Moving Goalposts
Control is More than a Tactic
Control is More than a Tactic
Moving the goalposts is no game.
Having the standard changed after you’ve met it is nothing short of demoralization.
That’s the point. You can never arrive. You can never get clear. Nothing is ever “enough.” The goal is not improvement. The goal is control. The game is perpetual jurisdiction: keeping you inside someone else’s court, forever answering charges that never resolve.
This works best when it wears the costume of morality. “High standards” sound like wisdom. But self-made religion and severity do not produce holiness; they produce a man locked in self-defense. Performance becomes the proof of integrity, and the rules themselves become untouchable.
Stable standards create mutuality. The lines on a real field do not move. In a just court, the accused can rest a case on clear witnesses. But fixed rules create risk on both sides: they allow real loss, real accountability, real verdict. A rigged game cannot permit that. So the standard shifts, the calls change, the outcome stays the same. It’s all theater—designed to keep you from looking behind the curtain at what is actually governing the room.
Moving the goalposts means ignorance is the play. Court never comes out of session, not even after you confess. Whether the next rung is deeper sincerity or more visible results, every admission becomes permission to raise a new bar. Confession is not met with closure. It is met with escalation.
You explain, and you’re “too defensive.” You hold your tongue, and now you’re “unwilling to help.” You give it your all, and that’s “controlling.” You step back to assess, and suddenly you “don’t care.” In a system like this, there is no correct move—only fresh angles for accusation.
When every action is read under the worst construction, even your righteousness is translated as “evil.” This does not require malice or hatred. But it does require a commitment: someone has decided that the fight is not for resolution, but for control.
“Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.” - Sun Tzu 6.1
Go deeper on Sun Tzu, Proverbs and the Natural Law of choosing your battles by clicking this link.
When every move is interpreted against you, the goal is not resolution. The goal is narrative jurisdiction: the power to remain the storyteller. No one holds sway like the one who gets to define what is real. That is why arguing with facts against entrenched power feels like debating fog. Words stop being shared objects. They become signals you are expected to obey.
Why This Happens
Domination is not always calculated. It is not always even conscious. More often it is instinct—protective, rehearsed, inherited. Once leverage has proven itself as a reliable way to avoid loss, why would a person question it? If this was the air a family breathed growing up, how would it even register as a tactic? The standards that formed you become the standards you enforce. That can be natural, and even good, up to a point.
But when you find yourself on the receiving end of leverage, it can leave you more dazed than open hostility would. The weaponization of words is hard to spot if you are accustomed to good will and mutual vulnerability. If you are willing to be wrong, to face shame, to give up power, you gain a kind of freedom. You can confess without bargaining. You can repent without needing guarantees. But not everyone plays by that covenant. Moving goalposts is how accountability is avoided, repentance is refused, and superiority is maintained without change—by redefining the terms you are required to submit to.
Once a person is committed to a story—once they have named themselves “this” and you “that”—protecting the purity of that narrative becomes a form of survival. This is where the Bible is such a relief. It does not ultimately matter what names others put on you, or even if something really was your fault. Mercy is new every morning. But without that faith, when righteousness is built on self-image and performance, any counter-narrative becomes dangerous. It threatens identity.
Whitewashing a tomb is safer than unearthing bones. Shifting the standard until the evidence fits is easy, so long as no one is allowed to question the rules. And consensus is the perfect camouflage: it gives just enough cover to avoid the hard work of actually changing.
Change, in the Bible, Means Repent
Every one of us carries the Old Man. Every one of us is tempted to tilt the facts toward our preference, to select the memory that makes us look clean, to edit the story so our conscience can rest. But the Christian is not, in the end, a self-justifier. You can say, “I was wrong,” without feeling annihilated. You do not need to keep others wrong in order to remain intact.
But not everyone can live there.
The Christian does not aim to be a controller. The Christian believes that safety does not require dominance, because that is what Jesus Christ teaches. Biblical standards are not a weapon; they are a gift. They create mutuality. Mutuality is risky. Mutuality can cost you. But it is better than demanding a standard no one can meet, and calling that righteousness.
The narrative priests of the world do not merely hold opinions. They confer meaning through presence—through confidence, tone, certainty. They appoint themselves as interpreters of motives, definers of memory, and seers of intention. Like the Sadducees of old, preserving ritualized supremacy outweighs even what is plain to the eyes.
“I am on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead.” -St. Paul, Acts 23:6
The anxiety-fused system we all live inside trains people early: harmony is maintained by managing the story. The “main stream” is simply what “everyone knows.” And when standards in that stream begin to shift in order to avoid confronting deeper fractures, virtue performance replaces plain reasoning. Identity becomes “being good,” “being safe,” “being on the right side,” no matter how harsh, unfair, or controlling you need to be to keep that place.
None of this requires horns and pitchforks. People can be “nice” and cruel at the same time. The devil quotes Scripture. Herodias surely knew how to cry. A narcissist can cry, “Narcissism!” and a publicized “victim” can be a real abuser. Labels do not guarantee innocence. Tone does not prove truth.
Sometimes the boy cries wolf, and the whole town runs out.
That is what makes moving goalposts so corrosive: they are harder to spot than an absent wolf. The field looks like righteousness. The charges sound like virtue. The mask is moral.
But the mask will crack. It always does. Which is why the Christian answer is not to perfect your own mask. It is to refuse the masquerade. This is not about performing “care” language, and it is not about trusting the leopard to change his spots. It is about refusing to step onto any field that demands you surrender your perception just to be allowed to stand there.
“Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.” - Jesus, Luke 14:31–32.
When the standard is never stable, you cannot learn. You cannot calibrate. You cannot say, “I did X, so Y will happen.” Instead you are trained into a single conclusion: “No matter what I do, I will be wrong.” That produces stasis, anxiety, hypervigilance, and constant internal rehearsal. It splits the conscience from the self.
A healthy conscience is necessary—not to keep you permanently accused, but to convict you of your actual sin, to repent with, to change by, and to close matters in peace. So, when the only options are scrupulous self-erasure or numb resentment, the wiser choice is not to play.
Learned helplessness is worth resisting. Rigged systems are worth stepping away from. Outcomes that have nothing to do with your behavior are worth refusing. You are redeemed in Jesus Christ to build, to learn, and to adjust. We do not tear down the law; we uphold it. And stable standards—the kind the Bible gives—make both integrity and reconciliation possible.
Peace is not coercion. Stability is not negotiable. Truth is not violence.
Repentance is repentance. Forgiveness is forgiveness. Boundaries are boundaries.
And, false categories are lies.
The endless tribunal cannot save you, cannot absolve you, and will never be satisfied. Jesus Christ names sin without distortion and pronounces verdict without manipulation. A clean conscience before God is worth more than any “win.”
So when you refuse the game of moving goalposts—when you learn to spot it for what it is and quietly walk away—you are not demanding comfort. You are accepting reality. It may hurt more than going along with the crowd. But a crowd is not proof.
The Way is narrow, and few find it.
