Suppose I were to say that the American legal system is a criminal organization. The usual response would be that this is a crazy accusation.
Now, suppose I were to point out that it is standard practice for American lawyers to advise their clients to lie under oath in certain circumstances. I expect that this would still generally be perceived as a heterodox, emotionally overwrought, and perhaps hysterical conspiracy theory.
Then, suppose I were to further clarify that people accepting a plea bargain are expected to affirm under oath that no one made threats or promises to induce them to plead guilty, and that the American criminal justice system is heavily reliant on plea bargains. This might be conceded as literally true, but with the proviso that since everyone does it, I shouldn't use extreme language like "lie" and "fraud."
This isn't about lawyers - some cases in other fields:
In American medicine it is routine to officially certify that a standard of care was provided, that cannot possibly have been provided (e.g. some policies as to the timing of medication and tests can't be carried out given how many patients each nurse has to care for, but it's less trouble to fudge it as long as something vaguely resembling the officially desired outcome happened). The system relies on widespread willingness to falsify records, and would (temporarily) grind to a halt if people were to simply refuse to lie. But I expect that if I were to straightforwardly summarize this - that the American hospital system is built on lies - I mostly expect this to be evaluated as an attack, rather than a description. But of course if any one person refuses to lie, the proximate consequences may be bad.
Likewise for the psychiatric system.
In Simulacra and Subjectivity, the part that reads "while you cannot acquire a physician’s privileges and social role simply by providing clear evidence of your ability to heal others" was, in an early draft, "physicians are actually nothing but a social class with specific privileges, social roles, and barriers to entry." These are expressions of the same thought, but the draft version is a direct, simple theoretical assertion, while the latter merely provides evidence for the assertion. I had to be coy on purpose in order to distract the reader from a potential fight.
The End User License Agreements we almost all falsely certify that we've read in order to use the updated version of any software we have are of course familiar. And when I worked in the corporate world, I routinely had to affirm in writing that I understood and was following policies that were nowhere in evidence. But of course if I'd personally refused to lie, the proximate consequences would have been counterproductive.
The Silicon Valley startup scene - as attested in Zvi's post, the show Silicon Valley, the New Yorker profile on Y Combinator (my analysis), and plenty of anecdotal evidence - uses business metrics as a theatrical prop to appeal to investors, not an accounting device to make profitable decisions on the object level.
The general argumentative pattern is:
A: X is a fraudulent enterprise.
B: How can you say that?!
A: X relies on asserting Y when we know Y to be false.
B: But X produces benefit Z, and besides, everyone says Y and the system wouldn't work without it, so it's not reasonable to call it fraud.
This wouldn't be as much of a problem if terms like "fraud", "lie," "deception" were unambiguously attack words, with a literal meaning of "ought to be scapegoated as deviant." The problem is that there's simultaneously the definition that the dictionaries claim the word has, with a literal meaning independent of any call to action.
There is a clear conflict between the use of language to punish offenders, and the use of language to describe problems, and there is great need for a language that can describe problems.
For instance, if I wanted to understand how to interpret statistics generated by the medical system, I would need a short, simple way to refer to any significant tendency to generate false reports. If the available simple terms were also attack words, the process would become much more complicated.
Related: Model-building and scapegoating, Blame games, Judgment, Punishment, and the Information-Suppression Field, AGAINST LIE INFLATION, Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist
Why is it a useful description to call the legal system a criminal organization, to define physicians as a social class, to describe X as a fraudulent enterprise, or other things in that class?
The only reason I can see is to make an attack against the thing you are describing, because if you do not intend the attack then the description is not useful- if describing an institution as a criminal organization doesn't mean that it should be dismantled (or better), then describing an institution as a criminal organization means nothing.
If saying that a title is nothing more than a social class doesn't also say that the title is without significant meaning, then saying that a title is nothing more than a social class is an exercise in definitional naval-gazing (by which I mean both a somewhat hyperbolic sense of the literal meaning and also as a dismissal of the practice of using tautological descriptions that parse as attacks without meaning them as attacks).
And so forth.
If you want to describe the problems, you have to describe, or at least cogently assert the problems. The problem that you are asserting about the American legal system seems to be related to the idea that it accepts some kinds of implicit coercion in plea bargains, but forbids other forms of coercion, and makes people claim that they haven't been coerced at all when accepting plea bargains? You never actually said why that's bad, and I honestly don't believe that it is bad- Sure, it's a little bit hypocritical; it might even be a violation of law. And the practice of plea bargaining is problematic from the start- but it would be even more problematic if there was no attempt to ensure that suspects were free from untoward coercion.
When you suggest that physicians are "actually nothing but" a social class with certain characteristics, you aren't communicating anything about the core point that being good at healing people is insufficient to become a physician. Those two words are the attacking part of the statement: "Physicians are a social class with specific privileges, social roles, and barriers to entry." is not an attack, it's an uncontroversial background statement that could easily lead into a point.
I can see why fudging times in healthcare might be bad, since recording inaccurate information about treatment could possibly result in making decisions based on inaccurate information, and developing bad norms about "insignificant" falsifications risks people falsifying more significant details. But I have to draw from my own knowledge to reach that conclusion; you seem to stop at "the system would grind to a halt if people simply refused to [follow the normal behavior in the system]", without reference to the bad things that the normal behavior in the system might cause.
"X relies on asserting Y, when we know Y to be false" is not intrinsically a problem. In most cases where "Asserting Y when it is common knowledge that Y is false" is a problem, it is a problem because it can lead to asserting Z when it is not common knowledge that Z is false and where belief in Z might be a problem.
The latter is a strict subset of the former, but it is the big one if "everybody knows that Y is false".
In the cases where asserting Y when Y is false, but it is not common knowledge that Y is false, the path to a problem likely passes through "People actually believe Y, because they have been told Y by someone who knows if Y is true."