The asymmetrical war is the cause of Estelle’s dissociative symptoms. The “tiny but loud autocrat,” one should quickly surmise, is her ego, which is not the bastion of individuality we assume it to be. This assumption, we learn, is a deliberate Orwellian twist that perpetuates social control over the individual by placing an authoritarian voice of its own creation at the helm of the natural person seeking liberation. The duplicity of the egoic turncoat — acting at times like the liberator but only further ensnaring the self in its grasp — fuels the distrust that keeps them at odds, preventing the one thing that can actually lead to a liberated individual: the rejection of all authority, including one’s own.