4 ideas
At the Knave's trial for stealing tarts, the King cites 'Rule Forty-two' against Alice, a rule he makes up on the spot. The Queen demands 'Sentence first—verdict afterwards,' and an unsigned, meaningless verse is read out as proof of guilt. Alice, who has grown back to full size, calls them 'nothing but a pack of cards,' and the whole court collapses as she wakes. It is a concrete case of arbitrary authority lasting only as long as someone takes it seriously.
Wonderland's creatures win arguments by reading words exactly as stated and ignoring what the speaker meant. The Mad Hatter's party insists that 'I say what I mean' is not the same as 'I mean what I say,' and the Dormouse adds that 'I breathe when I sleep' is not the same as 'I sleep when I breathe.' Reading this way shows how much everyday talk depends on unstated shared intent, and how easily someone acting in bad faith can derail talk by refusing to supply it.
Alice keeps changing size and forgets lessons she knew by heart. She concludes she may have been 'changed in the night,' and she cannot answer the Caterpillar's question 'Who are you?' The book suggests that a sense of self rests on stable memory and a stable body. When those are disrupted, a person cannot say who they are, even from the inside.
In the Caucus-race everyone runs in circles, stops whenever they like, and 'everybody has won and all must have prizes.' The mechanism is convention kept going purely by conformity: participants enforce the forms fiercely because the forms are all that is left.