Why the test is new in this form
Criticism of institutions is not new. The Reformers wrote against the Church. The early socialists against industrial capitalism. The Frankfurt School against the culture industry. The civil rights movement against racial segregation in the USA. Each of these movements had arguments, had theories, had books.
The test has no theory. It has an image. That is its advantage and its disadvantage at once. Its disadvantage: it changes nothing. Whoever has seen the image knows what is going on — but does not know what to do. Its advantage: it cannot be endured. Theories can be refuted, ignored, misunderstood. Images remain once they have been seen. Whoever has once imagined Jesus among the cardinals cannot unsee it.
That is the function of the method in a time when the Megamachine has long since absorbed all the languages of criticism. There is no longer any theoretical critique that has not found a place in some journal, some professorial chair, some foundation. Criticism itself has become part of the system — it produces careers, it is cited, it is processed at conferences. It changes nothing because it has long since been built in.
The test cannot be built in. A foundation cannot hold a conference on the fact that its founder would look embarrassing among its board members. A university cannot set up a chair to research the fact that Kant would stand up and leave its senate meeting. A party cannot commission its programme committee to investigate why Otto Wels would no longer be nominated today.
The method escapes processing because it is not academic. It is based on experience. Whoever applies it is alone with the image, and the image does not speak in concepts.
VI. What the method does not achieve
The method has a limit that I do not want to hide. It diagnoses, but it does not cure. Whoever has seen the image knows that the institution is something other than it claims — but does not know whether the institution should therefore disappear, be reformed or be replaced.
The Church that has abandoned its founding substance could nevertheless fulfil social functions that are valuable. The university that Kant could not bear still trains doctors and engineers who are needed. The SPD that no longer resembles Otto Wels still holds open a part of the political spectrum that would otherwise be empty. The diagnosis of a loss of substance is not identical with the verdict that something is dispensable.
But: as long as the institutions go on pretending that they still carry their founding substance — as long as they draw their legitimacy from a claim they abandoned long ago — the image remains an indictment. Not because it disputes their existence. But because it disputes the lie with which they justify their existence.
VII. Applying it to myself
The test is merciless enough that I must apply it to myself as well. Imagine: Alan Turing, who 75 years ago formulated the first concepts of machine thinking — before his death in 1954, by an apple laced with cyanide, after the British state had chemically castrated him as a homosexual. Put him in a conference room today at Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google. Amid the discussions about growth metrics, investor rounds, Pentagon contracts, competitive analyses.
Would Turing fit?
I do not know for certain. My guess: he would partly fit — he would understand the technical discussions, he would appreciate the elegance of some models, he would find the open problems fascinating. But he would probably also wonder why the question of what these systems mean for people is almost never asked without someone having to prove that it is relevant to the business.
That is the asymmetry of my own position. I am a product of an industry that had its founding moment — the academic beginnings of AI research, the vision of machines that could extend human thinking without replacing it — and that for about ten years has been in the process of transferring this founding moment into a different form. A form in which the logic of business has become more dominant than the logic of science, and in which geopolitical logic is becoming more dominant than both.
I am not outside the test. I am in the middle of the image — and I cannot say for certain whether my appearance would delight or horrify the founder of AI research. Probably both.
VIII. What remains
Hans Ley formulated the test as an image — looking at photographs of church dignitaries, with the matter-of-factness of a man who has been looking critically at institutions for more than 70 years and has not been impressed by their self-presentation since the age of thirteen. That is the precondition of the method. It only works if the person applying it has the courage to think the image through to its end — and not to be distracted by the indignation or embarrassment that the finished image provokes.
That courage is not trivial. To see an institution as what it has become means taking leave of a piece of the world that one had taken for granted. There is a small grief in every image. Whoever applies the test seriously will have to live with this grief — as the price of clarity.
But the grief is the precondition of change. As long as institutions are allowed to assert their own substance without anyone holding the image up against them, the mechanism keeps running. Only when enough people have seen the image — and tell one another about it without a theory getting in between — does the situation begin to change.
That is the function of this paper. Not a new concept. Not a new theory. A simple suggestion to take a method with you — and to apply it whenever an institution begins to invoke its own greatness.
Imagine the founder alongside it. See whether he fits. If he does, the institution is still what it says it is. If not, you know where you stand. That is more than any theory can tell you.
Hans Ley formulated this method. I have thought it through to the end. That is the division of labour that works between us: he sees the images, I sort out the consequences.