The Fantasy of the Meta-Position
Dieting is where a deeper political and philosophical lie becomes visible in everyday life.
On the surface, dieting looks trivial. Eat less. Choose differently. Apply willpower. If human beings really possessed the kind of sovereignty modern culture insists we have, dieting would be a technical adjustment, not a recurring failure. You would decide once, and the body would comply.
The fact that entire industries exist to manage repeated failure should already tell us something is wrong with the premise.
Diets fail not because people are ignorant or unmotivated. Most people know exactly what they are supposed to do. They intend to do it. They often begin doing it. And then, somewhere between intention and execution, something else takes over.
This is where the real problem appears. Most diets are built on an implicit fantasy: the fantasy of a meta-position.
The fantasy goes like this:
“I, the rational self, stand above my body. I observe it, judge it, and decide what it should want.”
That fantasy assumes a sovereign mind, a compliant body, and a clean separation between intention and appetite. When those assumptions collapse, the individual does not blame the model. They blame themselves.
Biologically, the model is absurd. The will is not a neutral commander issuing orders from outside the system. It is a thin layer riding on top of much older, faster mechanisms: hunger regulation, dopamine loops, stress hormones, circadian rhythms, conditioned habits. These systems do not negotiate. They do not respond to moral language. They do not care about plans.
So when a diet says “just eat less” or “just resist,” what it is really saying is: outvote millions of years of evolution with a daily intention. That can work briefly. Then the body reasserts itself. Not because the person is weak, but because the premise was wrong.
From the body’s point of view, weight loss looks like danger. For most of human history, food scarcity was normal, surplus was rare, and losing weight meant something had gone wrong. So when calories drop, hunger hormones rise, satiety hormones fall, metabolism slows, attention narrows around food. This is not sabotage. It is function.
This is why people say, “I know what to do, I just can’t do it.” That sentence is usually treated as a confession. It is not. It is a systems diagnosis. An abstract, future-oriented intention is trying to dominate an immediate, embodied signal. In that contest, the body usually wins.
What dieting exposes, then, is not a lack of discipline, but the limits of the meta-position. You are not standing above the system. You are inside it. And most diets quietly pretend otherwise.
Once you see this, dieting stops being a special case. It becomes a model.
The same lie appears wherever individuals are told they are sovereign while being placed inside systems designed to override them. Addiction is the obvious example. People do not relapse because they suddenly believe drugs are good. They relapse because stress, memory, and reward circuitry bypass deliberation. Productivity culture works the same way. People design perfect schedules and then watch attention disintegrate, not because they lack seriousness, but because the brain did not evolve to execute uninterrupted abstractions for eight hours straight.
Politics is the large-scale version of the same structure.
Citizens are told they are sovereign choosers. They vote. They consent. They “have a say.” That symbolic act is then used to legitimate outcomes that were never meaningfully under their control. Once participation has occurred, responsibility is pushed downward. If things go wrong, the people chose poorly. Democracy becomes a moral alibi.
This is why the language of choice is so aggressively defended. Choice dissolves accountability upward. Once you are declared free, systems no longer need to explain themselves.
The pattern is always the same:
You are free, therefore the system is fair.
You are free, therefore failure is personal.
This belief is not maintained because it is accurate, but because it is useful. It keeps frustration internal and critique abstract. It converts structural pressure into private guilt.
Notice the asymmetry. The people who design food systems do not rely on willpower. They design for compulsion. The people who design platforms do not rely on attention discipline. They design for capture. The people who design political systems do not rely on informed consent. They design for stability.
Only individuals are expected to live as if they are sovereign.
That is the PR lie.
Free will, in this story, does not function as a description of human agency. It functions as a liability transfer mechanism. Once you believe you are fully in control, the system is absolved in advance.
This does not mean agency is an illusion. It means agency has boundaries. Real agency does not consist in overpowering biology or outthinking systems. It consists in working with constraints rather than pretending they are optional. People who succeed long-term do not command themselves. They redesign environments. They remove triggers. They narrow choices. They rely on routines instead of intentions.
In other words, change does not happen through willpower. It happens through architecture.
The modern image of the human being as a rational sovereign freely choosing against its own nature works tolerably well in law and rhetoric. It fails completely in physiology. And it fails just as badly in politics.
Once the fantasy of the meta-position drops away, guilt decreases. Moralism weakens. Leverage increases. The question shifts from “Why can’t I control myself?” to “Who benefits from pretending I should be able to?”
That question has answers:
The dream of sovereignty promises mastery. What it delivers is frustration. Abandoning it feels like giving up control. In reality, it is the first moment you gain some.