Every exit leads back inside

Posted on: 22 December 2025

There's a type of resilience you won't find in management textbooks. It's not the capacity to withstand attacks, nor the ability to adapt to change. It's something subtler and, frankly, rather more unsettling: the capacity to turn opposition into nourishment.

Truly robust systems don't fight their critics. They absorb them.

The case study in front of us

I've observed this pattern for decades across different sectors, but the most elegant illustration happens to be right in front of us these days. Commercial Christmas has done something rather remarkable: it has created a market niche for its own detractors. The book against Christmas consumerism sells in December. The podcast about holiday social pressure peaks during the holidays. The article unmasking the emotional manipulation of seasonal marketing generates seasonal engagement.

The critique has become part of the product.

How gravitational pull works

This isn't a failure of critical thinking. It's the success of a system that has reached sufficient critical mass to function as a gravitational attractor. Whatever energy approaches it, be it enthusiasm, cynicism, irony or ostentatious refusal, gets captured and converted into participation.

The mechanism replicates wherever sufficiently dense systems exist.

The wellness industry sells the solution to the stress it amplifies. "Alternative" festivals cost four hundred pounds and require corporate sponsors to exist. Academic critique of capitalism produces academic careers, publications, conferences: a parallel economy that depends on the existence of what it criticises. Social media monetises even those who use it to denounce social media.

The underlying pattern is always the same: when a system reaches sufficient economic, emotional and social density, it ceases to have an "outside". Every position becomes an internal position.

Why some systems digest and others don't

Here's where it gets interesting: why do some systems develop this absorption capacity and others don't?

Easter hasn't generated a structured counter-narrative. August bank holiday neither. Nobody writes essays about the tyranny of Easter lunch or the consumerism of late summer. Yet these are rituals with similar elements: family, food, social expectations, spending.

The difference lies in stratification. Christmas has accumulated layers: religious, familial, commercial, cultural, emotional. And here's the crucial point: each layer covers the blind spot of the others. Escape the commercial, the familial catches you. Reject the familial, the cultural hooks you. Ignore the cultural, there's still the religious. Or the emotional. Or simply the shared calendar that makes it impossible not to know what day it is.

It's not a single hook that catches you. It's a net where each thread compensates for the weakness of the others. The more surfaces a system has, the more ways there are to interact with it, including the oppositional way. And every interaction, even the critical one, feeds the system.

A lesson for those who design

There's an operational implication for anyone designing organisational systems or analysing market dynamics: robustness comes not from purity but from layered complexity. A single-dimension system can be attacked and destroyed. A multi-layered system converts attacks into feedback.

But this creates a rather serious epistemological problem.

The observer's dilemma

If criticism of a system becomes functional to the system, how do we distinguish genuine analysis from unwitting participation? How do we know if we're observing the game or playing it?

The test I use is this: does the criticism produce actual defection or merely signal belonging to a different tribe?

Real defection is costly and silent. Those who truly exit a system don't talk about it, because talking about it means remaining in relation to it. The public critic, by contrast, maintains the bond through opposition. They need the system to define their position.

This explains why high-density systems are so difficult to reform from within. Every attempt at reform becomes a variant of the system, not an alternative to it. Revolutions that announce the end of an order often prepare its next version.

What to do with this

I'm not suggesting that criticism is useless or that all opposition is co-opted by definition. I'm observing a mechanism worth recognising before deciding how to move.

Awareness of the pattern changes the available options.

If you know the system digests frontal opposition, you can choose different strategies. You can operate in the interstices rather than on declared fronts. You can build alternatives instead of fighting what exists. You can simply stop feeding what you criticise with the energy of criticism.

Or you can decide that's fine. That participating in the game, even from the critic's position, still produces value for you. The important thing is knowing it.

The point, in the end

The Christmas system will survive this post as it has absorbed all its predecessors. And that's fine. The objective was never to bring it down: it was to understand how it works.

Because the same mechanism operates in systems that matter rather more: markets, organisations, institutions, technological paradigms. Recognising it there is more useful than complaining about obligatory gifts.

Systems that last aren't the ones that eliminate dissent. They're the ones that digest it. And the exits? They all lead back inside.