This article introduces the concept of "non-consensual consent" – a pervasive societal mechanism where people are forced to perform enthusiasm and voluntary participation while having no meaningful alternatives. It's the inverse of "consensual non-consent" in BDSM, where people actually have freedom but pretend they don't. In everyday life, we constantly pretend we've freely chosen arrangements we had no hand in creating.
From job interviews (where we feign passion for work we need to survive), to parent-child relationships (where children must pretend gratitude for arrangements they never chose), to citizenship (where we act as if we consented to laws preceding our birth), this pattern appears throughout society. The article examines how this illusion is maintained through language, psychological mechanisms, and institutional enforcement, with examples ranging from sex work to toddler choice techniques.
I explore how existence itself represents the ultimate non-consensual arrangement, and how acknowledging these dynamics could lead to greater compassion and more honest social structures, even within practical constraints that make complete transformation difficult.
Thank you. One of the goals of my blog is also to bridge the gap between Post-Modernist left thinking and STEM-Rationality type thinking, by writing in clear language and explaining my assumptions from first principles. Basically, I try to avoid complex jargon and avoid asserting things without explanation or examples, which I unfortunately see too often in leftist writing.
I too appreciate the clarity and structure of your writing. And the topics.
Non-consensual consent seems to me related to Heidegger’s ‘throwness’, which Google Gemini summarized as:
> In Heidegger's philosophy, "thrownness" (German: "Geworfenheit") refers to the idea that humans are passively "thrown" into existence in the world, without choosing their circumstances or having any control over their "being-in-the-world," essentially meaning we are born into a pre-existing world with a set of conditions and limitations that we did not choose; it signifies the fundamental fact that our existence is not something we actively create but rather something that has already happened to us.