By Januarius Asongu, PhD
Abstract
Why do ordinary people support leaders, institutions, and ideologies that constrain their own flourishing? This article synthesizes research across political psychology, social epistemology, and critical theory to examine the psychological mechanisms underlying political submission, resistance to change, and the internalization of constraint. Drawing on system justification theory (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004), research on adapted preferences (Khader, 2011), standpoint epistemology (Dror, 2022; Dular, 2024), and recent work on epistemic oppression (Miragoli, 2025), I argue that submission is not a defect of particular populations but a possibility within all human beings under conditions of institutional fracture and unmet psychological needs for reality, meaning, recognition, and protection. The article advances an analytical framework—Critical Synthetic Realism (CSR; Asongu, 2026a)—that integrates epistemic, psychological, and structural levels of analysis. I conclude that oppression survives not because people love constraint but because certainty can feel safer than freedom, and that emancipatory praxis must address psychological interiority alongside structural transformation.
Keywords: system justification, epistemic oppression, political psychology, adapted preferences, standpoint theory, internalized oppression, strong leader phenomenon, democratic backsliding, Critical Synthetic Realism
1. Introduction
In the winter of 1933, Wilhelm Reich posed a question that has haunted political psychology ever since: Why did German workers—the supposed vanguard of revolutionary consciousness—vote for the party that would destroy their unions, suppress their wages, and ultimately consume them? Reich's answer was not economic determinism but psychological observation: ordinary people, frustrated, humiliated, and exhausted, did not simply tolerate authoritarianism; under certain conditions, they desired it (Reich, 1933/1970).
Nearly a century later, this question has acquired renewed urgency. Across democratic societies, citizens have supported leaders who promised to dismantle the very institutions that protect their interests—voting against trade agreements, environmental protections, and labor rights while embracing candidates who explicitly reject democratic norms (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). In Brazil, India, Turkey, Hungary, and the United States, political movements have gained power by mobilizing not material grievance alone but a deeper psychology of recognition, humiliation, and the desire for order (Mounk, 2018).
This article addresses three interconnected phenomena:
- Support for strong leaders who centralize power, attack institutional constraints, and position themselves as the sole arbiters of truth and security;
- Resistance to change even when existing arrangements produce measurable harm to adherents' stated interests;
- Embrace of constraint—the active defense of systems, ideologies, and hierarchies that limit the flourishing of those who defend them.
I argue that these phenomena cannot be adequately explained by models of false consciousness, economic determinism, or simple accounts of manipulation and deception. Instead, drawing on recent research in political psychology, social epistemology, and critical theory, I propose that human beings seek four pre-political goods—reality, meaning, recognition, and protection—and that when conventional institutions fail to provide these reliably, people will attach to any leader, ideology, or movement that promises their restoration, regardless of that movement's long-term consequences for their material welfare.
To analyze this dynamic, I employ Critical Synthetic Realism (CSR) , the philosophical framework I developed in The Splendor of Truth: A Critical Philosophy of Knowledge and Global Agency (Asongu, 2026a). CSR is structured around three interconnected pillars: a Critical dimension emphasizing radical fallibilism and the corrigible nature of all knowledge claims; a Synthetic dimension promoting integrative reasoning across disciplines and traditions; and a Realist dimension affirming a mind-independent, stratified reality I term "Conditional Reality" (Asongu, 2026a). As I argue in The Splendor of Truth, truth is "absolute in its independent existence, yet known only through continuous testing, correction, humility, and ethical engagement with the world" (Asongu, 2026a, publisher description). This framework provides the meta-theoretical architecture for integrating the psychological, epistemic, and structural levels of analysis developed in subsequent sections.
The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews the psychological foundations of political submission, synthesizing research on system justification theory and adapted preferences. Section 3 examines the epistemic dimensions of oppression, including standpoint theory, epistemic advantage, and recent work on epistemic oppression. Section 4 explores the "strong leader phenomenon" through the lens of political psychology and research on domination-based social organization. Section 5 develops the concept of epistemic fracture—the breakdown of shared reality under conditions of institutional distrust—as a key mechanism explaining vulnerability to authoritarian politics. Section 6 presents Critical Synthetic Realism as an integrative framework. Section 7 concludes with implications for emancipatory praxis.
2. The Psychological Foundations of Political Submission
2.1 System Justification Theory
The most influential contemporary framework for understanding why people defend oppressive systems is system justification theory (SJT), developed by John Jost and colleagues (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004; Jost & Hunyady, 2005). SJT proposes that people are motivated—often unconsciously—to defend, legitimize, and bolster existing social, economic, and political arrangements, even when those arrangements disadvantage them. This motivation operates alongside ego-justification (the desire to maintain positive self-image) and group-justification (the desire to maintain positive in-group image), and sometimes overrides both.
Jost, Banaji, and Nosek (2004) identified several empirical signatures of system justification: (a) the internalization of inferiority among disadvantaged groups, (b) the development of outgroup favoritism among members of disadvantaged groups, (c) the attribution of blame to victims of inequality, and (d) the tendency to view existing arrangements as fair, natural, and inevitable. A meta-analysis of 94 samples from 20 countries confirmed that system justification is robust across cultures, though it takes different forms depending on historical and institutional contexts (Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2013).
Deutsch (2006) identified "awakening a sense of injustice" as a necessary precursor of social change. Jost and colleagues (2010) built on this insight to argue that system justification operates as an obstacle to awakening—a "soporific effect" that inhibits recognition of oppression. In their words: "System justification, the motivation to defend and justify existing social, economic, and political institutions, and to derogate or dismiss alternatives to the status quo, operates as an obstacle to awakening the sense of injustice" (Jost, Liviatan, & van der Toorn, 2010, p. 2).
From a CSR perspective (Asongu, 2026a), system justification can be understood as a form of epistemic closure—the refusal to subject one's operative reality-principles to critical correction. CSR's "Conditional Reality" thesis holds that all knowledge is both real and corrigible; reality exists independent of mind, but human access to it is always mediated, partial, and subject to revision (Asongu, 2026a). System justification operates as a defense against this corrigibility, offering the psychological comfort of certainty at the cost of epistemic openness. This insight helps explain why oppressed people sometimes resist social change: change threatens not only the material order but the psychological order—the sense that the world is predictable, meaningful, and just. When system justification is deeply internalized, proposals for structural transformation are experienced not as liberation but as chaos.
2.2 Adapted Preferences and the Internalization of Constraint
System justification theory connects with a parallel literature on "adaptive preferences" in feminist philosophy and development economics. Khader (2011) defines adaptive preferences as "preferences that are formed in response to the systematic denial of options and that are inconsistent with the agent's own wellbeing" (p. 14). The concept traces back to Elster (1982), who observed that oppressed people often "adjust their aspirations to their possibilities" in ways that make their oppression less visible to themselves and others.
A paper from the Human Sciences Research Council (2017) extends this analysis by distinguishing between external constraints (the reduction of available options) and internal constraints (the shaping of internal capabilities such that individuals cannot take up options that are formally available). The authors draw on Fanon (1963), Freire (1970), and Biko (1978) to argue that "dehumanizing treatment, over time, dehumanizes"—not through adapted preferences alone but through what they call "the myriad internalized effects of living in oppressive environments," including anger, powerlessness, apathy, and sometimes self-destructive or anti-social behavior (HSRC, 2017).
This is a crucial refinement. The "soporific effects" of system justification are not simply a matter of preference adaptation; they involve the contraction of consciousness itself, the narrowing of what feels possible, permissible, or even imaginable. As I argue in The Splendor of Truth (Asongu, 2026a), epistemic captivity—the inability to recognize the corrigibility of one's own beliefs—is both a cause and a consequence of oppression. CSR's Critical dimension demands "radical fallibilism" (Asongu, 2026a), the active cultivation of openness to correction. Oppression thrives where this openness is extinguished.
2.3 Internalized Oppression: Conceptual Debates
The concept of internalized oppression has attracted critical scrutiny. Dular (2025), in a recent article in the Journal of Social Philosophy, identifies a "general rhetorical strategy employed in theoretical discourse wherein philosophers argue from the mere existence of internalized oppression to some kind of epistemic, moral, political, or cognitive deficiency of oppressed people" (p. 320). Dular argues that this strategy has harmful consequences, including undermining the self-trust of oppressed people and diverting attention from structural causes of oppression to psychological deficits of the oppressed.
This critique is important but not fatal to the research program. The key is to avoid what Dular terms the "internalized oppression worry"—the assumption that internalization necessarily indicates cognitive deficiency or false consciousness. Instead, internalization can be understood as a rational adaptation to structural constraints, a form of "knowing how to survive" rather than "failing to know the truth" (see Section 3.3 below). CSR's Synthetic dimension (Asongu, 2026a) is particularly relevant here: it insists that psychological, structural, and epistemic levels of analysis must be integrated rather than opposed. Internalization is real; its causes are structural; addressing it requires both structural transformation and psychological work.
3. Epistemic Dimensions of Oppression
3.1 Standpoint Theory and the Inversion Thesis
Standpoint theory has long maintained that socially marginalized groups possess epistemic advantages regarding the systems that oppress them. The "inversion thesis" holds that marginalized people, by virtue of their social location, have a superior epistemic position compared to non-oppressed people when it comes to knowledge about the workings of social marginalization (Hartsock, 1983; Collins, 1990; Harding, 2004).
Dror (2022) provides the most rigorous recent analysis of this thesis, distinguishing between in principle and contingent epistemic advantage. The contingent version holds that oppressed people tend to have more informative experiences and stronger motivations to understand oppression, but that non-oppressed people could, in principle, acquire similar knowledge through solidarity, activism, or immersive experience. The in-principle version holds that the phenomenological experience of oppression itself—the fact of living in a marginalized body—grants access to knowledge unavailable to the non-oppressed.
Dror concludes that the contingent version is plausible; the in-principle version is not, except in the narrow domain of "claims about the phenomenological experience of marginalization, such as 'this practice can cause people of my social group to feel disrespected'" (Dror, 2022, p. 6). This has an important upshot: "privileged people are not epistemically disadvantaged in principle and are thus often blameworthy for their ignorance about oppression" (p. 1, emphasis in original).
Dular (2024) extends this analysis to moral epistemology, arguing for a "standpoint moral epistemology" in which marginalized agents have epistemic advantages with respect to moral knowledge about domination—not because marginalization itself is epistemically productive, but because marginalized agents are more likely to have the experiences, motivations, and hermeneutical resources necessary for certain moral insights.
I integrate these insights into CSR's epistemic framework. As I argue in The Splendor of Truth (Asongu, 2026a), CSR affirms "ontological realism, epistemic fallibilism, and moral realism while incorporating critical awareness of historical, social, and institutional mediation" (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 1). This means that knowledge about oppression is real (it discloses actual features of social reality), partial (always subject to correction), and situated (accessed differently from different social locations). No single standpoint exhausts the truth, but some standpoints may reveal aspects of reality that others occlude.
3.2 Hermeneutical Injustice and Epistemic Oppression
Fricker (2007) introduced the concept of hermeneutical injustice: a form of epistemic injustice in which marginalized groups are unable to make their experiences communicatively intelligible due to a deficiency in collective hermeneutical resources. Dular (forthcoming) argues that hermeneutical injustice can persist even when adequate concepts are available, if those concepts are structurally inaccessible or if dominant groups resist their application.
Miragoli (2025) proposes an "environmental model" of epistemic normativity that shifts attention from agential psychology to the organization and management of epistemic resources. On this model, "epistemic oppression" refers to structural arrangements that systematically marginalize certain perspectives by limiting access to the channels through which knowledge is produced and disseminated. Miragoli applies this framework to AI systems, arguing that "the injustice generated by the implementation of AI machines in our societies is, in some paradigmatic cases, also a form of epistemic injustice" (p. 522)—specifically, when AI systems act as gatekeepers of epistemic resources and their "epistemically conformist behavior" marginalizes minoritarian perspectives.
These analyses resonate with CSR's critique of what I call "intellectual authoritarianism"—the concentration of epistemic authority in ways that exclude marginalized knowers (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 4). CSR's emancipatory impulse is not merely political but epistemic: it seeks to democratize the conditions under which knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated.
3.3 Epistemic Reparations and Structural Obligations
Lackey (2022) advanced the concept of epistemic reparations—intentionally reparative actions in the form of epistemic goods that perpetrators owe to victims of epistemic injustice. Miragoli (2025) extends this framework to include structural epistemic reparations: obligations regarding "the organisation and management of the resources and the background epistemic conditions that regulate interpersonal epistemic exchanges between agents" (p. 528). This shift from transactional to structural obligations is crucial for understanding colonial and post-colonial contexts, where epistemic harm is not reducible to discrete exchanges between identifiable individuals.
4. The Strong Leader Phenomenon: Political Psychology of Submission
4.1 Domination-Based Social Organization and Consciousness Contraction
Eisler and Fry (2019), in Nurturing Our Humanity, synthesize research from neuroscience, developmental psychology, and political science to explain why certain social environments produce submission to strong leaders. Drawing on classic experiments on perception suppression, they argue that individuals conditioned through early experience to believe that "dominating and being dominated are our only alternatives" tend to develop difficulty dealing with change. This difficulty is associated with particular patterns of brain development, measurable in neuroimaging studies.
Their analysis has direct implications for contemporary political behavior: "People from such backgrounds tend to vote for 'strongman leaders'; support a punitive political agenda (such as capital punishment, heavy investment in prisons, use of military force in international affairs, and punishment of 'immoral' women and gays); and deflect their suppressed fear and anger into prejudices against 'inferior' or 'dangerous' out-groups" (Eisler & Fry, 2019, p. 183). Eisler and Fry explicitly connect this psychological pattern to the rise of "antidemocratic populists such as Trump in our world today."
Crucially, they identify the mechanism: the cultural construction of gender roles and relations provides the template for domination-based consciousness. When children are socialized into hierarchies of domination—in families, schools, and religious institutions—they internalize the premise that hierarchy is natural, inevitable, and morally necessary. This internalization then generalizes to political attitudes in adulthood.
From a CSR perspective (Asongu, 2026a), this represents a failure of what I term corrigibility—the capacity of individuals and institutions to revise beliefs in response to evidence. Domination-based socialization produces what might be called affective dogmatism: emotional investment in hierarchical arrangements that resists correction because correction would threaten identity itself. As I argue in The Splendor of Truth (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 6), the recovery of human flourishing requires the cultivation of corrigibility at both the individual and institutional levels.
4.2 Gender, Recognition, and Political Attachment
The gender dimension is not incidental. Research on "masculinity threat" and political behavior shows that men who perceive threats to their status—economic, social, or symbolic—are more likely to support strong leaders who promise to restore traditional gender hierarchies (Cassino & Besen-Cassino, 2019; McDermott, 2019). This connects to the "recognition" dimension of political psychology: strong leaders attract followers not primarily through policy but through performative recognition of threatened identities.
Dular's (2021) analysis of "mansplaining as epistemic injustice" is relevant here: the phenomenon is "a form of epistemic injustice distinct from testimonial injustice wherein there is a dysfunctional subversion of the epistemic roles of hearer and speaker in a testimonial exchange" (p. 2). This subversion is not merely interpersonal but structural; it reflects and reproduces hierarchies of credibility that track social power.
4.3 Moral Rackets and the Legitimation of Domination
Dular (forthcoming) introduces the concept of a moral racket as "a type of structural racket wherein social dominants exploit moral reputation to perpetuate systems of domination." A moral racket occurs when individuals "forcefully position themselves as moral saints for moral issues that either don't exist, or do, but were created in a way that serves their own interest." This concept illuminates how strong leaders legitimate their rule through moral performance—positioning themselves as protectors of the innocent, defenders of tradition, or saviors of the nation—while simultaneously benefiting from the systems they ostensibly oppose.
This framework helps resolve a paradox in the psychology of submission: why followers tolerate behavior in leaders (corruption, cruelty, deceit) that they would condemn in others. When a leader is positioned as a moral racketeer—someone who claims moral authority precisely by violating conventional norms in the service of a higher cause—transgressive behavior becomes evidence of authenticity rather than corruption.
5. Epistemic Fracture and the Collapse of Shared Reality
5.1 The Concept
I propose the concept of epistemic fracture to describe a condition in which a society's institutional infrastructure for mediating reality—universities, journalism, scientific bodies, courts, regulatory agencies—has lost sufficient trust that shared reality cannot be maintained. Epistemic fracture is not merely disagreement about facts; it is the collapse of shared procedures for resolving factual disagreement.
This concept draws on CSR's analysis of Conditional Reality (Asongu, 2026a). As I argue in The Splendor of Truth, "humans never encounter reality directly" but through mediating systems—biological, cultural, institutional, and desirous (Asongu, 2026a, Introduction). When these mediating systems fracture—when institutions lose credibility, when cultural narratives become irreconcilable, when desire overrides evidence—then what I term epistemic sovereignty becomes impossible. Individuals cannot reliably distinguish between credible and incredible sources of information because the very criteria for making that distinction have lost social consensus.
Epistemic fracture creates vulnerability to authoritarian politics for two reasons. First, when institutions lose trust, individuals cannot reliably distinguish between credible and incredible sources of information. Second, the resulting uncertainty is psychologically aversive; strong leaders who claim to restore certainty by fiat—"I alone can fix it"—exploit this aversion.
5.2 Institutional Trust and Democratic Vulnerability
Research on institutional trust and democratic stability supports this framework. When citizens trust institutions, they are willing to accept outcomes they disagree with because they believe the process was legitimate. When trust collapses, every outcome is suspected of illegitimacy, and every election becomes an existential crisis (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).
Norris and Inglehart (2019) identify a "cultural backlash" against progressive social change as a driver of authoritarian populism. But their analysis can be deepened by recognizing that cultural backlash is not merely a response to change but a response to the sense that institutions no longer reflect or protect one's identity. Epistemic fracture and identity threat are mutually reinforcing: when you believe institutions are controlled by hostile out-groups, you stop trusting their outputs, and your distrust confirms your sense that you are under siege.
I diagnose this dynamic as a failure of what I call institutional corrigibility—the capacity of institutions to acknowledge error, incorporate feedback, and revise practices accordingly (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 7). When institutions become dogmatic—insulated from correction, dismissive of criticism, captured by elite interests—they lose the trust of those they purport to serve. The recovery of democratic stability requires not merely better institutions but more corrigible institutions.
6. Critical Synthetic Realism: An Integrative Framework
Having reviewed the psychological and epistemic dimensions of oppression, I now present Critical Synthetic Realism (CSR) as a comprehensive philosophical framework for integrating these analyses. CSR is the philosophical framework I developed in The Splendor of Truth: A Critical Philosophy of Knowledge and Global Agency (Asongu, 2026a) and have applied across multiple domains including ethics, education, political philosophy, and the critique of superstition and ideological dogmatism (Asongu, 2024, 2025a, 2025b; Asongu et al., 2026).
6.1 The Three Pillars of CSR
As articulated in The Splendor of Truth (Asongu, 2026a), CSR is structured around three interconnected pillars:
First, the Critical dimension emphasizes "radical fallibilism" (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 2). All knowledge claims are provisional and corrigible. No belief, institution, or authority is exempt from criticism. This is not skepticism but epistemic humility: the recognition that certainty is not a reliable indicator of truth and that the capacity to revise beliefs in response to evidence is a virtue, not a weakness.
Second, the Synthetic dimension promotes integrative reasoning across disciplines, traditions, and levels of analysis. Oppression cannot be understood through psychology alone, or economics alone, or epistemology alone. CSR insists that psychological interiority, structural arrangements, and epistemic conditions must be analyzed together, each informing the others. This synthetic approach distinguishes CSR from reductionist frameworks that privilege one level of analysis over others.
Third, the Realist dimension affirms a mind-independent, stratified reality that I term Conditional Reality. Reality exists independent of human perception, but human access to it is always mediated, partial, and conditioned by historical, social, and institutional factors. This realism rejects both the absolutism that claims unmediated access to truth and the relativism that denies truth altogether. As I state in The Splendor of Truth, truth is "absolute in its independent existence, yet known only through continuous testing, correction, humility, and ethical engagement with the world" (Asongu, 2026a, publisher description).
6.2 Core Concepts of CSR
Several core concepts from CSR are directly relevant to the psychology of the oppressed:
Conditional Reality. This is CSR's central metaphysical thesis: reality is both real (mind-independent) and conditionally accessed (mediated by biological, cultural, institutional, and desirous structures). As I argue in The Splendor of Truth (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 3), the same individual can have access to different "realities" depending on which mediating systems are operational. This is not relativism; it is the recognition that truth is always accessed under conditions, and that improving access requires improving the conditions. In a separate but related application, I have also explored this concept in the context of quantum foundations (Asongu, 2026b).
Corrigibility. CSR treats corrigibility—the capacity to revise beliefs in response to evidence—as a cardinal epistemic and political virtue. Systems—whether scientific, political, or legal—that lack mechanisms for self-correction will inevitably become vehicles for domination. Liberatory praxis requires building institutions that can learn from error without collapsing into relativism (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 5).
Epistemic Sovereignty. CSR treats as a normative goal the capacity of individuals and communities to participate meaningfully in the production, validation, and circulation of knowledge about their own conditions. Epistemic sovereignty is not the rejection of expertise but the democratization of the conditions under which expertise is credentialed (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 8).
Human Flourishing. CSR grounds ethics in a teleological account of human flourishing. Oppression is not merely a violation of rights but a constraint on the conditions under which human beings can develop their capacities, pursue meaning, and live with dignity. The measure of any social arrangement is whether it promotes or impedes flourishing (Asongu, 2026a, Chapter 9; see also Asongu, 2025a on strategic CSR as a practical application of this principle).
6.3 CSR and the Psychology of the Oppressed
How does CSR illuminate the three phenomena this article addresses—support for strong leaders, resistance to change, and embrace of constraint?
First, support for strong leaders can be understood as a response to epistemic fracture—the collapse of institutional mediation. When individuals cannot reliably access reality through normal channels, they become vulnerable to any leader who promises to restore certainty. The strong leader does not need to be accurate; they need only to appear certain. CSR's Critical dimension diagnoses this vulnerability: the capacity for submission is activated when corrigibility is extinguished and dogmatic certainty becomes attractive.
Second, resistance to change can be understood through the lens of Conditional Reality. Existing arrangements, however oppressive, constitute a known reality. Change threatens not only material interests but the very structure of reality-as-known. Resistance to change is not always false consciousness; it is often a rational response to the psychological costs of uncertainty. CSR's Realist dimension affirms that these costs are real, not merely subjective, and that emancipatory politics must address them.
Third, embrace of constraint—the active defense of systems that limit one's own flourishing—can be understood as a failure of epistemic sovereignty. When individuals have been excluded from participation in knowledge production, they internalize the perspectives of dominant institutions and come to see constraints as natural, inevitable, or even desirable. CSR's Synthetic dimension insists that this internalization is neither purely psychological (a matter of individual pathology) nor purely structural (a matter of external force). It is both, and must be addressed at both levels.
6.4 CSR's Contribution to Existing Frameworks
CSR integrates and extends the existing frameworks reviewed in previous sections. From system justification theory, CSR accepts the empirical finding that people defend oppressive systems—but adds an epistemic analysis of why: because those systems mediate reality. From standpoint theory, CSR accepts that marginalized standpoints can yield epistemic advantages—but insists that no standpoint is incorrigible, and that all knowledge claims remain subject to revision. From epistemic injustice research, CSR accepts that structural conditions systematically marginalize certain knowers—but adds a positive program for epistemic sovereignty: the construction of corrigible institutions that democratize knowledge production.
As I have argued elsewhere (Asongu, 2025b), CSR represents "a distinctive contribution to contemporary philosophy by grounding scientific inquiry, educational formation, ethical responsibility, and legitimate authority in a unified account of reality, knowledge, and human dignity." For political psychology specifically, CSR offers a meta-theoretical framework that can integrate findings across subdisciplines while avoiding both reductionism and fragmentation.
7. Conclusion: Freedom Is Hard
The research reviewed in this article, synthesized through the framework of Critical Synthetic Realism (Asongu, 2026a), supports a sobering conclusion: oppression survives not because people love constraint but because certainty can feel safer than freedom.
System justification, adapted preferences, epistemic fracture, and the psychological appeal of strong leaders are not evidence of false consciousness or cognitive deficiency. They are evidence of human beings doing what human beings do—seeking predictability, meaning, recognition, and protection—under conditions that make those goods difficult to obtain through democratic, egalitarian means.
This has practical implications for emancipatory politics.
First, critique of oppression must be accompanied by the construction of alternative institutions that can mediate reality reliably. It is not enough to deconstruct; one must rebuild. CSR's Conditional Reality thesis implies that access to truth is mediated by institutional conditions; improving access requires improving those conditions.
Second, psychological interiority must be taken seriously. Shaming people for their attachments to oppressive systems is counterproductive; understanding the needs those attachments satisfy is prerequisite to offering alternatives. CSR's Synthetic dimension insists that psychological, structural, and epistemic levels must be integrated in both analysis and praxis.
Third, epistemic sovereignty requires more than access to information; it requires the capacity to participate in knowledge production. This means investing in local institutions, democratic deliberation, and the slow work of trust-building. CSR's Critical dimension reminds us that all institutions are corrigible—including those we build to replace oppressive ones.
Fourth, corrigibility itself must be cultivated as a virtue—not only in individuals but in institutions. The capacity to revise beliefs in response to evidence, to acknowledge error, to learn from marginalized perspectives—these are not merely epistemic virtues but political ones. Oppression flourishes where corrigibility is extinguished.
The capacity for submission is not a defect of some people. It is a possibility within all people—activated by institutional failure, humiliation, uncertainty, and the exhaustion that comes from constant vigilance. Freedom is harder than submission. It requires truth, courage, humility, correction, and hope. The psychology of the oppressed teaches us not to despair at this difficulty but to understand it, so that we might build societies—and cultivate selves—in which freedom is not only possible but sustainable.
As I write in The Splendor of Truth (Asongu, 2026a), the recovery of knowledge is "humanity's highest form of freedom—a freedom rooted in truth, sustained by courage, and fulfilled in the service of the common good" (publisher description). This is the ultimate lesson of the psychology of the oppressed: that liberation begins not with the overthrow of external constraints alone, but with the recovery of our own corrigibility, our own capacity to encounter reality as it is—conditional, mediated, but real—and to act on that encounter with courage and hope.
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