The Snake in the System: The Hidden Rules That Shape Our Lives

 I genuinely believed feminism “won.”

The battles were over.
Equality was here.

Then, Maclean’s Magazine ran a campaign that stopped me cold.

To highlight the gender wage gap, they charged men 26 percent more for the same issue. Women paid $6.99. Men paid $8.81. The difference reflected the reality that women working full-time were earning roughly 74 cents on the dollar compared to men.

It was simple. Concrete. Hard to dismiss.

My first reaction wasn’t outrage. It was embarrassment.

How did I not know this was still happening?

I’d absorbed the story that equality had already been achieved. That the system was mostly fair. That whatever gaps remained were minor.

That moment cracked something open.

If I could misunderstand something as measurable as pay equity, what else had I accepted without questioning?

Many of us were taught that colonization happened long ago.

It was tragic. It harmed Indigenous Peoples. But it ended.

I believed we were living in a merit-based society. Work hard. Make good choices. Take responsibility. Everyone has the same 24 hours. If someone struggles, it must be personal failure.

That story is comforting. It’s also incomplete.

Oppressive systems, like colonization in Canada, haven’t ended. They’ve evolved.

The Indian Act is still law. Indigenous land defenders are still arrested. Corporations continue extracting resources from unceded land. Indigenous children are removed from their families at disproportionate rates. Residential school survivors still live with the impacts of colonization today. 

This is not distant history. It’s present governance.

Instead of disappearing, colonialism embedded itself in property law, borders, policing, corporate power and the way we define success.

Colonial expansion required land. Land theft required racial hierarchy to justify it. Racial hierarchy required rigid gender control to regulate labor and inheritance. 

This is how colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy became fused into our current governing structure.

Ownership became sacred.
Hierarchy became “natural.”
Productivity became virtue.
Whiteness became default.
Maleness became authority.

These are not abstract values floating in culture. They’re enforced through institutions.

Property law protects ownership.
Policing protects dominion.
Wage dependency protects productivity culture.
Media and immigration systems centre whiteness.
Workplaces glorify burnout and call it ambition.

The material harm isn’t evenly distributed. Indigenous communities and People of the Global Majority face disproportionate dispossession, surveillance, over-policing and wealth extraction. That reality must stay clear.

Here’s what often goes unexamined:

This same structure also shapes and harms non-Indigenous and non-marginalized people in ways that feel normal. 

“Many of us learn that worth equals productivity. Rest feels indulgent. Asking for help feels weak. Interdependence feels immature. Emotions feel unprofessional. Burnout feels like proof of value.”

People are isolated from extended family, disconnected from land, carrying debt, competing constantly and measuring themselves against impossible standards.

That anxiety isn’t random.

It’s built into a growth-driven system that never says enough.

You’re told success is individual. You’re told struggle is personal failure. That belief prevents solidarity and protects the structure.

Look at how power behaves today.

Wealthy political elites are shielded from accountability. Corporate money shapes legislation. Influence networks protect abusers and silence whistleblowers. When these things happen, we’re not witnessing isolated moral failures. We are watching hierarchy function as designed.

A system that protects abuse at the top cannot deliver justice at the bottom.

The same logic plays out everywhere.

Workplaces protect high-performing executives over vulnerable employees.
Institutions silence complaints to protect reputation.
Communities defend powerful men because they bring status or money.

Power defends power.

Dr. Gabor Maté argues that addiction grows from trauma and disconnection. A society organized around isolation, relentless productivity and commodified time creates exactly those conditions. Disconnection becomes normalized.

The climate crisis follows the same pattern. Endless growth on a finite planet is not sustainable. Forests burn because extraction is normalized. Water is poisoned because profit outranks relationship.

Many Indigenous governance systems centred relational accountability to land and community rather than ownership and domination. Colonization worked deliberately to suppress those alternatives through residential schools, language bans, child removal and criminalization of ceremony.

Not just here in Canada.
Across the world.
In Ireland, to my ancestors, too.

When I say colonization is ongoing, I’m not claiming nothing has changed. I’m naming the structure that remains intact.

This is not about guilt. It’s about clarity.

None of us individually designed oppressive systems. But many of us benefit materially from them through property access, institutional credibility and insulation from racialized surveillance. At the same time, we are shaped by a system that narrows humanity to competition, accumulation and control.

Dismantling these oppressive structures is collective survival, not charity.

Shorter work weeks are about humanity.
Land Back is about jurisdiction.
Redistribution is about repair.
Community-founded, collaborative systems are about resilience.

What’s next?

If you’re reading this and wondering what the solution is, it begins with how we think. Which in turn informs how we feel and behave.

• How we spend our money and who’s profiting.

• Who’s voices we choose to learn from and amplify.

• How we choose to respond to living within this system.

• How we use our privilege.

We can choose to disbelieve, disengage from and begin to dismantle the structures that harm the vast majority of us.

I invite you to reflect on these prompts: 

When did I learn that productivity equals worth?
When I see poverty or addiction, do I blame individuals before questioning structure?
What do I fear losing when I hear “Land Back?”
How would my life change if interdependence was strength rather than weakness?

Colonization is not history. 

It’s infrastructure.

And infrastructure can be redesigned.

Oppressive systems are not just policy.

They live in our habits.

And habits can be interrupted.

Laurel Anne Stark is an Irish-Canadian decolonial technologist, founder of Remarkable Communications, and lifelong social justice advocate. Laurel gratefully acknowledges she lives, works, and plays as an uninvited guest on unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory in the area now known as Victoria, BC.