12 ways humans control one another
and how to stop it happening to you
“The thing with people going to rehab is no matter who they are, what poison they’re hooked on, or what time of day they arrive, they always arrive wasted.”
Breaking the systems that control us often leads us to experiencing them at their most potent.
The path to freedom is difficult for anyone to travel.
Over the last twelve weeks, I’ve been focused on one question:
How is control exerted in the modern world, and what laws govern it?
I’ve tried to step beyond politics or media operations and include everyday relationships. Those between people. Between systems. Between selves.
I’ve tried to avoid the good versus bad framing.
It’s too neat. Too loyal to the stories we’re taught to believe.
Even the darkest places are bright when you’re standing in their shadow.
What I do believe in is relationships.
The forces between bodies.
Whether it’s between two people or entire cultures, the relationship is the true medium of power.
Science breaks this down through four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear interactions. These explain how matter behaves at every scale.
The same logic applies between humans.
We are built with faults.
And under the right conditions, those faults get exposed.
Control works by shaping those conditions.
To me, history isn’t a record of heroes and villains.
It’s a map of leverage.
It shows who held what cards, and how they played them.
This isn’t a popular take, especially in the art world.
A lot of work today aims to “say something good.” It signals virtue, echoes sentiment, and sits neatly in its time. That work has value. But to me, it often stops at local-level truths, truths shaped by the media operations that are incumbent upon anyone born into an existing tribe, not those that provide long-term clarity.
Culture rewards what’s popular. Not always what’s honest.
Each week, I’ve tried to examine control from a different angle.
What follows is a summary of what I’ve learned: Twelve laws of control.
What do humans do, to increase control.
Drawn from part theory, part lived experience, relationship dynamics, and the patterns that repeat across time and space.
I believe these laws are global.
They transcend borders. They operate through feeling and structure.
Like any tool, they only become useful when we can see ourselves as both:
The victim and the perpetrator.
So under each law, I’ve included how it might be used against us, and also how it can be wielded.
Hopefully, it helps us understand the intent by which someone is operating when we see it in action.
If you’re here, I trust you’ll use them with care.
And if you’re walking this path alongside me,
I hope these tools don’t just protect you
I hope they help you protect others.
tl;dr Control is a function of perception. See more, be freer.
Week 1: SOFT
“If control feels gentle, we welcome it.”
Law I: Create comfort.
I once had to kill a rabbit on a military survival exercise. The best way to do it is to hang it upside down and stroke it against the grain of its fur until it calms down and becomes comfortable. Once calm, the rest of the ‘operation’ becomes a lot easier.
How it’s used
We’re comforted. We’re flattered. We’re wrapped in language that feels like care, ‘wellness,’ ‘empowerment,’ ‘coziness,’ eventually, the comfort lowers the bar, and you let your guard down.
How to negate it
Don’t trust things just because they’re beautiful or feel good. Beauty and pleasure take effort. Don’t let softness stop you from asking who benefits. Examine the packaging.
How to use it
If we want someone to comply, it’s easier if we make them feel safe. Make them feel seen and valued. Make the control feel like kindness.
Extra Reading
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)
Barthes was a French cultural critic who dissected how everyday objects and media are packed with ideology. In Mythologies, he breaks down how soap ads, wrestling, or steak dinners become cultural myths and, in turn, carriers of deeper, more powerful messages.
Beauty, luxury, and elegance aren’t neutral. They sedate critique.
Week 2: SURFACE
“We trust beauty more than truth.”
Law II: Control visuals.
Makeup is camouflage, suits let you get dirty. Presentation of reality is often the easiest way to disguise what something is. First impressions and the environment in which something is presented affect the perception of it more than its objective truth.
How it’s used
We tend to believe the curated image. Clean fonts. “About” pages. The structure and presentation embed trust in the narrative underneath. All of this is skin.
How to negate it
Change the context and understand what is hidden: what does this not show me? What’s hidden behind this aesthetic and structure?
How to use it
Perfect your presentation. Curate your environment. If you control how they see, you control how they interpret you.
Extra Reading
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967)
Debord was a French Situationist thinker who believed we had entered an era where appearances had replaced reality. He argued that in modern capitalism, everything becomes image, what he called “the spectacle.” We no longer live life; we consume representations of it.
Control is often more about the presentation of reality rather than the obfuscation of it.
Week 3: MUTE
“Praise creates silence.”
Law III: Reward obedience.
The crowd will accept what is partially correct and rewarded over the perfect solution that is hidden. Humans silence one another by amplifying noise that prevents those who can change the system from being heard.
How it’s used
We get rewarded for abstaining from controversy. Marginalisation is always a threat. Rewards exist for complicit behaviour. Every like we see next to a post trains our voice to vanish.
How to negate it
An opinion is always valid, especially if it is delivered to learn. Unpicking and understanding are easy ways to speak up without becoming marginalised. And if something doesn’t feel right, finding a way to explore that will often pull it apart.
How to use it
Shine light on the agreeable. Elevate the manageable. People will shape themselves to fit and ignore the solution they actually want
Extra Reading
Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1977)
Lorde was a Black feminist poet and essayist who believed silence was a weapon used against the oppressed. In this essay, she says that what we fear speaking about is often what we must say the loudest, and that silence does not protect us.
Often, we aren’t silenced through censorship; it’s through applause for the “right” kinds of speech.
Week 4: CAGE
“Comfort is more effective than chains.”
Law IV: Encourage prisons.
The desire to fit in, combined with the insecurity of being pushed out, encourages conformity - in turn, this limits free will. Wearing pink on Wednesday eventually leads to self policing rules across the culture.
How it’s used
We’re told freedom looks like having choices. A good job. A nice apartment. A wellness routine. But all of it fits into a grid that we didn’t design. When we start to feel trapped, we decorate the cell. We post it. We tag it. We defend it. And the system celebrates
How to negate it
Identify what comforts you’re addicted to, and ask who benefits. Who profits when you stay exactly where you are?
The cage is rarely flammable, but once we name it, it begins to stop working.
How to use it
If we want to control someone, we offer them structure.
A structure feels like love.
Let them think the rules are theirs.
They’ll beg to stay.
Extra Reading
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
Foucault was a French philosopher and historian who studied how power works through institutions. In Discipline and Punish, he looks at how prisons, schools, hospitals, and even architecture control people. He introduces the idea of the Panopticon: a prison design where inmates don’t know if they’re being watched, so they behave as if they are.
Control often doesn’t look like a guard; it’s more like an agreed-upon system. The office dress code, the gym, the phone, the job title. Foucault says we end up policing ourselves through culture more strictly than any institution ever could.
Week 5: CRACKS
“If you look closely, the system breaks.”
Law V: Acknowledge weaknesses.
Misdirection towards known weaknesses and inadequacies in a system allows agreement and fosters trust. They also allow systems to prevent undue focus on actual failure points that may undermine systems of control.
How it’s used
We see problems and improvements being made, so we accept the status quo. The framing prevents us from looking at our own problem. Gaslighting us into thinking we’re wrong for wanting change.
How to negate it
Critique continues. Use the crack as an exit point. If
How to use it
Show just enough fracture to seem authentic. Then pivot back to control.
Extra reading
Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (2007)
Salcedo is a Colombian artist who cut a literal crack into the floor of the Tate Modern to represent immigrant division, rejection, and invisible trauma. “Shibboleth” means a word or custom used to exclude. The work made the ground unstable, forcing you to acknowledge it.
Institutions love to show “reflection” but hate collapse. We’re allowed to see fractures and ideas for improvement, but change is much rarer.
Week 6: ACHE
“Beauty demands emotional self-erasure.”
Law VI: Celebrate pain.
Taking on difficult roles is celebrated. Being a broke artist is lauded. Dying for one’s country is a proud sacrifice. When models first join agencies, they are always asked to lose weight. The feedback loop of becoming weaker to conform allows for better control of them over time. It is a trade of sacrifice for acceptance.
How it’s used
We think being seen means being safe. So we perform our pain. And they watch as the feedback loop builds. Acknowledgement for service.
How to negate it
Suffer in silence. Feel in private. Create for yourself. Don’t package your ache. If there are difficulties in the road, wearing them only allows those that want you to stay there to celebrate them.
How to use it
Offer mountains to climb and challenges to achieve. People will sail around the world and fight to the death for the chance to show they have taken on more than another.
Extra Reading
Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0 (1974)
In this performance, Abramović stood still for six hours and allowed the audience to do anything they wanted to her using 72 objects. They stripped her, cut her, and nearly killed her. The work revealed how quickly the aesthetic of passivity invites violence.
Vulnerability becomes a spectacle, and power hides in the frame.
Week 7: TRUTH
“Truth is a weapon, it’s violent.”
Law VII: Personalise truth.
Honest perspectives can often appear hyper-personalised. By marginalising and focusing on the negative and personal side of truths, they can be discredited. A wealthy tax evader becomes a symbol of the class divide, an immigrant who steals, and an example of erosion of national identity. By turning truth into a story and personalising it, it becomes a weapon
How it’s used
By isolating worst cases and making the truth personalized, it becomes easier to distort the truth. Opioid addicts were marginalised and pushed out of the system following bankruptcy despite their route to addiction starting within the healthcare system.
How to negate it
Look for the reasons why, the best route to truth is always through the whys and hows rather than the whats and whens.
How to use it
Discredit the person, not the point. Misunderstand the perspective, make them explain everything until they mix up their story, then attack this.
Extra reading
Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics (1967)
Arendt was a political philosopher who survived Nazi Germany and wrote about how totalitarianism manipulates truth. In this essay, she warns that the real truth is uncompromising, and that makes it dangerous. Power prefers narrative, not fact. So, the truth gets rewritten as aggression.
Often, we equate calmness with legitimacy. Anger makes people ignore you. Rage gets you labelled a maniac.
Week 8: GRIEF
“Letting go of identity feels like death.”
Law VIII: Sell identity.
Status is attached to difficult roles within a system. Kids are taught that being a police man, fire warden, or nurse are ‘Key roles’ from an early age, the conditioning helps ensure low wages exist throughout their lives. Above all else, humans want to be accepted, allowing them to achieve status through the acquisition of identity creates these identities in reality.
How it’s used
We are wedded to our identities and the objects and roles that define them. To improve the status of these, often we will do things that go against who we are - weakening our values and authentic identity. It’s held up by the pain of losing an idea of who we are.
How to negate it
Be prepared to grieve the old you. Let it hurt. That pain means you’re growing. Also, the ego can’t die; it just grows back after you sleep a little.
How to use it
Offer new identities for sale. People will pay not to feel lost. Certificates, job titles, and academic validation are all great ways to make people puppets
Extra Reading
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, and civil rights thinker. In The Souls of Black Folk, he introduces the idea of double consciousness: the painful experience of seeing yourself not only through your own eyes, but through the hostile gaze of a society that doesn’t fully accept you.
He writes about the grief of carrying two identities: who you are, and who you’re allowed to be.
Identity, especially under oppression, is always fractured. Becoming whole often means mourning the self you were forced to perform. Du Bois’s perspective is less concerned with empowerment and more about the sorrow of survival.
Week 9: SHATTER
“Destruction can be sacred.”
Law IX: Resource rage.
As individuals become angry with the systems of control, they’re best encouraged. The wilder outbursts will allow for more stringent controls to be imposed on them on failure. A quiet challenge can’t be shut off, but an aggressive push can be banned.
How it’s used
You see a problem, you can’t fix it. The tools are held out of reach until you get angry. You jump to get them and break something in the process. Then you’re punished for jumping.
How to negate it
The only way to improve control is to control your own emotions. Gandhi played this best.
How to use it
Find ways to enrage them. While they’re out of control, direct the energy towards something culpable; once an issue has been caused, offer repentance in exchange for obedience.
Extra Reading
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009)
Fisher was a cultural theorist who argued that capitalism is so totalizing that it even absorbs its own critiques. Every rebellion becomes a brand. He calls this “reflexive impotence.” We know the system’s broken, but nothing changes. Even shattering is aestheticized.
Week 10: BITE
“Power begins at the edge of shame.”
Law X: Weaponize shame.
Shame is a powerful emotion that is hard to heal from. It’s born out of an insecurity of not being enough and not having an available solution. A very vulnerable position. Where people feel shame, they are easy to control. Not being able to balance work and home life, not being able to provide, not being beautiful enough. All places where humans force one another to do things they would otherwise not do.
How it’s used
Bringing personal or irrelevant information that undermines credibility is a common tactic. It’s something easily done accidentally. Should we separate the art from the artist? maybe, maybe not. But with those working with objective truths, there is no question. They are separate.
How to negate it
Name what they want you to hide. Say it in full. Don’t apologize.
How to use it
If you shame them first, they’ll stay quiet. Make them afraid to be seen.
Extra Reading
bell hooks, All About Love (2000)
bell hooks wrote about love as a form of radical action. But she also spoke about shame, especially how women and the marginalized are taught to feel shame for wanting too much. The system teaches us to hide what makes us powerful.
This matters to Bite because shame is the leash. And biting is the only way out.
Side note: bell hooks chooses not to capitalize her name as a deliberate act of decentering the self. Allowing her reader to focus more on “the substance of books, not who I am.” - I wonder if it has the opposite effect…
Week 11: VILLAIN
“To be free, we must be willing to be disliked.”
Law XI: Punish outsiders.
To conform is to know where the boundaries are. Every industry, grouping, or system is defined by its ability to know where its boundaries are. Those seeking to control that system will often be seen defining its boundaries by punishing those outside of it trying to get in.
How it’s used
You try to be good. Likeable. Respectable. They still don’t give you power. You push from the outside, and they label you as such to prevent you from ever coming in. They can never be us.
How to negate it
Outgrow the gatekeepers. Build around yourself, and infiltrate inside with the team. Let them hate you. Be bad. Smile while they boo. Eventually, they will subside
How to use it
Label someone different, whisper rumours in the back rooms, eventually, no one will listen to them.
Extra Reading
Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (1949)
Genet was a queer French writer and criminal who wrote about being hated, criminalized, and rejected. He saw villainy as liberation—a refusal to assimilate. His work embraces being loathed as a kind of freedom.
This matters to Villain because control only works if you want to be accepted. When you stop caring, you’re untouchable.
Week 12: EDGE
“The only way out is outside of choice.”
Law XII: Control the frame.
Defining the boundaries, what is and isn’t, what can and can’t, and how things are is always a play to control. Within a laboratory, control is important; some science requires safety. Within Art, business? innovation?
How it’s used
Boundaries are created by forks in the path. We are shown routes and paths, options to go down, and eventually, we assume we can’t go off-road. Predefined routes were made by those ahead of us, shortcuts aren’t possible, and the only way to play the game is by following those ahead.
How to negate it
Don’t pick from their menu. Invent a new game. Walk off the map. Take snacks. Enjoy.
How to use it
Prevent them from making the choice that damages you by offering them difficult options in the wrong direction. They’ll spend their time questioning which is better, some will never act, those that do, will still go in the wrong direction.
Extra Reading
Franz Kafka, Before the Law (1915)
Kafka tells the story of a man who waits his whole life for permission to enter “the law.” But no one ever lets him in. When he’s dying, he learns the door was always just for him, but now it’s closing. Kafka shows how systems trap you in false choices while you wait for real ones.
Control systems are effective when they feel endless. The only real escape is choosing something dangerous off the menu.
Poets Corner
Get That Poet Under
CONTROL!
Capital letters, Kapital silly,
silly, slap slap, tickle,
Dominatrix,
Donimatrix,
Donimarxist,
silly,
the power
of the rule
of three.
The only rule:
there are no rules,
rules,
rules.
- Thomas May
Control
We are bound to this world by very little.
At any moment, it could all be stripped away.
So we obsess over control.
Because when we feel it, even for a second, it makes us feel sturdier.
The less sturdy we feel, the more we reach for it. To reassure ourselves. To fix our position. To protect our status.
We all have those moments.
Moments where we hesitate to help.
Moments where we lash out, reshape the space, bend the energy back toward us, just to feel like we’re in power.
But the truth is simple:
There is no control.
What felt urgent today could vanish tomorrow.
The world shifts. There are powers at play.
There is beauty in the randomness that rewrites the game without asking.
I’ve done my best these last twelve weeks to map what I see. But it’s not everything.
Not all relationships are built on control.
Some are built on something higher.
On connection. On reciprocity.
This is just a snapshot.
Still, if you see these tools being used now,
maybe you’ll be a little more wary of them.
And the people using them.
Peace and love,
R