Who Gets to Decide What’s Real?
Authority, belonging, and manufactured reality
There’s a moment when authority realizes it no longer works, and it isn’t loud or dramatic. No one raises their voice. Everyone stays polite. Hands are shaken. Names are exchanged. The room fills with courtesy the way fog fills a valley—soft, deliberate, impossible to rush.
Nothing is challenged outright. No rule is broken. And yet something essential thins. Authority doesn’t shatter in these moments. It stiffens. It becomes formal. It relies on ritual—on posture, tone, and inherited expectations—to hold its shape.
That’s when you feel it: the shift. The moment power stops being assumed and starts being performed. You can feel the effort. And once you feel it, it’s hard to unfeel. What’s revealed isn’t weakness so much as dependence. Control doesn’t disappear. It becomes visible. And visibility is dangerous to systems that survive by being unquestioned. Once authority is seen performing, the illusion it depends on becomes harder to sustain.
The Myth of Control
We like to believe authority is something imposed—that control flows in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. But most authority doesn’t function that way. It relies on participation more than force.
That’s why the most stable systems aren’t the ones that punish the hardest, but the ones that require the least enforcement. They teach people to self-regulate. To anticipate consequences. To internalize the rules so thoroughly that no one has to say them out loud.
This is why control systems don’t collapse when they’re challenged. They collapse when they’re ignored. Power needs agreement. It needs repetition. It needs people to keep showing up as if the script still matters. When someone stops reacting. Stops explaining. Stops asking for permission to exist outside the script—that is when the scaffolding groans. The system, faced with a non-participant, can only resort to its own exaggerated performance. It becomes a play where one actor has forgotten their lines, and the others are left shouting theirs into a silent house.
Cults without Costumes
We reserve the word cult for the extreme, the visible, and the rare. It’s a comforting distinction. It lets us believe most of us live in the free air, while they live in the hall.
Consider the hall of Corporate Belief. Its lore is the quarterly report; its sacrament is the “all-hands meeting”; its heaven is a promotion to a corner office overlooking other, smaller halls. Doubt is rebranded as “negativity,” and to leave is not to choose a different path, but to “fail to align with the mission.” The promise is not salvation, but stock options—yet the demand for your soul, measured in hours and undivided attention, is just as total.
The hall of Wellness and Optimization. Here, the doctrine is purity. The leaders are gurus with perfect skin and custom protocols. The rituals are strict: this fast, that supplement, this mindset. To question the science is to “not be ready for healing.” To eat the forbidden food is not a choice, but a “collapse.” The promise is a perfected body, but the underlying creed is that you are perpetually broken, and only their system can make you whole.
Even our digital lives are lived in concentric halls. The Algorithm is a silent cardinal, curating a reality so seamless it becomes invisible. Its punishment is irrelevance; its reward is a drip of dopamine labeled “engagement.” We learn to perform the versions of ourselves that the hall best amplifies—the outraged citizen, the discerning aesthete, the humble-bragging professional—until the performance becomes identity, and the Like feels like a blessing.
They’re systems with rules about belonging. About speech. About loyalty. About who gets protected and who gets corrected. The difference between a cult and a culture is often just how socially acceptable the rules are—and how uncomfortable it is to name them.
The Cult of Personality
At the center of every hall is not an idea, but a person—or more precisely, the idea of a person. We don’t follow doctrines. Doctrines are abstract. We follow people who project certainty. The leader. The guru. The visionary founder. The intellectual father. The influencer. The idealized parent. Different kayfabe, same function.
Their approval feels like warmth. Their disapproval chills you to the core. They become symbolic caregivers.
Every rule you’ve already seen—the quarterly report, the wellness protocol, the algorithmic reward—only holds because it routes back to a human figure who embodies “the right way.” An authority you don’t just obey, but attach to. Belief becomes relational. Compliance becomes emotional.
This is the core mechanism: the translation of dissent into betrayal, and disagreement into disloyalty. Questioning a policy isn’t critique; it’s a personal affront. Leaving a group isn’t a choice; it’s an abandonment. The punishment comes before the rulebook ever opens.
The most effective control doesn’t threaten exile—it threatens loneliness. It whispers that outside the hall, there is no love, no truth, no belonging. The punishment is emotional long before it becomes structural. The fear is not of a gun, but of the void.
The Outsider Problem
This is where the system’s true fragility is exposed.
When a true outsider appears—someone who never learned the rules, who doesn’t speak the language, who is immune by virtue of not caring—the system hesitates. It has no grip. It cannot punish someone who doesn’t fear its hells.
So the system turns inward. It tightens its grip on those still inside. Discipline intensifies. Purity tests multiply. The believer is scrutinized, not the stranger. Why did you let that person in? Why didn’t you defend us? The outsider isn’t the problem. The insider’s glance toward the door is.
An outsider can be dismissed. But an insider who sees an outside introduces possibility. Comparison. Contagion. The system’s fury is always directed at its own—not for disobedience, but for awareness. For the crime of realizing that the hall has walls. And that beyond them, something else exists at all.
Why People Stay
People stay because leaving is a kind of death.
They stay from fear of isolation—the terrifying quiet after the constant chant. They stay because of sunk cost: the years given, the self already spent. They stay because belief has fused with identity, and pulling the thread feels like unraveling the body itself.
They stay because the system is clever—it speaks in the moral language of sacrifice, duty, and love, masking control as care. Doubt is framed as a personal flaw. Pain becomes proof of righteousness. Endurance is mistaken for truth. By the time someone considers leaving, the trap is already complete.
Leaving isn’t a simple rejection of belief. It’s a far more dangerous act: a rejection of who gets to define reality. It is choosing uncertainty over permission. It is stepping away from the single sanctioned light in the hall and saying, I will risk the dark to see if there are other stars.
What Does Freedom Look Like?
Freedom isn’t victory. There is no burning of the hall. No cheering crowd. No certificate of liberation.
Freedom is a somber, personal decision to stop performing. It is uncertainty. It is having no script, no referee, no promised applause. It is the quiet, relentless responsibility of building your own meaning, stitch by stitch, in a silence that can feel like emptiness. It is realizing that the permission you were waiting for will never come from outside—because the very act of waiting is the cage.
Freedom doesn’t feel like winning. It feels like standing alone, without permission. And then, slowly, learning how to bear the weight of your own horizon.