I wanted to share with you a chapter from my upcoming book, The Stillhouse Within, on control, authority, and why they typically fail to create the desired result. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Love to all.
Della
How much control does any of us have? How much control does the system have?
Questioning authority logically brings fascinating answers. Take laws: we outlaw theft, but theft happens. We outlaw speeding, but people speed. We outlaw murder, but murder still happens. What do laws actually prevent? My honest answer is—not much. Once someone has decided to act, the existence of a law doesn’t stop them.
If laws can’t stop people, perhaps morality or religion can. But those don’t work either. In fact, they often get used as justifications. Both are personal guidance systems, not collective ones. As long as someone can rationalize their actions—even by twisting the very systems meant to stop them—they will do what they’ve decided to do.
So, if the system doesn’t truly hold authority, who does? The individual. The truth is, people have far more control than they think. They believe they’re trapped, when the cage is unlocked and wide open. The authority of the system is mostly illusion. Smoke and mirrors. The authority is your own—you’ve just never been shown how to use it.
This isn’t an encouragement to break the law. We’re not creating chaos for chaos’ sake. What we’re doing is questioning the structure that convinces us we’re trapped in lives we don’t want.
The reason people break laws is not because they’ve misunderstood the rules, but because the punishment doesn’t matter to them. You speed because you don’t care about a ticket. Jail isn’t enough to keep people from killing. Even the death penalty doesn’t stop people. If the consequence doesn’t stop them, what does? Fear.
Punishment is designed to instill fear. But fear doesn’t work for long. It doesn’t always work with small children, and it doesn’t often work with adults either. Once a person moves past the fear of a consequence, they act anyway. That’s why systems of reward and punishment always fail.
When consequences don’t work, the suggestion is to make them harsher. This is how societies tip from democratic to authoritarian. If fear is the only control left, then punishment must become extreme. But for democracy to survive, people have to at least perceive some freedom. Remove that perception, and the system collapses into control.
The point of control is the perception of safety. When violence rises, or even the fear of it, people reach for rules that promise protection. We want gun laws to keep us safe from each other. We want speed limits so accidents aren’t fatal. The more unsafe we feel, the more rules we demand.
But the lie is that rules equal safety.
Safety created through rules always comes at a cost: your freedom to choose for yourself. It doesn’t stop at guns or speed limits. To guarantee safety, the system has to regulate everything — where you can live, what jobs you can have, how many children you’re allowed, what you can buy, even whether you’re permitted to leave your own country.
Push that logic far enough, and you end up in a place like North Korea: a society that is tightly controlled, and in that control there is a kind of safety. But there is no freedom. That is the trade-off.
Freedom comes with risk because to be truly free we have to give up on trying to protect people from each other. We have to stop being afraid of living without a long list of rules and extreme consequences. Rules and punishments might help create limits for small children who may not have the capacity to understand the consequences of their actions, but eventually we outgrow that dynamic. Society wasn’t meant to be shaped by the parent–child model we grew up with.
Adulthood means freedom of choice, without limitation or fear of manufactured consequences.
The real consequence is always inherent in the action itself. If I don’t go to work, I don’t get paid. If I play my music so loud the whole neighbourhood hears it, someone will complain and the cops might show up. The ticket for speeding may not stop you — but the possibility of losing control and dying in a crash might.
Risk is part of being alive. Getting out of bed is risky. Crossing the street is risky. Even breathing carries risk. But we do them all, because we accept the fragility of being human.
The difference between crossing the street and being confronted by someone with a gun is control. I control when I step off the curb. I don’t control what someone else does with a weapon. That’s why we look to the system — we want it to control what we can’t.
But if I had a nickel for every time that didn’t work, I wouldn’t need to write this.
The truth is this: the amount of perceived control you have over the external world does not keep you safe. It doesn’t protect you. It’s an illusion.
You can walk down the street, trip over nothing, and break a bone. You can get a paper cut. You can fall down the stairs. In each case, you were in control the whole time — and control didn’t protect you from yourself. The system can’t protect you from yourself either.
Freedom gives you the ability to choose: to walk down the street, to go downstairs, to pick up the paper. But the consequences of those actions are already built in. Even with control, you aren’t safe. There is still risk.
The real truth behind the need for control is fear — fear of chaos. We believe that if we let go of control, chaos will be the inevitable result. But that consequence is imagined.
Imagined consequences are not external punishments or natural outcomes. They live only in the mind. If we don’t have rules, there will be war. If we don’t make people go to work, society will collapse. If we don’t make people struggle, life will be too easy.
These aren’t truths. They are stories built from fear. And fear isn’t true.
Whether consequences are inherent, imagined, or manufactured, they all create the same effect: fear, and with it, the feeling of being out of control.
So the real question is this: how do we create a sense of control when, in truth, we don’t have any over the external world?
The answer is simple but profound: control comes from choosing to manage myself within the experience. I have full authority over how I think, feel, and respond to everything that happens — whether or not I have control over the experience itself. That is my true point of control in life.
Control is internal. It has never lived outside of me. When I go searching for it in the world, all I find are reasons to manufacture consequences to control the uncontrollable. That search puts my focus in the wrong place. I end up fixating on the problem instead of realizing the solution is within me.
The solution is never about control. It’s about perception. It lies in how I see it, not whether I can control it.
Authority, too, is an internal construct — not an external one. That truth is difficult to accept because we grew up inside a system designed to create the illusion of external authority. Yet it is the same system that consistently fails to deliver the authority it claims to hold.
Authority, when it remains internal, is inherent in being human. It is the heart of individuality, autonomy, and freedom of choice. This is where authority retains its power.
Authority loses power when we project it outward — when we ask it to control what cannot be controlled.
Authority is an illusion when it is used to promise protection or safety.
Authority is true when it creates radical freedom and self-responsibility.
True authority comes from free will. And the fear of that truth is why democracy teeters on the edge of authoritarianism — because we are still fighting over the illusion of control.