Against Stability

And Refusing Consolation

Photo by Zach Lezniewicz on Unsplash

Why This Essay Exists

So…this essay didn’t begin as some meaningful theoretical project. It kind of just emerged out of a recurring frustration (one that has followed me since childhood) that has resurfaced in recent years. Whenever questions of education, socialization, authority, or ‘normal life’ come up in my mind, I find myself running into the same impasse: there seems to be a near-universal refusal to acknowledge the degree to which what we call stability depends on suppression, management, and internalized constraint.

Recently, while working on a video examining the psychology of fascism through psychoanalytic lenses (mostly Wilhelm Reich) this intuition came back and I asked myself again: why do people submit to systems that clearly restrict them, even when those systems are exposed as contingent, ideological, or historically violent? And even more troubling still is the realization that this submission persists not only under conditions of scarcity or trauma, but among those who are okay. People who are materially secure, educated, and the closest one can get to free.

All my conversations following that work repeatedly circled the same paradox, which is that people openly consume stories, art, and cultural products saturated with chaos, rebellion, vulnerability, and dissolution (meaning they are drawn to narratives of breakdown and transformation), yet the suggestion that such instability might be lived (carefully, partially, without spectacle or justification) provokes discomfort, dismissal, or fear. So then, to me this meant that vulnerability is tolerated as an aesthetic, but treated as dangerous when approached existentially.

But…what troubled me was not simply this contradiction, but how difficult it was to speak about it at all. It seemed like language would fold in on itself. Discussions would always eventually slip into moralization, therapeutic framing, or institutional logic. And the only way I could explain it to myself was that when one attempts to articulate a form of freedom that does not promise safety, coherence, or redemption, it seems to begin to sound irrational, mystical, or irresponsible - which then opened up a whole bunch of mental side quests where I was indulging ideas of conspiracy theories (don’t worry…that isn’t what this is about).

So…this essay is my attempt to think deeply through this entire stream of thought.

What I am going to do here is not about proposing solutions. I am interested in examining the mechanisms by which modern life manages human instability and how this management produces the very alienation and authoritarian dependency which it claims to prevent.

A central aspect of this analysis is the work of Max Stirner, which means that this essay engages in a return to a thinker whose work is frequently dismissed as incoherent, mystical, or dangerously anarchic precisely because it refuses to offer consolation.

The Lie of Stability

Stability is rarely presented as an argument. It is presented as a necessity. From early childhood onward, we are taught (implicitly and explicitly) that stability is the precondition for health, learning, morality, and social life itself. By that reasoning then, instability is framed as something to be corrected, managed, or eliminated, and emotional volatility becomes a pathology, existential uncertainty becomes a risk, and ambivalence becomes immaturity. It would then make sense to think that the task of education (broadly) would be to produce a subject capable of sustaining order within themselves.

What is striking to me though is how little this framing is questioned. Stability is treated as self-evidently good, while vulnerability is treated as inherently dangerous. And yet, this opposition is not grounded in any neutral account of human nature as it is actually a political, psychological, and institutional construction. One that allows large systems to function by minimizing unpredictability.

I want to do a bit of a history of philosophy here to look more closely at how that even works.

From the Enlightenment onward, dominant philosophical projects have shared a common assumption which is that human beings require formation in order to coexist. Whether this formation is moral, ethical, or material, instability appears as a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be lived.

For Immanuel Kant for example, education is inseparable from discipline. This means that freedom, paradoxically, has to be learned through constraint. He explored the idea that autonomy emerges only after the subject internalizes rational law. This rationale means that instability is not creative but actually dangerous and has to be shaped into moral coherence. Basically, the human being cannot be trusted with their own impulses without prior conditioning which justifies this type of education.

Then, a little later on, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel offers a more dynamic account, but basically arrives at a similar conclusion. He claims that while contradiction and negativity are essential to historical movement, they are ultimately reconciled within ethical life (Sittlichkeit). So the individual finds freedom in recognizing themselves within it rather than resisting it. So here, instability is permitted but only insofar as it is sublated into a higher rational order. This rationale suggests that what does not integrate is rendered irrational, immature, or pathological.

Then, later later on, even Karl Marx, whose work is explicitly critical of ideology, ends up retaining this basic framework. Marx does this whole mental acrobatics move of exposing how institutions reproduce domination, but then he still assumes that the right material conditions will produce the right forms of consciousness. So again, even here, instability appears as alienation which makes it a problem to be resolved through historical development and collective reorganization. So…the subject is still something to be aligned with an objective process.

Across these divergent traditions which seem meaningful to contemporary society…there seems to be one shared notion: human instability cannot be trusted on its own and needs to be controlled and managed somehow.

But let’s move beyond a history of philosophy.

The conviction I am discussing here has become ingrained in contemporary educational systems, therapeutic frameworks, corporate cultures, and even popular discourse around mental health, where stability has become synonymous with responsibility. And by this logic, emotional containment is maturity, self-regulation is virtue, and to be stable is to be legible to institutions, to employers, and to social systems that depend on predictability.

But what is rarely acknowledged is that this version of stability is not neutral. It is achieved through continuous internal management. Individuals are “encouraged” to learn to suppress impulses, doubts, contradictions, and vulnerabilies. And I claim that this is done because they disrupt the smooth functioning of social structures rather than to offer some kind of protection for the individual. And over time, this suppression becomes internalized which leads to the subject no longer needing to be disciplined from the outside because they (conveniently) discipline themselves.

Education, in this sense, does not merely teach skills or knowledge. It installs the fear that exposure (emotional, existential, or psychological) will lead to collapse (meaning: the fear that speaking without justification, acting without guarantee, or existing without clear orientation is irresponsible or unsafe). Thus, stability becomes not just a condition of social life, but a moral demand.

And yet, this demand sits uneasily with lived experience, doesn’t it?

Despite the insistence that stability is necessary for flourishing, modern life is saturated with anxiety, burnout, depression, and quiet despair. Isn’t that strange? People who appear stable by all institutional measures (like the employed, educated, housed, socially integrated etc.) often report a persistent sense of emptiness or alienation. So one has to wonder if what is labeled as stability actually functions as containment rather than well-being.

This contradiction raises an uncomfortable question:
What if the instability we are taught to fear is not the cause of disorder, but one of its casualties?

So rather than asking how to eliminate instability, I want to begin by asking a different question: how has instability been framed as a threat in the first place, and who benefits from that framing? Because one has to wonder if treating stability as an unquestioned good means also to ignore the ways in which it is produced (through discipline, abstraction, and the continuous deferral of lived confrontation).

This is the main thesis here:

Modern societies do not eliminate instability. They simply displace it. They convert it into spectacle, aestheticized rebellion, curated spirituality, and symbolic transgression, which are all forms that can be safely consumed without ever being lived. Instability is permitted as representation, but forbidden as experience. This is icky to me and I refuse it.

What is denied at the level of existence (i.e. uncertainty, contradiction, exposure as lived conditions rather than managed experiences) inevitably returns at the level of fantasy (i.e. art, entertainment, spiritual imagery, or symbolic rebellion). This displacement does not resolve instability. It just fetishizes it. The result is a paradoxical system in which chaos is endlessly staged, narrated, and commodified precisely in order to prevent its encounter in lived life.

The only conclusion I can draw is that this management of instability is driven less by concern for human well-being (as they tend to claim on an institutional level) than by internalized needs for control, coherence, and authority projected outward and institutionalized. And those with the power to define what counts as “stability” do the greatest damage…because they train subjects to fear their own exposure, contradiction, and groundlessness. So, in a way, instability is not suppressed, it is just administered. And it is this administration, rather than instability itself, that sustains dependence, alienation, and submission.

Managed Chaos and Aesthetic Rebellion

Modern societies are obsessed with stability. But they are also just as invested in staging its opposite. What people are discouraged from living (uncertainty, vulnerability, contradiction) becomes images, stories, entertainment, and symbolic rebellion. Something safe and alien. Something to keep people from engaging with themselves.

But let’s think less abstractly about this:

Chaos, breakdown, and rebellion are everywhere in contemporary culture. We watch them, listen to them, and consume them constantly. What is missing is the permission to actually live these states in ordinary life without having to explain, justify, fix, or package them. Instability is allowed as representation, but not as experience.

Art, entertainment, and popular culture are sites where instability is allowed to surface safely as long as it’s aesthetically appropriate. And these narratives are not marginal. People like them. They are central to what people are drawn to. They resonate because they mirror something real. Like an internal pressure that has nowhere else to go.

But this resonance is more carefully contained than we think.

In aesthetic form, states like chaos, despair, and rebellion become legible and

stylized. For example, despair is acceptable as long as it leads to growth somehow. This is a story. Alien to lived experience. But this story is what makes it legitimate to us.

And I am going to claim that this is not accidental. Aestheticization functions as a regulatory mechanism. It allows instability to be acknowledged without allowing it to disrupt the structures that require stability to persist. So the subject is permitted to feel, and empathize, and even identify. But only within a frame that ensures return to stability.

What results is not repression in the classical sense, but displacement.

Rather than being denied outright, existential tension is outsourced. This means that people are encouraged to consume what they are discouraged from embodying. Chaos becomes something one watches, listens to, scrolls past, or aestheticizes into a mood or identity. This makes vulnerability nothing more than a style.

The saddest sentence in the world: Resistance becomes content.

This displacement has a paradoxical effect because it intensifies desire while it deepens alienation.

The more instability is rendered symbolic, the more it appears as something just out of reach. Something charged with authenticity, intensity, and truth. At the same time, the distance between the subject and their own lived instability grows. What feels real is no longer trusted as something one can inhabit. It becomes something we can observe or admire, but from far away.

In this way, aestheticization does not neutralize existential tension. It fetishizes it.

The fetish functions by isolating an element of lived experience and transforming it into an object of fascination detached from its conditions of emergence. So chaos becomes desirable precisely because it is no longer dangerous. And vulnerability becomes attractive precisely because it is framed, controlled and managed. So what once threatened order is now repackaged as depth, edge, or meaning, while remaining safely external to everyday life.

The weird thing is that this dynamic is increasingly visible in contemporary culture’s obsession with authenticity and exposure. Social media platforms are saturated with performances of vulnerability, confession, and emotional openness but these performances are so often so tightly controlled. They are timed, edited, framed, and rewarded. In this world, vulnerability becomes a currency and exposure becomes a strategy.

The result is a strange inversion: people speak endlessly about their inner lives while remaining deeply estranged from themselves.

And then what appears as openness ends up functioning as another form of self-management where feelings are shared in ways that maintain coherence, recognition, and control. And disruption is allowed only insofar as it can be reintegrated into identity, narrative, or brand.

The instability itself is never trusted.

This is why the appeal of chaos intensifies rather than subsides. Each aesthetic encounter offers a glimpse of something that feels alive, uncontained, and real, while simultaneously reinforcing the message that such states are unlivable without mediation. The subject oscillates between fascination and fear, as well as desire and retreat.

And the contradiction is not resolved because it is not meant to be.

The danger, however, is not that people encounter chaos symbolically. The danger is that symbolic encounter replaces lived confrontation entirely, as over time, the subject learns to associate instability exclusively with spectacle, art, or spiritual fantasy, while experiencing their own unmediated uncertainty as something illegitimate or unsafe.

In this way, aesthetic rebellion does not challenge the lie of stability introduced in the previous chapter. It reinforces it. It teaches people that instability belongs elsewhere, i.e. on screens, in stories etc. but not in reality.

So…the question, then, is not why people are drawn to representations of chaos. That much is obvious. The question is why they are so afraid of allowing even small, uninstrumental encounters with instability in their own existence especially when the cultural imagination is saturated with its imagery.

I think, to answer that, we have to turn away from representation and move toward the psychological structures that make submission to stability feel necessary even when it produces dissatisfaction.

So the next chapter will address this directly by examining why people cling to order.

Why People Submit Even When They Don’t Need To

When I was reading Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, the question I kept returning to was “okay but why when you’re doing ok?”

Meaning: If stability is restrictive and managed life produces alienation, and if rebellion is displaced into aesthetics rather than lived experience, then why do people continue to submit even when material conditions are acceptable? Why does this pattern persist even among those who are materially secure, educated, and ostensibly free?

The most common answers are inadequate.

1. Ignorance doesn’t explain it; the mechanisms of control are widely discussed and openly acknowledged.

2. Coercion does not explain it; many people submit without being directly forced.

3. False consciousness doesn’t fully account for the phenomenon either, since awareness of ideological manipulation often coexists comfortably with compliance.

What these explanations share is an assumption that submission is primarily a rational decision.

But I claim that it is not.

Submission persists because it regulates anxiety at a level that precedes conscious choice. So…people do not cling to stability because they believe it is true or just but because instability feels intolerable and order is not merely an external arrangement. It is an internal affective anchor.

And like I explained in my video…this is where the work of Wilhelm Reich becomes unavoidable.

Reich’s central insight in his analysis of authoritarian psychology is that mass submission cannot be explained at the level of ideology alone. Political beliefs, moral commitments, and stated values are secondary. What matters is character structure. So the emotional and bodily organization of the subject shaped through early discipline, repression, and habituation.

Authority, in this framework, is not primarily imposed. It is felt as relief.

From early childhood onward, many individuals are trained to associate safety with obedience, containment with care, and structure with legitimacy. Emotional expression that exceeds acceptable bounds is corrected. So naturally, ambivalence is discouraged, and uncertainty is framed as immaturity. And over time, these corrections are internalized and the subject learns what is forbidden and, worse, what is terrifying.

By adulthood, authority no longer needs to justify itself. It is experienced as familiar, grounding, and stabilizing. By contrast, the absence of structure triggers diffuse anxiety, and not because chaos is inherently destructive, but because the subject has never learned to inhabit it without fear.

This explains how submission persists even when it contradicts a person’s explicit beliefs or material interests. The function of authority is not to convince, but to soothe.

And to destabilize these structures, even conceptually, feels less like liberation than exposure.

This is why naming indoctrination rarely produces resistance. On the contrary, it often intensifies defensive attachment. (Just read the comments on my video lol). When legitimacy is questioned, what is threatened is not simply belief, but psychic equilibrium, so stability is defended because its calming, not because it is good.

This dynamic is particularly visible among those in privileged positions. It’s very much apparent that material security does not eliminate anxiety. Actually, it often increases the stakes of disruption. The more a life is built around predictability, recognition, and continuity, the more groundlessness appears catastrophic. For such subjects, collapse is not imagined as hunger or violence, but as loss of coherence, meaning: loss of meaning, identity, and orientation.

What makes this particularly insidious is that the submission it produces does not feel imposed. It feels chosen. People talk about responsibility, maturity, realism, and pragmatism and they frame their attachment to order as rational preference rather than emotional necessity.

But the same individuals are often drawn obsessively to representations of collapse, rebellion, and exposure.

This reveals the core contradiction: people both desire and fear instability. They seek it symbolically while avoiding it existentially. And authority resolves this contradiction by offering a compromise in saying: “Here is intensity without risk, rebellion without consequence, and vulnerability without exposure. Consume it! It will soothe the ache.”

Submission, then, is not a failure of intelligence or courage. It is a learned strategy for managing anxiety.

The difficulty of confronting this lies in what it implies because if submission is emotionally functional, then simply exposing its ideological nature will never be sufficient. This means that critique alone cannot undo what has been embodied.

Obviously this doesn’t make submission inevitable. But it does explain why it is so resilient and why calls for freedom that promise comfort, safety, or redemption are far more appealing than those that offer none.

But we have to do something more than critique now, because o move beyond this pattern requires a willingness to encounter instability without immediately seeking to manage it and also to experience exposure without demanding reassurance.

Essentially, why such encounters feel so threatening, and why they are so often mischaracterized as destructive, brings us back to the problem of freedom itself.

The Fear of Living What We Desire

So here is what I have been yapping about: the same subjects who cling to stability, who defend structure as necessary and vulnerability as dangerous, are often deeply drawn to its opposite, and this contradiction is not accidental, nor is it a sign of hypocrisy. It is the result of a split that modern life actively produces and maintains.

There are two sides to this.

1. On one side of this split is lived existence: regulated, legible, contained.

2. On the other side is fantasy: aestheticized chaos, symbolic rebellion, curated vulnerability.

So, the subject is permitted to visit instability, but not to remain there. This means that desire is acknowledged, but only in displaced form.

This arrangement resolves an impossible tension. It allows people to experience intensity without risk, exposure without consequence, and dissolution without loss of control.

But the price of this resolution is alienation from one’s own desires. And not because they are denied, but because they are never trusted.

What is striking is how often fear is invoked to justify this arrangement. And this evocation includes notions that vulnerability is destabilizing, emotional exposure is dangerous and uncertainty means collapse. And it seems these claims are rarely tested. They circulate as assumptions that are reinforced by institutional language, therapeutic norms, and moral narratives about responsibility and self-care.

But lived experience suggests something else.

Most moments of unmediated exposure do not result in catastrophe. They are often actually boringly anticlimactic and awkward and quiet. So, by psychoanalytic logic, they don’t actally disrupt the self. They disrupt the internalized demand to manage oneself continuously.

So then, the fear is disproportionate to the risk.

What is feared is not vulnerability itself, but the loss of mediation. Like to be exposed without a frame or narrative, and without identity payoff or moral justification. This feels like stepping outside the structures that guarantee legibility. And this is not actually danger in the material sense. What is actually feared is unrecognizability.

This helps explain why modern culture encourages vulnerability only when it is accompanied by form. The rationale is that the only thing that is intolerable is exposure without outcome.

So…to actually live instability without transforming it into meaning, lesson, or identity is to refuse consolation, and this refusal is often misread as nihilism, irresponsibility, or immaturity.

This misreading has a long philosophical history. Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed a similar dynamic in his critique of comfort, security, and what he called decadence. But he was not talking about moral failure. He was more exploring the fear of vulnerability as an aversion to risk and becoming by exploring that modern subjects increasingly prefer safety to vitality, and coherence to intensity.

Nietzsche proposed that what is never permitted is the simple act of existing without permission.

This is why the question of freedom becomes so difficult to articulate. It seems we lack the language to really assess our position. It seems that freedom is immediately translated into choice, rights, self-expression, or self-realization (all of which remain compatible with managed life). What is excluded is freedom understood as non-obligation, i.e. the refusal to justify oneself to an abstraction, even a benevolent one.

This resistance is intense precisely because it exposes how much of modern stability is maintained through fear rather than necessity. It exposes that uninstrumental encounters with instability are survivable. And of course this would undermine the moral authority of the structures that exist to manage them.

And, in my opinion, this is why the split persists.

Desire is allowed expression only in forms that preserve order.

Exposure is tolerated only when it reinforces meaning.

Chaos is admired only when it is distant.

The next chapter is all about the dude who was standing at that exact crossroads and was like “nah, I am not buying this” and in doing so, he exposed why freedom so often sounds irrational, mystical, or dangerous to those trained to fear it.

Stirner and the Refusal of Consolation

At this point, I hope it is a little more clear why Max Stirner is such a difficult figure to place. He is often dismissed as incoherent, dangerously anarchic, or vaguely spiritual. He is also accused of mysticism, ego-worship, or replacing God with the Self. It often seems that even sympathetic readers attempt to rehabilitate him by translating his thought into ethical guidance, existential authenticity, or psychological empowerment - which is unfortunate.

But in any case…there is a reason why he is so difficult to put into a box.

And the reason is that all of these readings miss the central gesture of Stirner’s work which is not to offer an alternative foundation, but to refuse consolation altogether.

This refusal is precisely what makes his thought appear irrational or “freaky” within traditions that assume freedom has to be grounded, justified, or redeemed. Stirner does not deny that people seek meaning, stability, or reassurance. He just denies that these desires grant authority to the abstractions that promise to satisfy them.

The concept of the Unique (Der Einzige) is often misunderstood as a metaphysical claim about selfhood. It is read as a kind of inner essence, or a true self waiting to be realized once external constraints are removed. But this reading inevitably pushes Stirner toward spirituality, and turns ownness into a form of self-actualization or inner truth.

But Stirner explicitly rejects this.

The Unique is not an essence. It is not an identity. It is not a higher self. It names nothing that can be stabilized, cultivated, or guaranteed. Essentially…the moment it becomes definable, it becomes another abstraction, or in his words: another spook claiming authority over the individual.

So what Stirner exposes is not the presence of a truer self beneath social conditioning, but the absence of any legitimate ground upon which abstractions can rule, which means that morality, humanity, reason, duty, identity, spirituality etc. claim authority by presenting themselves as higher than the individual. And Stirner’s whole gig is to strip them of that claim. And not by refuting their content, but by denying their right to command.

This is why Stirner is so often accused of egoism in the pejorative sense, because his critics assume that rejecting higher values necessarily means enthroning the ego as a new absolute. Karl Marx, in his polemical critique of Stirner as “Saint Max,” for example, interprets Stirner’s refusal of abstraction as a naive inversion or the replacement of divine authority with personal authority, ideology with inward belief.

But this critique misunderstands the target.

Stirner is not saying “believe in yourself.”
He is saying “stop believing that anything has authority over you by virtue of being higher.”

Including the self.

Including reason.
Including freedom.
Including ego.

This is what makes Stirner so resistant to institutionalization.

As Slavoj Žižek has noted in a different context, modern discourse is remarkably adept at describing domination, ideology, and unfreedom, yet strikingly impoverished when it comes to articulating freedom itself. Freedom either collapses into empty slogans or reappears as a quasi-spiritual experience.

And I claim that Stirner’s work sits precisely at this fault line because it exposes the limits of a language structured around justification.

Thus, Stirner’s anarchism is not a politics of refusal, nor a call for chaos. It is an existential non-foundation. It does not say “nothing matters,” but “nothing commands by virtue of being higher.” So what is left is not emptiness in the nihilistic sense, but availability that is creative, contingent, and unguaranteed.

And I think this lack of guarantee is what most readers find intolerable.

Stirner offers no reassurance that freedom will be safe or meaningful. He does not promise that unspooking will lead to harmony, community, or fulfillment. He simply insists that no abstraction has the right to demand sacrifice in exchange for such promises.

And in the context of this essay, Stirner matters because he exposes why those problems persist. Stability, aesthetic rebellion, submission, and the fear of vulnerability all rely on the same mechanism: the internalization of authority under the guise of protection.

And Stirner’s refusal of consolation interrupts that mechanism because it doesn’t tell the subject what to do and it removes the voice that tells them what they have to do.

Amd what remains is unsettling exactly because it can’t be institutionalized, aestheticized, or redeemed in any way. It can only be encountered in lived moments.

The final chapter will return to those moments. Not to prescribe them, but to clarify what is at stake when one lives, even briefly, without asking permission from an abstraction.

Living Without Permission

If this essay has resisted offering solutions, it is not because the problems it describes can’t be solved but because many of the proposed solutions reproduce the very logic they claim to escape. The programs, methods, and prescriptions that exist promise safety in that freedom can be made stable, repeatable, and harmless. But what they rarely acknowledge is that this promise is itself a form of control.

To live without permission is not to live without care, structure, or relation. It is to live without the assumption that one’s existence must be justified to an abstraction in order to be legitimate. This distinction is subtle, and it is often misunderstood precisely because modern life collapses legitimacy into approval, coherence, and recognizability.

This refusal is what Max Stirner names, without sanctifying, as ownness.

And such moments can’t be taught. The moment living without permission becomes a norm, it becomes another demand, another standard against which one measures oneself. This is why any attempt to formalize it (whether through education, therapy, or spirituality) inevitably reproduces the logic of management.

But let’s not be pessimistic here.

This does not mean that nothing can change.

What can change is the credibility of the lie that humans have to be protected from their own instability in order to live well. That lie persists because it is useful, not because it is true. It allows institutions to function smoothly. It allows authority to masquerade as care. It allows people to outsource their fear of groundlessness to systems that promise containment.

But when even small encounters with unmediated exposure are lived, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not once and for all. The shift is quiet and reversible. But it’s enough to weaken the hold of abstractions that rely on fear to maintain their authority.

So what am I saying?

This essay has argued that modern societies don’t eliminate instability. They just displace it, aestheticize it, fetishize it, spiritualize it, and manage it, while teaching people to distrust its lived form. And in doing so, they produce subjects who seek intensity symbolically while submitting existentially, and who admire freedom while fearing its practice.

It has also promoted the idea of questioning this arrangement, and clarified that this does not mean to advocate chaos, nor to deny the need for care, structure, or relation, and shown that this questioning effort is more about asking whether stability has become a substitute for life rather than a condition of it.

And what I am concluding is that living without permission does not promise safety or redemption. It does not resolve anxiety or guarantee meaning. But what it offers is something far less consoling and far more modest, which is the possibility of encountering oneself without immediately handing that encounter over to an abstraction.

I also claim that this possibility feels unsettling because much of modern life depends on convincing people that they cannot survive it.

And it is my aim, with this essay, to suggest otherwise.

Just test it yourself.

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Reading Suggestions:

Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1977.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Kant, Immanuel. Education. Translated by Annette Churton. University of Michigan Press, 1960.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Prometheus Books, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, 1974.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Translated by Vincent R. Carfagno. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Translated by Steven T. Byington. Dover Publications, 1973.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989.

Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010.