The Keming Tax

This paper proposes the Keming Tax: a construct naming the cognitive and emotional cost imposed by perceptual systems that register norm-violating discrepancies beneath the threshold at which most perceptual systems suppress the signal prior to awareness. The construct is decomposed into three components: a pre-verbal somatic flinch, a mandatory verification phase that cannot be aborted without residual cognitive load, and a foreclosed-action residue incurred when the detection cannot be acted on. The paper’s central claim is architectural: what is commonly diagnosed as clinical perfectionism in high-Keming individuals is in important cases a misreading of cognitive architecture as cognitive strategy, with clinical, occupational, and educational consequences. Four neighbouring constructs are differentiated. The architecture is argued to be constitutively coupled to the capabilities that make high-Keming individuals professionally valuable: one cannot be suppressed without partially disabling the other. A symmetry hypothesis is offered as a candidate for further testing: aesthetic sense and the Keming Tax may be one architecture in two polarities rather than two architectures that co-occur. An asymmetric-audit reading of skilled-trades disputes is developed, with the bathroom tile case as a worked example. Four testable predictions are proposed.