Nine Minutes
What happens when the state assumes your consent — and the clock starts before you understand the terms.
Christopher H. Conn
It moves through families, institutions, religion, schools, courts, and systems — often without ever asking permission. These essays examine the structures that manufacture consent and the cost of reclaiming it.
Six frameworks for understanding how authority operates — and what it costs.
What happens when the state assumes your consent — and the clock starts before you understand the terms.
Evangelical schooling teaches a specific kind of quiet. Not peace — compliance. The distinction matters more than anyone admits.
Systems designed to rehabilitate often do the opposite. What behavioral health taught me about institutional failure — and institutional possibility.
The line between authority and authoritarianism is thinner than the institutions drawing it want you to believe.
Rebuilding identity after institutional collapse. The version of you that survived isn't always the version that gets to live afterward.
A four-essay reading path through the central arguments.
How institutions teach consent through silence — and why that silence becomes structural.
Authority and authoritarianism — how the line between them disappears under institutional pressure.
When the state assumes consent on your behalf, the clock runs whether you agreed to it or not.
What comes after institutional failure — and what rebuilding actually requires.
A memoir about power, silence, and the institutions that shape identity.
From evangelical schools to federal prison to rebuilding behavioral-health systems, this work explores how authority assumes consent — and how individuals reclaim agency when every structure around them has been designed to prevent exactly that.