As a teenager, I was drawn to punk. Not the fashion or the noise, but the music and the attitude: autonomy, distrust of authority, and a deep resistance to anyone who claimed the right to watch, judge, or control others. In that world, people who enforced rules or monitored behavior were not neutral. They were the problem. There is a song by the Dead Kennedys called I Am the Owl that captured that feeling perfectly. It is a satirical monologue from the perspective of someone who sees everything, knows everything, and quietly observes others under the guise of ordinary roles. The message was unmistakable: these are not protectors, but watchers. Not allies, but something closer to predators.
At the time, that felt obviously true to me. If someone needs to watch you to make sure you do the right thing, something is already broken.
That belief wasn’t just about music. It was a simple worldview. Good people don’t need supervision. If you have to monitor behavior, you are not dealing with integrity but with compliance, and that already feels like a loss. Trust should be the default, not something that has to be enforced. And if someone breaks that trust, that is a failure of character, not a reason to build systems around it. In the back of my mind, there was also a quieter idea, one I would not have called it that at the time: that your word matters, that you do what you said you would do, and that you don’t need anyone watching to hold you to it. In that sense, rules and oversight always felt like a kind of surrender, an admission that we had already given up on expecting people to do the right thing on their own.
That view held up surprisingly well for a while. It felt clean, almost elegant. But over time, small cracks started to appear. Not because I suddenly encountered bad people, but because I kept running into situations where good people did things they themselves would not defend if you asked them directly. Nothing dramatic. Corners cut, responsibilities postponed, uncomfortable truths avoided. Not out of malice, but out of convenience, pressure, or simple human weakness. It had something of what Hannah Arendt once described: not evil as something monstrous, but as something ordinary. And that was harder to dismiss. If people who genuinely see themselves as decent can still drift into behavior they would not openly endorse, then the problem is not just character. Something else is at play.
It took me a while to see what that “something else” was. It is tempting to explain it in terms of bad intentions or weak character, but that is too easy and, more importantly, incomplete. People do not just act based on what they believe is right. They also respond to incentives, to pressure, to ambiguity, and to what they think will or will not be noticed. Left entirely to themselves, even well-intentioned people will sometimes choose the easier path over the right one. Not because they reject integrity, but because integrity is often not the path of least resistance. That is where my earlier belief started to shift. Maybe the absence of oversight is not a sign of trust, but a test that systems, and people, do not always pass.
At some point, I realized what that meant for me. The people I once saw as “the owl” were not necessarily the enemy. Not because surveillance suddenly became virtuous, but because the absence of it turned out to be less innocent than I had assumed. If people respond to what is visible and what is not, then making behavior visible is not just control. It is also a way of preventing the quiet drift that no one intends but still happens. In that sense, the owl is not only a watcher. It is also a witness.
And somewhere along the way, I became part of that. Not the anonymous, all-seeing presence I once rejected, but someone whose role it is to make sure that what people think goes unseen, does not always remain unseen.
So did I become what I hated as a kid? In a superficial sense, yes. I am now, in part, one of the people who watch, who ask questions, who make things visible that others might prefer to keep out of sight. But that is only half the story, and the least interesting half. What I hated was not the act of seeing. It was the idea of being watched by people who had no standards of their own. What changed is not that I abandoned that instinct, but that I redirected it. The problem was never visibility itself. It was visibility without integrity. And, perhaps more importantly, visibility is not there to replace integrity, but to support it, to make it easier for people to live up to the standards they already believe in, rather than to force behavior through control alone.
I still understand the instinct I had back then. Part of me still shares it. There is something fundamentally uncomfortable about being watched, and that discomfort is not entirely misplaced. But I no longer see it as a simple opposition between freedom and control. What matters is not whether someone is watching, but who is watching, why, and whether they are bound by the same standards they expect from others.
This is also where my work sits. In organizations, we cannot rely on integrity alone, and we should not try to replace it with control either. The role of compliance, at its best, is somewhere in between: not to force behavior, but to make it visible, to support people in living up to their own standards, and to step in where that proves insufficient.
In the end, I did not abandon the idea of an inner code. If anything, I came to rely on it more. The difference is that I no longer believe it can stand entirely on its own.
My Essay 