The Architecture of Self-Imprisonment
What appears as natural social constraint—our inability to break from collective patterns—is merely the artifact of systems we ourselves have designed yet experience as inevitable. Were these constraints truly external, might we not resist them more fiercely than when they emerge from architectures of our own creation?
We design the social systems that constrain us, then mistake those constraints for natural law; what feels most inevitable about human behaviour is precisely what we have most deliberately engineered.