This is an excerpt from my new book, The Problem with Goodness. I’m sharing it here because it names something I think many of us feel but rarely say out loud.
Chapter 1: The Noble Trap
“No one outside ourselves can rule us inwardly. When we know this, we become free.” — Buddha
If you pause and look closely, you may notice that much of your life has been lived according to rules you never agreed to. They were handed to you before you had words, before you had choice. This is what I call the noble trap: the story of how systems built in the name of goodness slowly became systems of control.
Systems That Begin with Care
Most systems begin with care and concern. There’s something noble in trying to create a structure for human life that protects everyone from harm. There’s something idyllic about a world where no one gets hurt and nothing bad ever happens.
But to create that degree of safety—and to prevent people from ever hurting each other’s feelings—the system would have to suppress individuality. We would have to make it illegal to call each other names, end a relationship, say no to a question, be angry or upset, cry, cut each other off, fight, or, dare I say it, be human.
When Freedom and Protection Collide
For centuries, philosophers have tried to create systems or ways of being that protect people from themselves and from each other. Some have attempted to do this while still trying to honour individuality and sovereignty. From Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Nietzsche to Søren Kierkegaard and many others, they sought to balance protection with freedom—and ended up with lists of rules and a need for control.
They could not protect both individuality and freedom while also protecting everyone from harm.
There’s one very clear reason for this: allowing individuals freedom means accepting that they may do things that cause harm or that we don’t like. This problem has been circled for centuries. How do we free people while still making sure nobody gets hurt?
The answer is simple: we don’t.
The Illusion of Safety
When we put up a fence to protect our chickens from the coyotes, we inevitably trap the chickens inside the fenced area. To keep our dogs from running into the street, we build backyard fences or tie them up. Because we believe those fences and chains are protecting our animals, we expand that logic to other human beings.
We proverbially try to chain people up so they can’t hurt each other. If we just fence everybody in, we tell ourselves, we’ll all be safe.
But is that true—or is it an illusion?
Sometimes the coyotes get in anyway. Sometimes the dog gets off its leash. Sometimes people figure out how to open the gate. Safety and the prevention of harm is an illusion. It’s a story we tell ourselves because it justifies our desire to create more rules and build more fences. But these ideas stop short of preventing harm—instead, I would suggest they create it.
Sorting Systems and Human Experience
Building systems and structures is a normal part of being human. We have logical brains that need organization. Typically, we sort by color, size, shape, or type. We sort things into piles as a way of understanding what they are. Systems help create order, function, and form in a life that can seem chaotic and unpredictable at best.
While sorting things into piles is useful when doing laundry or putting groceries away, it becomes problematic when we use the same thinking to decide which types of experiences should exist—and which ones should be prevented or removed entirely.
Systems, when applied to experience, are naturally confining to the human beings who live within them. They don’t allow for radical freedom or individuality, because most of those systems are based on the premise that certain experiences shouldn’t happen or exist.
It’s like looking at piles of laundry and deciding that everything in a certain color needs to be thrown away. The clothing is all green, and I don’t like green—therefore, whether it’s mine or not, I’m going to get rid of it. Not because I have the authority to do so, but because I’ve simply decided green laundry is not allowed to exist in my home.
From Rules to Control
Of course, green laundry doesn’t endanger anybody’s life, does it? That’s where the argument lies. But if you look around, we aren’t just preventing murder anymore—we’re telling people they’re not allowed to have green clothing. We’re making rules that have nothing to do with individual safety or well-being and everything to do with a need for control.
The biggest problem with systems—all systems—is that they risk scope creep. The river risks flooding its banks. And it’s happening over and over again in our existing structures. Our need for control is expanding faster than our systems of law and order can keep up with.
The more control you have, the more control you need, the more control you take.
What becomes glaringly obvious is that the rules don’t prevent anything. Murder has not been eradicated, and no amount of punishment will prevent it. People will kill each other for all kinds of reasons. And the reasons those things happen can’t be controlled—or prevented—by systems designed to stop them.
The more we try to prevent murder, the more murder persists. The system isn’t preventing harm—it’s unintentionally creating it.
Of course, human logic insists that if the rules don’t work, we just need stricter rules and harsher punishments. To give up would be weakness; we must try harder.
When a baby tries to climb over the baby gate, you don’t throw the gate away. You find another way to keep the baby from falling down the stairs. For small children, that logic makes sense. But when we begin treating adults like children, respect for the rules disappears. Adults don’t want baby gates. They don’t want to be told where they can and can’t go. They want to find out for themselves. And that is exactly how adults should be treated.
The Fear Beneath the System
The prevention of harm is a human rule or ideal. It comes from a need to gain control over our experience, to protect our loved ones, and to prevent death. Fear underlies all of that.
The fear of death, the fear of harm, the fear of losing control—or of being out of control—drives people to grasp at systems and structures that promise to contain the fear. We try to contain the risks of being human, of living in a world with millions of other humans we have no control over.
It’s as if we haven’t fully accepted our own mortality—or the inherent risk of existing in a fragile human form.
Human life is meant to be finite and temporary. We come in with the guarantee that we will die at some point. Human perception is fascinating, because we think we’re preventing death when we extend the lifespan of an individual through medical science.
Penicillin allowed us to go from dying at 40 to dying at 80, simply because it helped us survive diseases that once killed us much earlier. But it also created a need for control. The more we believe we can extend a human life through medical science, the more we try to control how long a human being should live. And when medical science fails—or doesn’t keep up—we turn to the system of law and punishment to make up the difference.
Infant mortality still exists. Cancer still exists. Murder still exists. Car accidents still exist. Death by falling down the stairs still exists.
How much can we truly prevent? And what do we have to give up in the attempt?
Life continually reminds us that we don’t have control. In fact, it’s screaming that we’re not meant to gain it. And yet, we try valiantly—every single day—to preserve the temporary life we lead, because we’re afraid of what might happen if we don’t.
The Morality of Control: Kant’s Trap
Immanuel Kant, for example, created the Categorical Imperative as a logical system for people to live by. It meant that an action is morally permissible if, and only if, it can be applied universally without contradiction. He wanted to anchor morality in something beyond religion and emotion. He wanted morality to be a universal construct—a litmus test that everybody could live by.
The question Kant asked was, “What if everyone did this? Could the world function if this was a universal rule?”
Let’s apply this to daily life. If someone asks whether you like their new outfit and you say yes—even though you think it’s ugly—that answer goes against the Categorical Imperative. If everybody lied to each other, regardless of the reason for the lie, communication and trust would erode over time. Even though this is what we call a “white lie,” it’s still lying—and would therefore be morally wrong and punishable within the system.
When we have to take responsibility for the outside world through our day-to-day choices, we create a cage. Many of us already do this to some extent by asking what others will think or feel when we make a decision. One of the biggest traps we face is that we can’t control the perceptions or feelings of other people. Trying to do so is exhausting, frustrating, and limiting.
How do we create a life we enjoy if we’re constantly worried about everyone else?
Kant’s idea was to force everyone into a structure that made each individual responsible for everyone else. The consequence is individual suffering, as people are forced to live with a lie the system created to protect people from each other.
The problem is, when we protect people from each other, we force them to fight with themselves.
And the internal fight is often far more dangerous than the external one.
Nietzsche and the Risk of Freedom
Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, was anti-system. He didn’t believe in—or agree with—systems rooted in obedience, self-denial, and guilt. He saw morality as a tool of control. While he focused much of his critique on religion, I see the same pattern in the secular world as well.
Morality is now used by governments and institutions to determine right and wrong. Laws are created based on moral beliefs rather than a clear intention to prevent harm.
Nietzsche’s solution was the Übermensch (Overman or Beyond-Man): a new kind of human who creates their own values and lives beyond good and evil. He wasn’t trying to protect people—he wanted to liberate them from the illusion that goodness is the highest goal.
But Nietzsche’s idea was co-opted. The Übermensch was twisted into superiority rather than sovereignty, and his work was misused to justify fascism and elitism. That’s the risk of creating something outside the system: the system will twist it and use it against you.
Compassion, Morality, and the Cage
I am anti-morality as well, because I view it much the same way Nietzsche did. It has been co-opted and used as a system of control. Morality has become the justification for many of the laws we currently have in place. Most of those laws have nothing to do with preventing harm, and everything to do with someone’s preference to not have green laundry in their home.
Morality, when used as an individual and personal guidance system, is absolutely fine. But when projected, it becomes a dangerous weapon—with radical, unintended consequences for society at large.
What Nietzsche and I are not is anti-compassion or anti-responsibility. We just limit those things in scope. Compassion works well in individual relationships. That’s where it belongs. Be compassionate with those you know. Be kind to people. But compassion is not a litmus test for determining right and wrong. It is not a moral code, and it does not apply to everybody or everything.
Compassion is a choice, not a requirement.
Likewise, shared responsibility belongs in the home. We can share the work of keeping the house clean and taking out the trash. But we shouldn’t try to create shared responsibility across large groups of people.
Society, when based on shared resources, becomes livable for all.
Society, when based on shared moral values, becomes a cage.
The Fear of No System
When we take on worldviews that fall outside the system—as I have done—there is always a risk that they will be twisted and turned into a different kind of system. Why? Because thinking outside the box scares people. If you're not in the box, then you're seen as a risk or a danger.
People will then create a new box to try to contain something that was never meant to be contained—because the idea of no system is terrifying.
What happened to Nietzsche happens to me, too—in smaller ways.
Systems of organization and function aren’t inherently bad—when they allow everything within them to retain its own individuality and freedom. It’s only when we try to force people and things into predetermined boxes, simply because it makes sorting more convenient, that we end up creating a cage.
And when our system of sorting is based on the illusion of good and evil—or right and wrong—it runs the risk of producing an overwhelming need for control, just to keep the piles sorted the way we want them to be.
The True Path to Safety
There is a legitimate underlying fear here:
What happens when we stop creating systems of control and start creating systems of radical freedom and individuality?
How do we protect people from harm?
The answer is that we don’t protect people from harm by caging the individual.
We protect people from harm by freeing the individual to live as they choose.
In doing so, we allow them to find the truth within themselves—instead of the projected truth society tried to place on them.
It is from this space that we ultimately create a society where the fear of harm is minimal—and radical freedom is given to all.
If you enjoyed the chapter and would like the whole book, you can find all the links by going to The Stillhouse at https://thestillhouse.space/the-problem-with-goodness.
Love to all.
Della