Why People Resist Finn’s Advice

Why Systems Are Built to Stop Them

By Victor Langheld

Finn’s line — “Get the finger out. Be yourself. Make your own salvation.” — is not rejected because it is obscure, difficult, or false.
It is resisted because it destroys the structural basis on which most psychological comfort and social power depend.

The resistance is not accidental. It is systematic.

1. The Psychological Reason: Agency Is Costly

To “make your own salvation” means:

· no appeal to authority

· no moral outsourcing

· no final explanation

· no guaranteed meaning

· no one else to blame

This demands continuous self-correction under uncertainty.

For most nervous systems, this is metabolically and emotionally expensive. Dependency is cheaper. Submission lowers cognitive load. Belief conserves energy.

Hence the ancient preference for:

· commandments over diagnostics

· identities over responsibility

· narratives over feedback

Finn’s advice removes the psychological anaesthetic.

That alone ensures resistance.

2. The Existential Reason: Non-Transferable Failure

If salvation is your own construction, then:

· your errors are yours,

· your stagnation is yours,

· your suffering is diagnostic, not tragic,

· your improvement is not owed.

This annihilates the comfort of shared metaphysical fate.

As Augustine of Hippo understood perfectly, responsibility must be theologically softened if a mass society is to endure. Hence Original Sin, inherited guilt, and divine grace — mechanisms that dilute individual accountability.

Finn removes all of them.

What remains is naked (i.e. cynic) consequence.

3. The Social Reason: Islands Cannot Be Fully Governed

A population that accepts island-hood is structurally unmanageable.

Islands:

· evaluate instructions instead of obeying them

· treat pain as feedback, not destiny

· discard beliefs that don’t function

· refuse metaphysical guarantees

Such agents cannot be ruled by:

· fear of damnation

· promises of utopia

· collective guilt

· symbolic enemies

This is why every durable system — religious, political, ideological — works first to deny island-hood.

4. The Core Control Move: Deny Local Agency

All large systems converge on the same tactic:

Convince individuals that salvation is external (for instance, ‘on the other shore’ or ‘in heaven’)

This externalisation may take many forms:

· God

· History

· Science-as-authority

· The Party

· The Market

· The Algorithm

But the logic is invariant:

1. You are insufficient (viz. sinful)

2. We possess the solution.

3. Trust us.

4. Obey.

As George Orwell showed with brutal clarity, systems that claim to act for individuals (like emerging generative AI acting as Big Sister) must first strip them of the capacity to act as individuals.

Finn’s advice (to recover personal authenticity) is therefore not merely unhelpful to power — it is lethal to it.

5. The Religious Case: Why Gurus Are Necessary

If people truly accepted:

· boundedness,

· local meaning,

· non-transferable insight,

then:

· gurus would be redundant,

· rituals would be optional,

· doctrines would be heuristics, not truths.

This is why even traditions that began with radical self-reliance — including early Buddhism — drift toward hierarchy, canonisation, and dependence.

The deathbed instruction is remembered.
The institutional reversal is inevitable.

6. The Modern Illusion: Technocratic Salvation

Contemporary systems replace priests with experts and gods with models, but the structure remains identical.

You are told:

· your suffering is systemic, not local,

· your responsibility is minimal,

· the solution is global,

· compliance is ethical.

Finn’s advice explodes this illusion.

If suffering is feedback, then someone is malfunctioning — and it may be you. That diagnosis is intolerable to systems built on collective innocence.

7. Why Finn Has No Followers (and Why That Matters)

Followers require:

· a leader,

· a promise,

· a path,

· a deferral of agency.

Finn offers none.

This is not a branding failure.
It is the proof of coherence.

A doctrine that cannot survive without a leader is not a method; it is a dependency engine.

Finn’s “teaching” survives only if:

· it is misattributed to no one,

· it is applied locally,

· it is discarded when it fails.

That is why it will never spread — and why it matters.

8. The Final Irony

Systems fear Finn’s advice not because it causes chaos, but because it produces quiet, uncooperative competence.

People who:

· adjust instead of complain,

· test instead of believe,

· self-correct instead of confess,

· move on instead of waiting,

do not revolt.
They do not worship.
They do not need saving.

They simply stop feeding the machinery.

9. The Last Line (Which Explains Everything)

Finn’s advice is resisted for one decisive reason:

It works without permission.

And any system that cannot make itself necessary will eventually work very hard to make such advice disappear.

Home