The problem is not that we have needs; it is that our need grants someone else the authority to govern us. Giving yourself the law is not needing no one, but holding an equal say in the rules we live by together.
When autonomy is mentioned, most minds picture a strong person who needs nobody and makes every decision alone: someone who asks for no help, earns their own money and stands on their own feet. Yet the idea the word carries — giving oneself the law — is not the same as solitude. A person can have a say in the rules of their own life while living with others; conversely, someone who looks independent from outside may be wholly bound to debt, work, family approval or digital systems. Autonomy requires questioning the power to dominate inside relations rather than abolishing relations.
No one is truly self-sufficient
We begin life entirely dependent on others. Then, once grown, we are expected to forget this fact and to treat carers and shared infrastructure as invisible. Yet from the food we eat to the language we use, from the road we walk to the health care we receive, we rely on the labour of countless people. Even someone who earns their own money does not single-handedly create the value of that money, the conditions of their work or the order that makes their life possible. Mutual dependence is not a weakness but the ordinary condition of human life.
The problem is not needing; it is that our need grants someone else the authority to govern us. A person whose income depends on a single boss’s decision, who needs family approval in order to have shelter, or who waits for a political broker’s help in order to receive treatment may be formally at liberty yet not autonomous. If support takes the form of a favour that can be withdrawn at any moment, it produces gratitude and obedience. Rights and solidarity, by contrast, can remove the shame from need; a person who receives help is not obliged to hand over their life.
A world of rules we did not make
Most of our daily life passes under rules we did not write. What time we start work, how we may reach credit, where we can walk in the city, what becomes visible on a platform — all are arranged in advance. It is not possible for everyone to determine each of these rules individually. Shared life requires shared arrangements. If autonomy meant obeying no rule at all, living with others would become impossible.
The question is our power to understand and change the rules that affect us. Is the rule’s justification open? Are those affected by the decision heard? Can it be corrected when it produces a wrong result? Is the sanction proportionate, and is there a path of objection? The autonomous person is not one who recognises no limit; it is one who can ask how the limit was made, who does not obey blindly, and who can take part in the common rule. Giving yourself the law is not everyone becoming a small sovereign; it is preventing the order we live in from becoming a power wholly alien to us.
The government inside us
It is easy to notice authority outside and much harder to see the one that has settled within. We may force ourselves to work when no boss is present, look for flaws in the mirror the moment nobody criticises our body, and think we are falling behind even while resting. Measures of success, beauty, productivity and respectability speak in our own voice. The one who gave the order becomes invisible, but the order persists. Modern government often does not coerce a person; it turns them into a subject who coerces themselves.
Giving yourself the law is not following every impulse that passes through us either. Some inner voices are made of expectations, fear and shame heard for years. Autonomy is not silencing them completely but being able to distinguish among them and to join a decision by thinking. Do I really embrace this goal, or do I believe I would lose my worth if I refused it? That a choice belongs to us does not mean it arose from no influence; it means it has become a process whose influences we can notice and whose responsibility we can carry.
Why the right of exit is not enough by itself
The modern world often measures autonomy by the right of exit: if you dislike your job, leave; if the platform bothers you, delete your account; if your neighbourhood is expensive, move. That the door is open certainly matters. But if leaving costs accumulated labour, health cover, a social circle and years of collected data, the option grows weak. A person may legally go, yet if they must leave most of their life at the door, the relation still carries a strong dependence.
Moreover, solving every problem by individual exit leaves the common world unchanged. Leaving a badly run job one by one does not repair the work regime; it merely opens a place for the next worker. Abandoning a platform does not change its data policy; it costs us our network. Moving out of a neighbourhood does not solve high rent; it displaces the person. Alongside the right to leave, autonomy requires the power to speak, to organise and to change the relation while staying.
The solidarity that makes autonomy possible
People having a say in their own lives is not merely a matter of courage and character. Income security, accessible housing, access to information, shared care and not leaving the objector alone form the social infrastructure of autonomy. These supports need not make a person more dependent on others; built well, they save us from being at the mercy of a single power. Someone who can lean on more than one relation is less bound to the whim of any one of them.
Seen this way, autonomy is not a polished form of individualism but a correction addressed to it. It defends the person’s right to decide while acknowledging that this right rests on shared conditions. We become free not by needing no one, but within relations in which our needs do not create a master. Giving ourselves the law is not denying the existence of others; it is holding an equal say in the rules we live by together and allowing no support to place us under a silent debt of obedience.