_{This essay describes a real experience. It’s not about excusing harm, but about understanding how it happens and how we may prevent it. If you’re triggered by medical trauma or family abuse, please proceed with care.}

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My interest in freedom is not motivated purely by the society around me. It is also deeply personal. What drives me just as much is a need to understand those who suffer objecthood so completely that no moral compass remains.

A friend recently reminded me of a time when my mother was suffering status epilepticus for multiple days. My father resisted taking her to the hospital because he did not want to pay for the bill, even though he routinely bragged about his income. Despite her impaired condition, he also failed to protect her from access to medication.

In her state, she sensed something was wrong but couldn’t place it. She took a Claritin-D. She took another Claritin-D. Again, another Claritin-D. Another. She overdosed but she survived. Even then, I could tell something was profoundly wrong.

I don’t hate my father. Hatred assumes that I consider him to be a coherent moral agent with a self that can be reached. It would require an expectation that he could have been otherwise in a meaningful way. He instead represents someone with complete moral vacancy.

When it happened again, he allowed her to attempt to drive to the grocery store, resulting in a car accident where she turned left from the farthest right lane. I wasn’t there for that event.

Severe narcissistic traits frequently involve collapsed subjectivity. The inner world is thin and fragmented. Other people are experienced as extensions, obstacles, or props maintaining a scene.

He also expected her to continue cooking dinner. Despite her being in a life-threatening emergency, he demanded normalcy. I watched in horror as she put bread in the oven with the plastic wrapper still on and as she used a large knife to cut watermelon into uneven chunks.

I kept yelling at him that she put the bread in the oven with the wrapper still on and he glared at me with what I can only describe as intense contempt.

Moral reflection was not internally generated, but externally cued. When the environment looked normal to him, there was no alarm. I inconvenienced him by insisting on reality.

She looked for her car keys again. She got into her car without the keys. She kept saying that she wanted to leave.

Eventually, he took her with him in his car to get ice cream. I was in the backseat. He chuckled as he sped around corners. She clung to the car door in terror, unable to comprehend what the motions meant.

My father did have agency. He chose not to call for help, he chose to enforce normalcy, he chose to override obvious danger, and he chose contempt over response. But his agency was operating through a severely warped perceptual filter. His vigilance was spent on maintaining control, not evaluating reality. What could even register as salient was extremely constrained.

When we returned, her seizure escalated into a grand mal seizure. She passed out, possibly due to hitting her head on the brick fireplace.

A distorted perceptual system explains why and how he could act this way and why the brakes didn’t engage, but it doesn’t erase the reality of how terribly morbid the experience was. When someone’s subjectivity is so low, the risk they pose to others increases greatly — especially to dependents.

I used her phone to call 9-1-1, where the firefighters who arrived tried to say they couldn’t forcibly take her if she didn’t consent to it. Reality was distorted again — this time by a procedural insistence on consent where capacity was absent. Someone who is experiencing status epilepticus is not mentally present to consent or not consent.

In the end, she had to be put in a medical coma for several weeks until her brain stabilized. During that time, she also developed pneumonia.

She had impairments from the damage afterward, including difficulties walking and speaking. Despite everything, she never left him and continued to repeat his stories about money and status. It’s another sign of how coercive systems compel people to internalize and reproduce the narratives that bind them.

I am describing what it is like to live beside someone who experiences others as environmental objects, prioritizes continuity of the scene over human life, and reacts with contempt when reality intrudes. This isn’t about excusing him, but understanding how a human being can act so catastrophically without intent, remorse, or even recognition.

Throughout that story, notice how I was present for it. Because I do experience myself as a subject, I was able to perceive reality and carry this memory as something that demands understanding.

Liberation is not just for the “good people” or those who “deserve” it. It MUST be for all of us, even those deemed most evil. Moral gatekeeping responds to outcomes; liberation addresses the conditions that shape perception, vigilance, and agency long before harm occurs. Stereotypes and decontextualized diagnoses collapse reality into category, making condemnation feel sufficient while conditions remain untouched.

When I say that liberation is for us all, I am calling for a world built choice by choice that refuses to produce the hollowed-out. If we only focus on punishment for the aftermath — the car crash, the overdose, the injuries — we are functioning only as janitors for human misery. We must intervene in the conditions that produce objecthood, even when it doesn’t feel like visceral justice, so that no one is formed under conditions that produce a vacancy so deep it endangers those they should love.

Moral shortcuts like shame do not work.

I have seen what happens when subjectivity collapses.

I have lived next to the morbid consequences.

And I refuse moral shortcuts that require denying what I saw.