Myth: If you follow the rules, act virtuous, and say all the right things, you’re definitely a good person.
Status: Busted
Imagine post-WWII France as the spiritual lovechild of Professor Dolores Umbridge, except she’s also your dentist and today’s procedure is a root canal.
This was the delightful world young Michel Foucault found himself in, where society's supposed Justice League (teachers, doctors, police, psychologists) formed a kind of morally-upstanding team dedicated to making sure you toe the line. They (probably) made him write “I will not tell lies” fifty times in his own blood, presumably with the same quill Umbridge used. Most people would’ve folded by number one. Maybe three, if they were particularly rebellious or had just read some Camus that morning.
But Foucault, tough as nails, looked at this parade of finger-waggers and said, “Not today, Satan!” and marched into history to fundamentally change how we understand truth, power, and why your therapist might secretly be part of the problem.
His theory was that knowledge wasn’t some neutral, dispassionate search for truth. It was a glorified popularity contest disguised in tweed. The people who knew the most were often the ones best at pretending. And those who feared being seen as weird, useless, or *gasp* politically incorrect quickly learned to parrot whatever slogan was trending on the top ten Moral Billboard of the Week. Effectively cheaper than building a Pit of Despair, and frankly better PR, for everyone could feel enough shame and comparison to torture themselves. Everybody wins!
However, Michel Foucault made himself very unpopular at dinner parties by possibly becoming the first man in history to point at everyone and say, “You’re all massive sellouts.”
This made him extremely beloved by no one. He accused them of inheriting, enforcing, or blindly obeying rules by people who keep up with les Jones’s without ever stopping to ask, “Wait, am I the drama?”
By giving society’s little off-Broadway number “Look How Good I Am” a brutal one-star review for self-congratulatory and overacted pacing issues, Foucault accidentally launched an entirely new problem.
Young people, ever the enthusiastic sponges for anything vaguely edgy and French, devoured his theory like a hot new trend. Unfortunately, they skimmed over the fine print where he warned, “Initial doses of this theory may induce feelings of intellectual superiority. Liberation is not pure. Side effects include performative activism, ego inflation, and an irresistible urge to deconstruct everything without having a backup plan. Please consult your inner compass before continued use.”
All this hyper-reflection turned the next several generations into the worst offenders of the very thing Foucault was trying to dismantle—partly because they had lots of energy and nowhere to be after 8 pm. So instead of restorative justice in a way that rebalanced the nature of the universe, the ego swallowed its own cause and social justice sold out to become a popularity contest, blindly appealing to the paranoid Ministry of Micromanagement.
Because history’s greatest hits keep coming back, are we ready to finally learn our lesson? Let me know what you think the secret third option is in the comments below.
HINT: The secret third option is not more of the same sh*t. Go ahead, declare your left or right ideology, creed, or identity as the supreme cosmic truth and win the grand prize of a “kick me” sign taped to your back.
Come on, folks, use a little imagination. The bar is subterranean.
Give up? Try this.
References
Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish, 1975.
George Orwell. 1984, 1949.
Dolores Umbridge’s Guide to Root Canals and Bureaucratic Torture, Hogwarts Archives, 1995.