Would You Kindly Think?
Freedom, Thoughtlessness, and the Randian Soul
(Picasso’s Guernica, photographed in the town - what happens when civilised, but unthinking, men act)
Alexander Goodman’s recent essay, here on substack, A Man Chooses, a Slave Obeys, captures a disturbing truth about our age: that most people now live under a kind of moral anaesthesia, mistaking obedience for virtue and sedation for peace. It is a fine piece of writing—lucid, literate, and morally serious. Yet it ends where the problem begins. Alex decries our collective sleepwalk into obedience but grounds his cure in the same ideology that made it possible.
1. The illusion of choice
The phrase “Would you kindly?” from the video game BioShock is the perfect metaphor for contemporary consciousness: the illusion of agency under conditions of control. Alex sees this clearly. The player believes they act freely, only to discover that every “choice” was programmed by another. It is a parable for modern life: our convictions are pre-selected, our emotions cultivated, our freedom marketed back to us as lifestyle and opinion.
So far, his diagnosis is acute. But then he pivots toward a strangely familiar salvation: the solitary, rational man who “chooses” and “rises above” the herd. Here the essay slips from Arendt to Ayn Rand.
2. Arendt and Minnich: thoughtlessness as moral failure
Hannah Arendt, writing after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, described evil not as demonic will but as the banality of thoughtlessness—the failure to think from the standpoint of another. Elizabeth Minnich later called this the evil of banality: the systemic manufacture of moral numbness through bureaucracy, ideology, and conformity.
For both, the antidote was never solitary reason but dialogical thinking—the hard work of staying present to others, of judging, of imagining consequences. Thoughtlessness, they warned, is not cured by intellectual pride but by moral imagination.
3. The Randian residue
Alex’s essay ends by exalting “the man who chooses”—the independent rationalist standing above the mob. But this is the Rand fantasy itself. The cult of autonomy, the moralisation of self-sufficiency, and the suspicion of relationality are not the enemies of thoughtlessness; they are its architects.
Rand was a precursor to Neoliberalism (you might better know this as Thatcherism) which later colonised the language of choice and freedom. It taught us that value lies in independence, that dependence is weakness, and that solidarity is sentimental. In this world, to choose is to consume, and to think for oneself means to withdraw from the social body that makes thinking possible. Alex sees the sedation but not its source. He condemns the obedience yet re-enacts the ontology that demands it: the isolated, calculating subject of the market.
4. Critical realism and the social production of consciousness
From a critical-realist perspective, agency is not a switch that heroic individuals flip; it is a relational capacity shaped by structure, culture, and context. Margaret Archer reminds us that reflexivity develops within the conversation of concernswe conduct between self and society. When institutions reward conformity, precarity, and speed, they erode that reflexivity.
People do not surrender judgment because they are weak but because the system trains them to. The algorithm rewards outrage, the workplace punishes hesitation, the economy extracts attention as labour. Thoughtlessness is not a moral flaw but a social pathology.
5. Fromm’s moral psychology: freedom for, not freedom from
Erich Fromm saw this long before the internet. In Escape from Freedom he argued that modern individuals, stripped of community and security, flee into authoritarianism or conformity. They escape from freedom because freedom, under isolation, is terrifying.
True freedom, Fromm insisted, is freedom for—for relationship, for creation, for love—not merely freedom from restraint. Alex’s independent man is the latter: heroic but hollow, mistaking solitude for sovereignty. The task is not to rise above the crowd but to rebuild the human bonds that make autonomy meaningful.
6. “Would You Kindly”
The real “Would you kindly” of our age is not political obedience but the market’s gentle whisper: Would you kindly compete?
Would you kindly monetise your worth?
Would you kindly optimise yourself?
We obey without coercion because the command is moralised as virtue. The nurse working unpaid overtime, the student optimising her “personal brand,” the worker smiling through exhaustion—all have internalised the creed that to serve efficiently is to be good.
This is the genius of power: it colonises conscience. It turns solidarity into sentiment, resistance into unprofessionalism, and obedience into moral excellence. The subject becomes both master and slave—Andrew Ryan and Jack at once.
7. Lifeworld colonisation: the system inside the self
Here Jürgen Habermas’s warning becomes crucial. He called it lifeworld colonisation—the quiet conquest of everyday meaning by the logics of money and power. The lifeworld is the space of relationship, moral discourse, and mutual understanding: the domain of family, care, and community where we sustain our humanity through dialogue.
When that space is invaded by instrumental rationality—by algorithms, bureaucracy, and market language—we begin to speak through systems rather than with each other. The result is the psychic and moral hollowing-out that Goodman describes. “Would you kindly?” becomes not merely a command but a grammar: the syntax of colonisation itself.
We internalise the language of management, the metrics of worth, the idioms of efficiency. The human lifeworld—once sustained by conversation and care—becomes a data field for extraction. This is the deeper meaning of the sedation Alex perceives: the colonisation of communicative life.
In health and education, this invasion is almost complete. The clinician who must tick boxes before holding a patient’s hand; the teacher who measures empathy by rubric; the citizen reduced to consumer—each is living proof that the system has entered the soul. The moral imagination is displaced by compliance; reflection by performance.
8. Health, exhaustion, and the sedation of consciousness
From the perspective of health sociology, Alex’s “sedation of the mind” is not only moral but physiological. The nervous system of late capitalism runs on cortisol and caffeine. Chronic stress, insecurity, and digital overload dull the very faculties—reflection, empathy, imagination—that sustain moral life.
Burnout is not just occupational; it is civilisational. When attention becomes a scarce resource and empathy an inefficiency, thought itself sickens. The mind, like the body, adapts to survive by numbing sensation. The result is precisely the moral anaesthesia Alex laments.
9. Thought as care
In nursing theory, we speak of care not as sentiment but as disciplined attention to the real. To care is to stay present, to resist abstraction, to treat the person as more than data. Thinking, in this sense, is a form of care. It requires what the nurse calls presence and what Arendt called judgment.
The opposite of obedience is not defiance but participation—the recognition that we are members of one another. The man who truly chooses does not rise above the world but returns to it with open eyes.
10. The world of membership
Wendell Berry once wrote that “health is membership.” To be whole is to belong rightly—to each other, to place, to truth. The pathology of our time is not lack of reason but loss of belonging. A civilisation cannot think if its members live as economic atoms.
To recover thought is therefore an act of healing. It means rebuilding the moral and relational infrastructures that allow reflection to flourish: communities of dialogue, workplaces of trust, institutions that prize care over metrics.
11. Conclusion: to think is to love the world
So yes, Alex is right to say that obedience reborn as virtue is the horror of our age. But the cure is not the proud solitude of reason. It is the humble, risky work of thinking with others, of rediscovering what Arendt called “the joy of public freedom.”
The choice is not between choosing or obeying. It is between illusion and relation. Between the sedative of autonomy and the discipline of belonging. Between the market’s “Would you kindly” and the moral imagination that asks, instead, “Would you care?”
Suggested reading.
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking.
Minnich, E. (2017). The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. Rowman & Littlefield.
Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.
Archer, M. (2003). Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System. Beacon Press.
Berry, W. (2012). It All Turns on Affection. Library of Congress.
#CriticalRealism #Habermas #HannahArendt #Neoliberalism #Thoughtlessness #MoralSociology #AynRand #Fromm #HealthAsMembership #Reflexivity #Care
'at least do the decency' , who do you think you are? I don't elevate empathy above reason, and i don't argue to do so. your Dr House example is so binary, and exclusionary. One can be cared for by a doctor with reason and with empathy. you lack of experience of working with any health care professionals shows here. I have spent my life teaching health professionals not to conform, to use reason evidence and clinical judgment, as well as trying to emphasise with people. You are a little arrogant in this regard, because you spout theory with zero real world experince of health care delivery and the people who are charged with delivering it. we certainly don't argue for collective obedience, quite the opposite. you say 'Civilisations fall when people treat thinking as optional'. Exactly, that was one of key points. Arendt, Minnich et al have written eloquently about thoughtlessness ! I've published on it! but I've also worked on the insidious nature of things such as instrumental rationality and technological rationality that can dehumanise when we reduce the indicidal to data and metrics. Did you even read the piece? I doubt it.
If you’re going to critique what I wrote, at least do me the decency of linking to the original piece. It keeps the discussion honest, and people can see for themselves.
You describe obedience as a social pathology, a system failure that can be cured through collective care. That’s the very premise Rapture was built to escape, and the reason it fell. Systems can incentivise evasion, yes, but they cannot cause it. Every abdication of reason is still a personal choice. The inhabitants of Rapture were free, and used that freedom to stop thinking. That is not systemic failure; it is moral failure, multiplied across minds until a civilisation collapses under its own evasion.
The same pattern is visible in healthcare today. When empathy is elevated above reason, care turns into sentiment, not healing. I would rather be treated by a brilliant, unempathetic Dr Gregory House than a doctor with perfect bedside manner who can only think within the prefabricated boxes of bureaucracy. The former may be cold, but he thinks — and thought saves lives. The latter conforms — and conformity kills. Rapture’s fall began in the same way: good intentions without judgment, compassion without consciousness.
Independence isn’t isolation, though it can be if one chooses. It’s the basis of real cooperation, the meeting of independent minds who respect reality, not the collective obedience that demands agreement.
Civilisations fall when people treat thinking as optional. Rapture was the warning. The principle remains: a man chooses. A slave obeys.
The article is here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-175716217