Some people are so reliably pleasant that it takes years, sometimes a lifetime, to notice that the pleasantness is not quite the same thing as warmth. They are agreeable, accommodating, easy to be around. They rarely make demands, rarely disagree, rarely let a difficult feeling show. And they may, privately, have very little idea what they actually want, because the machinery that produces the agreeableness has been running for so long that it has largely replaced the person it was built to protect.

This essay is about that machinery, examined through two thinkers who approached it from different directions and arrived at strikingly compatible conclusions: the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, and the American family therapist Richard C. Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems. The question that connects them is worth stating at the outset: What happens when the parts of us that learned to secure acceptance begin speaking louder than the self we are trying to protect?

Before going further, a clarification that the whole essay depends on. None of this is an argument against politeness, adaptation, or compromise, all of which are necessary and healthy features of living among other people.

Social life requires accommodation, and a person incapable of any is not liberated but simply difficult. The concern here is narrower and more serious: what happens when adaptation becomes so dominant that a person no longer knows what they genuinely feel, want, believe, need, or refuse. And underneath that lies a distinction this essay keeps returning to, between kindness and compulsive niceness, which can look identical from the outside and could hardly be more different underneath. Kindness can arise from choice, from values, from real concern for another person.

Compulsive niceness, people-pleasing, chronic self-silencing, may instead be a protective strategy shaped by fear, of rejection, of criticism, of abandonment, of conflict, of losing one’s place. The two are not always distinguishable in a single gesture. Over a life, they diverge completely.

Why does any of this matter enough to warrant an essay? Because the pattern I am describing is not a rare affliction. It may be one of the most common and least examined ways thoughtful, capable people gradually lose contact with themselves. And it is becoming harder to recognize in a culture that rewards the performance of a self more than the difficult work of actually inhabiting one. We live now inside systems, professional, social, digital, that pay us in approval for being agreeable, frictionless, and endlessly adaptable, and that penalize the friction of a real preference or an honest no.

The pressure to become a smooth surface has never been greater, and the tools for measuring how well we are liked have never been more precise. In that environment, the slow substitution of a managed image for a genuine inner life can happen without anyone noticing, least of all the person it is happening to, because from the outside it looks like success and from the inside it feels, at first, merely like getting along.

Which is why the two thinkers this essay turns to are worth the attention. Working decades and disciplines apart, D. W. Winnicott and Richard Schwartz each mapped, in different language, the same subtle migration: the way a person can drift out of contact with their own spontaneous experience in order to stay safe and accepted, and each offered a way to find the path back.

Reading them together does something neither quite does alone. It gives us a vocabulary for a confusion most people feel but cannot name, the sense of being simultaneously functional and absent, and it suggests that the way to sanity in a performative world is not to perform better, but to recover contact with the self doing the performing. That recovery begins with understanding how the performance was built in the first place, and no one described the foundations more precisely than Winnicott.

1. Winnicott and the experience of feeling real.

Winnicott, writing in the mid-twentieth century, gave us one of the most useful distinctions in the history of psychology, though it is often flattened in the retelling. He wrote of a True Self and a False Self, and it is tempting to hear that as a contrast between an authentic hidden personality and a fake outer mask. That is not quite what he meant, and the difference matters. Winnicott was not primarily using the modern vocabulary of authenticity. He was writing about something more experiential: spontaneity, aliveness, creativity, the personal gesture, a continuity of being, and above all the capacity to feel real.

The True Self, in his account, is best understood not as a fixed inner person waiting to be uncovered but as the source of spontaneous, alive, personally meaningful experience, the part of us from which a genuine gesture arises before it has been edited for the room.

The False Self, by contrast, is a protective organization built on compliance with the demands of the environment. And here Winnicott was careful in a way his popularizers often are not. He did not treat every social mask or ordinary politeness as pathological; he recognized that healthy functioning includes a degree of accommodation, a serviceable outer layer that lets us get along.

The serious trouble begins when compliance becomes the dominant structure through which a person relates to the world, when the accommodating layer stops being one mode among several and becomes the whole architecture. Such a person may appear competent, agreeable, successful, caring, admirably functional, while privately feeling empty, unreal, unknown, resentful, or cut off from their own desire, unable to say what they would want if wanting were permitted.

The most humane part of Winnicott’s account is his understanding of where this comes from, because it removes the moralizing. The False Self does not originally arise to deceive other people. It develops to protect something vulnerable that does not feel safe enough to appear.

A child whose spontaneous gestures are consistently met with disapproval, or with a caregiver’s own needs, learns to lead with compliance instead, not out of dishonesty but out of a kind of wisdom, protecting the tender, spontaneous core by keeping it out of sight. The mask, in other words, begins as a guardian. That it may eventually smother the thing it was guarding is the tragedy, not the intention.

2. Schwartz and the multiplicity of mind.

Richard Schwartz arrived at overlapping territory from an entirely different starting point. Working with clients, he kept noticing that people do not experience the mind as a single unified voice, and that ordinary language reflects this without anyone finding it strange. We say, without embarrassment, part of me wants to leave and part of me wants to stay, part of me wants to forgive and part of me is still furious, part of me wants to speak honestly and part of me is afraid of what honesty will cost. Out of this observation Schwartz built Internal Family Systems, whose central premise is that internal multiplicity is not a disorder but a normal feature of psychological life.

It is worth stating clearly, because it is a common misunderstanding, that this is not a claim about dissociative identity disorder or “multiple personalities.” IFS treats the sense of having different parts as an ordinary experience most people recognize, not a clinical pathology. Alongside these parts, Schwartz proposed something he called the Self, associated with a cluster of qualities that in his shorthand tend to begin with the letter C: calm, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, clarity, and connectedness.

The Self, in his framework, is not simply another part competing for control; it is more like the seat of awareness from which the parts can be met and led. And here a note of caution is required, one this essay will return to: Schwartz’s Self should not be automatically equated with Winnicott’s True Self.

They rhyme, but they come from different traditions and describe different things, and collapsing them would be a mistake.

3. Managers, firefighters, and exiles.

IFS sorts protective parts into three commonly discussed categories, and the vocabulary, once learned, is genuinely illuminating. Managers are the parts that try to prevent pain before it happens, that run ahead of rejection or shame or failure and try to arrange life so those things never arrive. Perfectionism is a manager. So are overpreparation, emotional restraint, relentless productivity, control, hyper-independence, conflict avoidance, chronic self-monitoring, and the inner critic that polices behavior in advance.

And crucially for this essay, so is chronic niceness, which often operates as a manager with a clear if unspoken logic: if I stay useful, agreeable, calm, undemanding, and easy to be around, perhaps no one will reject me.

Firefighters are different. They act after painful emotion has already broken through, and their goal is immediate relief rather than prevention. Emotional outbursts, compulsive distraction, doomscrolling, impulsive spending, overeating, substance use, numbing, these are the kinds of behaviors that can serve a firefighter function, rushing in to put out a fire the managers failed to prevent.

It is important not to over-read this: not every instance of these behaviors is caused by trauma or best explained through IFS, and treating every ordinary indulgence as a firefighter would drain the idea of meaning. The framework is a lens, not a diagnosis.

Beneath both sits the third category, the exiles, understood in IFS as the parts carrying the painful emotional burdens the whole system is organized around, the shame, fear, grief, loneliness, rejection, and sense of inadequacy or worthlessness that feel too much to hold. Managers work to keep this pain out of awareness; firefighters react when it escapes. Consider how this might form.

A child is repeatedly approved of for being quiet, useful, high-achieving, emotionally undemanding, accommodating, and gradually learns that belonging depends on suppressing anger, disagreement, grief, and need. A manager adopts the rule: do not upset anyone, do not need too much, do not make mistakes, remain acceptable.

In adulthood this can present as kindness, maturity, discipline, even emotional strength. But beneath the admirable surface may sit fear, resentment, exhaustion, and a genuine uncertainty about who the person is outside the role they have learned to perform.

4. Where the two theories meet.

Set Winnicott and Schwartz side by side and the overlap is hard to miss, even though they never shared a vocabulary. Both are centrally concerned with protection and vulnerability, with adaptation and internal conflict, with emotional survival, with disconnection from spontaneous experience, and with the gap between how a person appears and what their inner life actually contains. Winnicott’s False Self can be understood as a broad organization of compliance protecting vulnerable spontaneous experience. IFS might describe similar phenomena as a coalition of protective parts that have taken on extreme roles. The conceptual bridges almost build themselves.

A people-pleasing manager could be seen as helping to maintain a False Self presentation. An inner critic could be understood as policing behavior to forestall rejection. A perfectionistic manager could be keeping shame or inadequacy, an exile, out of awareness. And a firefighter might erupt precisely when the compliant identity becomes impossible to sustain any longer, when the False Self cracks under a strain it can no longer carry.

These parallels are real and worth drawing. But they are a conceptual comparison, not a proof that the two theories describe exactly the same underlying mechanism, and it would be intellectually careless to pretend otherwise. The theories come from different worlds.

Winnicott was a psychoanalyst working within object-relations theory, and his attention was fixed on early development, on dependence, caregiving, and the environment’s responsiveness to the emerging self. Schwartz built IFS later, as a therapeutic model shaped by systems thinking and by clinical work with families and individuals. Winnicott’s False Self is not simply one manager part; it is a broader structural concept.

Schwartz’s Self is not automatically Winnicott’s True Self. And the language of parts, however useful, can be held metaphorically, experientially, or as a clinical framework without any claim that parts exist as discrete neurological entities. The resonance between the two is genuine, and it is a resonance, not an identity.

5. Kindness, boundaries, and the difference that matters.

All of this sharpens the distinction the essay began with, between kindness and compulsive niceness, and gives it real content. Kindness, in the fuller sense, includes choice, empathy, and flexibility, but it also includes honesty, boundaries, the capacity to tolerate another person’s disappointment, and a respect that extends to oneself as well as the other.

Compulsive niceness looks similar on the surface but is made of different material: fear-based agreement, self-silencing, an inability to say no, resentment hidden beneath cooperation, dependence on approval, avoidance of conflict at any cost, the suppression of one’s own needs to preserve belonging, and the maintenance of external peace while a private war goes on inside. The cleanest way to feel the difference is this: kindness remains a choice, while compulsive niceness feels like a requirement. One is something you give; the other is something you cannot stop giving, even when it is costing you everything.

The liberating recognition, and it is genuinely liberating, is that these are separable. You can be respectful without becoming compliant, compassionate without becoming invisible, and peaceful without abandoning your own reality.

Boundaries, properly understood, are not punishments inflicted on other people; they are the terms on which a real relationship between two actual selves becomes possible. A person who has only ever led with the False Self, or only ever from their protective managers, often experiences the first honest no as an act of aggression, because to them any assertion of a self feels dangerous. It is not aggression. It is the beginning of being someone with whom another person can genuinely be in contact.

6. Peace as an inner practice, not a performance.

This reframes what peace actually is. We tend to imagine peace as the absence of external conflict, but a person can be entirely peaceful on the surface while being governed underneath by fear, self-criticism, suppressed anger, and competing protective strategies at war with one another. That is not peace; it is a well-managed occupation.

Genuine peace is closer to an internal capacity: to notice internal conflict rather than paper over it, to tolerate uncomfortable emotion without immediately discharging it, to distinguish present danger from remembered danger, to recognize a protective reaction as it fires, to stay curious rather than instantly defensive, to take responsibility without collapsing into shame, to communicate a boundary without needless aggression, and to act from values rather than from the fear of disapproval.

One pattern is worth naming here, because it offers such reliable temporary relief that it is easy to mistake for resolution: the move to push discomfort outside the self, through blame, projection, defensiveness, or finger-pointing. When something painful arises internally, locating its cause entirely in another person can produce genuine, immediate relief, because the discomfort has been relocated. This does not mean all blame is unconscious or that external criticism is always invalid; people are genuinely mistreated, and accountability often correctly belongs to another person or an institution, and pretending otherwise would be its own distortion.

The more precise point is that defensive externalization can reduce internal discomfort without producing any actual safety, insight, accountability, or resolution. It moves the pain rather than metabolizing it. Temporary relief is not the same as psychological safety, and a life organized around the former never quite arrives at the latter.

7. Understanding without excusing.

Schwartz offers a principle that is easy to misuse, and it needs stating with its guardrail attached. His view is that protective parts should be approached with curiosity rather than hatred, on the understanding that even a controlling, critical, pleasing, avoidant, or angry part usually believes it is preventing something worse, humiliation, abandonment, powerlessness, pain. That compassion is valuable and often therapeutic. But understanding is not justification, and the two must not be confused. A protective intention does not make every protective behavior harmless. A person can understand exactly why a pattern developed, can trace it with real compassion to the conditions that produced it, and still be fully responsible for its consequences in the present. And nothing in this framework implies that anyone should tolerate abuse, manipulation, coercion, or repeated boundary violations because the other person’s behavior comes from a wounded part.

The wounded origin of a harmful behavior explains it; it does not license it, and a therapeutic compassion that forgets this has curdled into something that harms the person it claims to help.

8. What the evidence does and does not support.

Intellectual honesty requires a clear word about the status of these ideas, because they are frequently presented with more certainty than they have earned. Winnicott’s work is theoretically rich and clinically influential, but it was developed through psychoanalytic observation and reflection rather than modern experimental research, and it should be understood as a powerful interpretive framework rather than a set of tested empirical findings.

IFS has grown enormously in popularity and has an emerging evidence base, but its scientific support remains less extensive than that of longer-established approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, and it would be misleading to present it as equally validated.

It helps to separate three distinct claims that are often bundled together. First, that people experience internal conflict and shifting self-states, which is well supported and matches near-universal experience. Second, that compassion, emotional awareness, and reduced self-criticism can be therapeutically useful, which also has meaningful support. And third, the stronger theoretical claim that the mind is literally organized into distinct parts in exactly the way IFS describes, which is a model and a metaphor of considerable clinical usefulness rather than an established fact of neuroscience.

Holding those three apart keeps us honest. And where related bodily theories are invoked to lend biological weight, they should be treated with the same care; some of the broader clinical claims made in their name remain debated, and a contested theory should not be wheeled in as settled proof.

9. Respect without self-abandonment.

What all of this finally points toward is a particular idea of healing, and it is gentler and more realistic than the popular alternatives. Healing does not require destroying the personality that helped a person survive.

The False Self, the managers, the whole apparatus of protective niceness, were not mistakes; they were intelligent adaptations to conditions in which appearing fully might genuinely have cost something. To attack them is to attack a guardian for having guarded. The work is subtler: to understand why the protective strategies developed, to recognize when they are no longer needed, and to build enough internal safety that less defensive, more spontaneous ways of living become possible, so that the alive and personal core Winnicott described can risk appearing, and the parts that have worked so hard for so long can relax a little, trusting that the person is no longer a defenseless child in a dangerous room.

So the goal was never to become less kind, and anyone who reads this as permission for coldness has misread it entirely. The goal is to become kind without disappearing, honest without becoming cruel, and peaceful without abandoning the self whose peace also matters. It is to let kindness become again what it was always meant to be, a choice made freely by someone who is actually there to make it, rather than a toll paid endlessly by someone who has gone missing behind the smile. The person behind that smile is worth meeting. Often the first one who needs to meet them is the one who has been smiling.

A note on references

This essay draws on two primary bodies of work and should carry a reference list built from the actual sources, verified before publication and not reproduced from memory. The core primary texts are D. W. Winnicott’s 1960 paper “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self” (in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965) and Richard C. Schwartz’s writing on Internal Family Systems, including Internal Family Systems Therapy (Schwartz, and later Schwartz and Sweezy) and his popular volume No Bad Parts (2021). All characterizations of both theories above are paraphrases, not direct quotations; no quotations, page numbers, or specific research findings have been invented, and where the state of empirical evidence is described (particularly regarding IFS), it is characterized in general terms and flagged for confirmation against current peer-reviewed reviews. Any additional empirical or neuroscientific claims added during editing should be sourced to specific, verifiable studies or omitted.

The purpose of Incorrigible Myths has never been to persuade readers toward a particular ideology or political tribe. It is to understand the psychological forces operating beneath the surface, the invisible architecture that shapes how people protect themselves, how the mind adapts under pressure, and how ordinary human beings try to stay acceptable, safe, and connected in a world that does not always make room for who they actually are.

If this reflection helped you see those patterns a little more clearly, in others or in yourself, consider sharing it with someone who values curiosity over certainty, self-honesty over performance, and thoughtful inquiry over the easy comfort of a role.

Healthier selves, like healthier relationships, are rarely built by becoming more agreeable. They are built when we become willing to notice our own protective strategies, offer others compassion without abandoning ourselves, and treat inner honesty not as a threat to belonging, but as the steady foundation that makes genuine connection possible in the first place.

Because once we lose contact with our own reality, the cost arrives slowly but surely. Every relationship asks a little more self-erasure than the last. Every boundary feels harder to hold. And the distance between who we appear to be and who we actually are keeps widening, until even we can no longer find the person behind the smile.

The views expressed here draw upon primary psychological texts, clinical theory, historical context, and matters of public interest. They are offered for commentary, critical inquiry, and public discourse protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Stay tuned for the next long-form reflection.

In the meantime, perhaps this is what those of us trying to stay grounded have to keep reminding ourselves, as we navigate a world that grows more complex, more performative, and harder to read:

Shakespeare may have been right that “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” but to recognize darkness, in the world or in ourselves, is not to be granted permission to surrender our own character to it.

And as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education.”

May we keep developing both. Intelligence helps us understand ourselves and the world; character decides what we do with that understanding, and whether we can stay kind without disappearing in the process.

In both cases, the costs are pushed downward onto taxpayers, workers, consumers, businesses, military families, and communities, while the podium presents the resulting disruption as evidence of strength.

To understand how these policies connect, we need to follow several threads: the two invoices arriving at the public’s door, the enormous numbers people are rarely encouraged to feel, the hidden mechanics of tariffs, the ways targeted countries adapt rather than surrender, and the deeper mythology that confuses the ability to cause pain with the ability to produce lasting outcomes.

Before We Begin:

This is a detailed analysis written for readers and listeners who understand what is at stake for the generation coming after us. It is not built to be consumed like a passing headline or a 30-second reel. Long-form reflection asks more of your attention, but it also offers what compressed mainstream coverage rarely does: context, proportion, historical memory, and the ability to connect events that are almost always presented in isolation.

I should explain where that instinct comes from. For years, I deliberately watched major news networks with opposing political perspectives, not because I fully trusted either side, but because I wanted to see the same day narrated twice and study the distance between the two accounts.

What struck me was not that one channel distorted reality while the other presented it clearly. It was that both, in their different registers, framed events in ways that left the underlying system largely unquestioned. The disagreement was loud and constant, with villains and heroes assigned every night. But beneath it all was the same assumption: the existing system of power and money was permanent and not open for discussion.

The fight was always about who should hold the wheel, never about where the car was going or who was paying for the fuel.

Over time, I came to suspect that the format itself was part of the effect. A media environment driven by constant, rotating outrage does not need to censor everything. It only needs to keep the public’s attention moving fast enough that no single question is held long enough to be answered.

There is always a fresh controversy by evening, always something new to be furious about before we have finished thinking about the last one. Within that churn, the slower questions, the ones concerning cost, consequence, power, and who benefits, rarely receive the sustained attention they require.

Just enough chaos on the surface keeps public attention scattered. And scattered attention is one of the most dependable protections available to a system under scrutiny.

This long-form reflection is a deliberate refusal of that pace.

Because an informed citizen should not only know what happened. They should also be able to ask why it happened, who benefits, who carries the cost, what assumptions are being protected, and what consequences may arrive long after the podium has moved on to its next announcement.

Over the course of this reflection, we will examine the following 9 connected ideas:

1. The Two Invoices.How war and tariffs deliver separate costs to the same households.

2. The Numbers We Are Not Built to Feel.Why billions become politically useful when the public can no longer picture their scale.

3. The Magic Trick of the Foreign Bill.How tariffs presented as punishment for another country can become costs carried by domestic businesses, workers, and consumers.

4. Canada as Target and Accidental Nation-Builder.How external pressure can create economic damage while also encouraging greater Canadian independence and resilience.

5. Australia and the Collapse of the Stated Logic.What happens when an ally with a free-trade agreement and a U.S. trade surplus is still targeted.

6. The Same Psychology in Two Theaters.How military force and economic pressure can emerge from the same belief: inflict enough pain, and the other side will eventually submit.

7. The Public Pays, the Podium Performs.How governments distribute the material costs downward while claiming the symbolic rewards of toughness.

8. What Power Should Preserve.Why durable strength should be measured through stability, trust, functioning alliances, attainable outcomes, and the ability to stop escalation.

9. Why I Do This Work.Why Incorrigible Myths looks beneath individual headlines to identify the narratives, psychological forces, and institutional patterns shaping public life.

That’s the road ahead. Follow it all the way through. The full picture is worth more than the comfort of an early conclusion.

We are already 7 months into a gruesome year, and the world is not slowing down to make itself easier to understand. If not now, then when? It’s the damn weekend. Give yourself the time to learn something powerful, something deeper than the headline, sharper than the talking point, and useful long after today’s outrage has been replaced by tomorrow’s.

By the end, you may not agree with every conclusion. But you will leave with greater clarity, a stronger sense of how these policies connect, and better questions to carry into every conversation that follows. You may even become the person at the dinner table who can see the larger pattern while everyone else is still debating the latest fragment.

Let’s begin.

1. The Two Invoices.

Texas state representative James Talarico put the contradiction more plainly than most: a country can close schools and hospitals at home while financing the destruction of schools and hospitals abroad; there is somehow never enough money for education and health care, yet there is always enough for war. He made the statement on the morning he learned that a soldier from near his district had been killed overseas: Army Private Isabella Gonzales, 19, from Carrollton and a recent graduate of Hebron High School. She was killed in an attack on a base in Jordan during a war whose purpose and cost were already being questioned.

These facts should be stated simply, without embellishment. The death of a 19-year-old should never become a rhetorical tool. She enlisted, was sent into a conflict she did not create, and did not return home. That is the human cost of policy, and it is where any serious accounting should begin.

That brings us to the connection between the tragedy and the arithmetic. The same governing instinct that sends young people into a war before anyone can clearly define its end also sends the bill to the households those young people came from.

Two invoices, then, arriving at the same kitchen table. One is the invoice for war, paid through taxation, borrowing, the replacement of spent munitions, the price of fuel, the diversion of public resources, and, at the sharpest edge, casualties. The other is the invoice for a campaign of tariffs against allies and trading partners, paid through import duties, higher production costs, disrupted supply chains, retaliation, delayed investment, and consumer prices. The two policies are not identical, and it would be sloppy to pretend they are. But they arrive from the same address, and they rest on the same belief, and the household receives both while being told that the disruption is a sign of national strength. A government can burn money abroad, bully allies next door, and bill the public for both. The question is whether that deserves to be called strength, or whether it is simply action without a real strategy.

2. The numbers we are not built to feel.

The human mind struggles to feel the difference between a million and a billion, and that becomes a serious problem when a country is deciding what it can afford. A million seconds is about 11 days. A billion seconds is nearly 32 years. The words sound like neighbors, but the quantities live in entirely different worlds. That is why the cost of a war can be announced without the public flinching: the number arrives at a scale most people cannot easily picture.

So consider the war’s cost through two figures that do not agree. The administration’s official estimate, stated by the Defense Secretary, put the cost at roughly $37.5 billion. In an independent Substack analysis, accountability journalist Stephen Semler estimated that the first 120 days cost roughly $103.3 billion. Click the link to see how he built that estimate from military operations and combat, munitions, destroyed or damaged assets, support connected to an ally’s operations, and costs carried by nonmilitary agencies.

Let me break this down into units small enough to register as something real, not just as numbers on a page. The per-minute figure is linked for anyone prepared to spend this final weekend of July in a low, useful fury. It is the kind that follows you to the gas station, where you begin doing the math in your head while your children ask why you look worried and whether you can still afford to take them to the theme park.

Translated into terms a person can almost feel, the larger estimate comes to about $860 million a day, roughly $36 million an hour, and close to $600,000 a minute.

Read that again: $600,000 every minute.

Sit with that number for a moment. Let it settle before we move on.

And that is before the additional funding under consideration. On top of what had already been spent, the White House requested a supplemental package of approximately $87.6 billion, much of it for defense and Iran-related costs, as well as replenishing munitions and strengthening the defense industrial base.

The point is not to declare one figure honest and the other a lie, because that is not what the gap shows. The point is the gap itself. When a government and serious independent analysts cannot agree whether a war has cost 37 billion dollars or a hundred and three, the citizen is being asked to consent to something whose scale is genuinely unknown to them.

Democratic consent means very little when one estimate of the bill is nearly three times higher than another. Talarico’s comparison also exposes an important imbalance. A proposed school program, health measure, or public service must prove its affordability in advance and justify every dollar before it is approved. A war, however, can begin before anyone clearly states its final cost, its destination, or what victory would even look like. One kind of spending faces intense scrutiny before the money is released. The other is approved quickly and examined, if at all, only after the money is gone.

3. The magic trick of the foreign bill.

Tariffs rely on a smaller version of the same trick: making a cost that lands at home look like a punishment imposed abroad.

Here is how it works. A tariff is collected by the importing country from the company bringing a product across its border. In most cases, it is not a cheque that Canada, Australia, or China sends to Washington. The payment is made at the border by the domestic importer. From there, the cost spreads through the economy. A foreign producer may absorb part of it through lower prices or lost sales. That is true, and it would be misleading to suggest that foreign suppliers never carry any of the burden.

But much of the cost can also fall on the importer, the manufacturer using the imported material, the retailer, and eventually the customer. Workers may feel it through delayed hiring or postponed investment. Farmers may be hurt by retaliatory tariffs. Families may pay more for the finished product.

Who carries the greatest share depends on the product, the level of competition, exchange rates, supply contracts, and whether buyers can find another supplier. But the central fact remains the same: a tariff presented as punishment for a foreign country can create serious costs inside the country imposing it. Put concretely, a tariff announced as a penalty on a Canadian metal producer can, at the same time, raise costs for an American builder buying that metal, an automaker whose components cross the border before final assembly, or a household purchasing the finished car, home, or appliance. Farmers may also feel the effects through higher input costs or retaliatory tariffs.

The announcement says Canada is being charged. The reality is more complicated. Under U.S. customs rules, the importer pays the estimated duty when the goods enter the country. Federal Reserve research has also found that tariff costs can pass through to American importers and consumer prices. That is not rhetoric; it is how the system works. A punishment announced for Canada can become an invoice carrying an American name and paid at home.

4. Canada as target and accidental nation-builder.

There is an irony inside the tariff campaign that its architects do not seem to have anticipated, and it is worth stating carefully, without triumphalism, because the damage to Canada is real and adaptation is not the same as immunity.

Repeated pressure on a trading partner can produce, instead of submission, a hardening. Faced with an unreliable single market, Canada has reasons to buy more of its own goods, to diversify the markets it sells into, to tear down the internal trade barriers between its own provinces that it had tolerated for decades, to build the east-west infrastructure and integrated energy grids it had long postponed, and to deepen relationships with Europe, Asia, Australia, Mexico, and others. Some Canadian commentators make a sharper argument: sustained American pressure may be doing more to strengthen Canada’s economic independence than any domestic campaign has done in 60 years. A bully may try to force a country to fold, only to push it toward greater independence, broader trade relationships, and a future in which it is far harder to intimidate.

I want to hold this claim at the right temperature. Canada did not start this. And no matter how well it adapts, it will still suffer real economic damage. Workers will lose jobs. Businesses will close. The long-term case for resilience does not erase those immediate losses. Adaptation does not make tariffs harmless. What it demonstrates is something else: that coercion can generate consequences the aggressor never intended, that pressure meant to produce dependence can instead produce independence, and that a policy designed to make a neighbor submit can end up making it stronger and more distant. That is not a victory for anyone. It is a lesson about what pressure actually does.

5. Australia and the collapse of the stated logic.

If the tariff program were what it claims to be, a precise corrective for trade deficits, then Australia would be the case that breaks it. The United States and Australia operate under a free-trade agreement. The United States ran a goods-trade surplus with Australia in 2025, on the order of $4.6 billion, exporting roughly $33.7 billion and importing roughly $29.1 billion. And yet Australian goods became subject to a new U.S. tariff, around 12.5 percent, under a forced-labor trade action, a tariff Australia disputes.

Sit with the logic, or the absence of it. Here is a country that buys more from America than it sells to America, that operates under a free-trade agreement, that is a longstanding security ally, and it is tariffed anyway.

Whatever principle is governing that decision, it is plainly not the correction of a bilateral deficit, because there is no deficit to correct. Which suggests the tariff has become something other than the economic tool it is described as.

It has become a general instrument of executive pressure, a source of revenue, a piece of domestic political theater, a way of forcing negotiations, applied to allies and adversaries alike on grounds that shift to fit the moment. When the official explanation cannot account for the clearest example, it is probably not the real reason.

6. The same psychology, in two theaters.

This is where the war and the tariffs reveal themselves as expressions of a single idea, and the political scientist Robert Pape’s framework helps make that pattern visible, although the connection I draw here is my own.

Professor Pape argues that the era symbolized by the 1991 Gulf War has passed. At the time, the United States combined military superiority, economic dominance, allied support, institutional legitimacy, and control over events. The tools of disruption have spread. Drones, missiles, surveillance, cheap commercial components, cyber capability, and precision systems are now widely available, and a weaker state no longer needs to defeat the United States conventionally to impose real costs on it. It only needs to threaten shipping, damage infrastructure, exhaust expensive interceptors, drive up insurance premiums, unsettle energy markets, and outlast American public patience. The contest is no longer domination versus defeat. It is domination versus disruption, and a state can win battles while weakening the very systems its power depends on. Which means power should be measured not only by what a country can destroy, but by what it can preserve: its alliances, its commerce, its legitimacy, its stability, its control over escalation.

Now lay the tariffs beside the war, and the shared psychology is obvious. Both assume that superior coercive capacity guarantees submission. The war assumes that enough firepower will make an adversary yield; the tariffs assume that enough economic pain will make allies and partners fall into line. And in both theaters, the target adapts.

Adversaries reroute and impose recurring costs; allies diversify, retaliate, delay investment, and build alternatives to dependence on the United States.

In an age defined by disruption, American power runs on exactly the things the tariff campaign corrodes: dependable allies, integrated supply chains, stable energy relationships, predictable commerce. To punish Canada and Australia while fighting a costly war is to spend down, on two fronts at once, the network of trust and cooperation that lets American power function in the first place.

Pape applies this framework to military power and the limits of American dominance. I am extending its logic to tariffs and economic pressure, where the same assumption appears: that overwhelming force, whether delivered through weapons or trade restrictions, will eventually compel the other side to submit.

7. The public pays, the podium performs.

Return, then, to the household, because that is where both invoices land. The taxpayer funds the war and will service the borrowing for years. The military family bears the part of the cost that no accounting captures. The farmer absorbs the retaliation, the builder and the autoworker and the manufacturer absorb the higher input costs, the consumer pays more at the end of the chain, and the young enlistee bears the sharpest edge of all. Meanwhile the podium describes all of this as toughness, as leverage, as winning, and distributes the costs downward and outward while claiming the strength upward.

I want to be careful not to overstate the connection. War and tariffs are different policies with different consequences. My comparison concerns only the underlying belief that enough pressure will force submission. That distinction matters, because precision is what separates analysis from propaganda. Tariff revenue is not, based on any evidence I have seen, directly set aside to pay for the war. I am not claiming that money simply moves from one account to the other. The connection is different. It is philosophical, fiscal, and distributive. The same governing instinct treats inflicted pain as evidence of strength. Both policies shift costs onto people who did not choose them, then present those costs as proof of victory. That is the shared move: the burden travels downward while the language at the top turns it into power.

And the essential point, the one that must not disappear beneath the arithmetic, is that ordinary Americans are caught in this machinery too. The farmer, builder, manufacturer, autoworker, consumer, and service member are not the adversaries in this story. They are carrying the costs alongside Canadians, often without hearing that reality acknowledged from the podium. The argument was never with them.

A Canadian reflection on these policies would miss its own point if it ended in anti-American nationalism. The border does not neatly separate the people paying the invoices. The burden crosses it and lands on households on both sides.

8. What power should preserve.

There is a myth underneath all of this, and it is worth naming as the incorrigible thing it is: the belief that if America can impose more pain than the other side, America must be winning.

It is a myth because pain is an instrument, not an outcome.

Destroying a target is not the same as producing a political settlement. Spending more is not the same as having a strategy.

* A tariff can wound a foreign supplier without rebuilding a single domestic factory.

* A strike can demonstrate capacity without producing any attainable end state.

Pressure often produces the opposite of submission. It creates resistance, adaptation, new partnerships, and a long memory. A country can possess enormous destructive power while slowly losing the cooperation that once made its leadership possible. Force without a realistic political destination is not strategy. It is movement disguised as one.

Abraham Lincoln warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand. His words were about a nation’s internal fractures, and they are worth remembering. Societies do not reach their breaking points only because of outside enemies. They also arrive there through the distrust, anger, and division that grow from within. These periods often begin gradually, with neighbors who stop listening and people who forget that disagreement does not require dehumanization. One administration may exploit these forces, but the deeper danger lies in a political culture that rewards humiliation, escalation, and theatrical displays of dominance. The answer cannot be more of the same. Criticism that copies the cruelty it condemns has already weakened its own case.

9. Why I do this work.

The longer I observe politics, institutions, relationships, and public life, the less interested I become in telling people what to think. I want to help people recognize the recurring narratives that shape our choices, loyalties, and systems.

Incorrigible Myths is not only about politics. Its purpose is to slow the noise, look beneath the latest headline, and separate reality from the beliefs we preserve because they offer comfort, reinforce identity, or give us someone convenient to blame.

I write from Canada, with roots in India and years spent observing life across different countries, not to pretend I stand outside these systems, but because distance sometimes reveals the pattern. The goal is not to hand readers and listeners a ready-made conclusion. It is to offer clearer questions, stronger context, and a more honest way of seeing how power travels from the podium into ordinary lives. If this work helps someone recognize a familiar pattern beneath a new headline, think more independently, or find words for something they had sensed but could not yet explain, then it has done what I intended.

So measure power by what it preserves, not only by what it can destroy.

Durable strength looks like stable prices and an affordable life. It looks like alliances that hold under pressure, institutions capable of correcting themselves, political goals a country can realistically achieve, and the wisdom to stop when escalation has gone too far. By that measure, a government can burn money abroad, pressure its allies, and send the bill to the public, yet still emerge weaker than it began.

The size of the invoice is not proof of a strong strategy. It never was. Yet the households receiving both bills are still being asked to pretend otherwise.

Source and methodology note:

This long-form reflection is analysis and commentary in the public interest, not an official investigation or legal finding. It draws on Robert Pape’s Foreign Affairs analysis, reporting from Reuters and the Associated Press, the White House and OMB supplemental request, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, USTR trade data, Government of Canada tariff guidance, Australian government tariff updates, and Stephen Semler’s published methodology.

Where official and independent estimates differ, that disagreement is presented as a transparency problem rather than resolved in favour of either side. Semler’s figure is identified as an independent estimate, not an audited total. No claim is made that tariff revenue directly finances the war; the connection asserted is distributive and political, not a line-item transfer. The critique is directed at the policies of the governments involved, not at citizens, and no government in the conflict, including Iran’s, is presented as innocent or beyond criticism.

If this long-form reflection stayed with you, and you made it all the way to the end, perhaps it was not because it introduced entirely new facts.

Perhaps it revealed a pattern. Something you already sensed, but had not yet found the words to explain.

My work explores the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, systems thinking, institutional behaviour, philosophy, geopolitics, and emotional regulation. Across these seemingly different subjects runs one central question:

What happens to people, institutions, and entire societies when trust begins to erode faster than it can be rebuilt?

Whether the setting is a family, a workplace, a courtroom, a government ministry, or a democracy under strain, the underlying dynamics are often remarkably similar.

* A grievance goes unheard.

* Listening gives way to image management.

* Image management gives way to control.

* Control invites resistance.

* Resistance justifies more control.

Eventually, the original problem disappears beneath the conflict itself.

The purpose of Incorrigible Myths has never been to persuade readers toward a particular ideology or political tribe.

It is to understand the psychological forces operating beneath the headlines, the invisible systems that shape how power behaves, how institutions respond under pressure, and how ordinary people make sense of an increasingly complex world.

If this reflection helped you see those patterns a little more clearly, consider sharing it with someone who values curiosity over certainty, evidence over performance, and thoughtful inquiry over outrage.

Healthier democracies are rarely built by louder arguments.

They are built when institutions become willing to listen, when citizens remain willing to engage, and when trust is treated not as a political advantage, but as the invisible infrastructure that makes every free society possible.

Because once trust becomes the casualty…

* Every disagreement feels larger.

* Every institution feels weaker.

* And every future conversation becomes harder than the last.

The views expressed here draw upon publicly available reporting, behavioural science, historical context, and matters of public interest. They are offered for commentary, critical inquiry, and public discourse protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Stay tuned for the next long-form reflection.

In the meantime, perhaps this is what those of us trying to stay grounded have to keep reminding ourselves, as we navigate a world that grows more complex, more performative, and harder to read:

Shakespeare may have been right that “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” but to recognize darkness is not to be granted permission to surrender our own character to it.

And as Martin Luther King Jr. put it,

“Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education.”

May we keep developing both. Intelligence helps us understand the world; character decides what we do with that understanding.

The deepest threat to democracy is not disagreement, but the moment citizens stop believing the system can hear them.

Every confrontation begins long before the first baton is raised. It begins in a moment shared by a crowd and the people facing it in uniform, and it is worth beginning there rather than with any particular grievance, because the moment is older and more universal than any of the specific complaints that produce it.

A brief note for listeners: if you are following the written version while listening, feel free to open the links included throughout this long-form reflection. They will take you to the reports, research, and source material that helped shape its argument.

With that context in place, it is worth beginning not with any single headline, but with the recurring human confrontation beneath it.

On one side stand people who have gathered because they feel unheard, carrying the conviction that some basic promise of fairness has been broken and that the ordinary channels of redress have failed them. On the other stand those charged with maintaining order, who increasingly encounter the crowd not as fellow citizens expressing a grievance, but as a threat to be contained. Between them lies a divide that was not created that day and cannot be repaired in a single afternoon. Yet into that divide, with terrible reliability, force tends to flow.

It is this deeper fracture between citizens and institutions that concerns me here. The immediate occasion for this long-form reflection is a wave of protests in India, driven by grievances familiar to anyone watching democracies come under strain. They include anger over a leaked NEET examination that made a mockery of the fairness promised to young students, the grinding pressure of youth unemployment, and a broader sense that those who govern have stopped listening.

But I do not want to write only about India, and I want to be clear about why. What I have learned so far, from years of watching the outrage cycle and the way mainstream media compresses complex crises into brief, combustible spectacles, is that the headline is rarely the whole story. The temptation in any such moment is to take a side, decide whether the protesters or the authorities were right, and argue the case. That argument has its place, but it dates quickly and can obscure something more important. The specific event is almost certainly a local expression of a broader pattern now visible across the democratic world. The interesting question is not who was right on a particular street on a particular day. It is whether events like these are isolated, or whether they are symptoms of a deeper regulatory failure inside modern democracies themselves, a failure that has less to do with any single government and more to do with what happens to the relationship between the governed and those who govern when the invisible thing that holds them together begins to thin.

That invisible thing is trust, and it is the real subject here.

Before we continue, a small confession.

The internet has trained us to consume ideas in 15-second fragments and mistake reaction for understanding. What follows is deliberately slower. Not because complexity demands more words, but because clarity sometimes does.

We live in an age overflowing with information yet starving for understanding. This work is my attempt to reverse that trend. It isn’t written simply to tell you what happened today. It’s written to help you understand why the same patterns keep appearing tomorrow.

My goal isn’t to win today’s news cycle.

It’s to slowly reshape the mental models through which you interpret tomorrow’s headlines.

If you stay with this work long enough, you may begin to notice something important: events that once felt random and disconnected gradually reveal the same underlying architecture. The world may not become simpler, but it can become more coherent. And coherence has a way of bringing peace to an otherwise chaotic mind.

So let’s slow the algorithm down for a few minutes.

If these reflections feel slower than what you’re used to, that is intentional. Understanding has never been particularly viral.

Let’s keep going.

Let’s examine the machinery.

1. The infrastructure nobody sees until it fails.

We tend to think of democratic institutions as structures made of rules, laws, procedures, buildings, offices. But the rules are only the visible part, the scaffolding. What actually allows the whole apparatus to function is something that appears in no constitution and sits on no organizational chart: a baseline assumption, widely shared, that the institutions are broadly fair, that they can correct themselves when they make mistakes, and that an ordinary person bringing a legitimate grievance will be heard rather than crushed. Trust is the infrastructure beneath the infrastructure. It is what lets people accept outcomes they dislike, obey laws they did not vote for, and route their anger through elections and petitions and courts rather than through the streets, because they believe, at some level, that the system will eventually respond.

Like most infrastructure, trust is invisible while it works and catastrophic when it fails. You do not notice the foundations of a building until they crack. And trust has a particular property that makes its erosion especially dangerous: it is expensive to build and cheap to destroy. Accumulated slowly over years of institutions behaving fairly and lost rapidly in a few visible moments of institutions behaving otherwise. A single televised instance of force used against people whose grievance was legitimate can undo, in the public mind, a great deal of patient credibility, because it confirms a fear that was already forming, that the institution is not on the citizen’s side. This asymmetry, slow to build and fast to lose, means that the trend across a democracy is rarely toward more trust by default. Left unattended, trust tends to erode, and much of the work of a healthy democracy consists of the unglamorous, continuous labor of rebuilding it.

What we may be living through, across many countries at once, is a kind of trust recession, a broad and simultaneous thinning of this invisible infrastructure, and the protests that erupt in one country after another are less like isolated fires than like the same underground fault registering in different places.

2. Why institutions become defensive.

To understand the pattern, you have to understand something that is rarely said plainly, which is that institutions, though they are made of rules, are run by human beings, and human beings under threat behave in predictable ways that institutions then inherit and amplify.

When a person feels their competence or character attacked, a well-documented set of defenses engages. The self contracts around protection. Admitting error becomes harder, because error feels like exposure. The energy that might have gone toward solving the underlying problem gets diverted toward defending the image of having no problem. Organizations do this too, at scale, and often more rigidly than individuals, because their defensiveness is the sum of many people each protecting their own position, layered on top of a broader interest in preserving reputation. When a government, police force, or ministry is confronted with evidence of its own failure, the healthy response, acknowledgment, investigation, correction, is also the most psychologically and politically expensive one, because it requires those in authority to say, in effect, we were wrong. Systems built on the projection of authority often experience that admission as a threat to the very legitimacy they depend on.

So a substitution occurs, and it is the same substitution that traps individuals. The system shifts, gradually and often without any single decision, from managing the problem to managing the perception of the problem. It stops asking, how do we fix this, and starts asking, how do we make this look manageable, how do we protect our legitimacy, how do we restore order without conceding fault? This is institutional self-preservation, and from the inside it rarely feels cynical. It feels like responsibility, like protecting a necessary structure from those who would undermine it. But the effect, whatever the intention, is that those in power begin to prioritize image over responsiveness to the people they serve, and the public, sensing this, responds in kind. Every act of self-protection that is read as evasion withdraws a little more from the account of trust, and the withdrawal is noticed, and it compounds.

3. The escalation spiral.

What makes this genuinely dangerous is that the two sides do not simply drift apart. They actively push each other further, creating a spiral that neither fully controls and that gradually develops its own grim logic.

Jordan Peterson’s recurring framework of order and chaos is useful here, provided we treat it as a lens rather than a verdict. Institutions represent order. They provide rules, continuity, predictability, and the structures that allow a society to function. Protest introduces disruption, uncertainty, and a temporary movement toward chaos. But chaos is not always the enemy of a healthy society. Sometimes disruption is the only force capable of exposing what an overly rigid order has refused to acknowledge. The danger begins when order becomes so inflexible that it interprets every disturbance as a threat, while chaos becomes so consuming that it can no longer distinguish reform from rupture. At that point, the excesses of each side begin justifying the excesses of the other. Order, frightened by chaos, becomes more rigid. Chaos, provoked by rigid order, becomes more volatile.

Consider how the spiral unfolds. Citizens, feeling unheard, protest. The institution, experiencing the protest as a threat to order and to its own legitimacy, responds with control rather than responsiveness. Control is the tool it already possesses. Responsiveness would require something more difficult: the costly admission that a legitimate grievance exists and that the institution may have failed. That control, especially when it involves force, is experienced by citizens as confirmation of the very injustice they came to protest. Their anger intensifies, their numbers grow, and people who were previously undecided begin to take sides. Few things radicalize a moderate faster than watching force used against people who appear to be asking only to be heard.

The larger and angrier protest is then experienced by the institution as an even greater threat, justifying, in its own eyes, even greater control. Each side’s defensive move becomes the other side’s provocation. Each reaction supplies evidence for the other side’s darkest interpretation. Crucially, as the spiral tightens, the original grievance, whether it was a leaked examination, unemployment, corruption, or some specific institutional failure, begins to recede from view. It stops being what the conflict is about. The conflict becomes about the conflict itself: order against resistance, institutional authority against public defiance, control against disruption.

The substantive problem that might once have been solved is left abandoned while both sides fight over the terms of the fight. This is narrative escalation operating at the scale of a society. It is powered by emotion on both sides because a threatened institution and a wounded public are often operating from the parts of human psychology that seek certainty, safety, and vindication, rather than from the parts capable of patience, reflection, and problem-solving.

Two modern amplifiers pour accelerant on this spiral, and they deserve naming. The first is media that — under commercial pressure, increasingly rewards conflict over understanding, because conflict holds attention and nuance does not, so the coverage tends to sharpen the confrontation into heroes and villains rather than illuminating the structural failure underneath. The second, more powerful still, is social media, whose algorithms are optimized for engagement and therefore for outrage, and which spread emotional contagion at a speed and scale no previous era could imagine. A single image, stripped of context, can inflame millions within hours, and the platforms reward precisely the most emotionally charged, least nuanced version of any event, because that is what travels. Between them, these systems take a local confrontation and both accelerate it and strip it of the context that might have allowed resolution, so that the spiral turns faster and the space for the calm, unglamorous work of listening shrinks.

4. When power stops listening.

There is a question at the center of all this that a healthy democracy must keep asking itself, and it is uncomfortable precisely because the answer is so often no.

At what point does maintaining authority become more important than solving the problem that provoked the challenge to authority in the first place?

This is the pivot on which everything turns, and it is worth sitting with, because the shift is subtle and rarely announced. A government confronting protest has, in theory, two goals that ought to align: restore order and address the grievance. In practice, these goals can come apart, and when they do, those in power will almost always find it easier to pursue the first than the second, because restoring order is within their direct control, while addressing the grievance requires acknowledging that it was valid. The moment a governing system begins to treat the restoration of its own authority as the primary objective, and the underlying problem as secondary, it has crossed a line that the public can feel even when it cannot name. At that point, protecting legitimacy has begun to compete with, rather than serve, the restoration of public trust, and those in authority have failed to notice that legitimacy was never really about power in the first place.

Legitimacy, in a democracy, does not come from the capacity to compel obedience. It comes from the belief, among the governed, that those exercising power are fundamentally fair and willing to listen. A government that secures obedience through force while forfeiting that belief has won the immediate confrontation and lost the thing that actually sustains it.

And here the psychology becomes long-term and unforgiving, because force has a memory. Each time those in power respond to a legitimate grievance with force rather than listening, they do not merely resolve that moment. They teach the population something durable about how authority behaves, and that lesson is carried forward, shaping how the next grievance is anticipated and how the next protest is interpreted before it even begins. A citizenry that has learned to expect force will approach those in authority defensively, interpret their actions through the lens of that expectation, and become quicker to protest and slower to trust the next time. Each use of force therefore raises the baseline hostility of every future encounter.

Trust, once converted into fear, does not easily convert back. A government that reaches for force to solve today’s problem is borrowing against a future in which every interaction becomes harder, and the debt compounds.

5. Not uniquely Indian.

The reason to insist that this is a pattern rather than a national story is that the same dynamic, in different costumes, has appeared across democracies that share little else.

* The United States has watched waves of protest over policing and racial justice run precisely this cycle, grievance met with force, force read as confirmation, confirmation swelling the protest, the whole thing amplified into national spectacle by media and social media, and the underlying structural questions often left unresolved once the streets emptied.

* France has a long and recurring tradition of mass protest, from pension reforms to the gilets jaunes, in which a government’s perceived refusal to listen produces sustained unrest and the confrontation itself becomes the story.

* Israel has seen enormous, sustained demonstrations over the balance of power between its institutions, with citizens fearing that the mechanisms meant to constrain government were being weakened, a crisis explicitly about institutional legitimacy and trust.

* South Korea has repeatedly seen very large peaceful mobilizations translate public anger into institutional consequence, a reminder that the cycle does not always end in force.

* Brazil has experienced the erosion of institutional trust and the polarization that follows, including contested results and challenges to the legitimacy of the process itself.

* And Canada, often imagined as placid, saw in recent years how a protest movement and the state’s response to it could rapidly become a national crisis about the relationship between citizens and authority.

The specific triggers differ enormously, and the outcomes differ, but the underlying grammar is recognizable across all of them: a grievance, an institution that finds listening more costly than controlling, a public that reads control as confirmation, and trust draining from the space between them. It is not an Indian problem, or an American one, or a French one. It is a modern democratic condition.

6. What can actually be done.

It would be easy to end in diagnosis, but diagnosis without direction is its own kind of failure, and the pattern, though powerful, is not a law of nature. It is a set of human and institutional behaviors, and behaviors can change. What follows is not a formula but a direction, organized around the different actors who each hold part of the solution.

For governments, the essential and counterintuitive move during a crisis is toward radical transparency rather than away from it, because the instinct to control information is often the very instinct that destroys trust. A government that acknowledges failure quickly, commissions genuinely independent investigations, and accepts public accountability instead of managing appearances is choosing the more difficult path. That difficulty is precisely what helps rebuild credibility, because the public can tell the difference between those protecting themselves and those willing to be examined. Underlying all of this is what researchers call procedural justice: the well-established finding that people are more likely to accept even unfavorable outcomes when they believe the process was fair, transparent, and respectful. People can live with losing. What they cannot live with is the belief that the game was rigged and no one was willing to listen. Procedural fairness speaks directly to that wound.

For police, the direction is toward de-escalation as a trained default rather than force as a first resort, toward oversight that is genuinely independent rather than internal, toward community policing that builds relationships before crises rather than only confronting citizens during them, and toward a clear and consistently applied distinction between peaceful protesters, who are exercising a democratic right, and the small number who commit actual violence, because collapsing that distinction, treating a whole peaceful crowd as a criminal threat, is one of the surest ways to manufacture the very hostility it claims to be containing.

For citizens, the responsibilities are more personal but equally consequential. The single most useful discipline in an age of emotional contagion is to verify before sharing and resist the pull of the most inflammatory version of an event, because every uncritical share of an image stripped of context feeds the spiral. Beyond that lies the harder work of separating institutions from the individuals who operate within them, so that anger at a particular failure does not harden into the conviction that the entire system is irredeemable. That conviction is itself part of the trust collapse that makes everything worse. And there is the most demanding discipline of all: participating between crises, not only during them. Democracies are sustained by the ordinary, continuous engagement of citizens during the years when nothing is on fire. A public that appears only for the emergency has already surrendered most of the ground.

For media, the direction is toward rewarding context over outrage, toward covering the slow structural stories that produce these crises rather than only the dramatic confrontations that result from them, and toward resisting the powerful commercial temptation to reduce every complex event into a clean morality play of heroes and villains, because that reduction, satisfying as it is, is one of the mechanisms by which understanding is lost and the spiral is fed.

7. What actually threatens a democracy.

None of this will eliminate disagreement, and it is important to say clearly that it should not try to, because disagreement is not the disease. Democracies are built to contain disagreement; it is, in a sense, their entire purpose, the mechanism by which a society processes its differences without tearing itself apart. A democracy full of loud, passionate, even furious disagreement is not a failing democracy. It may be a healthy one, doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Democracies do not fail because people disagree, or because citizens protest, or even because police sometimes confront them. They fail when something deeper and more fundamental gives way, when citizens stop believing, at a basic level, that their institutions are capable of listening, of correcting themselves, of treating people fairly. The protest is not the threat. The policing is not the threat. The threat is the slow, often invisible erosion of trust between those who govern and those who are governed, the gradual arrival of a moment when enough people conclude that the system will never really hear them, and begin, rationally, to stop routing their grievances through it. That conclusion, once widespread, is what actually ends things, because a democracy is finally an agreement to keep believing in the process, and when enough people stop believing, no amount of force can substitute for what has been lost.

But the same property that makes trust fragile also makes recovery possible, and this is the note worth ending on, because it is genuinely hopeful rather than merely consoling. Trust erodes fast, but it can also spread, and it spreads by the same mechanism it dies by: demonstration. Just as a few visible acts of institutional evasion can drain it, a sustained pattern of institutions consistently demonstrating fairness, accountability, humility, and a real willingness to learn can slowly rebuild it. Fear spreads, but so does trust, and trust is the more durable of the two when it is genuinely earned, because it is built on something real rather than on threat. The work is slow and unglamorous and offers few dramatic moments, which is precisely why it is so often neglected in favor of the quick assertion of control. But it is the only work that actually holds a democracy together, and the societies that will navigate this trust recession are not the ones that most effectively compel their citizens’ obedience. They are the ones that remember, even in the middle of confrontation, that the goal was never simply to control the street. The goal was to remain worthy of public trust.

That choice is difficult, but it is available in every crisis. In the end, it may be the choice that determines whether a democracy merely restores order or preserves its legitimacy.

If this essay stayed with you and you reached the end, perhaps it wasn’t because it offered new facts.

Perhaps it helped reveal a pattern.

My work explores the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, systems thinking, institutional behavior, philosophy, geopolitics, and emotional regulation. Across these seemingly different subjects runs a single question:

What happens to people, institutions, and entire societies when trust begins to erode faster than it can be rebuilt?

Whether the setting is a family, a workplace, a courtroom, a government ministry, or a democracy under strain, the underlying dynamics are often remarkably similar.

* A grievance goes unheard.

* Listening gives way to image management.

* Image management gives way to control.

* Control invites resistance.

* Resistance justifies more control.

Eventually, the original problem disappears beneath the conflict itself.

The purpose of Incorrigible Myths has never been to persuade readers toward a particular ideology or political tribe.

It is to understand the psychological forces operating beneath the headlines, the invisible systems that shape how power behaves, how institutions respond under pressure, and how ordinary people make sense of an increasingly complex world.

If this reflection helped you see those patterns a little more clearly, consider sharing it with someone who values curiosity over certainty, evidence over performance, and thoughtful inquiry over outrage.

Healthier democracies are rarely built by louder arguments.

They are built when institutions become willing to listen, when citizens remain willing to engage, and when trust is treated not as a political advantage, but as the invisible infrastructure that makes every free society possible.

Because once trust becomes the casualty…

* Every disagreement feels larger.

* Every institution feels weaker.

* And every future conversation becomes harder than the last.

The views expressed here draw upon publicly available reporting, behavioural science, historical context, and matters of public interest. They are offered for commentary, critical inquiry, and public discourse protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Stay tuned for the next long-form reflection.

In the meantime, perhaps this is what those of us trying to stay grounded have to keep reminding ourselves, as we navigate a world that grows more complex, more performative, and harder to read:

Shakespeare may have been right that “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” but to recognize darkness is not to be granted permission to surrender our own character to it.

And as Martin Luther King Jr. put it,

“Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education.”

May we keep developing both. Intelligence helps us understand the world; character decides what we do with that understanding.

A brief advisory from the Department of Minor Incidents Turned into Moral Verdicts: Find a chair, sit down, grab whatever is left in the fridge, and settle in, because I am about to take one pink note, one red Tesla, and a parking-garage accusation considerably farther than anyone expected, all the way from an ambiguous mark on concrete to a verdict on my character.

There is a red Tesla in the parking garage of my building, and it is mine, and one morning there was a note taped to the P5 door beside it. Pink paper, black marker, two strips of tape holding it to the mesh. The handwriting was firm, a little hurried, the kind of writing a person does when they feel entirely justified. It said: “Red tesla be a decent human and take your dog to pee outside!” The last word was underlined, hard, with a line drawn beneath the whole thing like a gavel coming down.

Stay with me till the end, because the altered version of the note says far more than the original accusation ever managed to. The words were the same, but the presentation had changed. Part of the opening was now obscured by the tape, making the message less direct and less readable than it had been the day before. Perhaps it was careless placement. Perhaps the writer had become slightly more aware of being seen while publicly judging someone else. I cannot know. But there is a certain irony in leaving an anonymous message about another person’s conduct, then returning to adjust the visibility of your own.

Most people, receiving a note like this, would feel the obvious things. A flash of indignation, the urge to write back something sharp, to tape up a reply, to win the exchange. I felt the edge of that. But what rose up stronger, and stayed, was curiosity, and it was not about who wrote it. I found, slightly to my own surprise, that I did not much care who wrote it. What held me was the sequence of events that had to occur inside a human mind before a person could arrive at that pink paper with that marker and that underline, fully convinced.

So let me make you a promise, because otherwise there is no reason to give this small event 3000 words. By the end of this essay I will explain why I photographed the note instead of answering it, why I sent it to legal counsel before I ever replied to a stranger, and why that unglamorous decision taught me more about human behavior than the note itself ever could.

Oddly enough, the most interesting part of this story turned out to be neither the anonymous note nor the legal questions that followed. It was observing how one naturally shaped the other.

Because here is the thing the note revealed, and it is the only genuinely interesting thing about it. The note itself was ordinary. The conviction behind it was not. Somebody had observed something, or believed they had, and traveled an enormous distance from that observation to a confident public verdict on a stranger’s character, “be a decent human,” and traveled it so quickly, so frictionlessly, that they never seemed to notice they were traveling at all. That distance is the subject of this essay. The note is only the doorway.

1. The leap nobody notices they are making:

Let me lay out the distance that note travels, because when you break it into steps, the size of the leap becomes almost vertiginous.

It begins, presumably, with an observation. Perhaps a small puddle somewhere it should not have been. That is the underground floor, the only part with any direct contact with reality, and even it is shakier than it looks, because a puddle in a parking garage could have many origins, and calling it urine, let alone canine urine, is already an interpretation rather than a fact. But grant the observation. From there the writer ascends. From the thing observed to a guess about its cause: a dog did this. From the cause to the assignment of blame: a specific dog, belonging to a specific owner. Then a real jump, from blame to inferred motive and pattern: this happens repeatedly, and the owner allows it, knowingly. And then, from that inferred pattern to the summit, a judgment of the person’s entire moral worth: this is not a decent human. Standing on that summit comes the feeling that makes the note possible at all, the sense of being not an attacker but a righteous corrector of someone bad.

Observe how many uncertain steps sit between the bottom of that staircase and the top. Maybe it was not urine. Maybe not a dog. Maybe not that dog. Maybe that dog once, in an emergency, and never again. Maybe the owner cleaned it and the writer never saw. Maybe it is a different resident entirely and the red Tesla simply made a convenient, memorable target. Every one of those is a step the writer skipped, and the skipping is the whole phenomenon. They did not weigh the alternatives and reject them. They never saw the alternatives, because the mind, under certain conditions, does not experience its inferences as inferences. It experiences them as perception. It feels like seeing, not guessing.

I want to be careful here, genuinely careful, because it would be the easiest thing in the world to do to this stranger exactly what I am describing them doing to me: to build a confident psychological portrait from two data points and a marker. I will not, and the refusal is not politeness, it is the entire discipline. I do not know who this person is, or what was happening in their day or their life. What I can do, usefully, is describe the kinds of mental shortcuts that could produce a leap like this in anyone, offered as possibilities rather than as a verdict on one mind.

If you are anything like me, this is probably the moment your mind wants an answer. What kind of person writes a note like this?

It is an understandable question, but it is also the wrong one. A better question is: what kinds of mental shortcuts could produce a moment like this in almost any one of us? Psychology has been studying those shortcuts for decades, and they are far less exotic than we tend to imagine. There is a well-documented tendency, known as the fundamental attribution error, to explain other people’s behavior by their character while explaining our own by our circumstances. When I am late, traffic was terrible. When you are late, you are inconsiderate. A note that leaps from “there may be a dog problem in the parking garage” to “be a decent human” follows exactly that path. There is confirmation bias, which can cause someone who has already blamed the red Tesla to treat every new incident as further proof, while overlooking anything that might challenge that conclusion. There is the pull toward black-and-white thinking, which transforms a messy situation with many possible explanations into one with a clear villain. There is the subtle shift from criticizing an action to condemning a person, from “please handle your dog” to “you are not decent,” a leap far larger than it first appears. And perhaps beneath all of these lies something remarkably ordinary: people often prefer a confident explanation to an honest question, because living with uncertainty asks more of us than reaching a quick conclusion. I cannot tell you which, if any, of these was at work here. The honest answer is that it could have been several, none, or something I have not considered. The point is not to force an answer where the evidence does not provide one, but to remain curious enough to notice how many other explanations were possible before one became a verdict.

2. What disciplined reasoning actually looks like:

The gap between observation and hypothesis is precisely where the trained mind and the untrained mind part ways, and the parting matters far beyond parking garages.

When someone does behavior analysis properly, the first move is almost boringly mechanical: sort everything into three buckets and never let them contaminate one another. There are observable facts, the things a camera would have caught, that any reasonable witness would agree on. There are reasonable hypotheses, the explanations that could account for those facts, held loosely and in the plural. And there are unsupported conclusions, the confident stories that outrun the evidence entirely. The craft is simply never letting an item from the second or third bucket sneak into the first. In this case the observable facts are almost embarrassingly thin: there is a note, it concerns a dog and a red car, it appeared, and it appeared again. Everything else, that there was urine, that it was a dog’s, that it was my dog’s, that it recurred, that I knew and did not care, is hypothesis or conclusion wearing the costume of fact.

A side note from Zoey:

Assumptions are dangerous.

Click the link and sit with that. It will make your life easier in the long run.

The untrained observer confuses these buckets constantly, not from stupidity but because the brain is built to. This is not metaphor; it is how neuroscience increasingly describes the organ. The brain runs ahead of the incoming signal, generating predictions about what is there, and much of what we experience as direct perception is the prediction, lightly corrected by the senses. Under calm conditions those predictions stay flexible and update when reality pushes back. Under stress they harden, and here is the part worth pausing on: an activated nervous system tends to grow more confident even as it grows less accurate. Arousal narrows the aperture. The angrier we are, the surer we feel and the worse our judgment gets, which is the precise inverse of what we would build if we were designing ourselves sensibly. Strong emotions make weak investigators. The feeling of conviction and the fact of accuracy are different things, and under pressure they drift apart.

Once you know the pattern you see it everywhere. It is the engine of family conflict, where one ambiguous remark at dinner is promoted instantly into proof of what someone “always” thinks of you. Social media is built to reward certainty and punish caution. It pushes people to make fast judgments about strangers based on only a few pieces of context. The same thing happens in workplaces, where one mistake can become a lasting reputation that nobody bothers to question. And at a larger scale, it shows up in politics and even between nations, where people stop asking what the other side did and start deciding what kind of people they are. Once that happens, disagreements that could have been worked out turn into deeper hostility. The mechanism is identical to the one on the pink paper. Something is half-observed, the mind races up the staircase, and an interpretation that should have stayed loose sets into a conviction that feels like plain sight.

3. The second morning:

The following morning, the note was still there. The message had not changed, but its presentation had. The tape had been repositioned just enough to obscure part of the opening, making the note noticeably harder to read than it had been the day before.

That detail may have meant nothing. Or it may have meant something. I genuinely do not know, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because speculation would make me a character in the very pattern I am examining. Still, it introduced a second uncertainty into a story already built almost entirely on someone else’s certainty.

One fact, however, required no interpretation: What I can say is that the only behavior I actually watched change over those two days was not mine. It was the anonymous writer’s.

I offer that as an observation, not a charge. I do not know why the tape placement was altered, or why the tape sat differently. But it does sharpen a set of questions, and I want to ask them directly, because if the person who wrote the note ever reads this, questions are the honest form for what I have to say, and they are harder to wave away than accusations.

Did you pause, even briefly, before writing “be a decent human,” and ask how many of your assumptions had already hardened into facts inside your own mind? When you came back the second day, was there a flicker of doubt, or only the momentum of a conclusion already reached? And if someone had taped an identical note to your own car after making the same number of leaps about you, on the same thinness of evidence, would you have called it fair? I am not asking to corner you. I am asking because I have had to ask myself versions of these questions more than once, and they never arrive comfortably.

4. Preparation, not retaliation.

Which brings me, at last, to the promise I made at the start, and to what I actually did, because it is the opposite of what the satisfying response would have been.

The satisfying response is to escalate, to write your own note, to win. It is satisfying precisely because it discharges the feeling, and it is almost always a mistake, because it converts a one-sided annoyance into a two-sided conflict and enters your own reactivity into the permanent record. What I did first was more measured and far less gratifying. I photographed everything. Both notes, the location, the dates, the changed tape, the surrounding context. Not because a photograph is a weapon, but because a photograph is a fact, and facts are the one thing in a conflict that appreciate over time while everything else decays. Memory softens and rewrites itself; a timestamped image does not. That is the whole principle in a sentence: documentation is emotional regulation with a timestamp. Calmly recording what is actually there does two useful things at once. It preserves the truth for later, and it gives an activated nervous system something disciplined to do besides retaliate.

The rest follows naturally, and it is all one theme: build facts, not stories. Preserve the physical evidence before altering anything, because the instinct to immediately tear the note down destroys the record you might later want. Keep a simple timeline while it is fresh, because sequence matters and memory scrambles it.

Stay regulated, which is not merely a matter of composure but a strategic advantage, since a calm person is more likely to observe accurately while an emotionally overwhelmed one is more likely to distort what they see.

Avoid retaliation, because it forfeits the one advantage you actually hold, which is that so far you are the party who has behaved reasonably. And refuse to accuse anyone without evidence, which means resisting the urge to decide it was the neighbor whose face you never liked, because doing so would make you the protagonist of this very essay, sprinting up your own staircase. Evidence consistently outperforms outrage. Outrage feels powerful now and looks worse each day; evidence feels inert now and grows more valuable the longer it sits.

It was in that spirit, and only that spirit, that I did one more thing: I sent the photographs and dates to my legal counsel and asked a few questions, because preserving facts before forming conclusions is simply another form of disciplined thinking.

I want to be precise about why, because it is the reverse of how it might sound. It was not because I wanted to sue anyone; taking legal action over a note about a dog would be absurd, and I did not treat a rude note as a lawsuit. It was because I wanted to understand my options before making assumptions of my own, which is the same discipline turned on my own conduct rather than the writer’s. The questions were genuine questions. Does anonymous conduct like this carry any legal weight at all, or is it simply someone being unpleasant, which breaks no law? If something like this were to repeat and escalate over time, at what point does a pattern begin to matter in a way a single instance does not? If an anonymous complaint ever moved from a private note toward something public and reputational, would that change the picture? And, most practically, what is worth preserving now, on the small chance it matters later? The answers were reassuringly undramatic, and they are not the point. The posture is the point. Emotion asks, “How do I respond?” Preparation asks, “What should I preserve?” The first question keeps you inside the conflict. The second lifts you above it. And the distance between those two questions is much of the distance between reacting to your life and actually navigating it.

5. What this was always about:

Now let the parking garage dissolve, because it was never the subject. Take away the paper and the marker and the red car, and what remains is the only thing that was ever interesting: the machinery, still running, in every relationship you have or have ever watched.

Notice how rarely we destroy our relationships over behavior, over things people observably did. We destroy them, far more often, over our conclusions about the person behind the behavior. A marriage does not end over dishes in the sink; it ends over the story the dishes came to represent, “you have never respected me and never will.” A friendship does not end over one thoughtless remark; it ends when the remark is promoted into proof of who the friend secretly is. Families fracture along these lines, one member sure they have finally understood another’s true motives, when what they have done is climb the same staircase from a fragment of behavior to a verdict on a soul. The behavior was observable. The motive was a guess. And somewhere in the rush from the first to the second, the guess hardened into a conviction, and the conviction became the conflict. Most conflicts do not begin with facts. They begin with the confidence of our interpretations. The facts are usually modest and survivable; it is the certainty we lay over them that does the damage, and the territory between a reasonable suspicion and an unshakable conclusion is where nearly all unnecessary conflict is born.

I never found out who wrote the note, and I have stopped wanting to, because the answer would be the least interesting part. If I learned their name and their reasons, the mystery would collapse into an ordinary story about an irritated neighbor, and the valuable thing would be lost. The valuable thing was never the writer’s identity.

It was the chance to watch, up close and in miniature, on a scrap of pink paper taped to a door, the human mind perform its oldest and most consequential trick: the conversion of a guess into a moral judgment, so smoothly it never once feels like a conversion. That trick runs under our arguments, our estrangements, our politics, our wars. It ran under that note. And the uncomfortable part is that the mind that wrote the note and the mind reading this essay are the same kind of mind, running the same machinery, and no amount of understanding the trick makes any of us fully immune to performing it.

If the person who wrote that note happens to read this, my hope is not that they feel embarrassed. It is that they feel curious, because curiosity is the beginning of every apology we never realized we owed, including the ones I still owe and have not yet noticed.

Perhaps the note will be gone by the time this is published. Maybe building management removed it. Maybe the person who wrote it reconsidered. Or perhaps they recognized something of themselves in this educational essay.

If so, the note will have done something neither of us expected. It will have stopped being an accusation and become a lesson.

The question worth carrying out of that parking garage is not who wrote it, but what it revealed: how often do I confuse confidence with accuracy? How often do I take something I only partly saw, build a complete story around it, and judge someone I had already decided I understood?

The note was never only about my dog, my car, or the stranger who wrote it. It became a small, sharp mirror.

And the longer I looked at it, the more clearly I saw myself.

If this changed the way you think…

If this piece helped you notice the invisible psychological steps between observation, assumption, and certainty, then it has already done its job.

My work explores the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, systems thinking, emotional regulation, philosophy, and strategic reasoning, asking a simple question that rarely has a simple answer:

What is happening inside the human mind before behavior becomes conflict?

Whether the subject is a handwritten note in a parking garage, a failing marriage, workplace dysfunction, political polarization, or international affairs, the underlying machinery is often remarkably similar. The goal has never been to tell readers what to think. It has been to help them think with greater precision, curiosity, and intellectual humility.

If this reflection helped you see a familiar situation through a different lens, consider sharing it with someone who values evidence over outrage, curiosity over certainty, and disciplined thinking over easy conclusions.

Because healthier relationships, stronger institutions, and more resilient societies rarely emerge from louder arguments.

They emerge from better observers.

Essays & Op-EdsIncorrigible Myths on Substack

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YouTubeThe Gifts of Pure Consciousness

Research PapersAcademia.edu

Where psychology meets strategy, and emotion stops running the show.

Author, KRI® Certified Behavior Analyst

Roots: India

I’ll leave you with the same question this experience left me asking myself.

The next time you feel absolutely certain about another person’s motives, pause for a moment before the story finishes writing itself.

Ask yourself:

Am I observing reality… or am I watching my own mind complete a story before all the evidence has arrived?

That question has changed the way I understand people.

Perhaps it will change the way you understand them too.

Stay tuned for the next long-form reflection.

In the meantime, perhaps this is what those of us trying to stay grounded have to keep reminding ourselves, as we navigate a world that grows more complex, more performative, and harder to read:

Shakespeare may have been right that “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” but to recognize darkness is not to be granted permission to surrender our own character to it.

And as Martin Luther King Jr. put it,

“Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education.”

May we keep developing both. Intelligence helps us understand the world; character decides what we do with that understanding.

There is a line delivered by the character Michael Burry, the investor who saw the 2008 crash coming while almost everyone else looked away: “Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.” It is usually quoted for its bluntness, but I want to sit with it for a different reason, because underneath the profanity is a genuinely strange observation, and the strangeness is the whole point. Why would truth and poetry belong in the same sentence at all? They seem like opposites. One is supposed to be cold, factual, verifiable. The other is warm, ambiguous, resistant to being pinned down. And yet the comparison lands, and it keeps landing on people years after they first hear it, which suggests it is pointing at something real that we have not quite named.

Here is what I think they share. Neither poetry nor truth will reveal itself to a person who arrives looking only for confirmation of what they already feel. A poem does not open for the reader who wants a slogan. It requires you to slow down, to tolerate not understanding for a while, to let the meaning arrive on its own terms rather than the terms you brought with you. Truth behaves the same way. It asks for a kind of participation, a willingness to be changed by what you find, and that willingness is precisely what most of us withhold most of the time. We do not hate poetry because it is difficult. We hate it because it will not flatter us. And if that is also why we so often turn away from the truth, then the interesting question is not why truth is hard to find. It is why we are built to avoid it even when it is standing directly in front of us. This essay is an attempt to follow that question all the way down, from a single human mind to the structure of an entire civilization, and to notice something unsettling about language along the way.

1. The thing we defend before we defend reality:

Begin with a claim that sounds cynical but is really just precise: people very rarely reject a truth because it is false. They reject it because it threatens something they value more than accuracy. This is the first thing to understand, and once you see it, a great deal of otherwise baffling human behavior clicks into focus.

Consider what a difficult truth actually threatens. It can threaten your identity, the story you tell about who you are. It can threaten your sense of belonging, because accepting it might place you outside the group whose approval you depend on. It can threaten your status, your certainty, your sense that the world is meaningful and that you have understood it correctly. It can threaten the image you have of yourself as a good, competent, reasonable person. Set any of those against a mere fact, and the fact loses, almost every time, because human beings did not evolve to be correct. We evolved to remain intact. Psychological equilibrium, the felt sense that the “self” is coherent and safe, is the thing the mind protects first, and it will bend, filter, or discard reality in order to preserve it. This is not a moral failing peculiar to stupid or dishonest people. It is closer to a design specification of the human animal, and the sooner we stop treating it as a personal vice the sooner we can actually see it working.

What is this equilibrium-protecting machinery, exactly? In my own research I have found it most useful to think of the ego not as arrogance or vanity, the way ordinary language uses the word, but as a regulatory system. Its job is not to make you great. Its job is to keep the experience of being you coherent and continuous under changing and often threatening conditions. When that system is working well, it stays flexible and proportionate, letting you reflect rather than merely react, letting you hold a criticism without treating it as an assault. When it is working poorly, usually because the conditions it developed under taught it that safety was scarce and threat was everywhere, it becomes rigid, and it starts treating every mirror as an attacker.

The crucial insight, and the one that runs through everything that follows, is that this rigidity is not a character trait a person chose. It is a state the nervous system enters when it does not feel safe enough to do otherwise.

Ego, in this sense, is not the enemy of truth. Dysregulation is. And the difference between the two is mostly a difference in how safe the system feels, which means the whole problem is subtle and more human than the language of “narcissism” or “dishonesty” usually allows.

2. The turn: when words stop describing and start defending.

Now the essay has to make its central turn, the one everything so far has been leading toward, because up to this point I have described how people resist uncomfortable truths, and that is a familiar story. The less familiar and more unsettling story is what happens next, when the resistance stops living only in the mind and migrates into language itself.

Here is the shift. Language begins as a tool for discovering and sharing reality. It is how we point at the world together and say, that is a tree, that happened, I feel this. But under sufficient threat, language begins to serve a different function. It stops being primarily a way of finding reality and becomes primarily a way of managing emotion. This is not the same thing as lying, and I want to be careful here, because “lying” is far too crude a word for what is actually going on and it smuggles in a moral judgment that obscures the mechanism. A liar knows the truth and states its opposite. What I am describing is subtler and more pervasive and mostly not conscious at all. It is language reorganizing itself, beneath awareness, around the protection of the self rather than the discovery of the world. Words stop being instruments of contact and start being instruments of insulation. Sentences become a form of self-soothing. Conversation, which is supposed to be how two people build a shared picture of what is real, becomes instead a way each person defends their existing picture from disturbance.

Watch how this actually operates, because the moves become recognizable once they are named. Even before the statement fully unfolds, its self-referential emphasis reveals where the emotional centre of gravity sits. A message presented as a matter of national security repeatedly narrows toward the individual, culminating in the emphatic, capitalized “ME!” The presidency, the military, and the nation are rhetorically pulled into the orbit of personal injury, until a threat against one individual begins to sound like a threat against the country itself. That does not establish motive or diagnosis, but it does show how language can collapse the distinction between the office, the state, and the person occupying it.

The first casualty is almost always context. A person under threat will strip the surrounding circumstances from an event so that only the fragment that protects them remains, not necessarily by consciously deciding to deceive, but because the full context is the part that hurts. Then comes the slow drift of meaning, the way phrases such as “I only,” “you always,” and “it wasn’t really” are bent to carry emotional loads they were never meant to carry, until the same word means one thing when it protects the speaker and another when it would expose them. In the most defended forms of speech, first-person pronouns can begin to crowd the room: I, me, my, mine. Their presence alone proves nothing, but their concentration can reveal where the emotional centre of gravity has settled, particularly when every event is translated back into personal injury, innocence, ownership, or grievance. Language stops describing a shared reality and begins orbiting the threatened self, until the question is no longer What happened? but What does this mean for me, how does this affect me, and how can I place myself beyond blame? There is also the strategic embrace of ambiguity, because vagueness offers safety: a statement that commits to nothing can never be proven wrong, and a person who never quite says anything definite can never quite be held to it. This is why, in the most defended conversations, you can talk for an hour and discover that nothing was actually said, that the sentences were architecturally complete but empty, elaborate arabesques of evasion. Behind all of it sits the deepest move of all: the reconstruction of memory itself, the gradual rewriting of what happened so that the past aligns with what the self can bear, performed so smoothly that the person doing it may not experience it as revision at all. They remember the edited version. They believe it. The commitment that honest language requires, the willingness to say a definite thing and remain accountable to it, is precisely the exposure the defended system cannot tolerate, and so language slowly reorganizes itself to avoid making that commitment altogether.

The endpoint of this process, when it runs far enough, is that language becomes self-referential. It stops pointing outward at a shared world and starts pointing back at the speaker’s own need to remain stable. And when enough people’s language has made that turn, something larger begins to fail. Reality loses its common address. We can no longer meet one another at the same set of facts, because the words we would use to describe those facts have each been privately repurposed to protect their speaker. Shared reality is not destroyed by a single dramatic lie. It erodes through accumulation, as language everywhere stops asking what is true and starts asking which version of events allows each of us to remain comfortable.

3. Perception bends before behavior does:

It would be comforting to think this happens only at the level of speech, that people perceive reality accurately and merely describe it defensively. But the machinery reaches deeper than that, and this is the part that should genuinely unsettle you, because it means the problem is not that people knowingly distort what they see. It is that what they see is already distorted before they say a word.

Perception itself is not a passive recording of the world. Contemporary neuroscience increasingly describes the brain as a predictive organ: rather than waiting for information and then responding, it continuously generates forecasts about what is likely to be there, and what reaches awareness is shaped as much by the prediction as by the incoming signal. Under healthy conditions this is efficient and adaptive; the predictions stay flexible and update when reality contradicts them. But under chronic threat, the predictions harden. The nervous system, having learned that danger is frequent and safety is scarce, begins weighting anticipated threat more heavily than present evidence, because historically the cost of missing a danger was death and the cost of imagining one was merely wasted energy. Over time, the system starts perceiving through the filter of what it expects to find. A neutral expression is read as criticism. A delay is read as abandonment. Disagreement is read as rejection, correction as humiliation, ambiguity as danger. And none of this feels like distortion from the inside. It feels like simply seeing what is there. The person is not choosing to misperceive. Their perceptual apparatus has been retuned beneath conscious awareness to confirm the threat it already predicts, so that by the time defensive language appears, it is faithfully describing a reality that was already bent at the source. This is why arguing with a highly defended person about the facts so rarely works. You are disputing their conclusion, while the distortion occurred upstream, within perception itself, before any conclusion was even available.

4. Why certainty becomes something like an addiction:

Once you understand that a threatened nervous system perceives defensively, a further consequence follows, and it explains one of the most frustrating features of human beings, including ourselves: the way certainty becomes emotionally irresistible and flexibility becomes almost unbearable.

For a system organized around threat, uncertainty is not merely uncomfortable. It is physiologically destabilizing, because uncertainty is the state in which the predictive machinery loses its grip and anything might be coming. Certainty, by contrast, is regulatory. Being sure, even being sure of something bleak, restores the felt sense of stability that the nervous system is desperate to maintain. This is why people cling to fixed interpretations long after the evidence has turned against them, why contradictory information feels less like a helpful correction and more like a personal threat, why ambiguity becomes something to be resolved as fast as possible rather than sat with.

The rigidity is doing a job.

It is holding the system together. And because it works, in the short term, it gets reinforced, until psychological flexibility, the capacity to hold a question open, to tolerate not knowing, to revise a belief without feeling annihilated, becomes progressively harder to access. Identity hardens around the need for certainty, and language hardens right along with it, because a self that cannot tolerate being wrong will build a way of speaking that never has to admit it. What looks from the outside like stubbornness or arrogance is, underneath, a nervous system that has learned it cannot afford the vertigo of an open question.

5. The delay that looks like laziness and is really protection.

There is a small, almost mundane behavior that illustrates this entire architecture with unusual clarity, and it is one we routinely misunderstand: procrastination. We tend to file delay under laziness or poor discipline, a moral or motivational failing. But a great deal of what we call procrastination is not that at all. It is emotional regulation wearing the costume of scheduling.

Consider what delay accomplishes for a threatened system. To act, to commit, to finish and submit a thing, is to expose it, and yourself, to judgment, to the possibility of failure, to a verdict that cannot be taken back. As long as the thing remains undone, the verdict remains postponed, and the self remains, for now, safe from it.

Confusion functions the same way; a person who keeps things vague and unresolved is a person who never has to face the sharp edge of a definite outcome. Ambiguity, again, becomes safety. Delay, in this light, is not a failure to get around to something.

It is a strategy, usually unconscious, for postponing exposure to a reality that might wound. The postponement of the inevitable becomes, itself, a way of surviving the inevitable a little longer. And once you see delay this way, you stop moralizing about it, in yourself and in others, and start asking the more useful question, which is what, exactly, the delay is protecting against, because there is almost always something, and it is almost never laziness.

6. The same architecture, wearing every costume:

Everything described so far has lived at the scale of a single person. But the reason this matters, the reason it rises above private psychology into something worth an essay, is that the identical architecture appears at every scale of human organization, wearing different costumes but running the same code. Defensive language scales exactly as defensive psychology scales, and once you can recognize the pattern in one person you begin to see it everywhere.

Watch it in a marriage that has curdled, where two people no longer talk to discover anything but only to defend positions, where context is stripped and memory is privately rewritten and the same words mean different things depending on who they protect. Watch it in a family where a difficult truth, an addiction, an old injustice, a parent’s failing, is managed by an unspoken agreement never to name it directly, so that the family’s shared language develops careful blind spots that everyone maintains and no one acknowledges.

Watch it, most painfully, in coercive relationships, where one person’s threatened need for control reorganizes the entire relational language around their stability, and the other person, by a kind of contagion, gradually loses their own grip on what is real, because the shared reality has been quietly bent to serve one nervous system at the expense of the other.

In my own work I have described how this can consolidate: how what begins as one person’s threat-driven need to control uncertainty becomes, through the other’s accommodation and eventual withdrawal, a stable structure that no longer even looks like control, just “how things are.” The healthier participant, exhausted from repair attempts that never land, disengages, and their withdrawal is misread as the problem, further legitimizing the very pattern that drove them out. No malice is required for this. It is an emergent property of a threatened system and the accommodations of the people around it, which is exactly what makes it so hard to see and so hard to name.

Scale it up again and the costume changes, but the code does not. In organizations, the person who reduces uncertainty by imposing control and suppressing ambiguity is frequently mistaken for a strong leader, because in a stressed system the suppression of volatility feels like competence. The system then selects for the very rigidity that is gradually eroding it from within.

* In religions and ideologies, the defended language of certainty offers belonging and relief from the vertigo of open questions, which is much of its appeal and much of its danger.

* In universities, the institutions ostensibly devoted to inquiry, the same threat dynamics can harden into orthodoxies where certain questions become unaskable, not because they have been answered but because asking them threatens someone’s equilibrium.

* In media, the incentive is speed and heat, and heat is generated by defended, certain, emotionally activating language, not by the slow, tentative, participatory language that truth actually requires.

* And in national myths, whole populations maintain carefully edited versions of their own history, stripping the context that wounds and preserving the fragment that flatters, performing at the scale of millions the exact memory-reconstruction that a single defended mind performs in private. Different costumes. Identical architecture. The mechanism that fractures a relationship is the same one that hardens an institution and fragments a country, because the same defensive circuitry is operating at every scale.

7. A note on how to notice, without deciding whom to condemn:

Because this pattern is real and widespread, it is tempting to turn it into a weapon, a way to diagnose and dismiss other people, and I want to resist that directly, because turning it into a weapon is itself one of the defensive moves the essay is warning about.

There is a genuine and fascinating observation to be made about language and attention, which is that before we can even detect a person’s ideology, we can often notice where their attention lives, and grammar is one of the places it shows. Language can point outward, toward a shared world, toward institutions and other people and questions held in common, toward “we” and “this problem” and “what is true.” Or it can keep returning, continually, to the speaker, circling back to the self as the reference point for everything. This is worth learning to notice, not as a diagnostic test to run on your enemies, but as a way of asking a genuinely useful question about any piece of language, including your own: is this pointing at reality, or is it managing the speaker’s need to feel a certain way? I want to be careful and explicit here, because this observation is easily abused. The significance never lies in any single feature of speech, and it certainly does not lie in counting words and declaring someone disordered. A person can speak about themselves for entirely healthy reasons, and frequent self-reference is not a symptom of anything by itself. The point is not to hand you a technique for pathologizing strangers from a distance, which would be both unkind and, by everything this essay has argued, unreliable. The point is subtler: to help you notice, in the texture of language, whether it is doing the work of discovery or the work of defense. And the first and most honest place to apply that noticing is not to others at all. It is to yourself, in the moments when your own words start reaching for the comfortable version rather than the true one.

8. The civilization that rewards the wrong thing:

Now widen the lens as far as it will go, to the level of the whole culture, because modern civilization has developed, without anyone quite intending it, a set of incentives that systematically reward defense over discovery, and the consequence is more serious than the word “misinformation” captures.

Look at what our largest systems actually reward. Algorithms reward certainty and emotional intensity, because those keep attention, and attention is what is being sold. Politics rewards outrage, because outrage mobilizes. Media rewards speed, because being first beats being careful. Advertising rewards emotional manipulation, because feeling drives purchasing more reliably than thinking does. Social platforms reward performance, the presentation of a curated self, over honesty, the messy disclosure of an actual one. And almost no major institution rewards intellectual humility, the slow, uncertain, participatory posture that truth actually requires, because humility does not trend, does not sell, does not win the moment. We have built, in other words, an entire civilizational apparatus optimized for exactly the defended, self-referential, certainty-seeking mode of language and thought that this essay has been tracing, and optimized against the open, tentative, reality-facing mode. The predictable result is not merely that false things circulate. It is something deeper and harder to fix: a kind of psychological fragmentation, a condition in which shared reality itself becomes harder to sustain because the systems shaping our attention are continuously training us, all day, toward defense and away from discovery. The problem is not only that we are misinformed. It is that we are being conditioned, structurally, into precisely the nervous-system state in which truth cannot easily land.

It is worth pausing to hold several distinctions carefully here, because the whole argument collapses into cheap cynicism if we blur them. Lying, the deliberate statement of known falsehood, is not the same as self-deception, in which a person genuinely believes their own edited version. Neither is the same as ordinary cognitive bias, the predictable shortcuts every human mind takes.

Defensive cognition, the threat-driven bending of perception and language, is different again, and so is the plain human error we all commit simply by being finite. And institutional incentives, the systemic rewards that shape behavior at scale, are different from all of these, because they operate above the individual entirely.

Most of the distortion this essay describes is not lying. It is the vast, mostly unconscious middle territory of self-deception and defensive cognition and incentive, which is exactly why moralizing about it, calling people liars, calling them stupid, misses the target so badly.

Compassion and accountability have to coexist here.

People are mostly not villains; they are mostly nervous systems doing what nervous systems do under threat, inside incentive structures that reward the doing. That does not remove responsibility, but it does relocate the problem from individual wickedness to something structural and human and, in principle, addressable.

9. What actually restores the capacity for truth:

If the diagnosis is that threat narrows us into defense, then the direction of repair follows from it, and it is not what our culture usually prescribes. We tend to think the cure for bad thinking is more information, better arguments, sharper facts. But if the real obstacle is a nervous system too threatened to update, then more information aimed at a defended system mostly bounces off, or worse, is experienced as further threat and deepens the defense. You cannot argue a frightened system into openness.

What actually restores the capacity for truth is, first, safety, because the entire defensive architecture exists to manage the absence of it, and when safety returns the architecture is no longer needed and begins, on its own, to soften. This is why the contemplative traditions, translated out of their religious vocabulary and into the language of psychology, turn out to be describing something quite precise. Where they speak of surrender, we can hear the restoration of psychological flexibility, the willingness to stop gripping. Where they speak of faith, we can hear trust, the felt sense that it is safe enough to loosen the defenses. Where they speak of waiting, we can hear participation, the patient, open posture that both poetry and truth require and that a threatened system cannot sustain. And where they speak of ego and its dissolution, we can hear, not the destruction of the self, which under threat only produces collapse or a harder defense, but the softening of a rigid regulatory system once the conditions that made it rigid have eased. The traditions understood something our information-saturated culture keeps forgetting: that you cannot force openness, that it is an outcome of safety rather than an act of will, and that the harder you attack a defended system, demanding it surrender or be accountable or face the truth, the more it fortifies, because to a threatened system those demands register as exactly the danger it was built to resist. The way back to reality, individually and collectively, runs through safety, through regulation, through the slow rebuilding of conditions under which a nervous system no longer needs to bend the world to survive it. This is unglamorous and slow and unsellable, which is precisely why the systems competing for our attention will never prescribe it.

10. The poem, again:

Which returns us, finally, to Burry’s line, and to why truth is like poetry, because I think we can now say what the comparison was pointing at all along.

Neither poetry nor truth can simply be consumed. Both refuse the passive reader, the one who wants to be handed a conclusion without being changed by it. A poem will not yield to someone scanning for a slogan, and reality will not yield to someone scanning for confirmation. Both require the one thing a defended system cannot easily give: participation, the willingness to slow down, to tolerate not knowing, to let the meaning arrive on terms other than the ones you brought. This is why most people, as Burry says, hate poetry, and it is the same reason we so often turn from the truth even when it stands in front of us. Not because either is false or difficult, but because both ask us to lower the defenses that keep us comfortable, and comfort, for a threatened system, feels like survival.

So let me leave you with the realization this whole investigation has been circling toward, and let me state it plainly because it is the thing I most want you to carry out of here. The greatest threat to a civilization may not be propaganda, which we can learn to recognize. It may not be censorship, which we can name and resist. It may not even be misinformation, which we can, in principle, correct. The deeper threat is quieter than all of these and lives inside each of us, in the ordinary, unremarkable moment when language stops asking “what is true?” and begins, instead, to ask “what version of reality allows me to remain comfortable?” That moment does not announce itself. It feels like conviction. It feels like simply seeing things clearly. It happens in marriages and boardrooms and parliaments and in the private sentences we say to ourselves at night, and it happens, most of the time, entirely beneath our awareness. The question is not whether it happens to other people. It does. The harder question, the one worth sitting with after you finish reading, is how often, in what words, and around which truths, it is already taking place within you.

Written independently as behavioural, historical, linguistic, and systems analysis in the public interest. This essay does not offer a clinical diagnosis of any individual, nor does it claim access to anyone’s private medical or psychological condition. References to ego regulation, defensive cognition, rigidity, language patterns, and threat responses describe general psychological dynamics and observable public behaviour.

Any specific incidents, quotations, dates, figures, or public statements referenced in this article should be verified against reliable reporting and primary-source material before publication. Where interpretation is offered, it is presented as commentary rather than established clinical fact. Readers are encouraged to consult the underlying sources, examine the wider context, and form their own conclusions.

The views expressed here are part of a broader inquiry into language, psychology, power, and shared reality. The purpose is not to diagnose individuals from a distance, but to examine patterns that can appear across relationships, institutions, political systems, and public discourse. Analysis and criticism are offered in the spirit of public-interest commentary, intellectual inquiry, and open democratic debate.

Thank you for reading, listening, questioning, and staying with difficult truths.

Stay Sharp. Stay Kind.

Peace.

If this work helps you recognize the pattern more clearly, think more independently, or find language for something you have sensed but could not fully name, you can support it consider sharing this essay with people in your circle who have the patience to look beyond the argument, examine the defenses beneath it, and ask what happens when language stops serving reality and starts protecting us from it.

Thanks for staying with me through this long-form reflection.

Author’s Bio:

Parhate U. Where psychology meets strategy, and emotion stops running the show. The Whistleblower from Canada, asking the moral questions most people avoid. Roots: India.

Research: Academia.edu

YouTube: The Gifts of Pure Consciousness

Podcast: Beyond Labels (Apple) and Incorrigible Myths (Spotify)

Essays/Op-Eds: incorrigiblemyths.substack.com

Stay tuned for the next long-form reflection.

In the meantime, perhaps this is what those of us trying to stay grounded have to keep reminding ourselves, as we navigate a world that grows more complex, more performative, and harder to read:

Shakespeare may have been right that “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” but to recognize darkness is not to be granted permission to surrender our own character to it.

And as Martin Luther King Jr. put it,

“Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education.”

May we keep developing both. Intelligence helps us understand the world; character decides what we do with that understanding.

Consider, for a moment, all the roles in human life that we refuse to hand to just anyone. We do not let a person fly a commercial airliner because they feel ready. We make them prove, under supervision and repeatedly, that they can stay calm when an engine fails at altitude. We do not let someone perform surgery, sit as a judge, command a battalion, or run a nuclear plant on the strength of charisma alone. For every one of these positions we have collectively agreed, as a civilization, that the stakes are too high to separate competence from temperament, and so we screen for both. We test not only whether a person knows the material but whether they can hold themselves together when the material turns against them. Even parenting, the most consequential unlicensed role most people will ever hold, we increasingly understand through the lens of emotional stability, because we have learned, through my previous posts on Incorrigible myths, what happens to a child raised by someone who cannot regulate their own storms.

And then there is the one exception. The single most powerful office on the planet, the role with more capacity to end lives, move markets, and reshape the world than any other human position that has ever existed, is also the one role where raising the question of psychological stability is treated as a partisan insult rather than a basic prerequisite. We would not board a plane without knowing the pilot was screened. We hand a person the nuclear codes and consider it rude to ask whether the same standard should apply. That asymmetry is the hook of this entire op-ed, and once you notice it, it becomes very difficult to un-notice. Why should the most powerful office on Earth be the only one where psychological fitness is considered nobody’s business?

I want to be careful and explicit about what this op-ed is, because the subject invites exactly the kind of sloppiness I intend to avoid. This is not primarily about Donald Trump. He is the case study, the most visible available example, but he is not the argument. The argument is about what happens when enormous power fuses with a psychological profile that may be poorly suited to holding it, while the institutions around that power keep operating as though nothing unusual is occurring. That is a structural question, not a personal grudge, and it will still matter long after any particular occupant of any particular office is gone.

1. Power has a psychological profile:

Start with a principle that sounds obvious once stated but is almost never applied where it matters most: personality matters more as power increases, not less. When an ordinary person has a bad day, loses their temper, nurses a grievance, or makes an impulsive decision out of wounded pride, the damage is contained by their small radius of influence. They can hurt themselves and the handful of people around them, and the world absorbs it. But as you scale a person’s power upward, you scale the reach of their unresolved interior along with it. The same temper that can ruin a dinner table in ordinary life can move armies when it belongs to someone in power. As a person’s authority grows, so does the reach of their personality. That is why traits we might ignore in private life can become matters of public danger when they sit inside high office.

There is a rough vocabulary for the qualities that actually matter here, and it is worth laying out without turning it into a clinical checklist, because these are human capacities rather than jargon. There is stress tolerance, the ability to keep thinking clearly when everything is on fire and the advisors are panicking. There is impulse control, the gap a person can hold between feeling something and acting on it, which is the entire difference between a considered response and a catastrophe. There is delayed gratification, the willingness to accept a worse outcome now for a better one later, which is the foundation of every serious strategy and the first thing to collapse under a fragile ego. There is reality testing, the capacity to see the world as it actually is rather than as one’s fears or vanity insist it must be, which is what allows a leader to hear bad news and update rather than shooting the messenger. There is empathy, not as sentiment but as the practical ability to model what other people and other nations actually want and fear, without which strategy becomes projection. And there is emotional regulation, the master skill underneath all the others, the ability to feel a powerful emotion, humiliation, rage, fear, and metabolize it rather than be driven by it. These are the qualities we screen for, informally, in pilots and surgeons and commanders. The question this op-ed keeps returning to is why we treat them as optional in the one role where their absence is most dangerous.

2. The case study:

This is where Trump enters the frame, not because he is the entire story, but because he is the loudest available proof of what happens when a society refuses to ask the deeper question. I am not going to diagnose him, and I want to be direct about why. Beyond the obvious fact that it would be irresponsible, it would also run against the whole reason I approach this work the way I do. I do not think labeling people has ever helped much beyond massaging our own ego when we point at someone and pretend we have understood them. That is exactly why the subcategory of my work under Incorrigible Myths is called Beyond Labels.

And here’s the fact that most of you can relate with, labels have not solved the human problem. More often, they have only sharpened the hatred humans already carry for one another. Reaching for a clinical label is also the weaker analytical move, because it allows the reader to file the whole matter under one man’s pathology and stop thinking. The stronger move is to examine what is visible, repeated, and documented, then ask what pattern it forms, because a pattern tells us more than a label ever could.

So set the labels aside and watch the behavior.

What is consistently visible, across years and contexts, is a set of responses that cluster in a recognizable way: an extreme sensitivity to humiliation, a tendency to treat any criticism as an attack requiring retaliation, a difficulty tolerating the admission of error, a reliance on dominance and spectacle when cornered, and a habit of reframing every outcome, however it actually went, as a personal triumph. In the research I spent several years working through, from Professor Sam Vaknin’s comprehensive literature on how a fragile and grandiose self-structure defends itself, to the broader literature on ego rigidity and defensive adaptation, this cluster has a coherent internal logic. A self organized around the maintenance of an image, rather than around a stable core, experiences any threat to that image as an existential emergency. Apology becomes impossible, because to apologize is to confirm the crack the whole structure exists to deny. Retreat becomes impossible, because backing down reads as diminishment. Honest confrontation becomes intolerable, because honesty exposes the vulnerability underneath. What remains, when those exits are sealed, is escalation: the growing need to make the threat disappear. I am describing a documented human pattern here, one that appears in kitchens and boardrooms as readily as it does in high office. For this section, I am using one of the shortest chapters from the research-based literature I mentioned earlier, because that chapter helped me understand something much larger than one personality, one relationship, or one political figure. It gave me a more holistic way to think about the humanitarian crisis now spreading across families, institutions, cultures, and nations, as it directly relates to other eastern philosophies that are prevalent and connects the dots so seemlessly it almost makes it easier to understand the shadows behind the performance, which we will discuss eventually for the sake of the length of this op-ed.

And yes, the chapter uses one of the most overused words on social media. But in the literature, the idea is far more nuanced, developmental, and spectrum-specific than the casual label people throw at one another online. Once we reduce another human being to a label, we usually stop investigating the pattern. Worse, we often begin performing the very rigidity we claim to be criticizing.

That is also why I am referencing my very first paper on Academia, The Self-Focus Spectrum: A Developmental, Attachment-Informed Framework for Understanding Narcissistic Phenomena Beyond Labels. The purpose is not to diagnose anyone. The purpose is to explain why labeling is one of the least useful things we can do, especially if we are genuinely trying to understand the crisis we are living through.

Because this is the central claim of the entire piece: the personality may attract the attention, but the pattern is what teaches us where the danger lives.

3. From performance to policy:

The danger is not the pattern itself, which exists harmlessly in millions of people with no power to speak of. The danger is what happens when that pattern sits at the top of a state and begins, subtly at first and then not subtly, to convert personal emotional needs into public policy. This is the hinge on which the whole concern turns, because a leader’s private wounds are their own business right up until the moment those wounds start setting the agenda for everyone else.

Consider a single documented day, because a concrete example does more work than any abstraction. In the space of a few hours, as reported, Trump referred to one foreign leader by the name of an entirely different one, confusing the Ukrainian president with the Russian one during a discussion of their war. In the same stretch, discussing the conflict with Iran, he announced that “we had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan,” a country that has nothing to do with either. He again signaled a determination to seize territory from a NATO ally, and, by the account of the reporting, told more easily disproven falsehoods in a day than perhaps any sitting president in American history.

Now here is where I have to be disciplined, because the temptation is to read those errors as evidence of a specific medical condition, and some observers have gone exactly there. One widely shared summary concluded that the episode was “another reminder to the world that the most powerful office on Earth is now occupied by a man whose physical and mental condition appears to be deteriorating at an alarming speed, leaving the entire planet in harm’s way.” I understand the alarm, and I share the underlying concern, but I want to separate what we can actually stand behind from what we cannot. What is verifiable is the behavior: the confusions, the fabrications, the impulsive territorial claims. Those are on the record.

I would be careful about moving from observable behavior to a confident claim about medical decline, not because the claim is impossible, but because none of us can diagnose a brain from a transcript. And even if we could, the diagnosis itself would not suddenly change the machinery around him: the donors, the enablers, the media incentives, the power structures, and the profit systems that continue to benefit from the chaos.

The moment an op-ed makes the story about diagnosis, it gives skeptical readers an easy exit. They no longer have to engage with the pattern. They can simply dismiss the whole argument as partisan psychiatry. The stronger claim is also the more careful one: whatever the cause, the observable behavior is exactly the behavior we screen against in every other high-stakes role, and that alone is sufficient grounds for concern. We do not need a diagnosis to notice that a pilot is slurring and misreading the instruments. We only need to notice.

The same restraint applies to a second common interpretation, one captured by Heather Delaney Reese, a political writer and commentator on American democracy, and a mother of three, whose work focuses on Trump-era politics, disinformation, and the civic damage produced by reckless leadership.

In one widely shared post, Heather argues that America is watching not only a man who appears to be “physically breaking down” and “mentally unraveling,” but also a presidency increasingly sustained by unelected operators behind the scenes.

I understand the force of that interpretation, and I understand why it resonates. But I would not make medical decline the center of the argument, because the deeper issue is not one man’s possible deterioration. The deeper issue is the machinery that continues to function around him: the donors, loyalists, media incentives, brokers, institutional cowards, and the power and profit systems that keep the spectacle running, even when the spectacle itself appears visibly unstable.

The fear is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Heather Delaney Reese captured that fear in a post about the most scandal-soaked politician in modern American life, a figure whose performances do not end when the cameras turn off, because the consequences keep moving through institutions, families, markets, and the lives of ordinary people.

She wrote:

There should be investigations. Not just into this president, but into every member of Congress who made this possible. Even the ones who are no longer serving and the ones who get voted out in November. We need to understand why they did what they did. Were they being threatened? Were their families being threatened? Were they promised money, positions, or protection? Or are they simply terrible people who wanted access to power and did not care what it cost their country? We need those answers. Because what they did was not a difference of opinion. It was not politics as usual. It was the deliberate abandonment of their oath of office and the willing destruction of the country they swore to serve. There must be accountability. Without it, the next version of this will be worse. And there will be a next version, unless we build the precedent now that what they did can never be done again.

The concern is legitimate. The certainty is not yet earned. And pretending otherwise only weakens the very case it is trying to make.

4. When psychology meets geopolitics:

Zoom out one level, from one man to the international stage, and the stakes of all this stop being abstract. Because when a psychological profile of the kind I have described meets the machinery of geopolitics, the consequences do not stay contained to speeches and gestures. They move through oil, shipping, inflation, and the price of food on ordinary tables thousands of miles away.

Take the confrontation with Iran as the illustration. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a very large share of the world’s seaborne oil passes, is one of those chokepoints where a single escalation can ripple outward into global prices within hours. A leader operating from grievance and the need to appear dominant will tend to measure such a confrontation by a simple and dangerous yardstick: did I look strong, did I hurt them, did I win the moment. But weakening an adversary is not the same thing as winning strategically, and this is where the psychological profile becomes a geopolitical liability rather than merely a personal flaw. A genuinely strategic actor asks what happens next, whether the adversary is now more or less likely to close the strait, whether the disruption to oil pushes inflation back up in the very economy the leader governs, whether the short-term dominance display purchases a long-term instability that lands on the citizens at home as higher prices for gasoline and groceries. The grievance-driven actor does not weigh those second-order effects, because the emotional reward is entirely in the first-order spectacle. This is the difference, in the end, between the temperament that seeks the satisfaction of the moment and the temperament that can defer it for a better outcome later, and it is precisely the temperament we test for everywhere except here.

For the sake of historical sanity, it is worth recalling the foreign-policy temperament associated with Barack Obama, who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Obama understood that the hardest, least glamorous work of diplomacy rarely gives a leader the clean theatre of triumph. Its victories are often invisible. They are measured in wars that did not happen, crises that did not escalate, alliances that did not fracture, and grieving families that never had to learn the price of one man’s performance.

A psychological profile organized around visible dominance cannot easily value that kind of invisible success, because there is no crowd for restraint, no applause for patience, and no humiliation to avenge. And so the very temperament that plays well on a stage may be the temperament least equipped for the patient, low-ego work that actually keeps nations safe.

5. The machine behind the man:

If you read the previous piece in this series, you will recognize that this op-ed is its deliberate companion, and the relationship between the two is the key to both. That earlier piece made the argument that we should stop watching the man and start watching the machine that keeps producing men like him, the incentive structure of outrage economics, attention monopolization, billionaire influence, and institutional capture that rewards a particular kind of behavior no matter who supplies it. That argument still stands, and this one does not contradict it. It completes it.

Read the full piece here:

The American Chaos Subscription Plan.

Where the billionaire class burns the furniture * the conman sells the smoke * And the people pay the invoice.

open.substack.com

Because there are two halves to this problem, and each is incomplete without the other. The earlier op-ed examined the operating system, the environment that selects for grievance, spectacle, and dominance and hands power to whoever performs them best. This op-ed examines the psychological profile capable of thriving inside that system, the particular human wiring that finds the incentives of outrage politics not punishing but rewarding, even nourishing. The machine and the man are not competing explanations. They are a lock and a key. The system creates a niche that rewards a specific psychological profile, and that profile, once installed, reshapes the institutions further in its own image, deepening the niche for the next occupant. Neither the environment alone nor the individual alone accounts for what we are living through. It is the fit between them, the way a certain kind of unstable profile and a certain kind of incentive structure have found each other and locked together, that produces the result.

To watch only the man is to miss the machine. To watch only the machine is to forget that machines still need a particular kind of person to run them.

6. The election is already being shaped:

This is also why the outcome of any election is being determined long before anyone counts a ballot, and I want to state this carefully, because it is easily misheard. I am not making a claim that any election is being rigged in the mechanical sense of altered vote counts. The shaping I am describing is subtler, more legal, and far more powerful than fraud, because it operates on the electorate’s mind rather than on the tally.

Elections are shaped in advance by the emotional and informational environment in which they occur.

* They are shaped by whether people feel afraid, and of whom.

* They are shaped by inflation and the price of groceries, which sour a public mood regardless of cause.

* They are shaped by which identities have been activated against which other identities, by what a war does to the sense of national threat, by how much economic instability has frayed people’s patience, by the level of trust or distrust in institutions, and above all by the media incentives that determine which stories get amplified and which emotional states get cultivated for engagement.

A population that has been kept anxious, outraged, and divided is not neutral clay on election day. It has already been shaped, and the shaping was done by the same forces this series keeps returning to. The votes are counted honestly and the outcome is still substantially determined in advance, not by fraud but by the long, subtle work of conditioning the emotional field in which the votes are cast. Understanding that is the difference between watching democracy as a single dramatic event and understanding it as a climate that is being adjusted continuously, long before the day arrives.

7. Why this matters:

Zoom out to the widest frame, because in the end this is not a story about one country’s politics. It is a story about power itself, and about the kind of creature we are.

Power does not replace personality. It amplifies it. This is the single idea I would most want this op-ed to leave behind, because it reframes everything. We tend to imagine that high office ennobles people, that the weight of responsibility summons a better version of them, and occasionally it does. But far more often, power simply removes the constraints that used to contain a person’s worst tendencies, and grants their unresolved interior a reach it never had before. Every insecurity that was harmless at a small scale becomes consequential at a large one. Every wound that went unhealed in private gets acted out in public, on a stage the size of the world. The petty need for admiration that once made someone exhausting as a colleague can, at the summit of power, distort foreign policy. The inability to tolerate humiliation that once made someone difficult to live with can, when backed by a nation’s power, endanger millions.

Power does not create the self from scratch. It magnifies what was already there.

Which is why psychological maturity is not a private virtue or a matter of taste. In anyone who holds extraordinary power, it is a national security issue, as concrete as any weapons system or defense treaty, because the stability of the person and the stability of everything they touch are the same question at different scales. Most of us who follow American politics have spent the last decade arguing about policies, scandals, personalities, and daily outrages. Those arguments were not wrong, but they may have been aimed one level too low.

The defining public-interest question of this era is not whether we like a particular leader. It is what happens when a society hands enormous power to a personality structure it has never honestly examined. It is whether we are willing to treat the psychological fitness required to hold power as seriously as we treat the fitness required to fly a plane or perform surgery or command an army, and whether we can build institutions and a public culture mature enough to insist on it. We screen the pilot. We screen the surgeon. We screen the people trusted with classrooms, courtrooms, bank accounts, and scalpels. So here is the question this whole op-ed has been circling: why do we still treat it as impolite to psychologically examine the one office powerful enough to end us all, and how much longer can we afford this delicate fiction?

Written independently as behavioural, historical, and geopolitical analysis in the public interest. It is not a clinical diagnosis of any individual, and it does not assert knowledge of anyone’s private medical or mental state; where it discusses psychological patterns, it describes documented general dynamics and observable public behavior.

Specific incidents, figures, and quotations flagged in the text must be confirmed against primary sources before publication. The matters discussed are subjects of legitimate public debate, and readers are encouraged to consult the underlying reporting and form their own conclusions.

The views expressed here draw on behavioural analysis, historical context, and matters of public interest. All references are intended for commentary, critical inquiry, and public discourse protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Thank you for reading, listening, questioning, and staying with difficult truths.

Stay Sharp. Stay Kind.

Peace.

If this work helps you see the pattern more clearly, think more independently, or put language to something you have felt but could not name, you can support it by sharing this Op-Ed with people in your circle who have the patience and courage to look beyond the spectacle and examine the system beneath it.

Thanks for staying with me through this long-form reflection.

Intelligence plus Character, that is the goal of true education.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Some cases scare us because of the violence itself. Others stay with us for a different reason, because they expose something colder than the act alone. The case near Lohagad Fort, where Ketan Agarwal lost his life and police have alleged a planned killing connected to a relationship, belongs to that second category. I am not here to diagnose anyone, pretend to know what was going on inside Sia’s mind, or write as though a verdict already exists.

What I want to examine is the public reaction, because that reaction tells us something important. People are not disturbed only by the alleged act. They are disturbed by the reported details around it: the apparent absence of visible remorse, the reported gesture of defiance, the alleged deception, the protective closing of ranks, and the fact that one of the accused is only 20 years old. That is the part people keep returning to. How can someone so young be linked, even allegedly, to something so calculated?

That word in the title, “self”, is important here, and I am linking it intentionally. In psychological and developmental terms, the self is not formed in isolation. It develops through relationships, attachment, emotional mirroring, boundaries, shame, accountability, and the consequences a person is either taught to face or repeatedly allowed to avoid. Before any individual becomes the subject of public judgment, they have already been shaped by a long history of family dynamics, social expectations, and learned responses to conflict.

Side note for listeners: if you are reading along while listening, feel free to click the links that are included in this op-ed. They are there so you can see the sources, reports, and research that helped shape the framing of this piece.

With that foundation in place, I want to examine 7 ideas that may help explain why this case has disturbed the public so deeply, while keeping the necessary distinction clear: behavioral analysis is not a legal verdict.

1. Youth is not the same as innocence.

The first point is simple, but uncomfortable: being young does not automatically make someone innocent, gentle, or confused. I think that is part of why this case has disturbed people so much. Many of us still want to believe that a 20-year-old is almost a child, still forming, still unsure, still being shaped more than choosing for themselves. There is some truth in that. But it becomes dangerous when we start assuming that youth makes serious wrongdoing impossible. A young adult can still deceive, calculate, harm, and make choices that carry real moral weight.

By 20, a person is not a blank slate awaiting character. They are, in a real sense, already the product of 2 decades of formation. Legally an adult, yes, and morally responsible as one, but also behaviourally the accumulated result of years of emotional conditioning, of every response and non-response that shaped them. The “self” that appears at 20 does not arrive fully formed on a person’s eighteenth birthday. It is built slowly, through relationships, family dynamics, emotional mirroring, boundaries, consequences, and the lessons a child absorbs long before adulthood gives those lessons legal weight. That is why the phrase “but she is so young” does not fully reassure people. In some ways, it makes the question more uncomfortable. If a young adult is capable of serious deception, emotional detachment, or moral collapse, then we are not only looking at one moment of behaviour. We are looking at years of formation that took place before the public ever knew their name.

2. The self is built relationally, not born at 20.

Here the work of the psychoanalyst Daniel Stern is genuinely illuminating, because Stern spent his career showing that the sense of self is not an innate gift but a relational achievement. We are not born with a finished interior. The self forms in the earliest and most ordinary interactions, in the back-and-forth between a child and the people responsible for them, in what gets mirrored back and what gets ignored, in how distress is met, in whether a child’s emotional signals are received and made sense of or left to echo unanswered.

Out of thousands of those small exchanges, a person’s inner architecture takes shape. Attachment teaches whether other people are safe. Parental response teaches whether one’s own feelings are real and manageable. The handling of shame teaches whether a mistake is survivable or catastrophic. Emotional mirroring teaches a child to recognize and name what is happening inside them. Boundaries teach that the world has edges that are not personal attacks. And crucially, the presence or absence of truth, accountability, and consequence teaches a child what happens when they do wrong, whether it is faced and repaired, or hidden and smoothed over. A conscience, in other words, is not installed at birth and it is not chosen in a single dramatic moment. It is built, or left unbuilt, across a childhood, in the specific emotional climate a family creates. This is not a theory that excuses anyone. It is a description of how the machinery of a moral self actually gets assembled, and it applies to all of us.

3. When a family builds a child who fears shame more than guilt.

Now we come to the part that should make every parent sit uncomfortably still, because this is not only about obviously negligent families. It is also about ordinary, loving, well-meaning families that may protect a child from discomfort so often that the child never learns how to face responsibility. There is a profound difference between guilt and shame, and the emotional climate of a family can teach a child which one to fear, which one to avoid, and which one to understand.

Guilt says: I did something wrong, and I must face it and repair it. Guilt is oriented toward the harmed person and toward truth.

Shame says something different and far more dangerous: I will be seen as bad, I will be exposed, others will think less of me.

Shame is oriented not toward the harm but toward the audience. A family can, without any cruelty and often with real love, raise a child who feels shame far more acutely than guilt, a child for whom the unbearable thing is not having done wrong but being caught, being diminished in others’ eyes, damaging the family’s standing. In some homes, and “log kya kahenge” culture can intensify this to a suffocating degree, the worst imaginable outcome is not a wrong done but a reputation lost. What will people say becomes the loudest voice in a child’s head, louder than conscience, louder than empathy.

You can love a child completely and still fail to build accountability into them. These are not opposites; they coexist all the time. Parents who adore their children sometimes protect them from every consequence, smooth over every failure, manage every situation so the child never has to sit in the discomfort of having done wrong and made it right. And here is the tragedy of it: protection without accountability can become a kind of moral injury. A child shielded from all consequence never develops the internal muscle that consequence builds. They learn, instead, that problems are made to disappear, that image is something to be managed, that the goal when something goes wrong is not repair but containment. When image-preservation becomes more important than truth, a person’s whole orientation shifts. And in the most extreme version of that shift, when exposure comes to feel more terrifying than the harm itself, another human being can begin to register not as a person with their own life and dignity, but as an obstacle, a threat to the image, a problem to be managed like any other. That collapse, a person reduced to an inconvenience, is among the darkest things the human mind is capable of, and it does not require a monster to produce it. It can be the end point of an ordinary failure to build a conscience, repeated over years.

4. Why the absence of visible remorse shocks us.

This brings us to the reported detail that seems to disturb people most: the apparent absence of visible remorse and the reported gesture of defiance. We should be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of detail people are tempted to over-read.

A face is not a courtroom. A gesture is not a verdict. People under arrest, surrounded by cameras, fear, shock, pressure, or emotional shutdown, can appear in ways that may not tell us the whole truth about what they actually feel. We should not pretend we can see inside another person’s conscience from a photograph or a few seconds of footage.

But the public reaction is not foolish. People expect that when a human life has been lost, the people connected to that loss should carry some visible weight of it. Some grief. Some fear. Some humility. Some awareness that another family’s world has been destroyed.

When those signals appear absent, people are not only reacting to the case. They are reacting to what looks like a collapse of character.

And if the allegations are proven, then the deeper question is not whether she looked remorseful enough for the cameras. The deeper question is how a person reaches a place where deception, self-protection, and image management can overpower conscience so completely that another human being becomes disposable. That is not simply a legal question. It is a question about moral formation. It is about what happens when a self is shaped without enough truth, accountability, consequence, and empathy. Because when remorse does not arrive where remorse should naturally appear, people are not just disturbed by the crime. They are disturbed by the possibility that the conscience itself was never properly formed.

5. Deception, compartmentalization, and the self that splits.

Part of what unsettles people in cases like this, if the surrounding allegations were ever proven, is the suggestion of deception, the idea that a person could carry on normally while concealing something enormous. Again, I am describing a general human capacity, not asserting what any individual did.

The capacity to compartmentalize, to wall off one part of one’s life or conduct from another, is something the human mind can do to a frankly disturbing degree, and it connects directly to the shame-oriented self I described earlier. A person built around image management becomes practiced, over years, at impression management, at presenting a curated surface while keeping the rest sealed away. Moral disengagement, the psychologist Albert Bandura’s term for the mental mechanisms by which people switch off their own ethical standards in specific situations, allows someone to do or conceal things that their stated values would otherwise forbid, by reframing, minimizing, or simply not letting the two halves of themselves meet. Emotional detachment does the rest, keeping feeling at bay so the surface stays smooth. None of this is exotic or rare. It exists on a spectrum, and most of us do milder versions of it. We manage impressions. We hide discomfort. We avoid shame. We try to control how others see us. But in a self that has been shaped to fear exposure above all else, those ordinary human defenses can harden into something far more dangerous. From the outside, that can look like calm. It can look like control. It can even look like coldness.

That appearance is part of what frightens people. But it should be understood as a possible outcome of emotional formation, not as proof that a person was born without a conscience.

This also connects with one of my independent research papers on the Self-Focus Spectrum, published in Quarter 4 of 2025 on Academia. Readers who want the deeper framework can click the link here.

6. Understanding a cause is not excusing the conduct.

I need to draw a clear line here, because everything I have written so far could be misunderstood as an excuse, and it is not. To explain how a self is formed is not to excuse what that person does. Those are two very different things, and confusing them is a serious moral mistake. Understanding formation helps us ask better questions about family, shame, parenting, protection, and accountability. It does not erase responsibility. It does not soften harm. It does not turn an alleged victim into a footnote in someone else’s psychological story.

If the allegations are proven, then no childhood, no family pressure, no shame, no fear of exposure, and no emotional history can justify the destruction of another human life. Explanation can widen our understanding, but it cannot be allowed to weaken our moral clarity.

Family pressure can explain fear. It cannot excuse the destruction of another human life. A suffocating culture of reputation can explain why a person might feel trapped, unable to simply tell the truth or walk away. It cannot justify eliminating the person who represents the threat. A childhood without accountability can explain how someone arrived at adulthood morally underbuilt. It cannot relieve that adult of responsibility for what they choose. All of these causes are real, and understanding them is how a society prevents the next tragedy. But an adult remains responsible for their conduct even when we can trace, with total clarity, the forces that shaped them.

A person can be young, can be the product of a damaging system, can be genuinely failed by the people who raised them, and can still be fully morally responsible for a grave mistake.

Holding those two truths at once, compassion for how a person was formed and unflinching moral clarity about what they are responsible for, is the mark of a mature society.

Reducing the case in either direction is a failure of moral maturity. If we say “she is a monster,” we stop thinking. If we say “she could not help it,” we stop holding responsibility where it belongs. Both responses are too simple for something this serious. The harder, more honest position is to study the formation without excusing the harm, and to hold the possibility of explanation without surrendering accountability.

7. What children actually need.

So let me end where the real lesson lives, which is not with any accused person but with the rest of us, and with what a case like this should make us reconsider about how we raise human beings.

We often say children need love, comfort, and protection, and of course they do. But that list is incomplete. Children also need truth. They need boundaries. They need consequences they can survive, because that is how accountability begins to form inside them. They need to learn that a mistake can be faced, repaired, and learned from, instead of hidden, denied, or smoothed over by the adults around them. They need to experience discomfort, failure, disappointment, and ordinary consequences, because those are the conditions under which conscience develops. If a child is protected from every difficult feeling, every consequence, and every moment of accountability, that child is not being strengthened. They are being left unprepared for life. Love without truth may feel protective in the moment, but over time it can produce a “self” with no real moral muscle.

The uncomfortable warning underneath cases like this, whatever the court eventually decides about the people involved, is that families, communities, and reputation-obsessed social systems can produce adults who look functional on the outside but remain hollow on the inside. People can learn how to manage appearances long before they learn how to tell the truth. They can learn how to avoid exposure before they learn how to face guilt. They can become more afraid of being seen than of doing harm.

This is not a verdict on Sia Goyal before the courts. It is a mirror for the rest of us, especially for anyone raising children. Are we forming people who can face the truth about themselves, even when it costs them? Or are we raising people who will do almost anything to avoid being exposed?

The first path is difficult, slow, and often uncomfortable. It requires boundaries, discomfort, accountability, and love strong enough to tell the truth. The second path is easier in the moment. It protects the image, avoids the conflict, and keeps the family story intact.

But the cost does not always appear immediately. Sometimes it appears years later, when a name enters the news, a life has been destroyed, and an entire society is left asking how someone so young could have become capable of such devastating harm.

This op-ed is behavioural and social commentary written in the public interest. It concerns general questions of moral development, family systems, and public reaction, and is not a finding about the guilt or innocence of any individual. The matters referenced remain the subject of active legal proceedings; the accused are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law, and specific details should be confirmed against credible reporting.

The views expressed in the Incorrigible Myths series draw on publicly reported real-life case studies, psychological research, historical context, and matters of public interest. All references are used for commentary, critical inquiry, education, and public discourse protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Most people react to outcomes. Very few learn to recognize the forces that create them.

What appears chaotic often becomes predictable when viewed through the right lens.

These Op-Eds are not written to create more noise, certainty, or performance. They are written to recognize patterns, restore context, and trace consequences in a world that too often reacts only after the damage is done.

Thank you for reading, listening, questioning, and staying with difficult truths.

Stay Sharp. Stay Kind.

Peace.

If this work helps you see the pattern more clearly, think more independently, or put language to something you have felt but could not name, you can support it by sharing this message with people in your circle who have the depth, patience, and courage to think honestly about selective empathy, gendered grief, due process, and the moral responsibility to keep justice victim-centered.

For a deeper review of my work, research, audio essays, and long-form commentary, you can explore the following platforms:

Parhate U.

Host of The Gifts of Pure Consciousness

Where psychology meets strategy, and emotion stops running the show.

Research Papers ⟶ independent.academia.edu/UtkarshParhate

World Affairs Audio Essays ⟶ Incorrigible Myths on Spotify

Human Behaviour ⟶ Beyond Labels on Apple Podcast

In-Depth Op-Eds ⟶ incorrigiblemyths.substack.com

Thanks for staying with me through this long-form reflection.

Intelligence plus Character, that is the goal of true education.

Martin Luther King Jr.

When a relationship becomes a place where reality is denied, pressure is normalized, and pain is made private, the way out begins with a record, a boundary, and a lawful path forward.

Let’s begin there, because that single distinction sits at the center of everything I have come to understand, and it is the thing most people misunderstand when they are looking at harm from the outside. When a person who has been harmed decides to go the careful, lawful, documented route instead of the loud one, the world often reads it as weakness, as giving up, as letting the other person off. I have come to believe almost the opposite. Revenge, and even the milder hunger to make the other person publicly admit exactly what they did, keeps you tied to the person who harmed you. It keeps them living in your head, setting your schedule, shaping your decisions, occupying the space where your recovery should be. Documentation, boundaries, and lawful action do something steadier and far more powerful. They build a door, and they let you walk through it with your dignity intact.

Some readers and listeners may not like what I have to say, and I can live with that. The purpose of this work is not to seek approval, validation, or social performance. It is to examine the complexities of human behaviour: the ego defences, coping strategies, self-protective distortions, and emotional survival mechanisms that can gradually destroy families by wearing down the spirit of the people inside them long before anyone else sees the damage. My hope is that someone may recognize the danger earlier, choose a lawful path sooner, and survive with more of themselves intact.

This op-ed comes from years spent studying coercive control, emotional dysregulation, trauma, the repercussions of chronic stress, and the strange machinery of self-protection and image management, alongside lived proximity to situations complex enough to remove any illusion that they are simple. Nothing in this op-ed should be read as legal advice. It is reflection and pattern recognition, written to make one hard-won idea more available to people who may need it: that the legal route, frightening and imperfect as it can be, is often the sanest path out of something that feels impossible to leave.

To understand why the lawful route matters, we first have to understand the emotional trap that makes leaving feel so irrational from the outside and so impossible from the inside. People often ask why someone stayed, why they did not act sooner, why they tolerated the intolerable, but those questions usually miss the machinery underneath the situation. Before we judge the delay, we have to understand the bind.

1. Why people stay when the way out feels impossible.

Let me start with the trap itself, because you cannot talk your way out of a trap you refuse to describe honestly. People stay in destructive, coercive, or collapsing relationships for reasons that are almost never stupidity and almost always fear, and the fears are specific.

There is the fear of court itself, of a system that feels alien and intimidating and built for people with money and lawyers on retainer. There is the fear of cost, the genuine terror that leaving will bankrupt you, that the process will drain every resource you have and leave you worse off than staying. There is the fear of shame, of the family gossip and the community judgment and the sense that a failed relationship is a personal verdict on your worth. There is the fear of not being believed, which for people who have been gaslit for years is not paranoia but a learned expectation. There is the fear of family pressure, of the parents or relatives who will treat your exit as their humiliation. And underneath all of them sits the two fears that do the most damage: the fear that the other person will never cooperate, will never sign, will fight forever, and the fear that the entire process will swallow your life whole and never end.

Those fears are not irrational. Some of them are grounded in real risk. But here is what I have come to see: they compound. Each fear feeds the next until leaving starts to feel not merely hard but genuinely impossible, and impossibility is the exact feeling that keeps a person frozen in place for years, absorbing harm, waiting for a perfect moment that never arrives.

The trap is not only the relationship, the trap is the belief that there is no lawful, survivable way out.

2. The emotional trap inside the legal one.

There is a second, subtler trap waiting for people who have been abused or controlled, and it is worth naming carefully because it catches the most conscientious people hardest. When you have endured something for a long time, you develop a deep, aching need for the whole truth to be recognized. Not part of it. All of it. Every incident, every manipulation, every private cruelty, laid out and acknowledged and named for what it was. That need is completely human, and it is legitimate.

Side note for listeners: if you are reading along while listening, feel free to click the links I have included. They are there so you can see the sources and reports that helped shape the framing of this piece.

With that framing in place, the next distinction becomes essential: emotional truth and legal reality are not the same thing. Emotional truth asks for recognition, acknowledgment, and moral clarity. Legal reality usually asks for evidence, procedure, timing, jurisdiction, and strategy. When those two needs collide, a person can feel unseen all over again, even while they are finally trying to do things the right way.

But the legal system is frequently not built to satisfy that need, at least not all at once, and certainly not at the first stage. A legal process has narrow objectives and specific mechanisms, and it often cannot, and will not, validate your entire emotional history on demand. For someone carrying years of unacknowledged harm, that mismatch can feel like a second injury, as though the system itself is telling you that what happened did not matter. I want to say clearly: that feeling is understandable, and it is also navigable. The gap between what you need emotionally and what the process is designed to deliver is real, but it is not a wall. It is something a person can walk through with maturity, if someone helps them understand that the two things, emotional truth and legal strategy, are not the same thing and were never supposed to be.

3. What a calmer legal strategy is actually doing.

This is the part I most want people to understand, because it is the part that looks like betrayal and is in fact the opposite. Sometimes a lawyer will advise the more strategic route, a separation-based path, for instance, rather than a contested moral battle over everything that was done. To a person who has suffered, that advice can feel almost insulting, as if the abuse is being moved to the margins when, emotionally, it sits at the center of everything.

It usually is not. The calmer route is frequently not a denial that the harm mattered. It is a separation of the immediate legal objective from the emotional need to prove every painful detail right now. The reasoning tends to run like this: the first goal is often simply to get legally unstuck, to secure your freedom and stability, rather than to win a total moral verdict at the opening stage.

This distinction is crucial because when people do not see a lawful way out, the emotional and psychological pressure can become unbearable. I wrote more about the extreme consequences of that pressure in my July 05, 2026 piece on Atul Subhash, where the absence of a survivable exit becomes part of the larger tragedy.

I have included the links so you can choose the format that works best for you: read the piece on Substack or Medium if you want to follow the text, or listen to the audio narration on Spotify if that is easier.

A more practical path can be less expensive, less likely to detonate into a years-long contested war, and less vulnerable to being dragged out by the other side. The harder facts, the coercion, the isolation, the monitoring, the psychological or physical harm, do not vanish because they are not made the immediate battleground. They can often be preserved, documented, kept as background, and brought forward if and when they become necessary. And in some legal systems and circumstances, a lawful process may still move forward even when the other person refuses to cooperate. For someone trapped by fear, that knowledge can be life-changing, because it challenges one of the deepest beliefs that keeps people frozen: the belief that their freedom depends entirely on the person who harmed them.

Choosing the simpler route, in other words, does not mean the abuse did not matter. It means you have decided that getting free comes first, and that you will not hand the person who harmed you the power to turn your exit into a decade of warfare. That is not weakness. That is strategy, and strategy in service of your own rescue is one of the most self-respecting things a person can do.

Often the real obstacle turns out not to be the grand question of proving guilt at all. It is something more practical and more solvable: how to serve documents, how to assemble records that are missing, how to move through fear and confusion, how to simply learn what steps are even possible. A great deal of what keeps people stuck is not the impossibility of the situation but the absence of a map.

4. Why this matters far beyond one household.

I want to widen the lens, because this is not only an intimate crisis. It is a social one, and the stakes are higher than most people realize.

When people do not know how to leave a destructive relationship safely, the pressure does not disappear. It builds, and it finds other outlets, and some of those outlets are catastrophic. Conflicts that might have ended through a measured, lawful separation instead curdle into family wars that consume everyone involved. Shame, revenge, unregulated emotion, enforced silence, and social pressure combine into something volatile, and we have all seen, in the news across many countries, where that volatility can end. Relationships that collapsed without a mature exit have escalated into years of ruinous litigation, into estrangement that fractures whole families, and in the worst and most tragic cases into violence and death. When someone feels trapped, and no one has shown them a dignified way out, their mind can start looking for dangerous answers. In that state, revenge, disappearance, self-destruction, or violence can begin to feel like the only options left, even when safer and more lawful paths still exist. When a society fails to teach people how to leave safely, lawfully, and with support, it allows fear, silence, and emotional collapse to make decisions that no stable mind would choose.

This is exactly why legal literacy is not a dry technical subject. It is closer to a form of harm prevention. The more people understand that lawful, documented exit is genuinely possible, the fewer of them will be driven toward the ruinous alternatives, revenge, panic, escalation, or the slow surrender of simply staying. Emotional maturity and legal literacy, taught together, can keep some conflicts from ever reaching the point of no return.

5. What families should do, and what they should stop doing.

Families occupy a decisive position in all of this, and they can tip it in either direction. Too often, when someone tries to leave a bad relationship, the people around them make it worse, not out of malice but out of their own ego, their own fear of shame, their own investment in reputation or in how things will look. They inflame. They shame the person for failing. They push for revenge, or they push for silence, and either push can be dangerous.

The more useful role is less dramatic and far more valuable. Families can help with the practical scaffolding: gathering documents, keeping records, and providing a stable place to stand. They can offer emotional grounding rather than emotional fuel, steadiness rather than panic, and patience rather than pressure. The goal is not to win a family war or to defend the family’s honor. The goal is to help a human being exit a harmful situation with their dignity and their stability intact. A family that understands this becomes a person’s greatest asset in the hardest season of their life. A family that does not can become one more force the person has to survive.

6. What this series will explore.

This op-ed is the first in a series, and I want to be clear about what it will and will not be. In the pieces ahead, I intend to work through case studies, some drawn from publicly documented and reported situations, others anonymized and generalized, that illuminate the patterns I have been describing: coercive control, emotional abuse, family pressure, the fear of the legal system, separation anxiety, the practical problems of documentation and service, concerns around protection and safety, and the slow machinery of relational breakdown.

Where I refer to real, public cases, including cases from India or elsewhere that have appeared in the news, they will be described carefully as reported allegations rather than proven facts, without treating accusation as guilt. Those references exist only to illustrate why emotional dysregulation, family pressure, relational collapse, and the absence of mature exits can become socially dangerous. The purpose of this series is pattern recognition, not gossip. It is meant to educate without claiming legal authority, and to prevent harm without turning human suffering into spectacle. If a single reader recognizes their own situation more clearly and finds one real, lawful step they did not know was available, the series will have done its work.

7. A way out with Dignity.

The legal route will not satisfy the hunger for immediate emotional justice. It is worth being honest about that. It can be slow, it can be costly, it can be uncertain, and it will rarely, at least at first, give you the full public acknowledgment of everything you endured. But it can offer something more useful than vindication: a way out. And a way out, with your dignity and your stability intact, is worth more than a verdict that keeps you chained to the person who harmed you.

If more people learn to document harm, set boundaries, and seek a lawful exit before revenge, chaos, and emotional warfare take over, fewer families may be destroyed by conflicts that nobody around them knew how to de-escalate in time. That is the whole hope behind this work. Not to tell anyone what to feel, and certainly not to tell anyone what the law is in their particular situation, but to make the idea of a dignified, lawful exit feel real and reachable to people who have been told, or have come to believe, that no such thing exists for them. It does. And knowing it exists is sometimes the first step out.

A note on safety: nothing in this op-ed is a safety plan, and general encouragement is not a substitute for expert help. For anyone in a genuinely dangerous situation, please know that the period around leaving an abuser can be the most dangerous time of all, and it should be navigated with qualified local support, not alone. Reach out to a domestic-violence service, a qualified lawyer, or emergency authorities in your area, who can help you plan for safety as well as for paperwork.

This op-ed is personal reflection and legal-literacy commentary from someone trying to understand these patterns, not from someone practicing law. It is not legal advice. Anyone facing abuse, separation, divorce, threats, or safety concerns should speak with a qualified lawyer, local support services, or emergency authorities where appropriate.

The views expressed here draw on behavioural analysis, historical context, and matters of public interest. All references are intended for commentary, critical inquiry, and public discourse protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Most people react to outcomes. Very few learn to recognize the forces that create them.

What appears chaotic often becomes predictable when viewed through the right lens.

These Op-Eds are not written to create more noise, certainty, or performance. They are written to recognize patterns, restore context, and trace consequences in a world that too often reacts only after the damage is done.

Thank you for reading, listening, questioning, and staying with difficult truths.

Stay Sharp. Stay Kind.

Peace.

If this work helps you see the pattern more clearly, think more independently, or put language to something you have felt but could not name, you can support it by sharing this message with people in your circle who have the depth, patience, and courage to think honestly about selective empathy, gendered grief, due process, and the moral responsibility to keep justice victim-centered.

Thanks for staying with me through this long-form reflection.

Intelligence plus Character, that is the goal of true education.

Martin Luther King Jr.

I keep returning to one uncomfortable fact: my study began before he died, but it was not fully formed when he needed it.

In March 2023, I began studying relationship patterns, ego, emotional regulation, coercive control, abuse dynamics, evidence, legal process, and the strange ways people lose themselves inside intimate relationships long before any court, family member, therapist, or friend knows what is happening.

By September 2024, when my 32-year-old friend died, I had already started seeing certain patterns more clearly, but I did not yet have enough practical language, data, or confidence to explain them in a way that could have reached him. I was roughly 40% through the book I had begun. That number sits with me in a way I do not know how to soften.

I am not writing this because I think knowledge can undo death. I am writing it because knowledge may still interrupt confusion for someone who is alive.

This Op-ed is not a court finding about my friend, his marriage, or any named person. It is not legal advice. It is not therapy. It is written as legal literacy, psychological reflection, and social commentary about a pattern many people experience but do not know how to name until too much damage has already been done. I am writing partly in memory of a friend who did not get the chance to understand this language while he was alive, and partly for the person who may still be inside a relationship where their body already knows something their mind has not yet been allowed to admit. I am also writing with his mother in mind. When I speak to her, I often find myself helplessly listening to a grieving parent’s demand for justice, not because I have the power to give it to her, but because the stories she has shared with me have only deepened my understanding of the gap that exists between suffering and legal remedy. There are families who lose a child and then have to learn, in the middle of grief, how evidence works, how jurisdiction works, how lawyers work, how money works, how language works, and how slowly justice can move when the people asking for it are already exhausted.

That is part of my regret too. My friend died before I had this framework fully formed. I cannot say that knowledge would have changed his ending, but I can say that the absence of language leaves people dangerously alone inside patterns they do not yet know how to name. And after death, that absence becomes even more brutal for the family left behind. His parents are not only grieving their son; they are also trying to understand how to fight for him in a system they may not fully understand, in a country where they may not know the process, the vocabulary, the cost, or even the first legal step to take.

So yes, I hope this Op-Ed reaches someone beyond the usual audience. I hope it reaches a lawyer, an advocate, or someone with the knowledge and conscience to help grieving parents who have not had a fair chance to understand how to seek justice for their son in the United States. They may not have the legal vocabulary, emotional energy, time, money, or institutional support to carry this alone. If this piece does anything useful, I hope it gives language to the living, dignity to the dead, and perhaps a small opening for a family still standing in the unbearable space between loss and justice.

Side note for listeners: if you are reading along while listening, feel free to click the links I have included. They are there so you can see the sources and reports that helped shape the framing of this piece.

By the end of this Op-Ed, I want the reader to understand five things more clearly: how coercive control hides inside ordinary relationship conflict, why victims often stay longer than their body can afford, how reactions can be weaponized while the pattern that produced them remains invisible, why legal systems need evidence even when emotional truth feels obvious, and why learning this language early may help someone protect their peace before confusion becomes collapse.

Let’s go deeper.

What I want to walk through now is the unnamed playbook that plays out inside homes, marriages, families, therapy rooms, and legal files, often without anyone having the language to identify it early enough. This is the language many of us should have been taught before love, marriage, family pressure, and legal fear became impossible to separate. Learning it will not undo what has already happened, but it may help someone recognize the pattern sooner, document more clearly, ask better questions, and leave before their body has to become the final witness.

Coercive control is difficult to explain because it rarely arrives as one clean incident. It arrives as a pattern. Pressure, blame, confusion, isolation, provocation, apology, hope, and another round of the same emotional machinery. A person may be slowly made to doubt their own reality. They may be blamed for reactions that were provoked over months or years. They may be told they are unstable, selfish, cruel, ungrateful, too sensitive, too angry, too weak, too suspicious, too dramatic, or too difficult to love. By the time they finally react, the reaction becomes the evidence everyone can see. The pattern that produced it stays hidden.

That is where coercive control becomes legally and emotionally dangerous. The person living inside the pattern may know something is wrong, but they may not know what kind of wrong it is. They may think marriage is supposed to be hard. They may think love means endurance. They may think patience will eventually heal the other person’s cruelty. They may think keeping the family together is more honorable than telling the truth. They may think leaving is failure. They may think documenting is betrayal. They may think asking for help will make them look weak, especially if they are men.

Many people do not stay because they are foolish. They stay because they are human. They stay because of love, fear, hope, shame, children, money, family pressure, immigration pressure, cultural expectations, legal confusion, guilt, reputation, and the terrifying question of what happens after the door closes behind them. Some stay because they are overgivers. Some stay because their ego is underdeveloped and their identity depends on being needed. Some stay because they were trained from childhood to keep peace by abandoning themselves. Some stay because they are waiting for the good version of the partner to return permanently, not realizing that the good version may be part of the cycle.

This is why the dynamic cannot be reduced to “good person versus bad person.” A controlling partner can drive a sane man or woman into reactions that do not reflect their deeper character. The person who was once patient becomes sharp. The person who was once generous becomes suspicious. The person who was once calm becomes panicked. The person who once believed in conversation begins recording, documenting, defending, explaining, and overexplaining. Then the controlling partner holds up the victim’s distress and says, “See? This is the problem.”

A pattern is not always visible from one screenshot. A marriage is not understood from one argument. The court may ask for evidence long after the body has already been keeping score.

This is where legal literacy becomes essential. Feelings are real, but legal systems often need proof. A court may not ask, “How did your soul feel after four years of being minimized?” It may ask for dates, messages, records, witnesses, financial documents, medical notes, police reports, therapy records, timelines, corroboration, and evidence of repeated conduct. The tragedy is that most people begin documenting only after they are already exhausted. By then, the body has been living inside the evidence for years, but the file is empty.

Documentation is not revenge. Documentation is memory with a timestamp.

For someone experiencing coercive control, documentation may include a dated journal of incidents, screenshots of messages, call logs, financial records, medical notes, witness names, patterns of isolation, threats, humiliation, sleep disruption, monitoring, forced apologies, public image management, and the emotional or physical impact of each incident. The point is not to create a dramatic archive of suffering. The point is to build a clear record before confusion becomes the other person’s strongest weapon.

Recordings must be handled with extreme caution. Laws differ by country, state, and province. In Canada, Criminal Code section 184 contains a one-party consent exception for private communications in certain circumstances, but legality, admissibility, privacy, and family-law consequences are different questions Click the criminal Code of Canada, section 184 to learn more. Before relying on recordings, anyone in a legal dispute should ask a qualified lawyer in their jurisdiction how to preserve evidence properly. Safety comes first. A recording is not worth escalating danger.

The psychological part is just as important. A coercive person may not always look cruel. They may look calm, professional, charming, reasonable, victimized, emotionally wounded, or socially impressive. They may perform well in front of therapists, families, lawyers, or friends. Meanwhile, the person carrying the stress may look anxious, reactive, inconsistent, angry, or confused. That is one of the cruelest reversals in these dynamics: the person causing the instability may appear stable because they are not carrying the same internal cost.

Therapy can also fail when coercive control is present. If one partner lies convincingly, reframes events, provokes privately and performs publicly, the therapist may begin treating the victim’s distress as the main problem. The victim enters therapy hoping reality will finally have a witness. Instead, they may leave with more shame, more confusion, and another professional language being used against them.

This is why I keep thinking about the body. The body does not wait for a court date before it starts recording stress. Chronic stress can affect sleep, appetite, digestion, memory, blood pressure, focus, immunity, and emotional regulation. Long-term activation of the stress response and exposure to cortisol and other stress hormones can disrupt many body processes and increase risk for serious health problems, according to Mayo Clinic’s overview of chronic stress and health . That does not mean we should say “cortisol killed him” or reduce any individual death to a hormone. Cortisol is not a courtroom verdict. It is one part of the body’s stress language, and that language deserves to be taken seriously before it becomes a crisis.

For men, the problem becomes heavier because many men are not taught to name fear, humiliation, coercion, or relational helplessness without feeling weak. A man may be allowed to be angry before he is allowed to be scared. He may be allowed to provide before he is allowed to collapse. He may be allowed to fight a case before he is allowed to say, “I am being emotionally destroyed.” When a man cannot name fear without shame, his body may become the first witness and the last witness.

This is where the public cases matter, but they must be handled carefully.

Click the below link to learn about Atul Subhash.

Atul Subhash’s was a 34-year-old Bengaluru tech professional who died by suicide in December 2024 after leaving behind a note and video alleging harassment by his estranged wife and her family.

is wife and some family members were arrested in an abetment-to-suicide case, according to public reporting, while legal proceedings and counter-claims have also been reported Click the NDTV link to learn more, Additional information available on India Today. The case later continued into legal questions around whether alleged harassment by a wife could amount to abetment of suicide, as reported in relation to Karnataka High Court proceedings detailed in Indian Express reporting.

A suicide note is not a court judgment, but it is still a document society should read with moral seriousness. The relevance of Atul Subhash’s case is not that every allegation in his final note should be treated as legally proven. The relevance is that his death forced India to confront a question it often avoids: what language, evidence, and institutional care exist for a man who says he is being psychologically and legally crushed?

That question does not cancel women’s suffering. It does not deny dowry harassment, domestic violence, marital cruelty, or the need for laws that protect women. It asks for moral consistency. If the purpose of law is protection, then the law must also be able to detect when process itself becomes part of the pressure. Allegations, counter-allegations, maintenance disputes, child access, family pressure, public shame, and repeated court dates can become the environment in which a person is trying to survive. A legal system that handles intimate relationships must be capable of recognizing genuine abuse, false claims, coercion, manipulation, reactive behavior, evidentiary gaps, and psychological collapse without making gender the only lens.

Ketan Agarwal’s case belongs in a different legal category and should not be forced into this framework. Public reporting says Ketan Agarwal, a young Pune realtor, died after a fall at Lohagad Fort, and the case is being investigated as an alleged murder involving his fiancee and another accused person Click on this NDTV link for more information. That case should be left to the courts. But it widens the moral question. Why do young men in relationship contexts often become visible to society only after death? Why does vulnerability have to arrive as evidence before it is taken seriously?

This brings me back to marriage itself. I do not believe the problem is simply that marriages no longer work. That explanation is too lazy. Often, two people do not understand themselves, and because they do not understand themselves, they cannot understand each other. A marriage requires regulation, repair, empathy, boundaries, truth, and the ability to build love under pressure. Lack of money, difficult in-laws, distance from family, instability, cultural pressure, and uncertainty can strain a marriage, but two self-aware people can still create a strategy for repair. Coercive control is different because one person is not trying to build peace. They are trying to preserve power.

A partner is supposed to help you become more whole, and you are supposed to do the same. A relationship should not require the burial of your truth. Love cannot mean becoming an emotional supply for someone else’s false self. Peace is not a luxury. It is information from the body.

If there is one practical message here, it is this: learn the language early. Learn the pattern before the pattern becomes your personality. Learn documentation before your memory is challenged. Learn legal process before fear makes every option feel impossible. Learn the difference between a bad fight and a repeated system of control. Learn that leaving is sometimes not hatred; sometimes it is the first honest act after years of self-abandonment.

Some people do not need another motivational quote. They need a timeline, a lawyer, a record, a witness, and a language for what their body already knows.

I cannot say knowledge would have changed my friend’s ending. That would be too arrogant, too easy, and too cruel to the mystery of a life. But I can say this: the absence of knowledge makes some people stay longer than their body can afford. He died before I had the language fully formed, and that is the part that still sits with me.

So I am writing this for the person who still has time. The person who is confused but not yet gone. The person who keeps explaining pain to someone committed to misunderstanding it. The person who thinks endurance is proof of love. The person who has not started documenting because they still hope they will never need evidence.

Your soul deserves peace, but the legal system may ask for proof. Learn both languages before the body is forced to speak for you.

The views expressed in this research series, articles, podcasts, and related media are based on publicly available information, behavioural analysis, historical context, and matters of public interest. All references are intended for commentary, critical inquiry, and public discourse protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Most people react to outcomes. Very few learn to recognize the forces that create them.

Politics, power, conflict, and public behaviour rarely emerge from nowhere. Reactions reveal motivations. Systems reveal incentives. Leadership reveals psychology.

What appears chaotic often becomes predictable when viewed through the right lens.

This is not about noise, certainty, or performance. It is about recognizing: pattern, context, and consequences.

Thank you for reading, listening, questioning, and staying with a difficult subject.

Stay sharp. Stay kind.

Peace.

And please, do what you need to do to feel regulated again.

Seriously.

Step away from the noise when you need to. The outrage machine will still be running tomorrow. So will the gender wars. So will the comment sections. So will the people who turn every tragedy into a weapon before they have even understood the wound.

A lot of people are mentally exhausted right now, even if they do not openly admit it. Too much stimulation. Too much division. Too much fear, anger, pressure, judgment, and nonstop information hitting the nervous system every single day.

You do not need to carry the weight of every tragedy at once.

Go outside. Talk to people you love. Read something meaningful. Breathe properly. Get some sleep. Reconnect with the parts of yourself that existed before algorithms, outrage, selective empathy, legal confusion, and emotional overload started competing for your attention.

Most importantly, do not lose your humanity while trying to understand human cruelty.

This article is not asking anyone to hate women, defend men blindly, attack marriage, or turn pain into ideology. It is asking for legal literacy, emotional honesty, better evidence, better language, and a more morally serious way of seeing victims before their suffering becomes a headline.

We need more regulated human beings right now, not more emotionally reactive ones.

We are all trying to understand this together, and understanding may be the first honest act left in a time built to keep us confused, divided, and morally selective.

If this work helps you see the pattern more clearly, think more independently, or put language to something you have felt but could not name, please share it with people in your circle who have the depth, patience, and courage to think honestly about coercive control, male vulnerability, selective empathy, due process, and the responsibility to keep justice victim-centered.

Author’s Bio:

Parhate U. Where psychology meets strategy, and emotion stops running the show. The Whistleblower from Canada, asking the moral questions most people avoid.

Roots: India.

Research: Academia.edu

YouTube: The Gifts of Pure Consciousness

Podcast: Beyond Labels (Apple) and Incorrigible Myths (Spotify)

Essays/Op-Eds: incorrigiblemyths.substack.com

Thanks for staying with me through this long-form reflection.

Intelligence plus Character, that is the goal of true education.

— Martin Luther King Jr.

According to Rep. Jared Huffman and House Natural Resources Committee Democrats, the 250th anniversary may have been routed through a private shadow entity built to move money, hide donors, sell access, and harvest your data. The fireworks are not the story. The machinery behind them is.

On the 4th of July, you are going to stand on a lawn somewhere, tilt your head back, and watch the sky fill with red, white, and blue, and it is going to feel like something. It is supposed to. 250 years is a genuine milestone, paid for by every generation that built this place, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to celebrate it. But while you are looking up at the fireworks, I want you to understand that the fireworks are not the story. The machinery behind the fireworks is the story, and according to a sitting member of Congress who spent the last year digging into it, that machinery may have been wired to a private political cash register.

I am not the one making the accusation, so let me be precise about where it comes from, because precision is the whole point here. Representative Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee and a lawyer by training, has laid out, in detail, what he and the committee’s Democrats say they found. And a careful legal adult does not casually stand in front of a camera and shout “crime.”

What Huffman reportedly said instead is that the elements of fraud appear to be present, which is roughly as close as a cautious lawyer gets to saying something smells like wire fraud without a jury already seated in the room. I am going to walk you through what he alleges. None of it has been proven in court. All of it deserves your attention right now, because the legal question belongs to investigators and the moral question belongs to you, today, before you are asked to cheer.

1. The birthday that was supposed to belong to everyone:

Start with how this was meant to work, because the contrast is the entire scandal. Back in 2016, Congress did something it almost never does anymore: Republicans and Democrats agreed on something. They created a commission called America250 to plan the anniversary, and, according to Huffman, they built it to be nonpartisan on purpose, precisely so that no president, of either party, could ever seize the country’s birthday and make it his own. That was the safeguard. Somebody, years ago, had the foresight to see this exact danger coming and to build a fence against it.

The commission was well underway, Huffman says, doing the unglamorous work of planning festivals and civic events meant to bring the country together around its founding. And then, by his account, Donald Trump decided he wanted something different. Not a shared national milestone, but a celebration he could bend toward his own political, financial, and personal purposes. The first move, according to the committee, was the direct one: an attempt to take over America250 itself, with a Trump appointee to the commission teaming up with the Speaker of the House to push four sitting commissioners out and replace them with loyalists. When that failed, Huffman alleges, they did not give up. They simply built a shadow.

2. The Shadow Birthday Machine:

They call it Freedom 250, and the structure is the part that should make the hair on your neck stand up, because structure is where intent hides. On paper, Huffman says, it is a shell company registered in Delaware through the same anonymous vendor the president uses for his other businesses. That alone would be unremarkable. What makes it different, according to the committee, is where they tucked it: inside the National Park Foundation, the charity that has funded America’s national parks for half a century.

Sit with why anyone would do that, because it is not an accident of paperwork. Lodged inside a trusted, decades-old charity, Huffman alleges, the entity could take in enormous sums of money without ever disclosing who gave it or where it came from. That is the whole trick, if his account holds. It lets you sell access, collect checks from anyone willing to write one, and keep every donor’s name a secret, all of it wearing the borrowed respectability of an institution Americans have trusted for fifty years. This is not patriotism. If the committee’s description is accurate, this is a private billing department wearing the flag as a costume.

And then, Huffman says, they starved the real thing. Congress had set aside a hundred and fifty million dollars for the anniversary, and the official America250 commission was reportedly promised a hundred million of it. Instead, according to the committee, the White House told the America250 chairwoman in November 2025 that she would get 59, and over the following months whittled that down to 25, while the rest flowed toward Freedom 250. Between that and other redirected funds, Huffman alleges, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are now unaccounted for. Read that again. Not misspent, not debated. Unaccounted for.

3. Follow the money, then follow the access:

Here is where, in Huffman’s telling, it gets worse, because money is only half of it. The deeper concern he raises is not that corporations donated. It is what he says they may have been buying. According to the committee, Freedom 250 went after the official commission’s corporate sponsors and offered them something more than a warm civic feeling: access to the president in exchange for cash.

Huffman names the donors he says were involved, Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, Chevron, MasterCard, United Airlines, UnitedHealth, and makes the point that hangs over all of them. Most of these are companies actively lobbying the same government, seeking contracts and favorable regulation from it, and now, he alleges, being sold special proximity to the man at the top of it. He adds a detail that would be almost comic if it were not so brazen: that as those checks were written, the president was posting their stock ticker symbols online, effectively talking up the share prices of his own donors.

It reportedly went international, too. The CEO of Freedom 250, according to Huffman, flew to Davos and stood in front of a room of foreign governments to ask them, in his own words, how they wanted to “shape” America’s birthday. Foreign governments, invited to shape the 250th anniversary of American independence. He called it “marketing freedom.” I would call it something with fewer syllables, but I will let you supply the word yourself.

4. The possible fraud, in plain English:

Now the sharpest allegation, and the one where the language has to stay exact. According to a whistleblower cited by the committee, not everyone who donated even knew where their money was going. Huffman alleges that fundraisers misled donors who intended to support the official, nonpartisan America250 commission by handing them Freedom 250’s banking information instead, so that contributions meant for the public commission were routed to the private entity. That maneuver, a donor thinking they are giving to one thing while their money lands in another, is what Huffman characterizes as potential wire fraud.

I want to be careful and clear here, because this is the part that matters most and the part most easily overstated. Whether any of this meets the legal definition of fraud is not for me to declare and not for you to decide from a lawn on the Fourth of July. That is a question for investigators, prosecutors, and if it comes to it, a jury. But the moral question does not require a courtroom, and it does not require waiting. If donors were misled, if public money was diverted, if a national birthday was turned into an access auction, then the wrongness of that is already visible in daylight, whatever a court eventually rules about its precise legal name.

5. Your registration became political data:

Here is the part that reaches past the donors and the executives and touches ordinary families directly, and it is the part I most want you to feel. Freedom 250 has been collecting more than money, Huffman alleges. According to the committee, its website runs through a company owned by Brad Parscale, the president’s longtime digital strategist. Which means, Huffman says, that every American who signs up for a supposedly free event, including the families who registered for the World Cup fan zone on the National Mall, hands over a name, a location, and a phone number that feeds straight into a political targeting operation.

Think about what that means in human terms. A family signs up to take their kids to a free birthday celebration for their country. They think they are attending a party. According to Huffman, they may in fact be walking into a voter-profiling funnel, their contact information gets absorbed into a political machine built to target them later. They came to celebrate America and, if the allegation holds, they left as a data point in one man’s campaign apparatus. That is not a civic event. That is bait.

6. They sanitized the memory:

While all of this was happening behind the stage, Huffman alleges, the people out front were being ordered to erase the country’s actual history. According to the committee, park rangers, public servants, were given instructions to take down factual signs about slavery, about climate change, about the forced removal of Native Americans, and to replace them with a sanitized, distorted version of the American story. Taxpayer money, Huffman says, roughly ten million dollars of it, paid for a fleet of trucks running PragerU videos and an AI-generated George Washington that tells schoolchildren their rights are a gift from God, a thing the actual Washington never said, parked in front of schools on the public’s dime.

A mature country does not celebrate its birthday by deleting its own memory. The whole point of turning 250, if it means anything, is that a nation old enough and secure enough can look at all of itself, the achievements and the atrocities, and still choose to move forward honestly. A country that can only celebrate by scrubbing the uncomfortable parts off the signage is not confident. It is afraid of its own reflection, and it is teaching its children to be afraid too.

7. Christian nationalism in birthday wrapping paper:

There is a religious dimension to this, and I want to handle it with care, because it is easily misheard. This is not an attack on Christians or on faith. It is a warning about the state using a public, pluralistic civic celebration to privilege one religious-political identity over everyone else’s. According to Huffman, the committee found an internal playbook calling for scripture readings and worship nights on the National Mall as official birthday programming, and documents suggesting that for the organizers, this anniversary was never really about America at all. It was about promoting two things: Christian nationalism and Donald Trump.

The founders America is supposedly celebrating included a man, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about a wall of separation between church and state. What Huffman describes is a deliberate battering ram aimed at that wall, an attempt to fuse a particular strain of Christian identity with national identity itself, to insist that the country’s laws and rights flow from one religion’s scripture rather than from the revolutionary and genuinely radical principle of self-government. You do not have to be irreligious to find that alarming. You only have to believe that a country belongs to all of its people, including the ones who pray differently or not at all.

8. The pattern, and the party on the South Lawn:

None of this is new behavior. It is the same pattern this country has watched for years, now pointed at its own birthday: spectacle out front, access and money in the back, loyalty demanded, history rewritten, and every public institution slowly bent into a mirror for one man. The committee’s account includes the detail that crystallizes it: sponsorship packages and photo opportunities with the president reportedly offered at ten million dollars each, and a UFC ring built on the South Lawn of the White House, not for the Fourth of July, but for the president’s own 80th birthday, with seats reportedly running a million and a half dollars and going to executives from the very companies his government is supposed to regulate. The public-money gravy train, according to Huffman’s report, also stopped at Event Strategies, Inc., the Trumpworld event firm tied to the January 6 rally machinery and now allegedly collecting anniversary-related federal contracts.

And when the committee’s Democrats tried to investigate, Huffman says, the Republican majority, which holds far more oversight power than they do, used that power to do the opposite of oversight: blocking requests, shielding the entities involved, and refusing to hold a single hearing. That refusal is its own kind of answer. Oversight that will not look is not neutral. It is a choice about who gets protected.

9. The real danger is the trained shrug:

Here is the part that keeps me up, and it is not any single allegation on the list. It is how many Americans have been trained to shrug when corruption arrives wrapped in red, white, and blue.

That is the deeper scam, underneath all the others. A country does not lose itself only through invasion or some dramatic coup with tanks in the street. Sometimes it loses itself slowly, through sponsorship packages and donor secrecy and data harvesting and fake history, and through a population so exhausted, so tribalized, so entertained and emotionally wrung out that it no longer has the energy to care. This is how a public conscience gets hijacked, and it is almost elegant in its cruelty: distract people with spectacle, frighten them with enemies, exhaust them with daily chaos, and then move the money while everyone is staring at the sky. The fireworks are not just a celebration in that design. They are the anesthesia. If the reaction to all of this is a tired national shrug, then the people who built this machine will have learned exactly what they wanted to learn, which is that it works, and that they can do it again to the next thing you love.

10. What sane Americans have to ask now:

So before you cheer, ask the questions the spectacle is designed to keep you from asking. Who paid? Who benefited? Who got the access? Who got your data? Who rewrote the history on the signs in your own parks? Who blocked the oversight that might have answered these questions? Who turned a public birthday, paid for by every generation that came before you, into a private machine? And maybe the sharpest one of all: why are Americans being asked to cheer before they are allowed to know?

The question was never whether Americans love their country. Most of them love it fiercely, and that love is exactly what is being exploited here. The real question is whether they love it enough to notice when someone is quietly stealing the stage, the money, the memory, and the meaning, all at once, and counting on the fireworks to keep everyone looking the other way.

America belongs to the people. Not to a president, not to anonymous donors, not to a shell company in Delaware, not to the corporate sponsors buying proximity to power, not to the mythmakers trying to rewrite the founding into a religious tract, and not to any political project that needs this much secrecy to survive. Two hundred and fifty years ago the founders made exactly that claim: that this country belongs to its people and not to powerful men who would rule it as their own. The birthday is almost here. The fireworks will fade by morning. The receipts should not.

America’s birthday should never have become one man’s throne room. It was always supposed to be a mirror. There is still time to look into it.

This essay is based on publicly available reporting, statements, and committee materials, including allegations made by Representative Jared Huffman and House Natural Resources Committee Democrats. Those allegations should be verified against current source documents, and they have not been established as fact in any court. All individuals and entities named are entitled to the presumption of innocence. This is commentary and public-interest analysis, not a legal finding.

The views expressed here draw on behavioural analysis, historical context, and matters of public interest. All references are intended for commentary, critical inquiry, and public discourse protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Thank you for reading, listening, questioning, and staying with difficult truths.

Stay Sharp. Stay Kind.

Peace.

If this work helps you see the pattern more clearly, think more independently, or put language to something you have felt but could not name, you can support it by sharing this message with people in your circle who have the depth, patience, and courage to think honestly about selective empathy, gendered grief, due process, and the moral responsibility to keep justice victim-centered.

Thanks for staying with me through this long-form reflection.

Intelligence plus Character, that is the goal of true education.

- Martin Luther King Jr.