The Cost of Becoming Ungovernable

On the hypocrisy of performing resistance while living entirely inside the system you claim to reject.

This morning I woke up and was scrolling Facebook, whilst drinking my morning tea brew, and came across a post by a woman who was asking their audience how they were preparing for the possible upcoming chain of events, if we were to lose oil supplies and spiral into an economic crash and recession. Someone responded with “would not be participating in the government’s agenda”.

I had a little giggle to myself, imagining this person living inside of the comforts of their own home, feeding themselves from the groceries they bought from the supermarket and annoucing to the world that they were not going to take part in the “agenda”.

It is so interesting to me, when people say with great conviction, that they're not participating in the “government's agenda” — usually right before driving home on a publicly maintained highway, paying for their groceries with federally insured currency, and posting that declaration to a platform built on infrastructure funded, in part, by DARPA research from the 1960s.

I am not writing this to attack people who think this way, but to ask for a little more honesty and deeper self reflection. Because the gap between what people perform and what they actually live has become one of the stranger features of modern life.

The System You’re Standing In

Let’s be precise about what “the system” actually provides (ps. I am not cheerleading the system — and am fundamentally against a lot of it’s infrastructure, but it IS important to discuss in relation to what I am sharing, here).

The water comes out of the tap because of municipal engineering. The food at the grocery store arrived on roads that didn’t build themselves, inspected by agencies you didn’t fund privately. The hospital you’d go to in an emergency is licensed and regulated. The money in your account has value because a government says it does and backs that claim with force.

You may disagree with all of this. You may think it should be privatized, abolished, restructured from the ground up. That’s a legitimate philosophical position. But holding that position while using all of it daily and claiming non-participation is simply not coherent.

“Opting out” while remaining enmeshed in the economy, the grid, the currency, the roads, and the legal system is not a political stance. It’s a costume.”

The Seduction of Symbolic Resistance

Symbolic resistance is appealing because it gives you the identity of a dissident without the cost. And there is a real cost to actual dissent — the people who have genuinely stepped outside dominant systems have done so at enormous personal sacrifice. The Amish, certain monastic communities, serious off-grid homesteaders: they’ve chosen a harder, more constrained life to live by their values. That deserves respect, even if you don’t share their worldview.

But the person angrily posting from their iPhone about the evils of corporate tech while refusing to grow their own food, generate their own power, or maintain their own security? They’re not outside anything. They’re a customer of the empire who’s annoyed about the service.

“The empire doesn’t care if you’re angry at it, as long as you keep buying what it sells.”

This is the thing that often goes unsaid: systems are remarkably indifferent to your opinions of them. The grid doesn’t flicker when you declare independence from it. The economy doesn’t hiccup when you say you’ve opted out. You can despise every institution you rely on and still rely on them completely, and they’ll take your money and your compliance either way.

What Enmeshment Actually Looks Like

Enmeshment with the system, does not mean that you are failing morally. We are all, to some degree, enmeshed with the system in some way… I mean, we were born into it.

It’s just the accurate description of a condition. Most of us are deeply enmeshed with systems we didn’t choose, couldn’t easily escape, and have complicated feelings about. And it is okay. That’s just the byproduct of being alive in a modern society.

The problem isn’t the enmeshment. The problem is the denial of it — because denial forecloses the more interesting conversations. If you acknowledge you’re inside the system, you can start asking how you want to be inside it. What you’ll push back on. What you’ll try to change. Where you’ll draw your personal lines. Those are hard, genuinely interesting questions.

“I’m not participating” ends the conversation before it starts. It’s a way of feeling virtuous without doing anything. It’s the political equivalent of saying you don’t watch TV while spending four hours a day on your phone.

Adopting a More Honest Position

The question I want to pose here, is this: “What would it look like to hold political or philosophical dissent with more honesty?”

Something like: “I benefit from this system, I have real problems with parts of it, and I’m trying to figure out where my responsibility lies.”

This is a little more uncomfortable for many and it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker or make you feel like a hero.

But it’s actually true. And truth, even inconvenient truth, is a better foundation for action than performance.

You can pay your taxes and oppose what they fund. You can use the roads and advocate for different infrastructure. You can participate in the economy and try to reshape it. These aren’t contradictions — they’re just the real texture of living inside a complex society while caring about what it does.

The people who have genuinely changed systems from within understood this. They didn’t pretend they were outside. They knew exactly where they stood — and they pushed from that place, with clear eyes, not with the comfortable illusion of clean hands.

The empire doesn’t need your approval. But it doesn’t need your pretend-rejection either. What it might actually fear — if such things can fear — is the person who looks at it clearly, admits their place in it, and decides to act anyway.

That’s a different kind of power. Less photogenic, maybe. But real.