I’ve made ‘The Will to Be Ruled’ essay available as a Spotify audiobook. The essay is 30 minutes long. I share the abstract below.

I choose to obey, therefore I am free

Modern liberalism rests on the fiction of the autonomous self – the rational chooser imagined to act freely within a stable moral order. Yet under the pressures of uncertainty and social disintegration, this ideal collapses into its opposite: the craving for authority. This essay traces how the Enlightenment’s myth of autonomy generates the psychological, libidinal, and linguistic conditions for totalitarianism. Drawing on Fromm, Arendt, Adorno, Reich, Han, and Desmet, it argues that instability and isolation drive individuals to seek coherence through obedience, moralising submission as voluntary freedom and even as pleasure. The paradox of the self-governed subject – I choose to obey, therefore I am free – forms the emotional and moral grammar of modern authoritarianism. Totalitarianism thus emerges not as a historical aberration but as the logical endpoint of Enlightenment individualism: a collective escape from the unbearable weight of self-creation. Within this framework, Dis-Integrationism reframes ethics as maintenance rather than mastery, proposing responsiveness over redemption – an attentiveness that keeps the field open in the half-light where the self still flickers.

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NB: I share this for convenience and also to showcase the AI voice of Adele from ElevenLabs. I use this voice for many of my audio renditions, as I find it pleasing to listen to. Given this free sample, I’d like to know how it sounds to you.

Interestingly (or not), this reading was of an earlier draft, so there are minor differences – it includes parts that didn’t make the final edit – but it remains directionally intact.