Let’s be honest - if there was a contract, we didn’t read it. Not because we were careless, but because by the time we arrived, the ink was already dry and the signatures had been forged in our name. Somewhere between birth and bureaucracy, the terms of the agreement were absorbed into our operating system like a software update we never approved. There was no dramatic moment of consent, no climactic handshake between citizen and state. No parchment. No ceremony. Only the quiet inheritance of a life already decided.

And so we work.

We comply. We optimise. We perform freedom by protocols we mistake for preferences, never quite sure whether the roles we play are chosen or assigned. We pay taxes, vote biannually, keep our BMI within a healthy range, share our location with dozens of apps, and take personality tests designed to tell us which corporate value best expresses our authentic self. We call this adulthood. We call this society. We call this progress.
It’s tempting, sometimes, to believe we made a choice. To think we signed something - maybe in the haze of youth, or under the influence of Rousseau, or in a civic education class where the teacher used words like “liberty” and “rule of law” with a sincerity that made it almost believable. But if we’re honest - and honesty, even now, still feels like a civic virtue - we know that the so-called contract was never really a contract. It was more like a hymn we were taught to hum before we could speak. Something sacred. Something binding.
Something no one understands but everyone agrees not to question too loudly.

And so here we are, living under the terms of a deal we don’t recall agreeing to, grateful for the occasional upgrades: a few more rights, a cleaner interface, more inclusive slogans. But the structure remains. The architecture of consent is immovable and bland, like the background music in an airport lounge. You don’t notice it until it stops. And then it’s all you hear.

The Fiction of Consent
At the heart of modern liberalism lies a story so elegant, so self-reinforcing, that to question it feels not only ungrateful but vaguely unhinged. The story goes like this: once upon a time, in a more violent and irrational past, human beings lived in chaos. Then, through reason, we emerged into civilisation using a contract - an agreement, implicit but binding, in which we gave up a portion of our raw freedom in exchange for the civilising comforts of order, legality, and peace.

We are told that we are the heirs of this agreement. Not just beneficiaries, but signatories by our very being here. Hobbes imagined a Leviathan to keep our worst instincts in check. Locke refined the model with natural rights. Rousseau added moral grandeur, insisting that to obey the general will - even against one’s inclinations - was not tyranny, but freedom in its highest form.

It sounds noble. Until you realise that this concept of freedom - the freedom to obey what is declared to be your own will, even if you don’t recognise it as such - begins to resemble something closer to gaslighting than governance.

Rousseau, with that peculiar mix of purity and menace that only philosophers and cult leaders seem capable of, claimed that if a citizen refuses the general will, “he shall be forced to be free.” And somehow this has survived, intact and mostly unchallenged, as one of the foundational principles of modern democracy. This democracy no longer even bothers to hide its paternalism, because paternalism is so obviously for your good.

What we’re dealing with, then, is not a contract in any meaningful sense, but a founding fable retroactively imposed, like the opening crawl of a movie that insists the plot was already in motion long before you took your seat. You are not asked to sign anything; you are informed that the signing has occurred, and that your only remaining task is to enjoy the benefits. Or at least, to avoid inconveniencing those who do.

And these benefits, we are assured, are vast. Rights. Protections. Dignity. Representation. The freedom to speak, provided you are respectful. The freedom to move, provided you don’t cross the wrong borders. The freedom to protest is granted, provided you submit your plans in advance to the appropriate authorities and promise not to block traffic or upset investors.

We sort our trash. We obey the crossing signals even at empty intersections. We update our privacy settings while knowing full well that the term has long since become a parody. We are encouraged to see these things as signs of maturity, of civic virtue, of enlightened citizenship. But it’s difficult to shake the suspicion that we are, in fact, simply well-trained.

The state no longer has to dictate how to live. It merely nudges. It nudges us toward health, sustainability, emotional regulation, tolerance - toward lives that are increasingly indistinguishable from virtue-signalling infographics.

And because we believe - or have been taught to believe - that freedom is compatible with this kind of soft choreography, we don’t revolt. We renew. We update our apps. We sign the next version of the contract by clicking “accept all cookies.”

Perhaps the most astonishing feat of liberalism is that it has convinced us that we are not controlled, only empowered, to obey and comply and empowered to choose between slightly different flavours of consensus.

Consent, in this context, is not an act.
It is a condition - ambient, assumed, retrofitted to our behaviour like a default setting we never bothered to question.

The Price of Freedom
It’s often said - usually by those who have never had to negotiate the price of their exhaustion - that freedom isn’t free. What’s less frequently admitted is that its cost is rarely disclosed upfront. It arrives slowly, piecemeal, disguised as common sense, or worse: as maturity. One day, you wake up and discover that freedom, in its modern incarnation, is less a political condition than a kind of moral subscription plan - something you’re supposed to renew, perform, and maintain through a series of increasingly opaque obligations.

You are free, of course. Free to work. Free to compete. Free to spend most of your waking hours in pursuit of economic usefulness, personal optimisation, and socially acceptable forms of self-expression. Free to choose between digital interfaces that all function the same, to express political preferences that differ only in tone, to pursue happiness in ways that align with market-tested ideals of health, balance, and productivity.

You are free, in other words, to be an individual - provided your individuality stays within range. Not too erratic. Not too indifferent. Not too expensive. Indeed, not too angry. Preferably fluent in irony, tolerant in theory, and grateful in tone.

What passes for freedom today is often indistinguishable from behavioural compliance. We move through spaces that demand more of us than most premodern empires would have dared to request: not only that we pay taxes and obey the law, but that we believe in the system, manage our emotional tone, demonstrate psychological resilience, eat responsibly, recycle properly, signal virtue selectively, and never forget to update the software.

And when this all begins to feel like too much - and it does, more often than most people are willing to admit - we are gently directed toward a variety of professional guides whose job it is to help us cope with the burdens of our supposed liberation. Coaches, mentors, therapists, thought leaders, mindfulness consultants: a growing industry dedicated to reminding you that the problem is not the system, but your attitude toward it.

They will teach you how to reframe your anxiety as growth.
How to optimise your burnout into productivity.
How to love the version of yourself that has adapted most efficiently to being monitored, corrected, and praised.
You will be taught, gently but firmly, to see all of this not as oppression, but as opportunity.

Because this is freedom now: a well-structured labyrinth, with good lighting and plenty of motivational posters, you can go anywhere you like, as long as you keep walking in circles.

Who Wrote This Deal?
It would be convenient to imagine that this deal - this implicit, omnipresent arrangement that defines how we live, how we speak, how we understand ourselves as citizens - was drafted by a single institution, or person, or party, or perhaps a dark room filled with cigar smoke and handshakes. But the truth, which is somehow more disturbing, is that no one seems to have written it - or rather, that its authorship has become so diffused, so professionally distributed across agencies, algorithms, cultural commentators, corporate guidelines, school curricula, and code-of-conduct teams, that the question “who decided this?” now lands with the same tragic flatness as a polite cough in a crowded elevator.

The rules are just there.
They precede you.
They welcome you at birth with a warm blanket and a vague promise of rights.
They follow you through adolescence, through LinkedIn, through tax brackets, through HR trainings, through comment sections, through airline safety videos, internal policy documents, ESG reports and branded mental health campaigns.

No one forces you. That’s important. It’s not that kind of regime.
It’s not coercive; it’s curatorial.
It selects for behaviours that are clean, calibrated, and inclusive.
It rewards those who align.
And it does this so smoothly, so reflexively, that deviation begins to feel not only risky, but embarrassing - like bad posture or forgetting someone’s pronouns.

There is no tyrant here. No judge in robes. No ideology with a clenched fist.
Only a vague expectation that you will be decent, thoughtful, emotionally literate, self-aware, non-toxic, non-hierarchical, socially attuned, and privately burdened by the right kind of guilt.

To be part of society today is to submit - not overtly, but stylistically.
To learn the tone of acceptable dissent, the proper ratio of irony to earnestness, the limits of satire, and the dos and don’ts of principled disagreement.
We are all now amateur diplomats of our own opinions, afraid not of being punished but of being unfollowed.

And in the background - always in the background - some help keep the terms in place. Not because they’re evil or manipulative, but because they believe in the arrangement. They think that this is how you preserve order, reduce harm, build equity, whatever the phrase of the month happens to be. They work in government, sure, but also in HR departments, in NGO lobbies, in the communications arms of public utilities, in DEI taskforces, in ethics committees, in tech firms, in universities, in the better kind of magazine.

You will never meet most of them.
But they’ve met you - or at least your data profile, your tone, your consumer footprint, your sentiment cloud.
And they know how to guide you - gently, softly - toward the kind of life that freedom now seems to require.

There Is No Exit
The trouble with systems like these - the kind that don’t declare themselves as systems but rather present as common sense - is that you can’t leave them. Not because you’re chained, but because you’re understood. And not just understood in the emotional mind (although there’s plenty of that, too - the slogans, the campaigns, the curated empathy), but understood in the predictive, algorithmic, anticipatory sense: your preferences, your triggers, your politics, your tone, even your exits are accounted for.

You are free, of course, to disagree. You are free to critique the state, the market, the algorithms, and the weather.
You can write angry tweets. You can start a podcast. You can vote for the candidate who claims to be anti-system. You can move to the countryside. You can reject plastic. You can meditate. You can protest - softly, and with a permit.

But try to speak in a grammar that does not belong to liberalism, and the system does not respond with violence - it reacts with confusion. Your words stop making sense. Your sentences fall outside the language model. You are no longer understood. And when you are no longer understood, you are no longer heard. You are, in effect, muted.

What’s remarkable about this arrangement is not its cruelty, but its mildness. No one shouts. There are no jackboots—just policies, interfaces, corrections, notifications, and reviews. The act of being silenced now feels indistinguishable from being politely ignored. It’s not that you can’t speak - it’s that no one is particularly obligated to care.

We like to believe that alternatives exist. That history remains open. That if things get bad enough, something will rise and interrupt the feedback loop. But every supposed alternative - every new movement, every rebranding of the political imagination - seems to end up routed through the same infrastructure: the language of rights, equality, inclusion, sustainability, dignity, growth. The software may update, but the operating system remains unchanged.

It’s not that there’s a door and you’re forbidden to open it.
The building was designed without exits, and the blueprints have been lost.

This is what Foucault meant by regimes of truth: not that power tells you what to say, but that it tells you what can be said meaningfully, and what cannot. Not censorship in the traditional sense, but epistemological landscaping - the quiet removal of all the paths that don’t lead back to the centre.

And when, against all odds, someone insists on speaking outside the approved architecture - when they try to conjure a reality the system cannot absorb - the response is almost always the same: not arrest, not exile, but pathologisation. You are labelled irrational, hysterical, nostalgic, unstable, radical, and broken. Not wrong. Just… misaligned.

There is no need to punish those who dream of exits.
The system waits for them to wake up, apologise, and update their preferences.

The Ritual of Resistance
Perhaps the most elegant feature of our contract - unsigned, unspoken, but very much enforced - is its ability to host its opposition. You can protest the war, the climate crisis, the borders, the billionaires, the billionaires who fund the borders that worsen the climate crisis that fuel the wars. You can scream, march, cry, organise, publish, or go viral. The system not only permits this, but it also needs it.

Because without resistance, the machinery would be too visible. The silence would be unbearable. So we are given rituals of defiance - clean, contained, cathartic. Marches with police escorts. Speeches amplified through platforms owned by those we oppose. Hashtags that flare and dissolve like sugar in warm water.

And perhaps this is the deepest trick: we do something, precisely so that nothing has to change. As Slavoj Žižek once put it, our culture doesn’t repress protest - it outsources it. You go to the demo, sign the petition, share the infographic - and the system thanks you for your service. It absorbs your indignation like a sponge, wrings it out, rebrands it, and reshelves it as proof that everything is working just fine. You are allowed to feel morally awake as long as your awakening does not interfere with production schedules.

This is interpassivity: the performance of action instead of action, the discharge of ethical urgency into symbolic gestures. Not apathy - but pre-emptive exhaustion. You speak, therefore you have spoken. You resist, thus resistance has occurred. You feel righteous; thus, righteousness must exist.

And as Herbert Marcuse warned, liberal democracies do not crush dissent - they tolerate it to death. They create a space wide enough for every grievance, every identity, every colour-coded cause, and then fill that space with committees, guidelines, safe spaces, moderators, and impact assessments, until what began as a cry becomes a whisper, and what began as rupture becomes a slideshow in a breakout room.

Repressive tolerance means you are free to speak - but only in the language the system has already approved. You may scream as loud as you like - so long as it sounds like reform. And reform, here, means more feedback surveys, better branding, and more ergonomic chains.

So we participate. We express. We attend. We post. We feel, for a fleeting moment, like we are altering the trajectory of history. But zoom out - and you see the pattern. The wars continue. The planet warms. The migrants drown. The borders harden. The outrage intensifies. The vocabulary expands. But the blueprint of the game remains intact.

And here is the truth we don’t like to name: the system does not fear our resistance - it runs on it. Every march, every trending slogan, every panel discussion is an energy source. Our fury is converted into proof of health, proof of pluralism, proof of life.

Progress becomes a mood. Resistance is a weekend hobby. The future is a subscription plan with auto-renewal enabled. And through it all, the machine hums quietly in the background - purring, not because you have weakened it, but because you have fed it.

This isn’t suppression. It’s managed catharsis. Not the silencing of voices, but their saturation. Not the banning of alternatives, but their buffering. And if you listen closely, you can already hear the next phase: the part where the language of liberty - soft, familiar, almost yours - begins to speak back, begins to shape your mouth, begins to decide what you meant all along.

The Language of Liberty
And so we end where we began: with freedom. Or rather, with its afterimage - the word that glows long after its meaning has burned away. We live inside its architecture: the rights, the choices, the apps, the subscriptions, the curated selves. We are freer than ever - at least in the way a screen is free: bright, smooth, responsive, and forever watching.

But perhaps the contract we never signed was never meant to guard freedom at all. Maybe it was designed to domesticate it - to take the unruly, untidy thing itself and distil it into a consumable format. A freedom that doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t spill, doesn’t demand, doesn’t burn. A liberty that fits in the palm of your hand.

Because the liberal state insinuates itself into the individual down to the marrow, to the level of our sleep patterns, anxieties, and small talk, there is almost no freedom left that is not already political. And all the freedoms we do have are political freedoms, in the sense that they are politicised in advance - the leftover space, if there is any, is itself politically regulated. In this way, to speak of freedom at all is to speak only of the small, managed kind: the kind the state tolerates and administers. Just as liberalism has stripped the field of any genuine ideological alternatives, it has eliminated the very idea of an ideological adversary.

The genius was never in making us believe we are free - it was in making the language of freedom so intimate, so constant, that it now speaks in our place. We police our thoughts, optimise our habits, edit our impulses, and call it responsibility. We feel guilt not when we are coerced, but when we fail to meet the standards of the freedom we’ve been taught to perform.

This is not tyranny. Tyranny would be easier to name. This is the slow erosion of the untamed by the reasonable, of movement by moderation, of living by compliance. It is the kind of power that no longer needs to hide - because it has already learned to wear our face, borrow our voice, and sign our name.

And maybe that is the real condition of our age: not that we have lost our liberty, but that we have been persuaded to mistake its reflection for the thing itself - until the day comes when we can no longer remember the difference.