The Cage You Built and Then Learned to Call Home

The prison becomes complete when the prisoner no longer remembers what the walls were built to prevent him from seeing. Man has always spoken of bondage as though it arrived from elsewhere. He points to the government, the employer, the religion, the economy, the family, the oppressor, the past. He rarely asks who first imagined the room.

Man does not merely enter prisons; he constructs them, protects them, furnishes them, teaches his children to call them normal, and then spends his life pleading for freedom from the structures by which he has learned to recognise himself.

For the most frightening possibility is not that the door is closed. It is that the door may have been open longer than the prisoner can bear to remember. And if that is true, then the first task is not escape. The first task is to discover why we kept building the room.

The full Introduction and Chapter One, read aloud, are free the moment you become a member. Tap below to listen.