Obedience Is Not Order
There’s this lie we’ve been fed so long we stopped tasting it:
“Obedience is maturity.”
“Structure is safety.”
“Freedom? That’s chaos.”
Some of the quietest rooms are the most violent ones—the kind where everyone’s dressed sharp. The presentations are tight—the policies, polished and language, as if fresh off the dictionary press, untouched by the friction of use. Rooms where no one says what they actually mean because they were too pressed for time to memorise both words and their meanings.
There’s a tension you can’t name, because naming it would be “unprofessional.”
Let me catch you up real quick; institutions love obedience. Not because it makes things better, but rather it makes things easier to manage (in a sense, I guess that’s better). It makes things predictable.
The empire may have collapsed, but its architecture still stands, rebranded as job descriptions, school curricula, and performance reviews.
Remember school?
Quietness = good student.
Memorization = intelligence.
Ask “why?” = disruptive.
We weren’t trained to think, not in the schools that ordinary folk go to. We were trained to repeat—education systems designed to churn out a particular type of obedient follower. They call it indoctrination in some circles.
By the way, this isn’t a conspiracy piece, and I’m not being cynical; obedience is measurable. You can log it. Score it. Promote it.
Freedom, on the other hand, that stuff’s messy. It questions things. Freedom says, “But what if there’s another way?”
Freedom doesn’t wait for permission, it creates space. Institutions aren’t built for that. They’re built for smooth workflows, not wild hearts. They want KPIs, not conscience. They hire for alignment, not imagination.
So here are the first steps toward polishing the corporate ladder:
Learn to dim.
Sound agreeable.
Write what the boss wants to hear.
Reword your rage into bullet points.
And they’ll call you mature. Think I’m lying? Ask Robert Greene; he’s written books on this!
But what if obedience is not maturity? What if it’s just survival dressed in a suit?
In postcolonial spaces, especially, this gets sticky. Because we’ve seen what collapse looks like; civil war, broken states, hunger. So we cling to order, even when it chokes us. We tolerate control in the name of “stability.” We silence dissent and call it peace, but obedience is not the same as peace.
Sometimes, it’s fear, beautifully filed fear, and it’s exhausting.
Playing by rules you didn’t write, in a game rigged to never let you win, and calling it adulthood.
Maybe real order isn’t about uniformity; it’s about trust. Maybe a functional institution isn’t one where everyone agrees but one where disagreement is safe. Where speaking up doesn’t cost you your future. Where being human isn’t an inconvenience. Where courage doesn’t get you isolated, it gets you heard.
We weren’t born to just follow instructions. We were meant to imagine. To disrupt. To make meaning out of mess, not just comply with what’s neat.
Let’s stop confusing fear with structure. Let’s stop calling obedience wisdom. Let’s build spaces that can hold Truth without cracking.
Because silence is not peace. And order without justice is just a prettier version of oppression.