My Story

I spent decades trying to understand what was wrong with my family.

Like most people, I started by looking at the obvious culprit - my parents.

My mother, to be more specific.

She was controlling, volatile, manipulative and seemed capable of turning almost any situation into a crisis. Chaos reigned down on the Hive, daily.

One person against many, and she was as always on top. Strange - because she was small, weak and pretty much helpless.

The Queen could only rule because everybody around her adapted to her. My father adapted. I adapted. The wider family adapted. Even people who claimed to oppose her adapted.

Few of them agreed with the system. They simply bent themselves around it.

“Keep her happy, and everyone will be happy.”

Except, happiness always kept moving just out of reach.

Me - I was the scapegoat child. The Queen’s enemy, the one that swallowed the blame for everything wrong in the Hive.

Living in that skin, I had a front row seat to her chaos. I examined her - and the others - closely, listening to the daily lies, projections and insults. I pulled her mantras apart, studied their impact and their origins, until I finally found the order behind the chaos. Eventually, to save my own life, I cut her off.

Indoctrinitis

The more I looked from outside, the less interested I became in the Queen herself.

Tyrants are easy to spot, and too easy to watch.

What interested me more was everybody else. We all adapted and enabled the madness - but why?

The answer was fascinating - and it wasn't unique to the Hive:

“Indoctrinitis: A collective disorder of emotional avoidance. A preference for comfort and belonging over conflict and pain.”

Once I'd figured that out, I started noticing the same structures elsewhere. Not perfectly identical, but familiar patterns appearing in unfamiliar places.

Mostly, I noticed the same instincts repeating themselves. A preference for comfort over clarity. A tendency to complain about a system while simultaneously feeding it. The ability to recognise a problem while pretending it's fine.

I suspect you might have noticed this yourself in some way.

Perhaps you’ve spent enough time around families, workplaces, institutions, or society in general to notice that people often behave in ways that make very little sense. Maybe you’ve wondered why obvious problems persist despite everyone claiming to oppose them.

Different scale, same instincts.

I call it the Colony.

What next?

Most people spend their lives looking for villains, and they're not hard to find: Kings, politicians, billionaires, narcissists. More often, they find something less dramatic and far more common: ordinary people adapting to things they know are wrong.

This site is an exploration of that process.

Once you start noticing it, you'll begin to see it almost everywhere.