The stories that keep us obedient

James Baldwin on protection, avoidance, and the limits we inherit.

What’s the balance between protection and control?

Early on, the difference is hard to see. A rule tightens, choices narrow, and it still feels like someone watching out for us. But the moment we’re told which questions are acceptable, the story stops being something we believe and becomes something we’re permitted to follow.

I’m Nate Sowder, and this is unquoted, installment 14. This week, we’re looking at James Baldwin and the dynamics of controlling systems.

Baldwin before Baldwin

James Baldwin grew up in Harlem in the 1930s, in a neighborhood where the church was often the only institution offering structure, identity and a sense of direction. His stepfather was a preacher… strict, volatile, convinced the world was dangerous and that discipline was the only defense against it. Baldwin was taught early that love and fear could sound the same from the pulpit, and that protection could arrive in a tone that felt indistinguishable from control.

By adolescence, he was already writing, already watching, already noticing how authority behaves when it’s anxious. He saw how parents and pastors tightened their grip (not because they were strong, but) when they were afraid… afraid of the world outside, afraid of losing their children to it, afraid of questions that didn’t have answers prescriptively laid out.

The punchline is that Baldwin left the church, but he never stopped studying its logic: the way belief gets inherited, the way fear gets institutionalized (let that sink in), and the way people learn to live inside systems that claim to protect them while shaping them into something… relatively insignificant.

What made Baldwin, Baldwin wasn’t doctrine or theory. Instead, it was his ability to see how systems (families, churches, nations, etc.) reveal their deepest insecurities in how they try to keep people “safe”. And how, in doing so, they confuse protection with control until the two become nearly indistinguishable.

What Baldwin saw

What Baldwin carried out of that childhood was clarity about how authority behaves when it feels uneasy. He noticed that the strictest rules often appeared when the people enforcing them felt threatened. When grips tightened, it wasn’t because the world required it; it was because the adults in charge didn’t know what to do with their own uncertainty.

He grew up watching beliefs passed down without examination, repeated out of habit, fear, or duty. Questioning them didn’t feel dangerous because of the ideas themselves, it felt dangerous because of what those questions exposed: How fragile the underlying certainty really was.

Baldwin learned that control often exposes the very vulnerability it intends to hide.

This became the thread running through his work. Whether he was writing about families, churches, or nations, he kept returning to the same observation: Systems that depend on obedience are rarely confident in their foundations. They appeal to safety, stability, or virtue, but what they are really protecting is the comfort of not having to reconsider themselves.

Baldwin didn’t need to catalogue every rule or doctrine. It was sufficient enough studying what people do when they’re afraid to face their own reflection.

When fear becomes policy

The dynamics Baldwin observed in the church weren’t confined to pulpits or families. You can see the same architecture anywhere a system confuses order with virtue and obedience with stability. Some cultures call it tradition, others morality, and some simply call it policy. But the structure is identical: fear becomes the rationale, and protection becomes the excuse.

You see it in countries where dissent is treated as contamination. The state offers “safety” in exchange for silence, promising harmony while making independent thought feel hazardous. Citizens learn to measure their words before they measure their ideas. Over time, people don’t become loyal; they become cautious. And while caution is easy to manage, history has shown this isn’t a foundation for stability.

You see it in religious movements convinced the world is deteriorating and that only strictness can save the next generation. Rules multiply. Curiosity becomes a liability. Children are raised not to understand their beliefs, but to repeat them as if conviction can survive without the capacity to question. It looks devout from the outside, but inside, it’s a culture afraid of the very people it claims to shepherd — held together by the oldest tool available: shame.

And you see it in political strategies designed to produce dependency. Systems remove options not because citizens can’t handle them, but because the system can’t. Policies become tight, resources shrink and the message becomes unmistakable: trust us, not yourself. The promise sounds like protection or worse: Equality. The effect feels more like containment, and the longer someone stays inside it, the harder it becomes to imagine leaving.

Across these contexts, fear has the opposite intended effect. It organizes around compliance rather than unity.

And compliance, once internalized, becomes something far more difficult to undo than force: it becomes normal.

Why control feels necessary

Controlling systems (and people buying into it) rarely see themselves as controlling. They see themselves as managing risk. Uncertainty becomes the problem to solve, and predictability becomes the measure of whether the solution is working. Once that logic takes hold, the system begins to interpret any deviation (any question, new idea, independent choice, etc.) as evidence that the threat hasn’t been contained.

This is how control becomes rationalized.
Not moral, not ideological… rational.

A system anxious about its own stability starts treating unpredictability as danger, even when nothing dangerous is happening. Order becomes a proxy for safety. Obedience becomes a proxy for belonging, and the more fragile the system feels internally, the more rigid its rules become externally.

• In families, this shows up as an insistence that “good choices” are the ones that avoid discomfort.
• In organizations, it shows up as leaders mistaking silence for alignment.
• In societies, it shows up as policies built to prevent change rather than manage it.

The irony is always the same: The tighter a system tries to hold things together, the more it reveals how afraid it is of letting people grow.

Control is a thing because a system doubts it can survive… not because a system is strong.

In the end, control survives not on strength, but on the fear of what might happen without it.

The stories avoidance hands down

Oddly enough, avoidance isn’t neglect. Avoidance is the explanation of which questions are allowed and which ones should never be asked. Every controlling system depends on stories that make it feel responsible. These are stories inherited so early and repeated so often that questioning them starts to feel like a breach. To Baldwin, these weren’t ideas or lessons. These were boundaries.

You can probably see where this is going.

The first layer is tradition. It hands us practices and expectations framed as stability. But tradition often survives because it saves people from having to examine what might change if they let themselves reconsider… well… tradition. Avoidance hides neatly inside continuity.

History is next. Not as a record, but as a curated reassurance. A society (in power) decides which parts of its past are useful, and arranges them (or deletes them, as you might notice) accordingly. Once that arrangement feels authoritative, uncertainty becomes harder to entertain. Questioning the narrative reads as destabilizing, even when the narrative was assembled to prevent destabilization in the first place (if you can believe it).

Then morality steps in to seal the deal. Guidance becomes doctrine, doctrine becomes obligation, and obligation becomes a performance of virtue that relies on predictability rather than understanding. Baldwin saw how easily morality can be drafted into the service of avoidance. What I mean here, is how often systems reward people not for being thoughtful, but for being steady and compliant.

And now we have a pattern. Avoidance becomes normal. The stories people inherit teach them to not ask questions. They close the space in which doubt can occur, and treat uncertainty as a sign of personal failure. The more these habits embed, the less the system needs to enforce anything. People maintain the limits themselves.

Baldwin’s clarity cuts cleanly here: Obedient systems train people to fear questions until avoiding them starts to feel like character.

If this feels like the moment everything clicks… good. We’re not done.

What control really creates

Once avoidance becomes the operating logic of a system, something predictable happens to the people inside it: They stop developing the instincts they would need to live without the system’s protection. For Baldwin, this was the tragedy of control. It doesn’t just limit what people can do. It limits what they believe themselves capable of understanding.

When questions are treated as disruptions, people learn to ignore the parts of their lives that don’t fit the approved story.

People stop examining their assumptions. They stop trusting their own judgment and stop exploring ideas that might complicate the version of themselves the system prefers.

You know the consequences better than me. People grow uncomfortable with uncertainty. They choose predictability. They confuse obedience with maturity because obedience is the only behavior the system ever rewarded. And when faced with something that requires imagination, or skepticism, or self-direction, they hesitate…

I don’t think they hesitate because they lack intelligence. I think they hesitate because of a horrible failure that has taken a really long time to take effect.

Baldwin’s warning was never about the severity of limits. It was about their effect. Control produces people who expect someone else to name boundaries for them. Once that expectation settles in, the system doesn’t need to impose its authority. It simply waits for people to stay inside the lines on their own.

The cost of making obedience a virtue

The longer a system depends on avoidance, the harder it becomes to see the trade-off being made. Over time, people forget that their certainties were handed to them. They begin to speak as though they reached those conclusions on their own. That’s how avoidance starts looking like conviction.

This is where I think the damage shows up. Systems built on obedience don’t need to enforce much. People begin to manage themselves long after the original authority fades off. They sidestep questions that would be unsettling to the story they inherited. They’re able to seek out and maintain a stability they never chose and participate in their own containment because the alternative (actual examination) feels disloyal to the world that taught them not to question.

Baldwin leaves us with a hard truth:
Control doesn’t secure a system; It reduces the scale of the people inside it.

Once that reduction feels normal, the system has very little to maintain. Avoidance passes from one generation to the next, each one repeating the scripts that make obedience sound eerily similar to maturity.

We tell ourselves we’re protecting what matters.

But protection without examination is something else entirely. It’s the refusal to imagine what someone might become if they were trusted with their own questions.

Unquoted is a series about the people and their ideas we can’t afford to forget.

The stories that keep us obedient was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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