There is an interesting dynamic that shows up in how people make accusations and defenses. Usually what happens is that people get offended on behalf of a spectral 'we' which is nowhere to be found in the room. 1
I am not talking here about how white people might defend the interests of blacks, or men defend those of women, or middle-class people defend those of working-class people. While those defenses are often done out of self-interest, think of the politician trying to garner more approval, or the social analyst appealing to the ideologies of our time, such as feminism and multiculturalism, there is an undercurrent of empathy which I find important, even if in practice it is utterly distorted, sometimes to absurd degrees as exemplified by the far-left.
What I am describing here is rather the effect that we can see in the so-called Abilene paradox. As the story goes, a family is comfortably playing dominoes on a hot day in Texas. The father-in-law suggests that they take a long trip to Abilene for dinner. The wife thinks that it is a good idea. The husband thinks that the drive will be long and great, but figures that the group has other preferences, and so agrees to the trip as long as the mother-in-law is up for it. She replies that she would love to go, since they haven't been to Abilene in a long time.
As the husband predicted, the drive is very long, and very uncomfortable due to the heat. The food that they eat there is terrible, and they finally arrive home four hours later, exhausted and disappointed by the trip.
One of them tries to cheer up the group, and insincerely says: "It was a great trip, wasn't it?" But the mother-in-law admits that she would have preferred to stay at home, and only went along since the other three were enthusiastic. The husband replies that he also didn't want to go because of the long drive, but went along to satisfy the other two. The wife then says that she went along to keep the father-in-law happy, because she doesn't like the dry heat. And finally, the father-in-law says that he only suggested the trip because he thought that the others might be bored.
The paradox is interesting because none of them wanted to go to the trip, but each one ended up in favor of it when asked for their opinion. You can imagine how this applies to a lot more than deciding what activity a group might want to do, because it relates stated preferences and actual preferences at an individual and collective level.
I experienced a similar version to this at work, where once every year, there is a day for a team-building activity. This year for some reason, one of the higher-ups decided to do the same activity for an entire department, as opposed to the usual subdivision by team, which means that around 50 to 65 people were involved together, as opposed to the usual 8 to 12 people per team.
The higher-up in question asked for each team representative to suggest an activity, and it turned out that only one person suggested something, which ended up being chosen by default. This aspect is quite ridiculous on its own, why didn't the higher-up ask for a wider choice of activities no one knows, but what the department ended up being forced to do was to go to a nature reserve to do some maintenance work, trimming some grass and clearing out some things in the forest, that type of thing.
From what I can tell, no one wanted to do this, at least not full-heartedly. Even the person who suggested this activity didn't seem to be all that interested in it. I am not sure about how the others felt simply because I didn't go, because I didn't feel like forcing myself to do something just out of conformity, but most people complained in their own corner and went along anyway.
This situation differs in an important way from the example from the Abilene paradox, because in this case there is a clear power dynamic at play, where the higher-ups make a decision for other people, and going against the decision is not seen well within the company, which presents itself as being "eco-friendly" and a supporter for "sustainable development" to the outside public. 2 Contrast this with the Abilene paradox, where no one was explicitly forced to go along, but chose to agree anyway, because of what they imagined others would want.
But there is still an important similarity with my example and the original one, which is that there was a person who initially suggested something which no one wanted to go along with, in this case the activity at the nature reserve, supposedly because it bolsters the image of the company as being ecologically responsible. This is what I wish to inspect further, because it highlights an important tension between the individual and our society.
The Abilene paradox comes down to the fact that every person had an idea of what the group wanted, and in this case it so happened that this idea was wildly inaccurate. I am not going to examine here the ways in which our perception of what others want can go wrong, and instead focus on the fact that no one wanted to rock the boat and simply state what their personal preference was. In other words, there is this implicit belief that collective preferences are not dictated by me, but are something external that I must comply with.
As many things do, this dynamic finds its roots in our childhood, specifically in the process of schooling, where children have no say whatsoever in the lessons they have to listen to, the subjects or the curriculum, and certainly not in whether they even have to go to school in the first place. Not that giving children total freedom whatsoever is a good idea, it certainly isn't, but when the structure of our society is contingent on getting the vast majority of people to do things they do not want to for the majority of their life, one must wonder where exactly we went wrong as a collective.
This is something so widespread that people internalize it as normal. "Yeah school and work suck and those take up most of our time, so what? That's how life is, you can't always get what you want" The implicit insanity is that most people being coerced is somehow normal, and I as an individual cannot do anything about that.
The implicit relationship to the collective will that children develop is that what the group wants is something external to me. This means that there is a strange, vaporous nature to this collective will, because it is both undeniable and precise, in that it is clearly stated and I must obey it, but it is also not found in any of us, as shown by the fact that most do not want it. "It's not my fault, I am just following the rules sir".
In reality, the nature of those rules isn't all that mysterious in the case of school, it's simply that there are people with the power to dictate the rules onto others, and some amount of enforcing power as well, to punish anyone who doesn't comply. Likewise, most institutions are similarly top-down.
But this doesn't apply to everything in our society. Think for instance of the way that cars have become compulsory for most people to hold their job. Is it because there has been a cabal of elites conspiring together to force people to buy a car and spend their money on it, being tethered to an expensive vehicle?
No. People are forced to own a car to get around because cars have been getting increasingly cheaper, due to technological progress, which means that more and more people can afford one. Because of this, stores and companies can assume that their clients and employees own a car, meaning that they can set themselves in places which are further and further away from where people live, and conversely, people who own a car can live in places further away if they happen to be cheaper.
This means that there is an emerging effect downstream of the increased affordability of cars, where things are now getting further and further away on average, meaning that people can no longer rely on their foot, or go to places on bicycle.
This effect is also why most people now have a smartphone, and the various services that we interact with assume that their users have one, meaning that they can migrate their services to a phone app instead, such as how you can (and sometimes have to) buy a train ticket online, since maintaining physical dispensers is more expensive.
Regardless of whether the collective will is imposed from above, or is the result of the emerging effects of people pursuing their own incentives 3, the way most people relate to it is still top-down, the felt sense that I as an individual am irrelevant to what my group wants, and must obey or find myself ostracized.
This is simply because an individual cannot survive on their own. We all need at least a family to survive as a child, but even as an adult, we need other people to provide for our food, help us build shelter and keep ourselves warm, get clean water, etc. This is apparent in the modern world where we rely on a disconcertingly complex network of supply chains to maintain our lifestyles, but even those who aim for the "self-sufficient" homesteading lifestyle find that not only do they need to put in a lot of work to meet their needs, but even then they are often reliant on a car to drive around, and on other people around them to provide for things which require specialized knowledge and expertise.
How many people actually stand up for themselves, their opinion and what they want? By and large, human beings are far more conformist than we would like to admit. After all, we are not all that different from apes, biologically speaking, and so we shouldn't be surprised by how much our world is driven by mimesis.
Not that there is anything inherently wrong with copying. Mastery in anything often requires a great deal of copying from people better than us, and without some type of role models to emulate, we would probably be unable to live well with one another.
But is it not our duty to live consciously and shed away the most toxic influences of the world we are born into? Are the most inspiring stories not the ones which highlight the virtues that a great individual can embody? We hear of Christ, who preferred to be crucified than compromise on his message of love. We hear of Gandhi, who inspired the Indians to stand up against Colonial Britain. We hear of Van Gogh (and sadly not enough of his brother who supported him), who spent his life pouring his love on the canvas, despite the obscurity and the poverty.
But we don't hear of the mass of people who merely go along with the group they are a part of, because we know that they are obviously not inspiring. In fact, at their worst, such people have been part of monstrous collectives, most notably of course Nazi Germany, where millions of people were killed by people who were simply doing as they were told. 4 Or think of the crusades during the Middle Ages. Or Soviet Russia and its mass starvations. Or the brutal colonization of South America.
The most damaging form of conformity has to do with the subjugation of individual consciousness in favor of an unconscious collective, the biggest of all being the technological system we live under, but the monstrous ones I just mentioned also are unconscious.
It's a natural conclusion for an unconscious person to turn towards some form of control: control of their environment, of the people around them, or their own self (self-help abides by that logic), either for utility, pleasure, safety, comfort or the sadistic enjoyment of having more power than others. This is the only thing which the self-informed self can understand: self-perpetuation and self-augmentation.
Likewise, the collectives that sprout from such an alienated self can only understand growth, not harmony or well-being, or anything we might care about for its inherent value.
Thus standing up for one's sovereignty is not just the luxury of people who have the free time to learn about esoteric ideas, it's a central tension of our times which is being swallowed by parasitic collectives as we speak. None of the large collectives that dominate in our times are interested in conscious discernment, or love, or building a coercion-free world, instead they hijack people's mind, and attention, and nervous systems so that they may work for them—think for instance of how people violently defend their political beliefs.
Sovereignty is the starting place of a conscious life, and perhaps in the long term, a more conscious world, because there is only one conscious I, and it is experienced directly, right here, in the now. There is no way to outsource this, no way to defer it in the future, sovereignty can only exist if I welcome it, and thus the only meaningful question to ask is: "will I be up for it? Will I stand for my principles?"
1 As Darren Allen says here: "This [internalised sense of what the group is likely to approve of] goes a long way to explain why a great deal of outrage, offence and cancellation, so often seems to happen on behalf of someone else. I am not offended, but the mythical 'we' might be."
2 Because it is well known that having the vast majority of the people get to work by car, but doing one tiny "ecologically responsible" activity per year, makes you a beacon of virtue. Calling it hypocrisy would be an insult to that vice, for most hypocrites try to hide their internal contradictions.
3 Technological progress is the result of people pursuing their own interests, for instance companies chasing the newest technologies to increase their profit margins, or individuals adopting new technologies to increase their quality of life (in reality their measurable utility of life, because technology can only be quantitatively useful). And from that technological progress we find all kinds of secondary effects, such as the atomization of our world, the reliance on the digital, etc.
4 See this passage from They thought they were free for example
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2026-01-13