The System Works Best When You Think Its Rules Are Yours
How socialization turns ideology into common sense and why liberation & sovereignty require questioning what we know.
September 21, 2026
There are things you “know.”
You know you should be productive. You know working hard is what responsible adults do. You know being “good” (🤮) means being agreeable, generous, helpful, respectable. You know success looks a certain way. You know smart people have the answers. You know professionalism has a dress code, a vocabulary, a posture. You know conflict means something has gone wrong. You know authority probably knows better than you. You know a good insert social identity here behaves a certain way. You know when you’re asking for too much, being difficult, or should simply be grateful.
You know.
Except some (a lot? most?) of the things you know aren’t actually true. Someone taught them to you and someone before them made them up.
One of the most dangerous things about socialization is that eventually the rules stop sounding like rules and start sounding like your own voice.
We tend to imagine socialization as something happening outside of us: parents teaching children how to behave, schools defining intelligence, workplaces defining professionalism, media telling us what beauty, success, family, gender, adulthood and happiness are supposed to look like.
But socialization is most effective when nobody has to tell you anymore.
You tell yourself.
Nobody has to say, Don’t say that. They’ll think you’re difficult. You simply don’t say it. Nobody has to tell you rest is irresponsible; you feel guilty sitting down. Nobody has to tell you asking directly for what you need makes you demanding; you edit the request before it leaves your mouth.
Blink twice, babes, the rules are inside the house…and once they have moved in, we stop calling it a social rule or norm. Instead we call it intuition. Responsibility. Professionalism. Maturity. Just the way things are.
That matters for reasons much bigger than whether you personally feel free, because systems do not survive through laws and institutions alone.
They survive because people learn how to reproduce them.
The system works best when we don’t realize we’re participating in it
One of the sociological frameworks I teach is the Four I’s of Oppression: ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized.
The ideological level gives us the story: what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, intelligent and unintelligent, respectable and improper, normal and deviant.
Those ideas become institutional. They show up in schools, workplaces, laws, policies, media, religion, medicine and government.
Then we act them out interpersonally. We decide who is attractive, credible, employable, threatening, intelligent or respectable.
And eventually, we internalize them.
We don’t simply believe these things about other people. We understand ourselves through them. That’s the real slick trick honestly.
An existing system does not need to constantly demand obedience if it can socialize us into believing its rules are simply normal. If I believe professionalism inherently looks and sounds a particular way, you don’t have to force me to conform. I’ll police myself.
And, if I have not done my liberatory work, I’ll police you too.
If I believe degrees determine intelligence, I’ll build hiring practices around that belief. If I believe good women are self-sacrificing, I may exhaust myself performing goodness while judging women who refuse to do the same. If I believe authority is inherently more knowledgeable, I may defer even when the person with the title is wrong.
The system has outsourced its labor to me. I reproduce it for free.
This is why “common sense” and social norms deserve suspicion.
There is a difference between education and conditioning. Education gives us more ways to think. Conditioning gives us fewer things we’re allowed to question.
I’m not interested in replacing one rigid set of beliefs with another. Liberation isn’t me handing you the Correct Liberated Opinions and Way of Being Handbook™ and telling you what you’re supposed to believe or how you’re suppose to behave now.
I’m interested in the question underneath the belief:
How did you come to know that?
Who taught you? What happened when you complied? What happened when you didn’t? Who was considered intelligent? Respectable? Believable? Who was allowed authority? Who was expected to accommodate everyone else?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who or what does this belief serve?
Does it serve humanity? Does it move us toward collective liberation?
Or does it make us easier to manage inside the existing status quo?
Beliefs don’t materialize out of thin air. We learn them inside families, cultures, schools, workplaces, relationships, religious communities, political systems, racial hierarchies, gender systems and a thousand overlapping social worlds.
Eventually those lessons become so familiar that they stop feeling ideological.
They become obvious.
Obviously adults should always be productive. Obviously the person with the degree knows more. Obviously parents (specifically mothers) sacrifice. Obviously good partners don’t need to ask. Obviously keeping the peace is mature. Obviously success means climbing.
Buuuuuuut “everybody knows” has upheld an astonishing amount of bullshit throughout human history.
If we never question the norm, we become part of its enforcement
It is easy to locate oppression somewhere outside of ourselves: the discriminatory institution, the prejudiced person, the exploitative work environemnt.
Much harder is asking:
Where does that system live in me?
Where have I absorbed its definitions of intelligence, beauty, success, worth, gender, family, professionalism and desirability?
Whose speech do I associate with intelligence? Whose anger frightens me? Whose confidence impresses me? Whose confidence irritates me?
What do I believe a good parent, employee, child, citizen, neighborhood etc is supposed to do? And what happens inside me when another person refuses?
If I inherit the system’s standard and then use it to judge myself and everybody else, I am not merely living under the system. I am helping reproduce it.
That doesn’t mean every person holds equal responsibility or power. Of course not. Power matters. Institutions matter. Material conditions matter. Identity matters.
Personal liberation without self-interrogation can quickly become:
I want freedom from the rules that hurt me while keeping the rules that benefit me.
That’s not liberation. That’s renegotiating your position inside the hierarchy.
This is why unlearning is an intellectual and applied practice.
We’ve cheapened the word unlearning a little. It sometimes gets flattened into affirmations and “release what no longer serves you,” which is lovely, but I’m talking about something more rigorous.
Real unlearning requires intellectual humility.
You have to become willing to discover that something you’ve believed deeply, perhaps for decades, might be wrong. Or incomplete. Or true only under certain circumstances.
You have to separate:
I believe this.
from
This is objectively true.
Those are not the same sentence.
For most people this can be difficult because WHAT they believe becomes synonymous with who they are, so questioning our beliefs starts to feel like questioning our sense of self.
But in my experience the most solid sense of self is rooted in the ability to question everything and be okay with the idea that “maybe I was wrong about that.”
Maybe exhaustion isn’t evidence of worth. Maybe being needed isn’t the same as being loved. Maybe keeping everyone comfortable isn’t kindness. Maybe conflict isn’t inherently dangerous. Maybe somebody being disappointed in me doesn’t mean I’ve done something wrong. Maybe changing my mind isn’t hypocrisy.
Maybe there are entire versions of my life I haven’t considered because I was taught not to consider them.
That is where liberation becomes possible. Not when we acquire all the right answers. When we become willing to question the ones we inherited.
Liberation requires more than critique
Once you start dismantling inherited beliefs, you eventually confront an unnerving question:
If I’m not following the script anymore, what am I following?
If success isn’t climbing the ladder, what do I actually want? If productivity isn’t a measure of worth, what makes a life valuable? If authority isn’t automatically correct, what do I trust? If I stop organizing my life around who I was taught to be, who the hell am I?
That’s why liberation requires more than critique. You need what I refer to in my work as your north star.
Not a career. Not a personal brand. Not a polished purpose statement.
What orients you? What are your values? What is worth protecting? Who do you want to be when nobody is rewarding you for it? What are you willing to disappoint people for? What serves humanity? What serves liberation?
To be clear, I don’t want you replacing society’s authority with mine either. The point is to build your capacity to interrogate, discern and choose, and choice requires discernment.
There are real consequences to refusing norms: economic consequences, relational consequences, sometimes physical consequences. Our social identities affect how much safety we have in any particular room or situation.
So liberation is not recklessness. It isn’t “F it, I’m just being authentic.”
The questions become:
Is this danger or discomfort? Is this boundary protecting me, or is an old socialization protecting the status quo? What is the cost of speaking? What is the cost of silence? Where do my identities give me safety? Where do they make me vulnerable? And if I have more safety here than somebody else does, what responsibility does that create for me?
The work is not learning to ignore every alarm.
It’s learning that every alarm doesn’t get to become an order.
This is also how systems change
The Four I’s explain how oppression reproduces itself: ideology becomes institutionalized, institutions shape interpersonal behavior, and interpersonal experiences become internalized.
But transformation can move in the other direction too.
We interrogate what we’ve internalized. We behave differently. Different behavior creates different interpersonal possibilities. Those possibilities enter institutions. Institutions begin changing what they normalize, reward and represent.
Eventually, what society imagines to be normal can change too.
This is why your liberation is deeply personal and never only personal.
When you refuse to reproduce the belief that natural hair is unprofessional, something changes. When you stop measuring intelligence through proximity to academic institutions, something changes. When you refuse to teach children that being “good” requires making themselves small, something changes.
When you model a different kind of adulthood, leadership, partnership, personhood, beauty, gender expression, or success, you make another way of being visible.
Visibility creates possibility. You become evidence that the old rule was never inevitable. That’s sovereignty.
It isn’t certainty, fearlessness, or never being influenced by the world.
Sovereignty is developing enough relationship with yourself that inherited rules no longer get to masquerade as unquestionable truth. It’s knowing your north star well enough to distinguish it from the directions you’ve been handed. It’s being willing to examine the places where oppression does not simply happen to you, but has been internalized by you.
It’s having enough humility to be wrong, enough discernment to recognize danger, enough courage to tolerate discomfort, enough self-trust to choose differently, and enough responsibility to ask whether your choices contribute to the world you’re trying to create or simply reproduce the one you say you want to change.
That question sits at the heart of why I created Sovereign (enrolling now).
Because this work is about more than “finding yourself.”
It is about examining who you were socialized to become, unpacking what you’ve inherited, understanding what it has cost you, deciding what remains, and building a life that isn’t simply a highly successful performance of who you were taught to be.
A life you can actually recognize as yours. And, hopefully, a life that makes a different world a little more possible for everyone who comes into contact with it.
So start here.
Pick something you know. Something obvious. Something you’ve never really thought to question.
What makes a good person? What makes someone successful? Intelligent? Respectable? What does professionalism look like? What do you owe your family? What does a responsible adult do? What does a good woman do?
Then ask:
How do I know?
And then go one question further:
Who or what does my believing this serve?
Humanity? Liberation?
Or a system that works much better when I never think to ask the question?
Don’t rush to answer.
Because sometimes there is an entire world hiding between what you know and what you’ve simply been taught, you just have to commit to explore what that world holds.
W/ curiosity & care,
Weeze