In today’s hyper-organized world, compliance is often mistaken for progress.
Across institutions, schools, workplaces and health-care systems, success is often defined by how well we conform.
We’re taught to internalize rules, monitor ourselves and avoid disrupting the status quo.
It’s not always explicit; power shows up in subtle ways, through performance reviews, organizational culture and invisible norms that shape our behaviour.
In the process, we become what Foucault called “docile bodies,” compliant, efficient and quiet. We are often told that those who don’t advance simply need to work harder.
But for many people, especially women, immigrants, racialized communities and gender-diverse individuals, the rules of the game were never made with them in mind.
Structural violence
Our workplaces are often described as neutral, but they are anything but.
Policies, performance metrics and technologies are all shaped by specific cultural and historical forces.
They reflect dominant ideas of productivity, success and professionalism, ideas that often exclude or disadvantage those who fall outside the norm.
“We learn not to question the system unless we offer a solution that fits within it.”
Even well-intentioned initiatives like mentorship programs can fall short.
While mentoring can provide support and opportunity, it can also unintentionally reinforce the very hierarchies it aims to dismantle, especially when it’s about “helping” someone adapt, rather than challenging the system itself.
Patricia Hill Collins reminds us that power doesn’t always show up through violence or overt discrimination. It can operate silently, through policies, bureaucracy and the stories we tell about who belongs and who doesn’t.
Structural violence, as she calls it, is embedded in systems that routinely disadvantage some while privileging others.
The cost of one-dimensional thinking
A one-dimensional society, as Marcuse calls it, is one where dominant ways of thinking are so deeply embedded that imagining alternatives becomes difficult.
We learn not to question the system unless we offer a solution that fits within it. And that expectation itself shuts down meaningful critique.
This thinking discourages creativity, diversity and resistance.
It produces workplaces where efficiency matters more than well-being, schools where standardized testing overrides holistic learning and institutions that prioritize profit over people.
Even activism is sometimes absorbed into the very systems it seeks to resist, turned into safe, manageable forms that don’t challenge the root of the problem.
What resistance looks like
But resistance is not always loud or confrontational.
Sometimes, it starts with asking different questions: questions that invite us to reimagine our systems, ones rooted not in conformity but in equity and care.
“Intersectional frameworks . . . invite a more decentralized, networked way of working, where leadership is shared and power is redistributed.”
Grounded in the lived experiences of those most excluded by mainstream systems, particularly racialized groups and low-income communities, they show us what’s possible when people co-create economic structures that reflect their values.
Similarly, social movements like Black Lives Matter have embraced transversal politics, a model that builds coalitions across differences without flattening them.
Instead of demanding uniformity, this approach holds space for varied experiences and identities.
It recognizes that our struggles are interconnected, but not identical, and that true solidarity requires humility, flexibility and trust.
These intersectional frameworks challenge the top-down, hierarchical structures that dominate many organizations.
They invite a more decentralized, networked way of working, where leadership is shared and power is redistributed.
What we need now is not more compliance, but more courage. Courage to imagine differently. Courage to name what isn’t working.
And courage to build systems that truly reflect the diversity, complexity and potential of our communities.
Because real inclusion doesn’t begin with teaching people to conform. It begins with transforming the systems themselves.
