Refusing the Script

Radical Undoing in the Age of Manufactured Sides

In the age of constant outrage, tribal branding, and algorithmic bait, choosing a side has become not just a social expectation, but a moral imperative. Everywhere you turn, someone demands your declaration. Are you for or against? Do you condemn loudly enough? Do you believe in the right things, the right way, in the right voice?

But what if the most radical act right now is to refuse to choose a side at all?

Not out of cowardice or confusion. But because the entire framing is corrupt. Because it is mental—in the psychiatric sense. Because to take a side in this system, as it stands, is to be captured by it. And because your real power lies not in reaction, but in withdrawal, recalibration, and deliberate creation.

The Side-Taking Economy

Modern culture thrives on attention extraction. The outrage economy rewards performance over principle. What appears to be political is often psychological—ritualised conflict that simulates meaning while draining will.

To choose a side today usually means submitting to a prefabricated identity. You are no longer a thinking, becoming, beholding human. You are now a “type”: Leftist. Libertarian. Techno-optimist. Trad. Burner. Resistance. Whatever the label, it comes with a script—and deviation is punished.

The faster the cycle turns, the more absurd the demands. Silence is violence. Disagreement is hate. Uncertainty is weakness. In this atmosphere, to stay centred becomes an act of rebellion. To not pick a side is not apathy—it is resistance.

Radical Undoing as Strategic Refusal

This is where the work of Radical Undoing comes in—not as abstract philosophy, but as practical, muscular discipline.

In Radical Undoing, we start by stripping away the default behaviours, gestures, tones, and thoughts that form our social identity. We learn to spot the loop—those small mechanical tics and survival responses that define our daily performance. The fake laugh. The quick nod. The need to be right. The need to be liked.

Now scale that up.

Every cultural script, every tribal alignment, every “side” offered to you by the machine is just a bigger, slicker version of that same loop. It’s identity automation. You are offered a ready-made role, and the price of entry is your sovereignty.

Undoing means stepping outside the theatre. Not booing the play, not picking a better actor. Just walking out.

Real Work vs The Spectacle

The spectacle wants your energy. It wants your fury, your declarations, your despair. It wants to pull you into a morality play where everyone’s talking and no one’s doing. It thrives on loops.

Radical Undoing says: break the loop.

That means turning away from “content” and toward creation. From reaction to ritual. From screen to sensation. From opinion to action.

You are not here to spend your life retweeting reality. You are here to build something real—a body of work, a way of being, a signal that can’t be collapsed into hashtags. That kind of signal doesn’t come from declaring allegiance to transient sides. It comes from silence, solitude, effort, pain, and attention.

The real work happens offstage.

You Are Not Above It—You Are Beyond It

Let’s be clear: this is not spiritual bypass. It’s not pretending to be “above it all.” That’s just another ego game. You are not above the world. You are in it—but on your terms.

The choice to not take a side is not about disengagement. It’s about choosing the terrain. You’re not refusing conflict—you’re refusing theatre. You’re not dodging truth—you’re refusing its cartoon.

Radical Undoing teaches you to choose your battles with precision. To reclaim your attention. To use your time like a scalpel, not a net. In this way, refusing to choose a side is not hiding—it’s honing.

You don’t owe the machine your allegiance. You don’t owe the algorithm your outrage. You owe yourself clarity, discipline, and the space to do the thing only you can do.

Strategy for This Moment

So what is the strategy now?

1. Stay out of the frame. The frame is false. The question is wrong. Refuse it.

2. Reclaim your signal. What are you here to build? Do that. Daily.

3. Starve the loop. Don’t feed the outrage machine with your energy. Withdraw and repurpose.

4. Undo the performance. Watch yourself perform. Then stop. Replace it with presence.

5. Choose ritual over rhetoric. Actions > opinions. Attention > affirmation. Discipline > dopamine.

This isn’t quietism. This is insurgency at the level of self.

You are not required to play a rigged game. You are free to walk away—and build your own. That, in the end, is what Radical Undoing is for: not escape, but emergence. Not neutrality, but sovereignty.

Not choosing a side is not a retreat from the world.

It is the first real move in reclaiming your place in it.