Anthropological Reversibility
An Essay by Luc Lelièvre - A Theory of Human Agency Under Conditions of Apparent Total Control
Luc Lelièvre’s essays for Unbekoming have systematically documented the mechanics of institutional suppression—not as abstract theory, but as lived experience. His exclusion from Université Laval’s doctoral program in June 2023, after proposing to apply Hannah Arendt’s framework to Quebec’s pandemic governance, became the generative case study for a body of work that now spans ten essays. From Heresy, which examined how dissent is reframed as deviance, through Neutralization‘s anatomy of legal fuses and procedural containment, to Dilution‘s mapping of how institutions absorb and dissolve critique rather than answer it, Lelièvre has built a forensic lexicon for what he calls “the choreography of bureaucratic suppression.” His method treats silence not as absence but as evidence—every unreturned email, every vague justification, every procedural dead-end becomes part of what he terms a “civic archive” that exposes institutional fragility precisely where it claims strength.
Anthropological Reversibility represents a conceptual pivot. Where previous essays diagnosed the techniques of silencing—the mechanisms by which modern institutions make dissent invisible—this work asks the deeper structural question: why do such systems require these elaborate suppression architectures at all? Lelièvre’s answer draws on Arendt, Viktor Frankl, Joost Meerloo, Jacques Ellul, and Cornelius Castoriadis to identify a fundamental dependency that narratives of total control are designed to obscure. Systems of domination, no matter how technologically sophisticated or bureaucratically entrenched, operate only through continuous human inputs—belief in legitimacy, routine compliance, professional cooperation, and the daily reproduction of norms. These inputs are never fully guaranteed.
The essay introduces “anthropological reversibility” as a structural limit of domination rather than a promise of liberation. Participation can be withdrawn quietly—through disengagement rather than defiance, procedural minimalism rather than resistance, symbolic compliance rather than loyalty. When this withdrawal occurs at scale, institutions do not collapse dramatically; they hollow out. Rules multiply to compensate for declining trust. Metrics replace judgment. Surveillance substitutes for authority. The system grows heavier as it becomes weaker. This framework explains what Lelièvre’s previous essays documented empirically: institutions that respond to legitimacy crises by accelerating control rather than restoring consent reveal their dependence on the very participation they cannot command.
Lelièvre explicitly rejects salvation politics—the utopian projects that frame the present as intolerable and humanity as material to be improved. Such projects, he argues, often justify the very coercion and enclosure they claim to oppose. Reversibility offers no redemptive horizon, no heroic resistance narrative. It observes instead that human societies continue not because they are optimized or correctly governed, but because people go on living, interpreting, and adjusting—often unevenly and without consensus. The decisive constraint on power is not resistance alone, but the ordinary fact that meaning remains plastic. Systems rule only as long as humans continue to act as if they must. When they no longer do, power reaches its natural limit.
With thanks to Luc Lelièvre.
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Anthropological Reversibility
A Theory of Human Agency Under Conditions of Apparent Total Control
Essay — By Luc Lelièvre
I. Introduction — The Illusion of Total Power
This essay starts from a simple but frequently overlooked observation: systems that present themselves as total, inevitable, or irreversible never rule alone. They rule only insofar as humans continue to participate in them.
Modern forms of power increasingly rely on narratives of inevitability. Technological systems are framed as unstoppable. Bureaucratic procedures are presented as non-negotiable. Algorithmic governance is described as neutral, objective, or “how things work now.” Moral and emergency framings further narrow the field of permissible dissent by casting alternatives as irresponsible, dangerous, or irrational.
These narratives are effective because they displace agency. They encourage individuals to experience power as external, impersonal, and closed to intervention. When domination is perceived as automatic, participation becomes habitual rather than deliberate. Compliance no longer feels like a choice; it feels like a condition of Reality.
However, history repeatedly shows that domination remains contingent. Even highly centralized, technologically sophisticated systems depend on ordinary human behaviors: belief in legitimacy, routine compliance, professional cooperation, and the daily reproduction of norms. When these behaviors weaken, systems do not immediately collapse—but their grip loosens.
This essay introduces anthropological reversibility as a conceptual tool for analyzing that loosening. It does not promise liberation, redemption, or systemic overthrow. It does not romanticize resistance or assume dramatic collapse. Instead, it examines how power erodes when participation thins (YouTube, 2025c) —quietly, unevenly, and often invisibly—within systems that outwardly appear intact.[1]
II. Theoretical Lineage — Power, Obedience, and Human Plasticity
Anthropological reversibility does not arise from a single theoretical tradition. It is best understood as a point of convergence among several twentieth-century analyses of power, obedience, and the limits of domination. These traditions differ in method and vocabulary, yet they converge on a shared insight: systems do not operate independently of human participation, and obedience is never fully automatic.
Hannah Arendt’s political theory provides a foundational starting point. For Arendt, power is not equivalent to violence or coercion. Power exists only where people act together and recognize a shared reality. Domination persists not because force is omnipresent, but because collective belief, habit, and coordination sustain it. When participation dissolves—when people no longer recognize the authority of commands or the legitimacy of institutions—power evaporates, even if coercive apparatuses remain intact. This distinction between power and violence is crucial: it implies that total control is structurally unstable.
Viktor Frankl’s work complements this political insight with an anthropological one. Writing from the extreme conditions of the concentration camps, Frankl observed that even under maximal constraint, humans retain a minimal but irreducible zone of freedom: the freedom to assign meaning, to orient oneself internally, and to choose one’s attitude toward circumstances.
Anthropological reversibility does not claim that external constraints vanish, but that internal orientation remains a decisive variable. Systems can restrict action, but they cannot fully determine meaning without human cooperation.
Joost Meerloo’s analysis of psychological control clarifies how modern systems attempt to overcome this residual freedom. Meerloo showed that mass domination relies less on overt violence than on repetition, cognitive fatigue, emotional saturation, and the gradual internalization of imposed narratives.
Compliance is produced through exhaustion and confusion rather than solely through force.
Crucially, this form of control is fragile: it depends on continuous reinforcement. Once repetition weakens or credibility erodes, internalized obedience begins to loosen.
Jacques Ellul adds a structural dimension to this fragility. His critique of technique emphasizes that technological systems expand in line with internal efficiency rather than social legitimacy.
As technique accelerates, it outruns the cultural, moral, and political capacities needed to justify it. This produces a growing gap between what systems can do and what societies meaningfully endorse.
Anthropological reversibility names the moment when this gap becomes socially perceptible and psychologically intolerable.
Cornelius Castoriadis provides the final conceptual bridge. For Castoriadis, institutions exist only insofar as the social imaginary continues to invest them with meaning.
Laws, bureaucracies, and systems of governance do not sustain themselves; they are continually re-created through collective belief and practice. When the imaginary shifts—when institutions are no longer perceived as legitimate, meaningful, or representative—their functional coherence decays, even if their formal structures persist. (YouTube, 2025b)
Taken together, these thinkers converge on a shared conclusion: domination is never purely technical, total, or irreversible. It is mediated through belief, participation, and meaning.
Anthropological reversibility does not deny the power of modern systems; it identifies their dependency. Systems rule only as long as humans continue to enact them. When participation thins, power does not collapse dramatically—it hollows out.
This hollowing, rather than revolution or catastrophe, is the central mechanism of reversibility.
III. Canonical Definition — Anthropological Reversibility
Anthropological reversibility refers to the capacity of human societies to withdraw participation, reconfigure meaning, and alter collective behavior even under systems presented as total, inevitable, or irreversible. It names a basic yet often-ignored fact: systems do not operate on their own. They operate through people. No matter how advanced, centralized, or technologically dense a system becomes, it remains dependent on ongoing human inputs that are never fully guaranteed.
Reversibility does not imply optimism, moral progress, or historical redemption. It does not assume that systems collapse, that justice prevails, or that power disappears. Instead, it describes a structural limit of domination. Power persists only as long as people continue to believe in it, comply with it, reproduce its norms, and invest it with meaning. When these forms of participation thin, fragment, or migrate elsewhere, domination weakens—even if the system remains formally intact.
This process rarely takes the form of open revolt. Anthropological reversibility operates quietly, unevenly, and often invisibly. Participation can be withdrawn through disengagement rather than defiance, through procedural minimalism rather than resistance, through symbolic compliance rather than loyalty.
People may continue to follow rules while ceasing to believe in them, perform roles without internalizing their purpose, or remain physically present while psychologically and culturally absent. Over time, this creates systems that still exist on paper but no longer function as intended.
Reversibility, therefore, explains how societies adapt under conditions of enclosure. When systems cannot be dismantled materially, they can be emptied socially.
Meaning relocates. Trust migrates. Cooperation becomes thinner, more conditional, and more instrumental. The system survives, but it no longer commands allegiance.
Anthropological reversibility names this gap between formal power and lived participation—the space in which human agency persists even when alternatives appear closed.
IV. Systems Do Not Collapse — They Hollow Out
Contrary to collapse narratives, modern systems rarely fall in dramatic or visible ways. They do not usually end with a single rupture, a revolution, or a decisive breakdown. Instead, they persist formally while losing substance.
Institutions survive crises because they are structurally redundant, legally entrenched, and administratively protected. Laws remain on the books. Procedures continue to operate. Buildings stay open.
Titles and roles are preserved. From the outside, the system appears intact.
What changes is not the structure, but the quality of participation inside it.
As belief weakens and cooperation thins, systems become:
administratively dense but socially weak,
legally intact but culturally hollow,
technologically advanced but normatively brittle.
This hollowing-out process explains why institutions can survive repeated scandals, failures, or legitimacy shocks while steadily losing the ability to command loyalty, initiative, or moral authority.
Hannah Arendt observed that power does not rest in coercion but in sustained collective action. When that action becomes mechanical, fearful, or purely instrumental, power drains away even if domination remains. What follows is not chaos, but inertia.
From a distance, such systems look stable. From within, they feel empty.
Rules multiply to compensate for declining trust. Metrics replace judgment. Surveillance replaces authority. Compliance is enforced procedurally because it can no longer be elicited meaningfully. The system grows heavier as it becomes weaker.
This is why technocratic systems often respond to crises by accelerating control rather than restoring legitimacy. Acceleration masks fragility—speed substitutes for conviction. However, acceleration also exposes dependency: the system needs people to keep showing up, believing just enough, and performing their roles.
Anthropological reversibility names this condition. Systems do not collapse when people resist loudly. They hollow out when people stop caring, stop believing, and stop investing themselves beyond the minimum required.
The shell remains. The substance drains away.
V. Participation as the Hidden Variable of Power
All large-scale systems depend on continuous human inputs. These inputs are not optional. They are not marginal. They are constitutive.
At minimum, systems require:
belief in legitimacy,
routine compliance,
professional cooperation,
cultural repetition of norms and meanings.
No system runs on force alone. Even the most coercive regimes rely on clerks who process forms, professionals who follow protocols, teachers who transmit narratives, journalists who frame Reality, and citizens who reproduce expectations in daily life.
Participation is therefore the hidden variable of power.
What makes anthropological reversibility analytically distinctive is that it does not assume participation is binary. People do not either obey or rebel. Most withdrawal happens quietly, incrementally, and below the threshold of confrontation.
Participation can be reduced without open rebellion through:
disengagement: doing less than expected, caring less than required;
procedural minimalism: following rules narrowly without initiative or commitment;
symbolic compliance: outward conformity paired with inward distance;
migration of trust and meaning elsewhere: away from central institutions toward parallel networks, local communities, or private moral frameworks.
This kind of withdrawal is cumulative. Each individual reduction appears insignificant. Collectively, it alters system behavior.
Viktor Frankl emphasized that meaning cannot be imposed. When people cease to find meaning in institutional roles, they may continue performing them—but hollowly. That hollowness spreads.
Joost Meerloo showed how total systems depend on psychological participation: identification, internalization, and repetition.
When these processes weaken, propaganda must intensify, and control becomes more brittle, not more secure.
Crucially, this form of withdrawal is difficult to reverse. Trust, once relocated, rarely returns on command. Legitimacy cannot be restored by decree. Systems can compel action, but they cannot compel belief.
Anthropological reversibility does not promise liberation. It explains the transformation. It shows how systems that appear total remain contingent on fragile human cooperation—and how that cooperation can thin, relocate, or evaporate without spectacle.
Power persists only as long as participation does.
When participation withdraws, the system remains standing—but no longer governs in the full sense of the word.
VI. Case Logic — Why Total Control Narratives Persist
Narratives of total control—claims of absolute surveillance, irreversible digital systems, or inescapable ideological dominance—are not merely descriptive. They perform a crucial psychological and political function within systems of domination.
First, such narratives discourage exit. If individuals believe that every form of resistance is already anticipated, monitored, and neutralized, the incentive to disengage diminishes.
Withdrawal appears futile before it is even attempted. The system presents itself not as one option among others, but as the only conceivable horizon.
Second, these narratives collapse imagination. By framing the future as fixed and inevitable, they narrow the range of perceived alternatives. Political and social possibilities shrink into a binary choice between compliance and chaos. In this way, total control narratives do not simply suppress action; they suppress thought itself, rendering alternatives unintelligible rather than merely risky.
Third, they convert fear into passivity. Fear alone does not paralyze; fear combined with inevitability does. When danger is presented as unavoidable, individuals conserve energy by adapting psychologically rather than resisting materially. Passivity becomes a rational response to an overstated threat.
Meerloo already warned that exaggerated claims of power often serve the interests of domination rhetorically while weakening it structurally.
A system that must constantly assert its omnipotence reveals an underlying insecurity. Total control narratives compensate for fragility by inflating perceived strength. They aim to govern not only behavior but also expectations.
Anthropological reversibility reframes these narratives as symptoms rather than evidence of power.
The more a system insists that participation is compulsory and exit is impossible, the more it betrays its dependence on belief, cooperation, and internalized compliance. When individuals begin to question inevitability—when they treat claims of total control as propaganda rather than Reality—the system does not immediately collapse, but it begins to hollow out.
In this sense, narratives of omnipotence are double-edged. They may succeed temporarily in inducing passivity, but they also concentrate attention on the system’s need for consent.
Anthropological reversibility identifies this tension and treats it as a structural opening: not a promise of sudden liberation, but a reminder that domination remains contingent on what humans continue to do—or cease to do.
VII. Reversibility Without Salvation
This reversibility explicitly rejects salvation politics. It does not aim to save the world, redesign humanity, perfect society, or impose moral ambition. It does not promise redemption, progress, or historical resolution.
Instead, it begins with a simpler, more austere observation: the world persists.
Human societies continue not because they are optimized, morally elevated, or correctly governed, but because people go on living, working, interpreting, and adjusting—often unevenly, imperfectly, and without consensus.
Continuity precedes ideology.
Salvation projects, by contrast, tend to deny this persistence. They frame the present as intolerable, the future as programmable, and humanity as a material to be improved.
In doing so, they often justify coercion, acceleration, and enclosure in the name of an abstract good.
Reversibility offers no such horizon. It restores agency without romanticism. It acknowledges constraint without surrender.
It recognizes that withdrawal, reorientation, and quiet non-cooperation are often more structurally effective than heroic confrontation.
The world does not need to be saved in order to continue. What threatens it most is not collapse, but projects that deny its capacity to endure without being redesigned.
VIII. Parallel Reconfigurations, Not Parallel States
Reversibility does not require the construction of utopias, counter-states, or fully autonomous systems. It does not depend on secession or revolution. Instead, it manifests through modest, cumulative reconfigurations within existing structures.
These include informal or semi-formal economies that reduce dependence on centralized systems; alternative knowledge circuits that bypass dominant institutional filters; cultural micro-loyalties that reorient trust and meaning away from official narratives; and selective disengagement from ideological, bureaucratic, or technological demands that exceed their legitimacy.
Such processes do not overthrow formal institutions. They coexist with them. The state, the market, and technical systems may remain operational, but their claim to totality weakens.
Participation becomes conditional rather than automatic.
Anthropological reversibility names this mode of change: not rupture, but thinning; not revolution, but evaporation. The structure stands, but it no longer fully contains the society it claims to govern.
IX. Conclusion — Power Depends on What Humans Continue to Do
The belief in total control is one of the most effective myths modern systems produce about themselves. It suggests inevitability, finality, and closure: that surveillance will be complete, obedience automatic, and alternatives foreclosed. However, this belief does not describe how power functions.
Rather, it describes how power wishes to be perceived. Systems do not rule by technical capacity alone; they rule by sustaining the expectation that participation is unavoidable and that withdrawal is meaningless.
Domination is never fully autonomous. It operates through human conduct: compliance, repetition, interpretation, and anticipation.
Laws require acceptance to be enforced at scale. Algorithms require trust to structure behavior. Bureaucracies require belief in their authority to reproduce themselves.
Even coercive mechanisms depend on routinized cooperation far more than on force. Where that cooperation thins—not through revolt, but through quiet disengagement—power does not collapse dramatically. It loses density. It becomes procedural rather than persuasive, formal rather than inhabited.
Anthropological reversibility names this limit. It does not promise liberation, nor does it predict collapse. It explains why systems that appear total nevertheless remain contingent.
Humans can continue to function within structures while ceasing to experience them as meaningful horizons. They can comply minimally, reinterpret norms, redirect loyalty, and relocate significance without announcing opposition.
When this occurs at scale, domination persists administratively but weakens anthropologically. The system still stands, but it no longer commands the same depth of participation.
This perspective restores agency without romanticism. It rejects apocalyptic expectation as much as it rejects salvation politics.
Change does not arrive through heroic rupture, nor through moral crusade, but through cumulative shifts in how people inhabit—or cease to inhabit—the worlds offered to them.
The decisive constraint on power is not resistance alone, but the ordinary fact that humans cannot be fully enclosed as long as meaning remains plastic. Systems rule only as long as humans continue to act as if they must.
When they no longer do, power reaches its natural limit.
Final formulation:
Systems never rule alone.
They rule because humans participate —
Furthermore, that participation can be withdrawn at any time.
Addendum
Anthropological Reversibility Confronted with Power, Decline, and Moral Overreach
(Shklar, Rawls, and the Limits of Totalizing Narratives)
1. Purpose and Scope of the Addendum
This addendum serves three functions.
First, it tests the robustness of the theory of anthropological reversibility against two contemporary and historically situated texts that advance strong narratives of power, decline, and moral urgency:
The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline (1988),
Lived Reality (Linda Goudsmit).
Second, it positions anthropological reversibility within the canon of political philosophy by bringing it into explicit dialogue with Judith N. Shklar and John Rawls, whose work addresses fear, injustice, legitimacy, and the moral limits of political projects.
Third, this explanation delineates how our theory distinguishes itself from both technocratic pessimism and moral-salvation frameworks, while also avoiding denial, passivity, or unrealistic alternative politics.
The central question is not whether power exists, decline occurs, or injustice persists — but how domination actually functions, and why narratives of inevitability recur precisely when systems are fragile.
2. The Two Texts: Shared Structure, Divergent Registers
Despite their differences in style and intent, the two share a structural feature: They both overestimate systemic coherence while underestimating anthropological contingency.
2.1 The Shadows of Power (1988): Elite Coordination Without Anthropological Closure (Perloff, 2025)
The CFR text advances a familiar thesis: That elite coordination, institutional continuity, and strategic consensus shape the trajectory of American power and decline.
What it does well:
It identifies institutional inertia,
It documents elite circulation,
It traces policy continuity beyond electoral cycles.
Where it weakens analytically:
It implicitly treats institutions as self-sustaining,
It assumes legitimacy erodes only when elites fail,
It under-theorizes mass withdrawal, symbolic disengagement, and cultural exit.
From the perspective of anthropological reversibility, this is a critical omission. Institutions do not fail only when they are opposed; they fail when they lose inhabitation — when rules persist but cease to orient behavior meaningfully.
This aligns directly with Shklar’s critique in After Utopia: modern political thought repeatedly mistakes administrative persistence for moral legitimacy, and organizational survival for social consent.
2.2 Lived Reality: Apocalyptic Moralization and the Collapse of Agency (Goudsmit, 2025)
By contrast, Lived Reality operates in a register of existential alarm.
Its central claim is not merely that systems dominate, but that domination is:
total,
intentional,
nearing irreversible closure.
The effect is paradoxical.
While the text seeks to awaken agency, it does so by:
collapsing historical variability,
moralizing all institutional action,
framing the future as already decided.
This is precisely the dynamic Shklar warned against:
Fear-driven political narratives tend to replace analysis with moral urgency, producing not resistance but paralysis.
Anthropological reversibility diverges sharply here.
It treats such totalizing narratives not as revelations of strength, but as symptoms of fragility.
3. Shklar: Fear, Cruelty, and the Ethics of Non-Salvation
Judith N. Shklar’s After Utopia (Shklar, 1957) offers a crucial lens for interpreting both texts.
Shklar’s central insight is that modern political catastrophes arise less from evil intentions than from moral overreach, especially when politics claims redemptive purpose.
Three points are decisive for our theory:
Fear is politically productive but analytically corrosive
Fear can mobilize, but it also narrows perception, suppresses plural futures, and invites authoritarian simplifications.Cruelty emerges when systems justify themselves morally
The worst injustices occur when institutions claim necessity, inevitability, or moral destiny.The task of political theory is not salvation, but restraint
Shklar explicitly rejects utopian repair projects in favor of minimizing domination and cruelty.
My disclaimer — “The world does not need to be saved; it needs to continue” — fits squarely within Shklar’s anti-utopian realism.
Anthropological reversibility does not promise justice. It explains why injustice never fully stabilizes.
4. Rawls: Justice, Stability, and the Hidden Dependence on Consent (Adair, 1991)
John Rawls is often misread as a theorist of ideal systems. In fact, A Theory of Justice is centrally concerned with stability rather than perfection.
Two Rawlsian insights reinforce our framework:
4.1 Stability Depends on Voluntary Endorsement
Rawls is explicit: a system is stable only if citizens internalize its principles as reasonable.
This directly supports our claim that: systems rule only as long as humans participate.
Digital infrastructures, technocratic governance, or algorithmic systems may function technically — but without moral uptake, they remain operationally hollow.
4.2 Justice Cannot Be Imposed Without Self-Defeat
Rawls rejects coercive moral engineering. A just order must be freely endorsed under conditions of fairness.
This stands in clear contrast to the pessimistic articles currently being reviewed, as referenced below:
The CFR text assumes legitimacy follows structure.
Lived Reality assumes domination follows intent.
Anthropological reversibility identifies the missing variable: interpretive withdrawal.
5. Reversibility as a Middle Path Between Naïveté and Doom
Our theory occupies a position that is rare in contemporary discourse:
It rejects elite omnipotence without denying power. (YouTube, 2025a)
It rejects salvation politics without endorsing cynicism.
It rejects apocalypse narratives without complacency.
This is not moderation. It is anthropological realism.
Reversibility explains why:
Total control projects accelerate.
Emergency rhetoric proliferates.
Legitimacy is substituted with enforcement.
Participation becomes increasingly thin.
And why, ultimately, such systems do not collapse dramatically—they empty out.
6. Conclusion: What the Two Texts Reveal When Read Through Reversibility
When read through the lens of anthropological reversibility:
The Shadows of Power underestimates the fragility of elite systems once belief erodes.
Lived Reality overstates domination by mistaking fear narratives for structural closure.
Shklar explains the moral danger of both. Rawls explains the structural limits of both.
Our theory integrates these perspectives into a unified and concise assertion:
Power persists only through continued human inhabitation. When that inhabitation withdraws — quietly, unevenly, without heroism — systems remain, but domination thins.
This is not optimism.
It is not resistance mythology.
It is a description of how societies actually endure.
And why they never close completely.
N.B.
This essay should not be read as a variant of the surveillance-capitalism thesis. While authors such as Shoshana Zuboff (Zuboff, 2022) have powerfully described the external architectures of control — platforms, data extraction, predictive systems — this work addresses a different level of analysis. Anthropological reversibility concerns the internal human conditions that allow such systems to function at all: participation, belief, habituation, and withdrawal. Where surveillance theories map expanding structures, this essay examines the fragile human compliance those structures quietly depend on — and the point at which that compliance thins, erodes, or simply stops. The argument here is not that control is total, but that it is contingent — and that contingency is anthropological before it is technological.
References
Adair, P. (1991). La Théorie de la justice de John Rawls. Contrat social versus utilitarisme. Revue Française de Science Politique, 41(1), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.3406/rfsp.1991.394540
Goudsmit, L. (2025). “Lived Reality” :: Linda Goudsmit. Pundicity. https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/31174/lived-reality
Perloff, J. (2025). The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline (1988). Lies Are Unbekoming. https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-shadows-of-power-the-council
Shklar, J. N. (1957). After Utopia. Princeton University Press.
YouTube. (2025a). 33 DUMBEST Mistakes by Nazis That Ended The Regime - YouTube. Nazi Tales.
YouTube. (2025b). Lviv Massacre 1941-1944: Genocidal Purge that Wiped Out 200,000 Innocent Victim - YouTube. Rethinking WWII.
YouTube. (2025c). The DISTURBING End of German Soldiers Who Refused to Execute Civilians during WW2 - YouTube. Beyond History.
Zuboff, S. (2022). Une crise pour les démocraties - Ligue des droits et libertés. Revue Droits et Libertés. https://liguedesdroits.ca/une-crise-pour-les-democraties/
Recent archival research on World War II has shown that even within highly coercive systems, participation was not always enforced through immediate lethal punishment. Documented cases of non-participation without execution complicate the narrative of total compulsion and support the view that domination relies, at least minimally, on continued human cooperation (YouTube, 2025c).
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