I have a recurring question that keeps coming back, usually right after I say something that makes a room go quiet.
Why am I like this.
Why do I keep seeing the same patterns, calling them what they are, and then acting surprised when people react as if I’ve committed a social crime.
I can list the usual suspects. High IQ. Mild autism. A few LSD hits in the late 2000s. That’s a grab bag people reach for when someone won’t play along with polite fictions.
But the sharper answer is older and more boring.
I was raised LDS.
People who grew up outside it don’t understand what that does to your mental model. Mormonism is many things, but here is the part that matters for this: it is unusually explicit about rules and authority.
In my upbringing, “because that’s the rule” was not an embarrassment or a failure of explanation. It was a complete sentence. It was one of the formal modes of justification. They didn’t hide it. They didn’t soften it. They didn’t dress it up as a vibe.
This is the rule. This is who has authority to declare it. This is what happens if you violate it.
You can disagree, you can suffer, you can leave, you can rage about it, but you can’t pretend it isn’t happening.
That kind of clarity rewires you.
It trains you to separate two things that most modern institutions insist on blending: power and truth.
Mormonism says, out loud, that obedience is often obedience. It does not require you to call it freedom. It does not require you to call it self-expression. It does not require you to call it safety. It does not ask you to pretend that the rule is merely what any good person would do anyway.
It just says: this is the rule.
That sounds harsh, and it often is, but it has a strange side effect. It makes you allergic to the particular kind of dishonesty that is now everywhere: covert authority pretending it isn’t authority.
Because once you’ve lived in a world where authority is declared explicitly, you can’t unsee what’s happening when authority is smuggled in through tone and etiquette.
And that is what modern institutions do.
Universities, media organizations, HR departments, nonprofits, and professional managerial systems enforce rules while denying that rules are being enforced. They do it with different words, softer words, therapeutic words, moral words.
They don’t say “because that’s the rule.”
They say:
Be professional.
Be responsible.
Be respectful.
Be inclusive.
Be safe.
Be evidence-based (meaning: cite the approved sources).
Be balanced (meaning: do not state the obvious too clearly).
Be constructive (meaning: do not point at the incentives).
The enforcement is real. The punishments are real. The hierarchy is real. The outcomes are real.
But the system insists you participate in a second layer: you must deny that you are obeying.
This is the difference between overt authority and covert authority.
Overt authority says: do what I say.
Covert authority says: if you were good, you would want what I want.
Covert authority isn’t just control. It’s control plus compulsory self-deception.
And that is the line I keep tripping over.
If you ask me why I can’t just go along, it’s not because I’m brave. It’s not because I’m morally pure. It’s not because I’m smarter than anyone. It’s because the covert version feels like contempt. It treats adults like children and then demands that we call it maturity.
Now layer on whatever cognitive traits I have (call it autism, call it stubbornness, call it low tolerance for social ambiguity), and you get the second part of the engine: I cannot stop asking where the rule is.
What is the actual rule.
Who made it.
How is it enforced.
What happens if I violate it.
What story are we required to tell about it.
That last one is the killer. Because once you start noticing the story layer (the ritual language that makes power feel like virtue), you start seeing it everywhere.
Media doesn’t primarily tell you what is true. Media tells you what power wants you to believe everyone else believes. It teaches you what you are allowed to say without consequence. It teaches you which facts are “controversial” (meaning: correct but inconvenient). It teaches you which claims can be made without evidence (“sources say,” which often means: “we made it up”). It teaches you the acceptable emotional posture to take toward events before you even know what happened.
Most people learn this and adapt. They become smooth. They learn which truths must be said with a smile, and which truths must not be said at all.
I did not become smooth.
And if the LSD did anything, it wasn’t to install new beliefs. It just made it harder to pretend I didn’t see the framing. Psychedelics loosen attachments to the “obviousness” of social reality. They pull the curtain back on the fact that most of what you experience as normal is a coordinated narrative in a particular key.
Once you see that, you can still function, but you can’t go back to innocence.
So here is my confession, in plain language.
I am like this because I was trained early to treat rules as real, authority as explicit, and obedience as named.
That training made me intolerant of institutions that demand obedience while denying they are doing so.
I can live with hierarchy. I can even respect it, when it admits what it is.
What I can’t tolerate is hierarchy that insists it’s not hierarchy (that it’s merely kindness, or safety, or neutrality, or professionalism), and then punishes you for noticing.
And I think that is why my critical instinct keeps turning inward, recursively.
If you are sitting in a class, inside an institution, you should point your critical analysis at the class itself.
Not because every professor is evil, or every institution is a conspiracy, but because the institution is not a neutral container for truth. It is a machine with incentives. It shapes what can be said, what can be tested, what can be rewarded, and what must be treated as taboo.
When students are allowed to evaluate professors on “tone” and “bias” and “hospitality,” the institution has made a specific choice. It has decided that education is a service experience and that epistemic discomfort is a defect.
That might be efficient for retention. It might be good for business. It might lower conflict.
It is poison for truth.
This is the part where a healthier person would now pivot to optimism, or propose a program, or end with a warm moral.
I don’t have one.
I am not proud of being like this, because it is socially expensive. It makes normal life harder than it needs to be. It burns bridges that would otherwise be useful. It produces a lot of anger for very little change.
But I also don’t know how to stop seeing what I see.
Once you have a rule-detection reflex, and once you’ve learned that the most important rules are the ones nobody admits are rules, you become the kind of person who keeps pointing at the invisible machinery.
You become, in other words, like me.