Have you ever noticed how deeply our society has mangled the idea of autonomy until it barely resembles anything human. We are trained to imagine ourselves as tiny sovereign islands whose choices exist in perfect isolation, even though every choice we make bleeds outward into the lives, bodies, and emotional landscapes of the people around us. This distortion becomes most obvious when you look at how people react to being asked to include others in decisions that materially affect them. They treat that inclusion like a robbery of their freedom while pretending that the fallout they create is somehow weightless. It is a strange fucking equation where accountability feels like trespass but consequence does not. That reversal is not natural. It is manufactured.

Once you see that pattern clearly, you see the fingerprints of imperial logic all over it. Empire teaches people to believe that their impacts are simply facts of life while the impacts they endure from others are violations. It builds a worldview where asserting your comfort is normal and absorbing the discomfort you cause is the responsibility of everyone else. Even in intimate settings like friendships and sexual relationships, people reproduce this same structure. They cling to a tiny imagined sphere of personal autonomy that somehow must override any harm, risk, or emotional turbulence that their habits create for the people tied to them. They do not call it domination, because domination becomes invisible when it is practiced in miniature. But the architecture is the same as the state.

Autonomy in this society is an anemic little idea. It is important, but its actual scope is minuscule. Without collective reinforcement, it barely extends beyond the limits of your limbs. People act like it is this vast realm of unbounded license, but in reality, it is a fragile conceptual tool that only gains strength when held collectively. Autonomy means next to nothing alone but can reshape the world when connected, autonomy becomes powerful only through reciprocal recognition. When people defend autonomy as if it thrives in isolation, what they are actually defending is the right to ignore the relational web that makes meaningful freedom possible at all. They mistake solitude for sovereignty.

This is why the refusal to let affected people participate in decisions about your habits is not neutrality. It is a small scale reenactment of the governing posture. It is the transformation of personal life into an arena where one person’s preferences become law and everyone else becomes subject to its effects without representation. People get defensive because they think the alternative is giving up their body or their agency to someone else. But the real alternative is mutual accountability, not subordination. It is the acknowledgment that freedom and consequence are siblings, and you cannot amputate one without mutilating the other.

The irony is that this hyper individualist version of autonomy destroys the very thing it claims to protect. When you treat others as intruders the moment they engage with the consequences you create, you turn autonomy into a weaponized excuse to avoid responsibility. You reproduce the emotional logic of the state: my expansion is natural, your resistance is aggression. You dull yourself to the effects you produce while reacting violently to the idea that anyone else’s needs might intersect with your own. That is how empire sneaks into intimate life. It teaches people to feel righteous about impact and persecuted by accountability.

Calling autonomy a shared delusion is not cynicism. It is clarity. Human autonomy has always been conditional, always intertwined with the collective arrangements that allow us to survive and express ourselves. Pretending otherwise only makes cooperation impossible and leaves people trapped inside tiny fictions of personal sovereignty that cannot withstand pressure from reality. When we admit that autonomy is constructed, relational, and fundamentally limited, we become able to actually use it. We can explore the psychological forces behind defensiveness. We can talk honestly about how to reshape habits that spill over onto the people we care about. We can stop mimicking the structures that dominate us.

If we want liberation, we cannot replicate the same imperial logic that treats consequence as invisible and accountability as violation. We have to rebuild autonomy as a cooperative process, not a barricade. Because any model of freedom that depends on apathy toward those affected by it is not freedom. It is empire wearing the mask of self.