Christopher H. Conn

Power rarely announces itself.

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.

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Intellectual Territory

Core Ideas

Six frameworks for understanding how authority operates — and what it costs.

Consent
6 Essays
Institutions
5 Essays
Authority
4 Essays
Silence
3 Essays
Identity
5 Essays
Recovery
4 Essays

Featured Writing

Recent Essays

Consent · 12 min read

Nine Minutes

What happens when the state assumes your consent — and the clock starts before you understand the terms.

Silence · 9 min read

The Education of Silence

Evangelical schooling teaches a specific kind of quiet. Not peace — compliance. The distinction matters more than anyone admits.

Institutions · 14 min read

The Trash Heap Has Spoken

Systems designed to rehabilitate often do the opposite. What behavioral health taught me about institutional failure — and institutional possibility.

Authority · 11 min read

Crossing the Line

The line between authority and authoritarianism is thinner than the institutions drawing it want you to believe.

Identity · 8 min read

The Aftershock

Rebuilding identity after institutional collapse. The version of you that survived isn't always the version that gets to live afterward.

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Start Here

A four-essay reading path through the central arguments.

The Education of Silence

How institutions teach consent through silence — and why that silence becomes structural.

Crossing the Line

Authority and authoritarianism — how the line between them disappears under institutional pressure.

Nine Minutes

When the state assumes consent on your behalf, the clock runs whether you agreed to it or not.

The Aftershock

What comes after institutional failure — and what rebuilding actually requires.

The Book

Consent
Without
Language
Christopher H. Conn

Consent Without Language

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.

Power Consent Institutions Identity Recovery Systems
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Christopher H. Conn

The author (right) with his partner David.

About the Author

Christopher H. Conn

Christopher H. Conn is a writer whose work examines power, consent, and institutional failure. He founded Fidelity Behavioral Health, a closed-continuum program in Colorado for justice-involved and unhoused individuals that was studied by a SAMHSA workgroup.

His background spans behavioral healthcare consulting, mergers and acquisitions, compliance, and grant writing. His memoir, Consent Without Language, traces a life lived across evangelical institutions, the federal justice system, and the behavioral-health infrastructure — examining how authority manufactures consent and what it takes to reclaim it.

Full Biography