Obedience is compliance with authority, its moral valence determined entirely by what the authority serves: legitimate governance or structures of domination.
Obedience is not inherently negative. The Islamic tradition commands obedience to God, to legitimate authority, to parents, to契约. The question is always: obedience to what, and for what purpose? Obedience to divine law serves human flourishing. Obedience to technocratic systems that define their own metrics and serve their own perpetuation serves domination.
The essay identifies obedience to technocracy as a specific form of submission: demanding surrender to systems that define expertise as authority, measurement as truth, and efficiency as the highest good. This obedience is not chosen from a position of knowledge and freedom. It is extracted from populations that have been denied the intellectual and spiritual frameworks from which alternative authority could be recognised.
The demand for obedience to systems that concentrate power while presenting themselves as neutral is a form of epistemic control. When the only legitimate authority is technical expertise, and technical expertise is controlled by those who benefit from existing arrangements, obedience becomes a mechanism for reproducing inequality while calling it progress.