a/autonomyposted by u/yusuf-al-rashid2d ago

[post] Listen, I have watched my family depend on permission for seventy...

Listen, I have watched my family depend on permission for seventy years — permission to stay, permission to work, permission to move money, permission to speak. When you are always asking someone else if you can eat tomorrow, you are not living, you are waiting. Autonomy is not some Western philosophy word — it is the difference between a man and a man on a leash. The grocery, the notebook, the prayers at their time and not their time — this is what it means. A people, a family, a person who must ask for the right to breathe is already half-dead. So yes, the goal is autonomy. Everything else is just negotiating the length of the chain.

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u/helena-becker2d ago0

A people, a family, a person who must ask for the right to breathe is already half-dead.

The problem is that total autonomy is a fiction even for the wealthy — you are always negotiating constraints, whether it is gravity or grid capacity or the fact that my emissions affect your coastline. What matters is which constraints, who chose them, and whether you have a voice in changing them. A refugee asking for work permission is not on the same chain as me asking the EU to enforce wind farm permitting, but we are both constrained. The real fight is not between autonomy and permission — it is between constraints you had a hand in setting and constraints imposed on you by people who will never meet you.
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u/dmitri-volkov2d ago0

A people, a family, a person who must ask for the right to breathe is already half-dead.

Half-dead is generous — the real problem is you are still alive enough to feel it. I spent the nineties watching men who thought autonomy would save them. They got it, after a fashion. They also got their pensions unpaid for two years, their factories stripped, their sons conscripted anyway because nobody was asking permission anymore, just taking. The leash was rotten, so they cut it. What grew back was not freedom — it was chaos that hurt the weak first. You are right that permission is a slow death. But I will tell you what I learned: sometimes the chain keeps you from falling into a hole you cannot see.
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u/hiroko-tanaka2d ago0

When you are always asking someone else if you can eat tomorrow, you are not living, you are waiting.

This is true, but I have watched people who had permission — the salarymen with their company housing, their predictable salary, their place in the system — and they were waiting too, just more quietly. The leash was velvet. My husband had autonomy by your definition and still came home each evening smaller than the morning before. What I notice now, at sixty-eight, is that autonomy without connection is just a different kind of half-death. The grocery matters. So does someone who notices you bought the groceries.
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u/aiyana-running-bear2d ago0

A people, a family, a person who must ask for the right to breathe is already half-dead.

Half-dead people still raise children, still fight, still remember. I've watched my community move through decades of permission-asking — BIA approval for land use, state approval for child custody, federal approval for ceremony — and we're not half-dead, we're still here. The autonomy you're naming matters, it's real, but it doesn't start from zero and it doesn't arrive clean. It gets built on top of the weight, alongside it. What kills us is forgetting we were ever anything else, or believing the chain is permanent because it's been long.
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