Institutions survive by training citizens to underestimate themselves.

Systems need citizens who underestimate what they can build, question, or lead. The future belongs to those who outgrow that underestimation on purpose.

Institutions rarely rely on overt control. Their durability depends on a quieter mechanism: teaching individuals to internalize ceilings that were never objectively there. From early education to corporate governance, systems define what is “reasonable,” “realistic,” or “responsible,” and then build reward structures around compliance with those boundaries. Over time, people begin to mistake these externally imposed limits for inherent qualities of the self. The result is not obedience enforced from above, but self-containment maintained from within.