This meditation on subjectivity draws on mundane and explicitly political contexts to argue for mathematics education practices that help us understand how people use mathematics to shape our world. I use two contexts to consider how to develop citizens who understand how we are subjugated by mathematical systems (designed and sustained by people). One context comes from my experiences teaching school mathematics in the 1990s, when I introduced random processes into my everyday classroom practices. The second context is a current situation in which I find adults struggling to set up and understand ways to choose representatives for leadership.