3 Societal Scripts That Devour Your Personal Sovereignty

How to become the person you were born to be

It’s no secret that the dominant systems within Western culture breed emotional dependence. Whether it’s education, medicine, or technology, these cultural machines sell people quick fixes and one-size-fits-all solutions. They parasitically feed on fear, insecurity, and the average person’s longing for approval and connection.

Because these systems breed dependence in individuals from an early age, it’s common to adopt the habit of renouncing your power without realizing what you’re doing. Sometimes you may even believe you’re “being proactive” while in truth you’re sabotaging yourself, limiting your resilience and making your life harder in the long term.

This self-sabotage usually results from following fear-based scripts that serve the interests of the educational, medical, and technological systems. These institutions encourage the average person to trade self-reliance for a thin promise of security. Most of these promises only enrich the people in power and keep the individual out of touch with their most valuable resource — self-trust.

The problem is that these societal scripts are subtle and alluring. They’re often created with help from behavioral psychologists with 20+ successful propaganda campaigns under their belt. Walking away from these scripts can feel like a decision to inconvenience or even endanger yourself.

But when you see what’s on the other side of inconvenience and fear— healing, aliveness, and peace — you’ll wonder why you spent so long in survival mode.

Why and How Western Culture Breeds Dependence

As described in Kelly Brogan’s Own Yourself, Westerners lack significant initiation rituals that mark the passage out of childhood and into sovereign, empowered consciousness. In some cultures, young people celebrate their passage into maturity with crocodile-like scales carved into their backs and chests. Others get graduations or 18th birthday parties. Celebrations can be lovely, yet they feel unceremonious when compared to practices that give people the lived experience of growing beyond their perceived limits.

Rituals that initiate people out of fear and into resilience serve as invitations. They invite people to carry their newfound self-trust into everything else they do. When Westerners celebrate the passage of time through sensory pleasures and other trivial forms of stimulation, they miss this important perspective shift.

The absence of initiation rituals speaks to a larger pattern within Western culture. Generally, Westerners lack respect for the learning brought about by pain, struggle, and confusion. Instead, most of the population prioritizes convenience, safety, and instant gratification.

As a result, most people stay in a state of arrested development indefinitely. Not only does this process go unacknowledged, but it’s seen as normal. Some people view self-deprecation as a marker of basic politeness, and a weak stomach for discomfort as a cornerstone of being a person.

This isn’t shocking. The Powers That Think They Be conditioned people to look for chances to believe they’re oppressed. Triggered. Doomed by their genes for life-long illness and the like.

The most prominent institutions within culture — education, medicine, and technology — benefit when the population remains child-like. It’s good for the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex if we believe that pain is nothing but an annoyance to numb, manage, or kill. Big Tech wins when the masses assume exploring the physical environment without a GPS is an invitation to getting lost, stranded, or killed. The education system thrives when 18 year olds believe that college acts as an insurance policy against a precarious life.

These institutions use fear tactics to initiate people into the belief that being their own source of authority is risky. The truth is that crossing the “dangerous” waters of personal sovereignty create the kinds of beings who don’t need these one-size-fits-all systems.

The Most Insidious Vectors of Dependence

Below are societal scripts that keep the population dependent on outside resources and remote from self-trust.

Education’s “You Need This” Script:

Throughout school, there’s a silent yet powerful message that individuals need to be taught or “educated” out of a basic inadequacy. Ideally, school would give children an opportunity to learn valuable, creativity-enhancing skills. Yet its core function is to transform them into employees. In The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto argues that the public school system encourages dependence on approval from authorities, stifles the pursuit of personal passion, and cripples the individual’s ability to think critically and independently.

It’s not difficult to see this in action: in my experience, educators labored over geometry and U.S. history but left out things like compound interest, metabolic flexibility, the pleasure-pain principle, and other topics that determine the difference between success, ease, life-long misery, and early death.

The logistics of school also speak to the lack of respect for the individual’s well-being. Sitting behind a desk for six+ hours a day is toxic. Similarly, indoor air pollution tends to be much worse than outdoor. Staying inside, sitting down, and relegating movement to an isolated window called “physical education,” works against what the human genome evolved to expect. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans spent most of their time outside and in motion.

Yet the school system pathologizes the desire to move around, seek variety, and relate freely with the world around you. So much so that physicians may even place you on legal methamphetamine at age 9 in hopes that you’ll sit tight behind your desk, raise your hand to pee, and imbibe the curriculum prepared for you by a board of distant corporate “experts,” lest you get slammed with a DSM category and grow up against a label like Oppositional Defiant Disorder. According to this paradigm, YOU are the problem. Your ancient body requires taming by an ever-wise institution.

If you’re a really good student, you might even feel “validated” by your label, since, from an early age, you could tell that something just “wasn’t right” about you. Thus Stockholm Syndrome teaches millions of children to merge their self-confidence with their ability to successfully circle multiple choice answers and sit still for 30 hours per week for 13 years.

“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big lies are kept hidden by the incredulity of the public.” Marshall McLuhan

Medicine’s “Your Body is a Machine to be Managed” Script

Conventional medicine thrives at handling emergencies. But most of its solutions are worse than the diseases it claims to “manage.” For instance, many people, out of fear, hold jobs they only tolerate in order to maintain health insurance. Because stress is a major risk factor for disease, this decision often becomes the very reason they eventually pursue medical help.

Similarly, rather than asking questions about whether their lifestyle meets their needs for companionship, fulfillment, and play, people seek out psychiatric medication. The predicament often takes this form: a doctor prescribes a person an antidepressant. It sort of works at first. But three months later they have insomnia, severe weight gain or loss, irritability, emotional numbness, or worse. They receive another medication to contend with the side effects of the first.

Because they don’t have a degree in biomedical science or psychiatry, they may believe that doing their own research is too difficult, too dangerous, or simply inconvenient. Instead, they put their health into the sanitized hands of doctors more interested in avoiding liability than helping them understand and reverse the root causes of their distress.

Pharma and its advocates see fear as a core marketing strategy. I’ve recently encountered class-based fear tactics encouraging people to believe that only some people are fit to go without birth control. After searching for fertility trackers, it wasn’t long until I encountered articles issuing messages like “The rhythm method is designed for financially stable people in committed relationships. Don’t try it at home.” Or as I saw in the bizarre, Pharma-apologist publication wearing a holistic health costume, Well & Good: “It goes without saying you should talk to your doctor before trying any new wellness routine.”

I agree that talking about lifestyle and health optimizations with doctors can be useful and important in some cases. But the language above disturbs me. It makes personal health a professional problem, instilling a lack of confidence in the individual’s ability to calibrate their diet and lifestyle based on feedback from their own body.

It’s like saying: Better stick with your morning pills, hormonal patches, the injections you know nothing about. After all, your body is unruly and needs taming by gloved hands.

According to The Science, you aren’t Educated enough to listen to your own body, reader. As stated in The Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, education and seduction are bedfellows. If the Powers That Think They Be tell the masses they need a degree to hold an opinion or detect a pattern, then people become more interested in getting in line for new tests and treatments than in listening to and learning about their bodies. It’s straightforward. Fearful masses = $$$.

“You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” Terence McKenna

Technology’s “You Need to be Informed and Connected” Script:

Technology may be our biggest trickster. The taste for instant gratification most powerfully motivates the drive to renounce one’s personal power. Social and news media mobilize the power of the intermittent reward schedule. When you check your news feed, you’re occasionally gratified. Other times, your findings bore or frustrate you. The uncertainty creates an alluring trap. Within this uncertainty, the urge to be informed and connected becomes a rationalization for compulsive checking.

Not only does this dynamic interfere with your capacity for deep work, but it makes you easier to control. Most mass-produced media constantly uses classic propaganda tactics, hypnotic language, and other subliminal ploys. As a result, it’s easy to mistake being in a state of hypnosis for arriving at your own opinions.

Over time, you lose sight of what’s original to you. The line between your opinion and what has been fed to you becomes increasingly blurry. Then you become the puppet of an ideology, and you don’t even know it. You’re no longer an individual with considered opinions formed after a detailed investigation. You’re an avatar for a corporate agenda.

Over-reliance on technology also encourages people to prioritize the digital over their lived reality. From using a calculator for small operations to refusing to explore your neighborhood without technological help, co-dependence on technology gradually eats away at your competence as well as your orientation in physical reality. For example, some people consider it unsafe to leave their house without their phone, relying on a GPS to get everywhere.

It’s wonderful to be able to comfortably navigate new places with the help of a GPS. Yes. But there’s inherent value in being able to internalize the logic of your surroundings and to get around without outside help.

This may sound extreme, but I can’t help but feel that the idea of *needing* a phone to leave the house is a form of trauma-based mind control. If the masses are afraid to be without their phones, they spend more time on various apps, offering more data to be sold to third parties. Also, when artificial intelligence sits in your lap 24/7, your attention becomes fickle and thin.

Again, great for those in power. Distracted people struggle with flow-based work, a skill that can make you more intellectually and financially empowered. In this way, those in power benefit from the idea that being without a phone is more than inconvenient: it’s dangerous.

This mindset feels like a natural consequence of “helicopter parenting,” which took hold in the early 2000's. As the Internet helped expose people to a wider array of information, the population’s fears became less rooted in experience and more related to all that could possibly go wrong, which became easier to perceive as the globe became more connected. While in the past. most children roamed the streets on their own terms, parents began to see “outside” as the landing ground for predators of various kinds. Staying inside behind a screen became the safer alternative.

Most people have become so afraid of sensationalized “What Ifs” that physical reality (being “outside”) becomes downright frightening. Because contending with the physical often builds a level of resilience only gained from experience, this messaging is a set up for fragility and learned helplessness.

How to Reclaim Your Sovereignty

Medicine, technology, and education share a common tactic: they use fear programs to suck power out of the masses. By trading your independence for security, you lose touch with the deepest sense of security you can have: your sovereignty.

Most people stay caught in these programs out of scarcity. They think there’s no other way. Without conventional medicine, they’re destined for an early death. Without their phones, they’re wasting time and being unproductive. On the contrary, there’s a lot to be gained on the other side of these limiting systems.

Hack Your Own Incentive Structures

“I never let school get in the way of my education.” Mark Twain

Compulsory school emphasizes a curriculum over personal curiosity. There’s this low-hanging message that curiosity is only praiseworthy if it aligns with its program, i.e. making money or building status. Of course, many people run with their own interests and aren’t stifled by these injunctions.

But the messaging runs deep. Because of these suggestions, lots of people lose the motivation to invest deeply into what intrigues them. Over time, they lose touch with their natural creativity. They become more interested in being entertained, watching Netflix, or shopping. Their understanding of who they are and what they like gets channeled into passive, consumptive activities.

This is part of school’s overarching advisory against self-trust. From an early age, people enter a receptive state. They’re encouraged, even coerced, to do so. The teachers and curriculum claim to know what they don’t. This blossoms into a doubt around the validity of subjective tastes and intuitions.

For example, have you ever set out to read a specific book, but found it difficult to follow and boring to read? In some moments, you might have assumed that your attention span was the problem. The tendency to blame oneself is rooted in the programming many of us received during our years of compulsory schooling.

In my experience, curiosity drives the most potent forms of growth. Books so engrossing that they demand reading in one sitting usually remain with me for the longest.

Something that got lost in compulsory schooling was the power of intrinsic motivation. When something really feeds your spirit, success comes easy. The meme, “If you work hard, you can have whatever you want” is wrong. What school didn’t convey was that it’s less about overcoming “hard” work and more about gaining an appetite for tedious work. Why? Because if something is truly hard, it might not be the best route to your personal satisfaction. The feeling that your work is hard may be code for “it’s not for you.”

It’s true that meaningful pursuits involve challenges. But when something really clicks, it usually doesn’t require forcing, straining, and suffering. The challenge instead lies in consistency, the ability to keep returning to something over time despite fluctuations in mood and incentives. Meaningful pursuits also demand acceptance of the occasional tugs of boredom that come with even the most gratifying activities.

In spite of certain inevitable stumbling blocks, truly aligned work is never hard. It just demands a willingness to overcome resistance. Since most people don’t think about the subtle difference, they end up pursuing life paths based on Should statements. Although these pursuits can lead to short-term gains, like money or approval, they usually require self-denial that transforms into daily numbness and frustration.

Unhooking from public education programs comes down to seeing your emotions as compasses. If a book bores you, close it and find another one. If your business idea turns out to be an exercise in stress, hair pulling, and self-hatred, trust that there’s a useful message within those feelings.

I’m not saying that aversion to something is always a sign you should drop everything and quit. But the message most people got during their years of compulsory schooling was that their feelings and impulses were obstacles to growth, not compasses.

Instead, I’m advocating for seeing your intuitions, impulses, and tastes as guideposts. They’re maps adding direction and finesse to the projects in which you choose to invest your time and presence.

Health Can’t Be Patented

“Distress is a gateway to change, an invitation to look at and fix what might be misaligned or out of balance.” Kelly Brogan

In the past, if I had a headache, sore throat, or another form of pain, I used to believe that anti-inflammatory medication was a way of proactively addressing it.

The cost of medicating pain can be imperceptible yet lead to short- and long-term consequences. As noted in The Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, pain is adaptive. It’s a signal meant to optimize behavior. When you suppress pain, you may interfere with feedback loops designed to guide you to choices that can solve the problem. For example, a headache could the product of a mineral deficiency. Theoretically, it’s possible that medication could interfere with your cravings for mineral-rich foods or with other systematic processes. Though your headache seems to go away, you risk creating downstream consequences that affect you for weeks to come.

From a psychological standpoint, most medications provide comfort in vain. They give the appearance of solving the problem, but they really just numb the evidence of the problem. Pain is first and foremost a signal meant to help you. Some forms of pain are ruthless and punishing, but nevertheless, there is a message within them.

It can feel grueling to think about growing from pain when you’re in the depths of it. Yet a lot of people assume that pharmaceutical medicine and the Kill, Numb, or Suppress mindset that goes along with it is their best option.

In my experience, it isn’t. When you medicate at the first sign of pain, you’re sending yourself the message that your tolerance for adversity is low. You’re missing an opportunity to expand your comfort zone and your trust in your body. In addition to disrupting the healing mechanisms already underway by the time you sense pain, you’re diminishing your belief in the body’s inherent pull toward balance. These effects may seem subtle.

But when you don’t give yourself a chance to witness pain’s natural arc, you never grow psychologically from your suffering. Such growth has benefits that extends well beyond physical pain. It makes pain of every kind an opportunity for expansion. And in addition to whatever you’re physiologically interrupting by taking the medication, you’re also sending the unconscious message that you can’t handle your experience without professional intervention. Rather than simply evaporate, this injunction bleeds into other areas and becomes a low-grade whir of inner distrust and conflict.

When you fight pain, you’re fighting yourself. You’re waging an inner war. Instead, when you see pain as a guiding force, you operate from the perspective of equanimity, rather than the drive to numb or destroy an enemy.

Restoring Trust in the Inner Space

“But ordinarily we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we don’t let them complete their work: we try to suppress them or discharge them with premature action, not realizing they are like a process of creation, which, like birth, begins with pain and turns into a child.” Alan Watts

Most people hate being distracted. Even though its pull is strong, deeper down, they want to create systems that take the friction out of meaningful, though challenging, pursuits. They don’t want to live on the leash of the dopaminergic, immediate gratification style of life that breeds listlessness and boredom. The problem is that so many needs get channeled into our phones, laptops, and email inboxes: staying connected, keeping tabs on the results of work, etc.

If you aren’t careful, it’s easy for a phone to take ownership over your experience. You can find yourself checking it before you even consciously realize what you’re doing. It can become the first object you grab every time you feel uncomfortable.

I’ve personally found it useful to make airplane mode my phone’s default state. That may sound extreme, but this is how you ensure your phone remains the useful tool it was intended to be. When you can receive a notification at any moment, your attention becomes someone else’s. You are at the whim of your phone. Conversely, when it mostly remains on airplane mode outside of specific windows, you put the power back into your own hands. You check the phone when you want to, rather than being led by notifications, all day, every day.

As Deep Work author Cal Newport explains in this interview, most people don’t realize that the consolidation of new ideas and insights only happens in states of receptivity.

If you listen to music and audio every free moment, you’re not giving yourself the opportunity to process what you’ve learned or experienced. Instead, you’re getting endlessly programmed by someone else’s agenda. Even if you’re listening to powerful, uplifting material, something gets lost when you’re never alone with your own thoughts. No matter what type of information you’re consuming, without the opportunity to process it, you might as well be watching TV or peeling paint off your window sills.

Humans spent thousands of years riding the ebb and flow of input, output, and silence. Compare that to around 10 years of smartphone use.

In other words, taking a walk with nothing but your thoughts might be one small yet powerful defense against technology’s assault on your inner freedom. Being apart from your productivity machine may be the very thing that allows you to evolve along with what you learn. It may even make you more comfortable with solitude, which is the very state the Powers That Think They Be want the masses to occupy the least.

A strange and disturbing dynamic feedback loop sits at the heart of the problem. The educational, medical, technological, and other cultural machines rely on dependence from the masses to thrive. Disturbingly, they mobilize paternalistic, fear-based strategies to rob people of the very experiences that would otherwise be occasions for their initiation and thus their access point for sovereignty.

Here’s what I mean. People would be less fearful if they sat with their pain and learned from it, trusting that it carried a useful message meant to guide future behavior. They’d feel safer in the world if they engaged with it directly, rather than through maps or messaging platforms. And by trusting their own impulses, most people would find inherently motivating projects to build their lives around. They wouldn’t need to rely on degree programs and state-led curriculum to guide their futures.

Yet most people don’t feel a sense of grounding within these possibilities. It’s no wonder: from an early age, people are programmed to believe they’re peripheral. They need authority to show them the way.

Fortunately, people are waking up. As more and more people realize they don’t need these paternalistic, red-tape-laden systems, their dissolution becomes more likely. As Buckminster Fuller wrote:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

We can build this new model with simple, daily realizations. You were born to trust your body. You were born to internalize the logic of your surroundings and freely embrace new ways of thinking and acting based on your intuitions and instincts.

Every time you trust yourself, you increase the probability that you’ll do so in the future. Imagine where you’ll be in five, ten, fifteen years if your life were built on self-guidance, rather than fear and docility?

Exactly.

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