When Authority Returns in a New Form
(Judgement, Assessment, and the Re-Entry of the World)
Earlier in Fought Disorder, authority was experienced as threat.
It surveilled.
It constrained.
It overrode.
In Chapter Twenty-One (“Tribunals and Tribulations: Part One”), authority appears again — but something has changed.
It no longer feels omnipotent.
It no longer feels personal.
It feels administrative.
From Persecution to Evaluation
During psychosis, authority is interpreted symbolically:
A stand-in for judgement
A force of punishment
A narrative antagonist
In this chapter, authority sheds its symbolic charge.
It becomes:
Panels
Meetings
Assessments
Reports
Outcomes
This is not confrontation.
It is review.
What’s Different This Time
Crucially, the narrator is no longer trying to out-interpret authority.
Earlier:
Meaning competed with control
Narratives battled for dominance
Here:
Meaning recedes
Authority speaks without being mythologised
The power imbalance still exists —
but it is no longer inflated by delusion.
What’s Happening Linguistically
This chapter introduces a twenty-first shift:
De-symbolised authority.
In ordinary cognition:
Authority is limited
Power is procedural
Decisions are partial, not total
Here, for the first time in the book, authority begins to occupy that ordinary register again.
Language stops reading judgement as fate.
It reads it as process.
Why This Is Uncomfortable in a New Way
Earlier authority felt terrifying.
This authority feels:
Exposing
Bureaucratic
Indifferent
There is no drama here.
No villain.
No cosmic stakes.
Just evaluation.
That neutrality is unsettling — because it offers no narrative to fight against.
The Return of Proportion
Notice what quietly returns in this chapter:
Waiting with outcome uncertainty
Decisions that don’t explain everything
Judgements that are limited in scope
This is reality reasserting scale.
No single meeting decides a life.
No panel defines a person.
No outcome explains everything.
Psychosis thrives on totality.
This chapter dismantles that — not by argument, but by mundanity.
The Reader’s Experience
Readers often feel a strange mix of relief and discomfort here.
Relief:
The threat is gone
The drama has drained
Discomfort:
There is no catharsis
No clear redemption
No narrative closure
That is intentional.
Recovery does not arrive as vindication.
It arrives as process.
Why This Matters So Much
This chapter shows the difference between:
Being judged by meaning
andBeing assessed by systems
One annihilates the self.
The other merely evaluates behaviour.
That distinction is fragile — but lifesaving.
Language Is No Longer the Arena
For the first time, language is not the battlefield.
It is:
A tool
A medium
A record
Meaning no longer needs to win.
It only needs to be adequate.
Why the Book Splits This Chapter in Two
This is not a single moment.
It is a drawn-out recalibration.
Part One shows the return of assessment.
Part Two will show what that assessment does to identity.
Where This Leads
After judgement comes:
Adjustment
Re-positioning
Learning how to live under limits without seeing them as punishment
That work is quieter — but deeper.
