I can relate, I fail them all the time. But that’s not this post.
Here we have two excellent essays that make me think, if this is the new level of social programming, I finally might abide!
Can they teach this in the schools? I might even go back to teaching! (Ok, let’s not exaggerate. We prefer our wee homestead life, even through the weather disasters, great many failures and physical pain.)
I’ve selected my favorite bits, there’s much more to appreciate on each of these Substacks, just follow the links.
The Coward’s Bargain: How We Taught a Generation To Live In Fear by Josh Stylman
“This wasn’t an accident or an overreaction. This was a stress test of how quickly a free society could be transformed into something unrecognizable, and we failed spectacularly. Anyone who actually followed the science understood the only pandemic was one of cowardice. Worse, most people didn’t even notice we were being tested. They thought they were just “following the science”—never mind that the data kept changing to match the politics, or that questioning anything had somehow become heretical.
The beautiful thing about this system is that it’s self-sustaining. Once you’ve participated in the mob mentality, once you’ve policed your neighbors and canceled your friends and stayed silent when you should have spoken up, you become invested in maintaining the fiction that you were right all along. Admitting you were wrong isn’t just embarrassing—it’s an admission that you participated in something monstrous. So instead, you double down. You disappear when confronted with inconvenient facts.
Raising Prisoners
And this brings us back to the children. They’re watching all of this. But more than that—they’re growing up inside this surveillance infrastructure from birth. The Stasi’s victims at least had some years of normal psychological development before the surveillance state kicked in. These kids never get that. They’re born into a world where every thought might be public, every mistake permanent, every unpopular opinion potentially life-destroying.
The psychological impact is devastating. Research shows that children who grow up under constant surveillance—even well-meaning parental surveillance—show higher rates of anxiety, depression, and what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” They never develop internal locus of control because they never get to make real choices with real consequences. But this goes far deeper than helicopter parenting.
The ability to hold unpopular opinions, to think through problems independently, to risk being wrong—these aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re core to psychological maturity. When you eliminate those possibilities, you don’t just get more compliant people; you get people who literally can’t think for themselves anymore. They outsource their judgment to the crowd because they never developed their own.”
The COVID Conformity Test
This is how totalitarian thinking takes root—not through jackbooted thugs, but through a million small acts of self-censorship. When a venture capitalist whispers his concerns about immigration policy like he’s confessing to a thought crime. When successful professionals agree with dissenting views privately but would never defend them publicly. When speaking obvious truths becomes an act of courage rather than basic citizenship.
Orwell understood this perfectly. In 1984, the Party’s greatest achievement wasn’t forcing people to say things they didn’t believe—it was making them afraid to believe things they weren’t supposed to say. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” O’Brien explains to Winston. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.” But the real genius was making citizens complicit in their own oppression, turning everyone into both prisoner and guard.”
Neutralization: How Bureaucracies Silence Dissent Through Legal Fuses and Narrative Control by Luc Lelievre
Institutional power rarely reveals its full mechanics in one stroke. Instead, it unfolds in sequences—calculated, procedural, and often cloaked in the language of neutrality. Neutralization, the fourth installment in Luc Lelièvre’s Unbekoming series, dissects this final movement in the choreography of bureaucratic suppression. Building on prior analyses—Heresy, which outlined how dissent is ideologically framed as deviant; Suppression, which explored institutional mechanisms of exclusion; and Omission, which detailed the structural design behind silencing—this essay turns its attention to the silent sophistication of neutralization: the use of legal fuses, narrative gatekeepers, and administrative dead-ends to reroute dissent and erase its public trace.
7. Administrative Gaslighting and the “Fuse Effect”: When Bureaucracy Becomes Theatre
Modern bureaucracies rarely operate through overt acts of repression. Instead, their preferred mode of silencing is procedural — a form of administrative gaslighting that cloaks itself in language of due process while subtly eroding the dissident’s credibility. This technique is not accidental; it is designed.
One illustrative method is what could be termed the “fuse effect”: low-visibility actors within the institutional machinery are positioned to execute decisions that carry legal or symbolic consequences, thus absorbing the potential fallout. These operatives — often legal clerks, junior lawyers, or regional representatives — function as buffers. When the dissident challenges a structural injustice, it is these intermediaries who respond, allowing higher-level decision-makers to remain untouched by controversy. The system insulates itself from reputational risk while continuing its work of marginalization.
But when these “fuses” begin to fail — either through overreach or exposure — institutions escalate. They deploy higher-profile agents, such as communications directors or legal executives, who are tasked with closing the file definitively. In my own case, the surprising intervention of a top-level official from a legal commission — someone with no adjudicative mandate — reveals just how far the institution was willing to go to protect the official narrative. Rather than engage the constitutional merits of my claim, it chose to obscure them through authority signaling and symbolic closure.
This bureaucratic theatre plays out under the guise of objectivity. But for those of us who have documented each step, the pattern is unmistakable: delegitimize the voice, dilute the argument, displace responsibility. These are not failures of oversight; they are evidence of design.
The question, then, is no longer whether the dissident is “right” or “wrong” by institutional standards. It is whether he can endure — and expose — the machinery that seeks to erase him. In that sense, the public record becomes not only a site of resistance, but a form of protection.
8. Conclusion: Toward a Reckoning
