Conflict often arrives like an uninvited rude guest—loud, impolite, and entirely indifferent to our wishes for peace. It enters our lives through relationships, communities, ideologies, and nations. Most of us are taught early on that conflict is something to be avoided, suppressed, or defeated. We imagine harmony as the absence of friction, and discord as the sign of something broken.

But perhaps we’ve misunderstood the nature of conflict. Perhaps it’s not a problem to solve, but a tension to navigate. It is like an art to be learned, not a flaw to be erased.

Conflict is not simply the absolute opposite of peace. It is the birthplace of change. It is a forge in which difference rubs against difference, often painfully, sometimes violently, but with the latent potential to generate not destruction, but insight. The crucial question is not whether we will encounter conflict (because we certainly will) but how we will carry ourselves when it appears.

The tendency to flatten people into fixed identities and rigid categories has become not only fashionable but dangerous. Across the globe, groups arm themselves with unbending definitions of who belongs and who doesn’t, who is right and who is beyond redemption. These definitions feel comforting in their simplicity, but they are traps. They create enemies out of those we don’t yet understand. They turn fellow humans into static symbols. And they make conflict not a space for encounter, but a battlefield for annihilation.

But life, in its actual complexity, rarely cooperates with our desire for clear lines. People are contradictory. Cultures are layered. Truths are partial. And history is always unfinished.

Rather than insisting on ultimate answers, we might begin to value honest questioning. Rather than defending the sanctity of one perspective, we might explore what emerges when multiple experiences are placed side by side—not to cancel each other out, but to co-exist in a kind of generous tension. Not all ideas are equally valid, but most are worth listening to, at least long enough to understand where they come from.

A more humane society will not arise from the victory of one idea over another, but from the slow and courageous work of building relationships across difference, even when that work feels like a kind of surrender. It is not.

To step into conflict constructively is not to capitulate—it is to resist the tyranny of certainty. It is to treat others not as representatives of fixed categories, but as people in flux, like ourselves. It is to ask: What do you fear? What do you need? Where does it hurt? These are not soft questions. They are revolutionary ones. Because they make room for change—both in others and in us. Conflict, then, can be a moral opportunity. A chance to reframe the conversation. It is to be reframed not in terms of domination or purity, but of responsibility and care. We can become architects of understanding, not by pretending all is well, but by acknowledging that tension is inevitable, and choosing nonetheless to shape it, rather than flee from it.

This shift toward what we might call "constructive zones" of conflict is not about agreement. It is about the refusal to let disagreement rot into hatred. It is about building social spaces where trust can grow, where dignity is not contingent upon uniformity, and where even those who have wronged can be re-engaged, not because they are innocent, but because they are human.

To draw conflict into a constructive zone requires immense discipline. It requires slowing down, even when emotions are fast. It requires speaking precisely, even when slogans are easier. It requires a style of leadership that does not confuse loudness with clarity, or righteousness with wisdom.

It also requires, most profoundly, a philosophical humility—a recognition that the world is not static, that identities are not final, and that today’s adversary may become tomorrow’s ally if treated with the patience of someone who understands that people are always becoming.

Peace, then, is not the absence of noise. It is the careful orchestration of competing sounds into something more tolerable, even beautiful. It is not the silence of winners, but the quiet confidence of those willing to stay in the room, to keep listening, and to keep building—even as the floor shifts beneath them.

Let us not fear conflict. Let us fear only the loss of curiosity or loss of wisdom. For as long as we are willing to wonder about one another, there is still hope. This hope is not for perfect harmony, but for something richer: a living peace, born of struggle, shaped by dialogue, and held together not by sameness, but by shared effort.

We’ve seen that peace is a dynamic thing. It’s something we must build all the time in a world that is always changing and is made by us. In this world, violence and feeling weak are not just things that go wrong sometimes. They are always here, part of how things are in the world.

So, fighting back the domination (resistance) and helping others (care) become very important ways to live our lives, both for ourselves and in groups. But we must also be careful not to think about fighting back and helping in simple, storybook ways. Fighting back is not just about romantic heroes who are good fighting against bad monsters. Helping others is not just about strong people being nice to weak people because they feel sorry for them.

Let us examine. Both resistance and helping others are smart actions. They are not forever, they can break easily, and we must always change how we do them because dangers change and people get hurt in new ways.

In old, simple stories, fighting back often looks like heroism. A small number of truly good people fight against many terrible monsters. These stories suggest that they will win because they are simply on the side of Truth. But if we see the world in a more real way, we know that no one side is completely right. And fighting back is never simple or only good. Even a fight for a very good reason can become bad. Even a very cruel power can sometimes do a small good thing, we look hard.

So, resistance is not saying that one side is forever Good and the other is forever Evil.

It is a practical, careful promise to say "no" to being controlled, to being treated as less than human, and to giving up hope. We do this even while knowing that we ourselves can never be perfectly good or clean in the fight.

Smart resistance asks us:

• Where and how can I say "no" to being controlled in the best way, without causing too much unnecessary harm?
• How do I avoid turning into the bad thing I am fighting against?
• What good things am I helping to build for the future, not just reacting to the bad things happening now?

In this way, resistance is not like a play on a stage. It is like careful gardening. It means pulling out the weeds of cruelty. But it also means making the ground ready so that something better might, one day, grow there.

In the same way, helping others – the act of taking care of people who are weak or hurting – must not be just about feeling emotional or being "nice." Helping is a choice you make carefully. It is often hard and has a price. It means deciding to protect lives and connections that can break easily, even when you know you won't always get something good back, and even when the world still has problems you can't fix easily.

In a world that is not fixed and always changing, helping must be smart:

• It must know its limits. We cannot save everyone. We should also not try to carry all the heavy problems alone.
• It must not treat people like babies. Real help makes people stronger; it doesn't trap them by telling stories that they can only be weak.
• It must know that help goes both ways. We do not help others like we are gods looking down; we help with them, knowing that we are all weak sometimes and need help. Besides, by helping others, we develop better habits.

So, mutual helping is important for the whole community, not just a private act.

It builds small groups and ways of being together that respect people through friendships, groups working together, and sense of community. These fight against the cold, cruel power of others with the strong, warm feeling of sticking together.

Perhaps the hardest but also most beautiful thing is that resistance and mutual helping must be done together, at the same time. Fighting back without helping becomes being mean but calling it fair. Helping without fighting back becomes giving up but calling it kindness.

To live in a good way in a world that is not fixed is to become skillful at holding two ideas that seem to not fit together. It is dialectics.

• To fight against the things that make people feel less than human without starting to hate those things or the people who do them.
• To help the people around us without pretending not to see how systems and power hurt them.
• To keep going knowing we will lose some fights, and that we will never have a final, sure win that lasts forever.

This is the good quality of people who choose to be active in the world without pretending things are perfect. They do not hold onto ideas of perfect places that don't exist. They do not give up and think nothing good can happen. Instead, they build, even in groups that don't last forever, with broken hopes, in systems that are not finished – the strong but breakable ways of living where respect, sticking together, and hope can still live.

In this strange, changing world, smart resistance and smart mutual helping are not things we can choose to do or not do. They are what give us our respect and worth as humans. They don't promise there will be no violence, or that we will never feel weak.

They give us something calmer, stronger, more like real people: the ability to live, to act, and to love like our lives are important even when the world doesn't promise that they are important.

And maybe in that "like," in that kind, strong act of pretending that becomes real when we promise to do it, we find the closest thing to being saved that this changing world gives us.

Let me recite the first words of Dhammapada.

Preceded by mind
are phenomena,
led by mind,
formed by mind.

To live is to live with others. From birth, we are not thrown into the void but into relationships — of care, language, memory, and meaning. We do not choose to be born into a culture, into a way of life, into the rhythms of a shared world. This belonging is not an accident. It is our first condition of being.

It is in this sense that living in society is natural — not as a biological law, but as an existential fact. We grow by reflecting others, negotiating norms, finding shelter in shared rituals and stories. There is no self that stands before society; rather, the self is formed through it.

And yet, this truth — that we are communitarian beings — must not be confused with the illusion that our communities or identities are fixed, pure, or eternal. Cultures are not sealed containers. They are not singular essences that define us once and for all. Cultures evolve, split, remix, and interact. People migrate across them, reinterpret them, and sometimes reject them altogether.

To defend the dignity of community life is not to defend closed essentialism. It is to recognize that we inherit social forms, but we also transform them. That we are born into stories, but we can rewrite their endings. We are not condemned to mimic what came before. We are entrusted with shaping what comes next.

A healthy communitarian vision must be open to this tension. It must affirm that society matters — that local belonging, shared languages, mutual responsibilities, and intergenerational care are crucial for human flourishing. But it must also reject the temptation to turn belonging into a prison, or to use community as a weapon against outsiders, dissenters, or the newly different.

What emerges is a relational way of life: one that neither isolates the individual nor freezes the community into an unchanging idol. In this vision, identity is not a cage but a platform — a starting point for deeper dialogue, creativity, and political negotiation. The village matters, but so does the road that leaves it. Tradition matters, but so does the choice to reinterpret or depart from it.

The greatest danger is when power seizes the language of community to enforce conformity or erase difference. When those in charge claim to speak for “the culture” or “the nation” as if they are divine truths, they turn living traditions into tools of control. They suppress complexity, ignore change, and punish autonomy. That is not community. That is command.

True community is not afraid of difference. It adapts. It listens. It makes room for evolution. It understands that authentic belonging is not coerced — it is cultivated. And it honors that while we may not choose where we begin, we must be free to shape where we go.
This is why the task is not to abandon communities, but to humanize them. Not to burn down cultures, but to open them to their own richness. Not to romanticize the past, but to co-create a shared future that respects both roots and wings.

We need a politics that supports this vision — not by imposing a centralized model of society, but by enabling local agency, cultural resilience, and pluralist experimentation. By designing institutions that protect the right to belong without enforcing sameness. By balancing the memory of who we have been with the possibility of who we may become.

To live communally and yet reject fixed identities is not a contradiction. It is a mature politics of freedom — one grounded in the real conditions of human life, but never resigned to their limits. It is to say: we are born into togetherness, and we are responsible for making that togetherness just.

We tend to see maps as innocent things. We think that neutral diagrams that tell us where we are. They’re on our walls, in our pockets, and in our schools. We use them to locate ourselves, to find direction, and to feel a sense of place. But maps, like stories or myths, don’t just describe reality. They decide what counts as real.

Maps shape the world as much as they show it. They are not just tools but are instruments of power. Behind every neat border and labelled region lies a set of choices. They are about who gets to belong, who is left out, and what is considered valuable.

The history of map-making is not a silent one. It has been deeply tied to conquest, colonization, and control. When European empires expanded, they didn’t just invade land—they redrew it. They drew lines on paper that claimed ownership, divided communities, and renamed places that already had names. In doing so, they introduced a way of thinking we might call territorial essentialism—the idea that people naturally belong to the areas marked out for them.

This belief didn’t come from the land itself. It came from the ambitions of those who wanted to manage it.

In many parts of Southeast Asia before colonialism, territory was not a box with clear edges. It was more like a ripple. Power flowed outward from a center—like a sacred city or royal court—but the edges were soft. It is often known as Mandala system. People belonged through relationships, through language, trade, loyalty, and shared stories. The Khmer empire and Malay sultanates didn’t use borders the way colonial states later did. Their maps, if they had any, were maps of connection, not confinement.

Colonialism changed all that. Western cartographers arrived with rulers and grids. They flattened rich local knowledge into square boxes. They ignored how people used land spiritually, seasonally, or communally. Instead, land became property. It became something to tax, to sell, to extract. Indigenous geographies, oral traditions, pilgrimage paths and sacred forests were dismissed as childish or backward.

This wasn’t just a matter of drawing lines. It was a matter of deciding who could draw them. The mapmaker became a kind of silent ruler. The map maker was able to erase a people’s past, define their future, and determine who counted as a nation.

Over time, these foreign lines became internal beliefs. We began to treat them as if they had always been there, as if they were carved into the earth, not scribbled by colonial administrators in distant offices. We started to believe that the state, as drawn on a map, was the highest form of truth. That idea still shapes how governments rule and how people suffer.

After colonialism, things did not return to how they were. The newly independent states not only kept the old maps but also added new myths. They borrowed symbols from the pre-colonial past and attached them to colonial borders. Some countries claimed the shape of its nation as something ancient and sacred, even though it was only recently defined. Some countries celebrated its “unity in diversity” while suppressing dissent from groups like the indigenous peopls who had their own stories and their own maps. Take a look at Myanmar, India, Thailand or Indonesia for Southeast Asian examples.

Nationalism today often takes this form: a dangerous mix of rigid boundaries and selective memory. It uses both colonial tools and ancient empires to justify power. It claims that belonging is fixed—that each people has a rightful place, and everyone else is a stranger. This turns borders into barriers and identities into weapons.

What makes maps powerful is also what makes them dangerous: their simplicity. A line seems clean. A border feels final. But these drawings hide far more than they reveal. They leave out centuries of movement, intermarriage, negotiation, and exchange. They make it seem as if conflict only arises when someone crosses a line, when in fact the line itself may be the cause of the conflict.

Simplifying complexity is not neutral—it is political. When we flatten the world into boxes, we also flatten people. We erase the grey zones of belonging where most real life happens.

The most stubborn myth of all is that borders never change. That what is drawn on the map is timeless. But history constantly redraws the world. From Africa’s colonial frontiers to the breakup of the Soviet Union, borders are often the result of hasty deals and forgotten conversations. Yet we still treat them as sacred. In the South China Sea, China’s “Nine-Dash Line” is a perfect example. It is not a reflection of deep history, but a modern invention disguised as ancient truth. Maps like this aren’t used to understand the past. They are used to control the future. They are tools of power, used by elites to rally support, distract citizens, or assert control.

We do not need to throw away maps. We need to read them differently—with skepticism, empathy, and imagination.
Let us ask better questions: Who drew this map? For whom? Who is missing? What other ways of living together might we imagine?

Some ethnic groups, like the Rohingya or West Papuans, or even internal nations like Navajo, Karen or Shan, may choose to embrace strong identities in order to resist being erased. That is strategic essentialism, which means using the language of identity not because it is true forever and always, but because it is useful now. But even as we assert these "strategic" identities, we must remember that they are human creations, not eternal facts. Otherwise, there is a risk of us becoming who we fight.

The lasting solution lies in imagining new ways of belonging. Ways that allow for shared spaces, layered identities, and flexible governance. Borders can be meeting points, not prisons. Communities can be built on trust, not lines.

Nowhere is this struggle clearer than in Myanmar. The military-dominated state insists on a single characteristic—“Burmaness”—for a country filled with dozens of nations, hundreds languages, and countless histories. The Dobama Movement claimed that from the Himalayas to the sea, everyone must be Burman. It was later used to develop myths and justify control but not to build unity.

But the peoples fought back. The struggles are not just against the army, but against the idea that their identities could be reduced to conform lines on a map. Ethnic groups like the Kachin or Karen did not simply ask for independence. They demanded the right to be seen, to be complex, to belong without being absorbed. Myanmar’s neighbors have not aggressively attacked and assertively claimed the lands or peoples at its borders. It is not outsiders, but insiders, who continue to colonize in the name of national unity.

Maps are not the enemy. But treating them as sacred truth is. When maps are mistaken for moral law, they serve kleptocrats who hoard power, nepotists who inherit it, and plutocrats who buy it. The lines we inherit should not determine who we are. We must see maps for what they are: human tools, shaped by history, and always open to revision.

Only then can we begin to imagine a politics where belonging is not determined by geography alone but by dignity, memory, and mutual respect.

We have grown used to seeing politics as an arena of contests—where rival ideologies duel, interests are negotiated, and victories are often measured by numbers. It is, we assume, a place of strategies and calculations, of speeches and slogans, of power asserted and resisted. But somewhere along the way, we stopped speaking of one quietly radical idea: friendship.

Not the kind formed over dinner or shared music tastes—but a rarer kind, older and deeper. Friendship, in this richer sense, is the capacity to care without counting. It is the instinct to ask not “What can you do for me?” but “How might we live well, together?” It is rooted not in contracts or convenience, but in trust and the belief that the other person’s life—though unknown, unfamiliar—still matters.
What if politics, at its most human, was not about managing enemies, but about cultivating this kind of friendship?

Should we care strangers? There is a quiet moral revolution contained in the phrase political friendship. It doesn’t require sentimentality or shared biographies. It demands something simpler but harder: to carry the wellbeing of people we’ve never met into the decisions we make. To include them—equally and sincerely—in the circle of concern.

In a world increasingly shaped by profit, polarization, and performance, this is not easy. We are trained—by institutions, by markets, even by fear—to calculate, to measure worth, to define others by their usefulness or their alignment with our side.
But friendship, as a political principle, resists this. It is not transactional. It does not dissolve with disagreement. It does not withhold dignity. It asks us to remain loyal to the idea of others—not because they are like us, or because we agree—but because they are human.

Of course, we cannot speak of political friendship without speaking of power. Friendship cannot flourish in a vacuum. It grows—or withers—in the conditions we build around it. In societies marked by inequality, oppression, or historical violence, friendship is not merely a warm feeling; it is an act of justice. It asks difficult questions: Who sets the terms of recognition? Who is heard? Who belongs?
To practice political friendship in such a world is to commit not only to kindness, but to justice. It is to dismantle hierarchies that keep some people perpetually voiceless. It is to offer not just care, but solidarity.

Now, can friendship be a resistance against dominant power? In a time of increasing polarization—where people are reduced to labels, where politics risks becoming a form of civil war with or without guns—friendship may seem anachronistic. But perhaps it is exactly what we need.
Friendship, politically understood, is resistance against the flattening of others into enemies. It is the refusal to cancel complexity. It insists on dialogue, even in disagreement. It protects us from the cynical temptation to believe that politics is nothing more than domination dressed up in policy.

All politics rests on a slender thread: trust. And trust, like friendship, cannot be legislated into being. It is not built by surveillance or slogans. It grows slowly, in the patient work of showing up, listening, acknowledging harm, and not walking away.
When we lose friendship, we reach for control. More rules, harsher punishments, thicker walls. But none of these teach people to care. Only relationships do. And without care—without even the possibility of it—politics ceases to be a space for peace. It becomes a war managed by paperwork.

Let's think about unity. To speak of political friendship is not to demand agreement or sameness. In fact, the best friendships grow in friction—in the honest tension between difference and loyalty. Friends disagree, but they don’t discard each other. They stay, even when it’s uncomfortable. It is diversity in unity, not mere unity in diversity.

Political friendship, then, is not a mere utopia. It’s a discipline. It asks us to keep negotiating shared life across deep differences. To remain committed to each other even when trust is hard-earned. It invites us to reimagine conflict—not as a threat to be erased, but as a space where dignity can still be protected.

We might also ask: Who gets to be a political friend? Too often, our compassion is shaped by habit—by the boundaries we inherit from nation, race, religion, or ideology. But if friendship is to renew politics, it must unsettle those inherited limits.
It must teach us to ask not only “Who do I care about?”, but “How did I learn not to care about others?” And what might it mean to undo that learning?

I argue that Friendship is probably the Most Political Idea of all. Aristotle once called friendship the highest good of human life—not because it was easy, but because it reminded us that we are not solitary creatures. We are beings made to live with and for one another. Politics, if it is to heal rather than harm, must recover this reality. Not as a sentimental decoration, but as a foundation. Friendship might be the most demanding thing politics could ask of us. But it may also be the most liberating.

Because friendship teaches us that justice is not about fixing people, or sorting them into winners and losers. It is about sharing space, negotiating needs, and choosing dignity—together.

And perhaps that—more than power, more than profit—is the most radical political idea of all.

In most democratic imaginations, opposition is seen as a sign of health—a necessary balance to power, a space for alternative voices. But opposition is often romanticized in theory and demonized in practice. Especially in fragile or polarized societies, the space to dissent can be tightened not only by authoritarian control but also by democratic majorities that have forgotten one critical truth: losing an election does not mean forfeiting one’s dignity.

This is the paradox—democracy is said to be a system of consent, yet so often the consent of those who lose is treated as a formality rather than a foundational element. When power is claimed as victory rather than responsibility, the consent of the governed becomes hollow. And when those who lose their political ground are treated as obstacles instead of participants, the very legitimacy of the system begins to erode.

The phrase "consent of the governed" rings through many constitutions and declarations, but few ask: whose consent is being heard? And whose consent has been lost, ignored, or assumed?

In any election, there will be losers. But democratic opposition is not about temporary defeat—it is about preserving the political voice of those out of power. The majority may hold office, but democracy is sustained by the persistent presence of the minority. When the opposition is bullied into silence, caricatured as unpatriotic, or institutionally disabled, democracy begins to betray itself. Because democracy without a meaningful role for the opposition is merely a polite autocracy.

Consent is not the same as compliance. The defeated do not owe silence. They do not owe admiration. What they are owed is recognition—that their concerns still count, that their values are not obsolete, that their place in society is not contingent upon electoral success.

A truly democratic society protects the right to contest, not just the right to govern. It honors disagreement, not as a threat but as a contribution. This does not mean endless obstruction or cynical sabotage. It means that the voices of the politically outnumbered are not sacrificed at the altar of efficiency or unity.

Too often, democratic systems reduce opposition to a performance—symbolic seats in parliament, token debates, managed protests. But these gestures mean little when the deeper structures of decision-making remain locked. A good democracy doesn’t merely allow dissent; it integrates it. It builds channels for the minority to influence, to shape, and to revise. It ensures that the institutions of governance do not become extensions of the ruling party but remain accountable to the entire public, including those outside power.

This is especially crucial in societies where history has divided people along lines of identity, class, or geography. When opposition is concentrated in certain groups, the exclusion of opposition becomes the exclusion of entire peoples. And when this happens, the message is clear: only some voices matter. The rest are noise.

What then becomes of consent? It turns into something extracted rather than given. People go through the motions of democracy without feeling its spirit. Trust erodes. Cynicism grows. And from this wounded ground, deeper conflicts emerge.

The task, then, is to reclaim the meaning of democratic opposition—not as a tolerated nuisance but as a co-author of legitimacy. This requires institutional design that protects dissent, but more than that, it demands a culture that values disagreement not as defiance but as devotion to the shared project of living together.

It also requires that we resist the hunger for moral victory. That we see politics not as a contest to declare who is right forever, but as a space of ongoing negotiation between those with different views of the good. Opposition, in this light, is not the opposite of loyalty. It is a different kind of loyalty—a loyalty to a system that remains open, responsive, and plural.

Democratic opposition is about more than winning the next election. It’s about sustaining a society where even those without power still have presence. Where the consent of the governed is not assumed, but continuously renewed—through inclusion, through dialogue, and through the recognition that the voices of the "losers" are not disposable, but indispensable.

If democracy means anything, it means refusing to forget those who have lost. It means building a society where the opposition is not a placeholder but a partner. Where the consent of the lost is not a technicality, but a moral commitment. And where the dignity of every voice—especially the quiet, the defeated, the skeptical—is the measure of our collective strength.

In every society that seeks to be just, the language of rights is among its most sacred. We speak of the right to speak, the right to live, the right to be treated with dignity. Rights are powerful tools of defense—especially for the weak in the face of the strong. But rights alone are not enough. When disconnected from responsibility, rights risk becoming hollow. Worse, they risk becoming instruments of selfishness, entitlement, or selective moralism.

The modern obsession with rights tends to present them as fixed, self-evident, or universal truths. But in truth, rights are human constructions—the result of political struggles, cultural shifts, and collective agreements. They do not fall from the sky. They are claimed, negotiated, won, and redefined over time. This makes them both fragile and powerful. Fragile, because they can be revoked or manipulated. Powerful, because they express shared commitments that shape how we live together.

To claim a right is not to declare isolation from others, but to insist on one's inclusion within a moral and political community. Rights, in this way, are relational. They draw boundaries—not to separate, but to protect participation. My right to speak assumes your willingness to listen; my right to protest assumes a society that tolerates dissent. A right that cannot be respected by others is merely a slogan.

This is why responsibility is not the enemy of rights—it is their companion and condition. Without a culture of responsibility, rights float unmoored, subject to convenience or manipulation. But responsibility is often misunderstood. It is not about obedience to authority, nor about guilt or burden. True responsibility is about response—our ability and willingness to respond ethically to the presence, voice, and dignity of others.

Responsibility makes rights meaningful. It reminds us that rights are not shields to hide behind, but spaces to stand within—to protect others as much as ourselves. Responsibility transforms rights from tools of individual defense into instruments of common life.

However, to talk of responsibility in a deeply unequal world is dangerous if we are not careful. Too often, responsibility is demanded only from the weak, while the powerful are excused. The poor are told to be patient, the oppressed to behave, the suffering to endure. But true responsibility begins with power—those who hold more must bear more. Responsibility without justice becomes submission. Justice without responsibility becomes chaos.

This is where we must be skeptical of those who claim to "give" rights as if they are gifts from the top. Rights are not granted by grace; they are rooted in shared human agency. They are part of the struggle to live with others in ways that respect difference and negotiate conflict without domination.

Our task, then, is not to idolize rights, but to embed them in a culture of mutual care. And not to preach responsibility in the abstract, but to build structures that make responsibility possible—through shared power, fair institutions, and open dialogue. Responsibility cannot be demanded in a vacuum; it must be cultivated, modeled, and reciprocated.

A society obsessed only with rights becomes self-centered. A society focused only on responsibility becomes authoritarian. A just society must weave the two together—not as abstract doctrines, but as everyday practices. In families, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods, we learn how to claim our rights by practicing responsibility—and how to take responsibility by being recognized in our rights.

To build such a society requires a shift in moral imagination: away from isolated individuals and toward interdependent agents. It calls us not to purity or perfection, but to humility and dialogue. And it asks us to remember: freedom is not the absence of others, but the presence of just relationships.

In the end, rights and responsibility are not opposing forces. They are the twin lungs through which democratic life breathes. Without both, our political body weakens. With both, we can build a society not of domination and denial, but of shared voice, shared power, and shared care.

Few things are more astonishing than a thin piece of paper or a set of digital numbers that can decide whether we eat today, whether a child gets medicine, or whether a society collapses. It is tempting to treat money as natural, like rainfall or gravity. But money is, in truth, something far stranger: a belief, a habit, a dance we all perform without entirely understanding why.

What is money, really? Someone who values individual liberty might tell you that money is freedom, a neutral medium that allows humans to express value and make choices. Someone focused on social power might argue that money is control, an instrument used to mask the exploitation of the many by the few. A banker might call it a tool. A monk might call it a temptation.

But there is another, quieter way to look at it. One that doesn’t shout “freedom!” or “oppression!” but whispers, “agreement.” We could say: money is not a thing, it’s a relationship. It doesn’t exist like a rock or a tree. It exists more like love, or law, or shame—real, yes, but made real only through people’s repeated acts of belief.

In this view, money is a symbol, floating above us like a cloud that we’ve agreed to pretend is solid. We build cities on this cloud, trade lives across it, go to war over it. It is powerful not because it is gold or paper, but because we say so.

And yet, that saying is not meaningless. It has weight. To walk into a shop and offer a credit card for food is not a delusion; it is a demonstration of collective faith. You believe that your card will work. The cashier believes the same. The bank believes you’re good for it. Everyone around you, without speaking, agrees to play along. And so the meal is yours.

This is why money is real, but constructed. We don’t dig it out of the earth like truth. We make it together, then forget we did. It is a kind of shared amnesia wrapped in daily transactions.

Some say this is dangerous. And they are right. For when we forget that money is a creation, we start treating it like a god. We sacrifice time, health, and relationships to it. We blame people for being poor, as if money were air and they had simply forgotten to breathe. We forget that behind every coin is a system of values, a culture, that gave it meaning in the first place.

Others say that the system should be abolished. Perhaps. But it is important to remember: even if capitalism were dismantled tomorrow, money in some form would almost certainly return. Why? Because humans need ways to store trust, to count obligations, to trade energy. We may no longer use cash, but we will still trade something—favors, food, information, influence.

The person who values individual liberty is right that freedom matters. People should be able to choose what they value. The person focused on social power is right that power matters. Not all choices are free. We can simply add: what we value is always constructed. Value does not exist out there in the world like a mineral waiting to be found. It exists between us, in relationships, stories, fears, and hope.

If money is a myth, it is one of the most successful myths humanity has ever told. But like all myths, it can become dangerous when we stop questioning it. The goal is not to destroy the myth, but to make it visible again, to see it as the fragile, human, invented thing it is.

We can then begin to ask better questions. Not “how much is it worth?” but “what kind of world does this kind of money create?” Not “how do we get richer?” but “what do we want to value together?”

For in the end, money is a mirror. It reflects what we choose to worship. If we look closely, we might see not just numbers or coins, but ourselves—hoping, bargaining, dreaming—and perhaps, choosing again.

Normative politics—those visions of what ought to be—have long animated revolutions, inspired movements, and offered moral compass when societies drift. Yet, as much as they provide clarity and purpose, normative politics also carry dangers. When ideals are mistaken for blueprints, or when visions become demands for purity, politics can lose its openness and turn into control. What begins as a promise can become a cage.

At its best, normative politics helps us imagine better futures. It names injustice, affirms dignity, and demands accountability. It draws lines when compromise becomes complicity. But at its worst, it freezes the world into moral binaries. It assumes that one worldview—however noble—is enough to govern a society made of plural experiences, contested truths, and unfinished stories.

One of the most persistent pitfalls of normative politics is moral overreach. The belief that because an idea is “good,” it must also be imposed. This easily slips into moral arrogance, where disagreement is not respected but pathologized. Dissenters are cast as enemies, not interlocutors. And what started as a struggle for justice becomes an obsession with conformity.

This is where power hides in idealism. For even the most righteous cause can be weaponized. Normative frameworks, once institutionalized, tend to centralize judgment. They create gatekeepers of truth, often punishing those who deviate—not because they are wrong, but because they threaten coherence. The political becomes moralized, and the moral becomes politicized, leaving little space for ambiguity, irony, or genuine disagreement.

Another danger is performative idealism. When ideals become currency for validation, politics becomes more about posture than practice. Leaders proclaim justice while enacting exclusion. Movements cite love and solidarity but reproduce hierarchy internally. The words are right, but the structures remain untouched. In such a climate, people lose trust—not in ideals themselves, but in the sincerity of those who speak them.

Normative politics also risks inflexibility. By projecting a fixed vision of the good, it often resists adaptation. But life is unpredictable. Communities evolve. Pain surfaces in unexpected places. No single moral framework can preempt all the tensions that come from real, lived plurality. When politics refuses to adjust, it fractures under its own rigidity—or worse, it coerces people to fit a mold they never chose.

This is not a call to abandon ideals. It is a call to hold them differently. Instead of treating normative visions as final truths, we can see them as working hypotheses—guiding stars rather than destination points. They should orient us, but not imprison us. They should inspire dialogue, not end it.

Good normative politics leaves room for humility. It knows that no side holds all the answers. It seeks alignment, not domination. It treats the political not as a battlefield of moral triumph, but as a space of shared navigation—messy, uncertain, but necessary.

This also means recovering the relational nature of politics. Rather than asking only “What is the good?” we ask “How do we relate well, even amid disagreement?” This shift foregrounds processes over doctrines, practices over dogmas. It honors the fragile, ongoing work of building together.

To avoid the pitfalls of normative politics, we need less sanctimony and more curiosity. Less purity and more process. Fewer proclamations of truth and more invitations to explore it together.

After all, no ideal is worth pursuing if it requires the silencing of others. And no society is just if it forgets that every normative claim is also a political act, shaped by power, context, and history.

Let us continue to imagine. Let us dream of better. But let us also remain grounded—always aware that the moral high ground, if left unchecked, can become just another tower of control.

In every country, and especially in those marked by division, there is an urgent question we must ask: What are majority privileges? It is not a question meant to accuse, but to understand. Because wherever there is a dominant group, be it by ethnicity, religion, language, class, or even culture, there is also a pattern of unspoken advantage. And if we are to build a society that honors dignity and safety for all, we must learn to see the unseen privileges that shape the everyday lives of those in the majority.

Majority privilege is often quiet. It hides in language that doesn’t need translation, in rituals that are considered “normal,” in holidays that require no explanation. It is present in laws that assume certain ways of life and in institutions that mirror only one version of history. It is the comfort of seeing oneself reflected in the symbols of the nation: flags, anthems, textbooks, uniforms. It is walking into a room and assuming it was designed with you in mind.

These privileges are not always earned. They are inherited, extended, and repeated through habit more than intent. That is what makes them so powerful and so difficult to notice. When you are part of a majority, it is easy to confuse what is familiar with what is fair. But comfort is not the same as justice.

Democracy, in its deepest sense, is not simply the rule of the majority. It is the protection of all. It is the careful work of making sure that power, even when it flows from numbers, does not crush those who are fewer or different. The danger of ignoring this is what political thinkers have long warned against: the tyranny of the majority.

This tyranny is rarely dramatic. More often, it is slow and procedural. It happens when public policies reflect only one story, when laws reinforce a single worldview, when belonging depends on assimilation, and when dissent is painted as disloyalty. It is a tyranny not always of violence, but of silence: of muffled voices, of invisibility, of being told that your pain is an inconvenience to national unity.

The antidote is not to reverse the hierarchy, replacing one dominance with another. Nor is it to flatten society into sameness. The goal is subtler and braver: to build a society of shared dignity, where difference is not merely tolerated but respected, where no one is asked to shrink themselves to fit the mold of belonging.

This requires that we look at power not as a possession, but as a relation. It shifts with context, and so must our attention. In some rooms, someone’s voice is always louder. In others, someone is always first to be questioned. Understanding majority privilege means noticing how the floor tilts in our favor or against us, not to assign blame, but to reimagine balance.

A just society is one where agency is preserved. That is, where every person, regardless of background, has the ability to speak, to act, to refuse, and to belong without begging. Agency is not about getting what one wants, but about being taken seriously, having choices that matter, and being able to shape the world one inhabits.

But agency without safety is fragile. And safety without agency is suffocating. The two must walk together. True political friendship begins here, not in agreement, but in mutual regard. It means we listen not to convert but to understand. It means we hold space for others without demanding they disappear into our expectations.

Political friendship asks something rare in our time: that we care not only for the people who resemble us, but also for those who challenge our assumptions. It asks that we stay loyal to those not like us, not out of guilt or fear, but because the common good is never common if it excludes.

In a divided country, these ideas may sound idealistic. But perhaps they are the most practical things we can reach for. Because where division runs deep, so must the commitment to fairness. And where there is fear, there must also be room for courage: not the courage of dominance, but the courage of humility.

So let us ask: What privileges do I carry without realizing? What histories have I inherited without questioning? Who remains unseen in the spaces I move through with ease?

These are not accusations. They are invitations: to become gentler with power, to become more precise in our ideas of justice, and to become more generous in our vision of who belongs in the story of “us.”

Only then can we begin to build something that lasts: not merely a system of rules, but a culture of dignity. A way of living together that honors agency, that defends safety, and that holds the door open for political friendship to grow.

We live in a world haunted by two truths: that groups give us strength, and that groups can become prisons. For many communities scarred by colonial rule, racism, or the erasure of their language and customs, collective rights can offer a way to recover lost trust and dignity. Yet the moment we turn identity into rigid law, we risk building new cages even as we tear down old ones. To honor shared history without fossilizing it, to protect the vulnerable without creating new tyrants, we must learn to treat group rights as evolving tools for justice, not as permanent fixtures.

Why, then, do groups need special rights? Think of language itself. When a mother tongue is silenced, a way of seeing the world is lost. By protecting languages and sacred places, societies can help communities rebuild what colonizers once destroyed. In New Zealand, returning land to the Māori did more than restore acres; it returned a people’s voice and gave them the chance to care for their own stories. In Canada’s far north, the Inuit now help design school lessons and manage wildlife, blending ancient rhythms with new concerns. These measures are not about favoritism. They are corrective steps, aiming to restore what was taken by force or neglect.

Yet every corrective tool carries a risk of overreach. Rights meant to heal can harden into dogma. When leaders claim to speak for an entire community, they may silence those who question tradition—young people who blend old songs with new rhythms, women who seek equality within cultural rituals, or LGBTQ members who wish to live fully. When culture becomes a museum piece, frozen in time, it ceases to nourish the living. And when legal categories fix people into narrow boxes, individuals may feel forced to perform a single identity in order to keep their hard‑won protections.

These dangers lead us to the idea that group rights should breathe. They must be provisional, like scaffolding around a new building. If rights are never reviewed, they calcify. In some parts of Botswana, for example, indigenous land agreements come up for negotiation every ten years. This gives communities a chance to adapt as their needs change. Elsewhere, cultural councils prove their fairness by ensuring that women, youth, and city dwellers all have a say—preventing power from gathering in the hands of a few elders. And wherever possible, people must be free to step away from a group label without losing basic protections, so that personal choice is never sacrificed to collective identity.

Another key to breathing rights is to recognize that belonging is a journey, not a birthright. Blood alone cannot define a person’s connection to a tradition. In Hawaii, for instance, homestead rights extend to everyone who traces half their ancestry to the islands, acknowledging that heritage often blends across generations. In Catalonia, teaching children in the local tongue does not ban other languages. Instead it opens the door to true bilingualism, allowing every student to move freely between worlds. And when the ancient tattoos of the Māori are etched with modern tools, they carry old stories into new skins, reminding us that culture must evolve to stay alive.

Philosophers have long wrestled with these questions of justice. Jean‑Jacques Rousseau spoke of the “general will,” the common desire for a good life that differs from the mere sum of private wishes. John Rawls imagined a society designed behind a veil of ignorance, where no one knows their rank or role, so that the rules chosen would be fair to all. Their insights remind us that group rights must serve the many, not entrench the few.

At its best, group rights become a mirror of our readiness to share power. They mend broken trust by giving those left out a real seat at the table. But they can just as easily become new weapons of exclusion if they allow some voices to shout louder than others. We can test their worth by asking simple questions: Do these rights help people feel more free? Can a young poet honor her grandmother’s tongue while writing in slang? Can a village protect its forest without driving away outsiders who also dream of one green world?

Ultimately, group rights should be tools, not tombs. They should serve our messy, glorious task of becoming human together. They need review, renewal, and the humility to change. Only then can they repair old wounds without creating new scars—and only then can we find the balance between belonging and freedom that makes community worth its name.

History is not what happened. History is what we say happened. And in that distinction lies a quiet revolution of thought — one that invites us not to take the past as a monument, but as a living argument. To read history, truly read it, is not to memorize dates and kings, but to listen to voices, silences, and the craft of remembering itself.

We live in a world built on historical claims: of ownership, of victory, of loss. Borders exist because of historical events. Flags fly because of historical memory. And yet, curiously, few of us are taught to read history with the same care we might read a poem — with doubt, curiosity, interpretation, and above all, humility.

The comforting myth is that history is a line — neat, chronological, moving from cavemen to smart cities. But history is more like a mosaic that someone keeps rearranging depending on where they're standing. To read history critically is to reject the idea that there is one true, fixed meaning. The past does not lie still. It shifts each time a new storyteller tells it. History is influenced by constant negotiations. Empires once celebrated are now mourned. Revolutions once condemned are now romanticized. The "truth" of yesterday becomes the controversy of today.
This does not mean we abandon history to chaos or lies. It means we approach it as a practice, not a possession. We ask: Who is telling the story? For whom? What is left out? What is the cost of remembering it this way?

Let us talk about identity. States and nations often speak of themselves as if they were born fully formed. “We have always been this people, speaking this language, living on this land.” But such claims, though poetic, are strategic. They use history to harden the fluidity of culture into a shield or a sword. To read history wisely is to recognize that identity is a story we choose to tell about ourselves — sometimes for survival, sometimes for domination, often both. Cultures evolve, blend, borrow. Heroes are constructed to inspire; villains to warn. No one is purely one thing, ever. This doesn't mean we should condemn taking pride in heritage at all times. It means we should wear it lightly — like a robe, not a cage. We might ask: How have others lived here before us? How might our identity include them, too?

Every history book is "full of absences". The servant in the background of the painting. The woman whose name is forgotten. The child who died before records were kept. The fields, once full, now buried under concrete. The communities erased with no monuments to remember them. Reading history, then, is not only about what is said, but about who is missing. A critical reading listens to the margins. It asks, What didn’t make it into the archive? Whose memories were too inconvenient to preserve? Sometimes, we are the ones forgotten. Other times, we are the ones doing the forgetting.

The devil is in the detail and the power is there. There is a curious detail about many historical texts. They are often written to flatter the powerful. Victories are glorious, laws are wise, and the leaders are brave. But in the "footnotes", it seems not much so. In the economic policies, the logistical decisions, the betrayals dressed as diplomacy, the truth hums quietly. To read history well is to notice where power hides. To recognize how cronyism and elitism dresses up as legacy, how domination claims the language of civilization. Not to breed cynicism, but to nurture discernment. Power rarely introduces itself as power. It arrives wrapped in principle and decorated with tradition. To read history critically is to ask: How did power get here? Whom did it serve? And how does it ask to be remembered?

Now, how do we read it? We might also read history not only to analyze, but to compassionate and to learn. There is something intimate in realizing that people in every century struggled with doubt, heartbreak, greed, beauty, and failure. The philosopher in exile, the teenage soldier, the widowed mother of five — they all lived in the same emotional landscapes we do. History, when read very well, is a mirror of our fragility and strengths. It reminds us that the present is not the culmination of progress, but another moment of becoming. And this humbles us. We may even begin to forgive ourselves and each other. We may do so more easily by knowing that none of us were given clean beginnings.

Reading can be an act of ethical imagination. In the end, to read history critically is not to deny the past, but to treat it with the seriousness it deserves. Not as a final word, but as a conversation. Not as an rigid inheritance, but as a responsibility. We do not study history to relive it. We study it to ask what we must now choose, what burdens we carry forward, and what stories we might write differently for those who come after us.

So the next time you open a history book, pause before you dive in. Ask: Whose world is this? What truths were chosen? And how might I, as a reader, do justice not to the facts, but to the human complexity behind them?

The state (usually a nation state) is often imagined as a fixed, bounded, and self-justifying entity as if its authority emerges from some inherent essence, a timeless legitimacy, or a divine mandate. But through a critical lens, such assumptions crumble. The state is not a natural or inevitable structure as it insists. It is a system, constructed over time, contingent on context, shaped by contestation, and maintained by flows of inputs and outputs. It is not what it claims to be, but what it does, and how it is perceived, negotiated, and challenged.

Understanding the state as a system of extraction and distribution allows us to deconstruct its power while demanding accountability. It allows us to look beyond its claims to legality or tradition and ask deeper questions: Who gives to the state? Who benefits from the state? What justifies the exchanges we are asked to accept?

Every state, no matter how democratic or authoritarian, relies on inputs. The resources may be material, symbolic, and emotional. State extracts or receives these  resources from the people and communities within its reach.

• Resources and Taxes: The most visible form of inputs including wealth, land, and labors. They are extracted in the name of development or protection.
  
• Loyalty and Legitimacy: A subtler form of power. People are asked to accept the state's authority, often through rituals, myths, flags, elections, or coercive threats.
• Compliance and Order: The everyday submission to regulations, borders, identification, and bureaucratic routines — often accepted not because they are just, but because resistance is costly.
• Security and Surveillance: People are required to expose themselves to state scrutiny for the promise of protection. This is a trade often made under duress.
  

None of these inputs are morally neutral or naturally owed. They are negotiated claims, often backed by force, fear, or ideological persuasion.

Let's talk about outputs. States justify their existence by pointing to the goods, services, and protections they offer. These are supposed to be the returns for the inputs taken. They include:

• Security: Protection from violence, both external and internal. This is often the state’s strongest claim to legitimacy — the monopoly of force in exchange for peace.
• Infrastructure and Services: Roads, education, health, communication — sometimes delivered efficiently, often unevenly or selectively.
• Legal Recognition: Citizenship, rights, documentation — the tools to participate in formal life.
• Symbolic Unity: A sense of belonging, nationhood, identity — often excluding those who do not fit dominant narratives.

Yet in practice, these outputs are not distributed equally. Entire regions or communities may give inputs without receiving remarkable benefits. Marginalized groups often find themselves systematically excluded — over-policed but under-protected, taxed but under-served, loyal but unrecognized.

This imbalance is the heart of political discontent. When the inputs extracted from people do not translate into dignity, security, rights, or care, the state reveals itself not as a neutral arbiter but as a hierarchical apparatus, serving particular interests while marginalizing others. For the powerful, the state becomes an amplifier of wealth and control. For the vulnerable, it is a gatekeeper, an enforcer, or even an occupier. The asymmetry between input and output is not a design flaw — it is often a reflection of political hierarchies embedded in the state system.

Because the state is a system — and not a rigid essence — it can be contested, reshaped, and resisted. Its inputs can be withheld. Its outputs can be demanded. Its structure can be made more transparent, participatory, and just.

Let us reject the idea that the Nation State is the only possible way. Instead, it asks communities to imagine alternative systems: federations, networks, councils, cooperatives, or more creative ones. The crucial point is the models should make the power more accountable. The input and output are aligned with mutual respect and negotiated legitimacy.

This also means taking seriously the plurality of political heritage. Different peoples may have different roots and various communities might need different relationships to political authority. Uniformity under a centralized nation state may not be the answer. We must design systems of governance that allow local autonomy, cultural dignity, and horizontal coordination, rather than enforcing homogenized rule.

In this way, to see the state as a system is to liberate our imagination. It is to stop worshipping the state and start evaluating it. It is for asking whether it truly serves the people who sustain it. It is to embrace skepticism towards power and to defend the Common Good. The state, in this view, is rather a machine than destiny. It is a system that is powerful, complex, often extractive — but ultimately, built by human hands. And what is built by humans can be rethought, repurposed, or dismantled in pursuit of common goods that honor human dignity and collective agency.

In a fractured world, marked by domination, marginalization, and layers of structural violence, the solidarity of the oppressed is not merely a slogan but a lifeline, a political strategy, and a moral necessity. When those who suffer under systems of power begin to recognize not only their shared wounds but also their shared capacities, solidarity emerges as both resistance and reconstruction. It is a conscious alignment across different struggles, rooted not in sameness, but in mutual recognition of injustice and the will to transcend it.

To be oppressed is not to be passive. Oppression attempts to reduce people into silence, dependency, or fear. But history shows again and again that even in the most degraded conditions, humans resist. What solidarity enables is the amplification of that resistance — not as isolated uprisings, but as interlinked acts of reclaiming dignity, resources, and meaning. This is a process which we cannot avoid as conscious creatures, even when we know that meaning and stories are constructed socially.

Solidarity does not require identical experiences. It requires an ethical commitment to the freedom and dignity of others, even when their context is not your own. The solidarity of the oppressed must be a relationship of political friendship, where each struggle echoes another, forming a network of care, protection, and shared strategic learning.

A solidarity built on rigid essentialist identities is fragile. It can quickly turn inward, suspicious of difference, or defensive about purity. What is needed is solidarity grounded in critical thinking: one that understands identities — class, ethnicity, gender, religion — as strategic, historical, and constructed, but no less meaningful as "truths".

This solidarity must not be about claiming a universal victimhood. It is about recognizing that all forms of oppression are maintained by hierarchical power, and that liberation in one area is intimately tied to the liberation in others. A feminist revolution that ignores colonial or class oppression cannot succeed. An anti-colonial movement that reproduces patriarchy or silences minorities cannot bring justice.

For a critical thinker, power always demands scrutiny. Even in movements for justice, the seeds of domination can take root if not vigilantly checked. That is why solidarity must remain horizontal, dialogical, and pluralistic. No one group or identity actually owns the truth. No leader is above accountability. Solidarity of the oppressed thrives when it builds structures of participation, not veneration.

Yet, strategic unity is vital. Oppressed groups must sometimes speak with a collective voice to negotiate, bargain, or demand rights. This is not to deny their internal diversity, but to confront power with coordinated strength. Strategic essentialism here becomes a political tool — but one always subject to critique from within.

Solidarity of the oppressed is held not by ideology alone, but by relationships: trust built through shared risks, mutual support, and a willingness to learn from each other’s mistakes. It is forged in protest, in underground organizing, in community care, in refusing to be divided by the tools of the powerful — fear, scarcity, suspicion, and envy.

In the face of absurdity, we must hold onto this moral foundation: No one is free until all are free. Not as a poetic ideal, but as a structural reality. Oppression anywhere reinforces the system of oppression everywhere. The long-term survival of any struggle depends on cultivating a culture of solidarity — across borders, identities, and generations.

In the face of rising authoritarianism, extractive capitalism, nationalist populism, and digital surveillance, the oppressed cannot afford to remain fragmented. Neither can they afford shallow calls for unity that erase real grievances. We must not stop just by hashtags or speeches. What we need is a deep, critical, principled solidarity— grounded in shared commitments to dignity, justice, autonomy, and collective flourishing.

This is the solidarity that builds movements, rebuilds broken societies and creates the conditions for new ways of living. It is not charity, nor pity. It is mutual obligation — and mutual liberation.

The call for self-determination has long echoed across oppressed peoples, silenced nations, and marginalized communities. It is a cry for dignity, for voice, for the power to shape one’s own path. And rightly so. No one should be ruled from above without consent, nor be folded into a system that denies their story, their memory, or their future.

But what exactly is the "self" that seeks determination?.

If we are honest, that self is not a pure, timeless entity. It is not a sealed ethnic essence or a static tradition. It is a shifting, contested, living fabric — made of culture, resistance, pain, aspiration, and invention. It evolves. It disagrees with itself. It negotiates.

To favor self-determination, then, is not to pretend that identities are fixed but to affirm that communities must have the power to participate in shaping their own definitions. The right to self-determination is not the right to freeze identity, but to navigate it with freedom and care.

This is where the idea matures. Self-determination, at its most ethical, is not about enclosing people into permanent categories or ancient flags. It is about creating the space to revise, to reimagine, to choose — together and repeatedly. It is a practice of becoming, not a return to some essential past.

Especially in contexts where central power dominates, where uniformity is enforced, and where cultural differences are flattened into legal sameness, the claim of self-determination becomes a strategic affirmation of agency. It is a refusal to be told who one is, or must be.
That refusal is not essentialist. It is emancipatory.

It is entirely possible to defend self-determination while remaining deeply skeptical of fixed identities and grand claims of origin. The key is to understand that determining the self does not mean discovering a pure essence. It means having the political power and cultural space to explore who we are, together, without coercion.

And that process requires institutions that protect dissent, pluralism within communities, and the ongoing revision of the collective will. It demands that self-determination not be claimed only by those in power within a community, but shared across its margins.

The question, then, is not whether self-determination is valid — it is. The question is how we ensure it stays open, dialogical, and human, rather than rigid, exclusionary, or manipulated by elites.

In this light, self-determination is not a contradiction to liberty. It is its partner. It is the means by which communities escape externally imposed identities and claim the right to define themselves without pretending that definition is ever final.

Let us protect that right. And let us also protect the humility and fluidity that make it worth defending.

Revolutions are often portrayed as moral peaks of history—moments of rupture where the oppressed rise to shatter the old world and usher in a new dawn. Resistance, too, is romanticized: the brave few who speak truth to power, who confront injustice, who burn for freedom. These narratives have shaped generations. And yet, they are dangerous when unexamined. Not because resistance and revolution are unnecessary—but because their meaning is too often hijacked by those who crave power in new forms.

At their best, resistance and revolution are about reclamation: of dignity, of autonomy, of the right to shape one’s own life in concert with others. They emerge not from theory, but from lived injustice. People do not resist abstractions; they resist hunger, humiliation, violence, and voicelessness. They revolt not for perfection, but because the status quo suffocates the possibility of breathing freely.

But the danger begins when resistance forgets its roots and revolutions believe they are ends in themselves. The struggle becomes a ladder, and those who climb it quickly forget the ground from which they rose. Here, power reappears, not as a system to be transformed but as a throne to be seized. Resistance morphs into domination with a new flag, and revolutions become regimes with new rules but old logics.

This is not simply a matter of bad actors or betrayal. It is a structural risk: when revolution is anchored in fixed ideas of “the people,” “the enemy,” or “the future,” it risks becoming what it opposed. When resistance is defined by rigid identities and sacred binaries, it opens itself to dogma, purges, and purist moralism.

The alternative is to understand resistance as a continuous and adaptive practice, not a single heroic event. It is not about replacing one ruler with another, but about redistributing the very conditions that enable voice, participation, and co-existence. Resistance is not pure; it is messy, contradictory, and local. It doesn’t demand perfect ideologies, but reflexive communities that can challenge themselves as much as they challenge power.

Revolution, then, must not be worshipped as final liberation, but engaged as a strategic rupture, an opening that enables new political forms to emerge. But those forms must remain open to scrutiny, revision, and rebalancing. The most successful revolutions are not those that impose new truths, but those that multiply the spaces where truth can be negotiated together.

This demands a deep skepticism of hierarchy, even in resistance movements. Who speaks for the revolution? Who decides what counts as betrayal? Who claims to represent the people? Often, the loudest voices in movements are those most capable of mimicking the language of legitimacy—whether through ideology, martyrdom, or charisma. But legitimacy cannot be inherited or performed; it must be earned, distributed, and constantly questioned.

Revolutionary leaders must never see themselves as saviors. They must see themselves as facilitators of a shared struggle—a struggle not just against a regime, but against the deeper logics of domination, erasure, and monopoly of voice. They must organize not just for protest, but for plural futures, where difference is not merely tolerated but structured into the very architecture of power.

In this light, resistance is not simply against a state or system, but against the conditions that prevent people from building alternative lives together. It is not just a “no” to oppression, but also acceptance to complexity, negotiation, and shared becoming. It is, at its core, a long labor of co-creation, not a sudden seizure of control.

And this is perhaps the hardest truth: that resistance and revolution, if they are to be worthy of their names, must resist the temptation to become unquestionable themselves. They must resist the seduction of certainty, of closure, of declaring the struggle over. They must remain unfinished, vigilant, and humble.

In the end, resistance is not about pure ideals or perfect blueprints. It is about a commitment to human dignity in a world where power is always being built and rebuilt. And revolutions? They are not the end of history. They are only the beginning of the work to make power bearable, sharable, and accountable for everyone.

Power is not inherently evil, but its pursuit often corrupts. In a world where political legitimacy is frequently confused with dominance, and where access is mistaken for authority, the quest for power has devolved into a machinery of exclusion. Elitism and cronyism are not accidental distortions of political systems; they are symptoms of a deeper decay in how we understand community, merit, and legitimacy.

Modern political landscapes—especially in transitional, post-colonial, or conflict-ridden states—often suffer from the inherited scars of centralized rule. These are places where the state has long functioned not as a servant of the people, but as an apparatus of control. In such settings, power does not flow from collective deliberation, but from proximity to decision-making hubs. This centralization breeds a distorted culture: one where networks override principles, loyalty trumps capability, and influence is recycled among the well-positioned.

Elitism emerges as a justification. It cloaks itself in meritocratic language—education, experience, vision—but its function is to protect the few from the demands of the many. It turns leadership into pedigree and governance into inheritance. Elites often present themselves as “essential” to stability, progress, or statenhood. They claim to be the necessary brains behind the body politic. But this is a strategic narrative, not a truth. These identities of political necessity are constructed, maintained, and reinforced through institutions, media, and historical revisions.

A post-essentialist view sees through this: there is no natural class of leaders. No one is born more legitimate to rule than others. Governance is not a fixed trait. it is a skill, a responsibility, and most importantly, a relationship of trust. When leadership becomes a self-affirming identity rather than a collective trust-based process, society shifts from representation to manipulation.

Cronyism is the practical expression of elitism’s ideology. It is where strategy overtakes integrity. In systems where trust is low and institutions are weak, loyalty becomes currency. Cronyism is not always emotional favoritism. It is often a calculated method of risk management in uncertain power games. But this risk-averse behavior strangles moral imagination. The circle of influence tightens. Innovation is stifled. Participation is narrowed.

And the people? They are asked to believe that the system is too complex for them, that they must wait their turn, that their dissent is naïve. Cronyism and elitism together form a political machine where access is gatekept, dissent is punished, and public service is rebranded as elite privilege.

But strategic essentialism teaches us that identity—be it of leadership, class, or “expertise”—can be wielded for resistance as well. Marginalized communities, under-represented groups, or sidelined political actors can temporarily claim collective identities (like ethnic, regional, or class-based leadership) not because they believe in fixed essences, but because these identities offer footholds in asymmetric terrains of power. This is not surrender to essentialism, but a strategic navigation of its dominance.

Yet the trap lies in forgetting the strategy. Many who rise by mobilizing collective identity fall prey to the same elitist games once they ascend. They imitate the power structures they once opposed, now justified as “our turn.” The oppressed become the new gatekeepers. The cycles of exclusion replicate under new names.

The deeper issue, then, is not just who holds power, but how we understand it. A society that confuses control with legitimacy will keep reproducing elitism and cronyism, even with new faces. What we need is not just redistribution of power, but a redefinition of it: power as facilitation, not dominance; leadership as responsibility, not entitlement.

To confront elitism and cronyism, we must decentralize not only institutions but also imaginations. We must redesign political cultures where access is not a privilege, but a shared right. This means rethinking education, public participation, and political narrative-building. It means embedding transparency, rotational leadership, and accountability into the DNA of our institutions.

Above all, it means rooting political legitimacy not in prestige, but in relational trust. In political friendship, not proximity to the throne. A society grounded in mutual recognition and layered deliberation cannot be captured so easily by cliques and circles.

The quest for power does not need to be abandoned—but it must be reframed. Not as a race for dominance, but as a shared project of governance. Not as control over others, but as co-creation of the terms of life together. We must be skeptical against entrenched power. Let us not imagine to get perfect permanent solutions. We need to think of perpetual responsibilities.

Elitism and cronyism may seem inevitable, especially in societies with deep inequalities. But they are not eternal. They are human constructions. What is constructed can be dismantled. The challenge is not simply political. It is moral, cultural, and epistemic. It is about what kind of society we believe is possible—and what kind of people we must become to build it.

There is a quiet fiction that many modern societies live by: that the nation state is the supreme guardian of order, the necessary container of human life, the final arbiter of justice. Law, under this logic, becomes sacred; and power, when institutionalized, becomes natural. But this fiction unravels when examined through a more grounded lens. It is revealed that what actually sustains human beings is not the machinery of the state, but the meaning-making depth of society.

Let's talk about what we mean by the word "culture" first.

Anthropological philosophy, exemplified by Clifford Geertz, paints culture as a dense web of shared meanings and symbols. Understanding a culture, therefore, demands a deep dive into the intricate interpretations that its members weave into their practices and beliefs. For Marxists, culture is a superstructural element, ultimately determined by the underlying economic base. It serves to perpetuate the dominant ideology and maintain existing social hierarchies. Critical theorists, particularly those of the Frankfurt School, focus on the manipulative potential of mass culture in capitalist societies, arguing that it homogenizes thought and suppresses genuine human experience.

Poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard offer a more fragmented and fluid understanding. Power operates through cultural discourses, and meaning is not singular but multiple, varying across perspectives and contexts. Pragmatism, with thinkers like John Dewey, takes a more functional approach.

For Williams, it is the word “culture” that brings together and helps him understand the transitions in the other key words. Culture, in other words, is the filter or lens through which art, industry, class and democracy must be understood.

Here in this piece, I refer culture as the following. Culture is a dynamic and evolving system of socially constructed meanings, practices, and symbols shared diversely by a group. It's not a fixed entity but a pragmatic tool for social organization, communication, and problem-solving. While internally diverse and fluid, these shared frameworks have real-world consequences in shaping behavior, fostering collective identity, and enabling strategic action like safety, recognition and collective agency.

To be human is to grow into a world of stories, gestures, rhythms, and customs—not through edicts and decrees, but through the intimate texture of culture. Culture is not merely an accessory to life; it is life’s first teacher. Before we speak the language of politics, we inherit the language of the people around us. Culture is our first skin, our first logic, our first way of seeing the world.

And yet, culture is not fixed. It is not an essential container, nor a cage. It breathes. It adapts. It folds in on itself and opens outward. A critical thinker view of culture practically allows us to embrace its presence without worshipping its permanence. It teaches us that cultural belonging does not mean surrendering to unchangeable traditions, but participating in a dynamic, communal project—one that can evolve, resist, and reimagine.

But while culture is formative, the state too often pretends to be foundational. It demands obedience through force, cloaked in legality. Where culture persuades and nurtures, the state compels and punishes. It may offer security, but too often at the cost of consent. And in its quest for uniformity, the state suppresses the very cultural plurality it claims to protect.

This is where the problem begins. When the state elevates itself as the primary authority over life, it marginalizes the more organic, decentralized, and often more ethical sources of social order: families, languages, neighborhoods, rituals, and the everyday ethics of co-existence. Law becomes abstracted from life. Justice becomes a bureaucracy. And citizens are reduced to subjects of enforcement, rather than participants in community.

Cultural ascendancy over politics in this context is not about replacing the state with ethnic supremacy or romanticized tradition. It is about re-centering the sources of meaning, identity, and moral guidance within communities—allowing people to live through the richness of shared values rather than the imposition of distant commands. It means recognizing that human beings thrive not under centralized control, but within plural, evolving cultural spaces that nourish both autonomy and belonging.

This does not mean we should do away with all forms of coordination or collective protection. But it means we must be deeply skeptical of concentrated power, especially when it becomes impersonal, unresponsive, and coercive. The state should not be a god. It should be a tool—limited, revisable, and accountable to the moral ecology of the people it claims to serve.

A good society does not demand uniformity; it enables dialogue. It does not enforce order through fear, but cultivates harmony through mutual recognition. And this is the promise of cultural ascendancy: a vision where communities are not passive recipients of policy but active curators of their own values, stories, and paths of development.

Of course, this path is not without danger. Culture can be weaponized. It can be used to exclude, to fossilize, to dominate. That is why we need strategic essentialism: the mindful, conscious use of cultural identity not as destiny, but as a provisional tool of resistance and solidarity. And that is why we also need cultural humility—an openness to re-interpret, to critique, to evolve.

In this light, our task is not to abolish all institutions, but to reimagine them. Institutions should not be monoliths towering above culture, but vessels formed within it—flexible, plural, and shaped by those they touch. The state, if it must exist, must learn to become smaller than the cultures it serves.

Let us then refuse the false choice between chaos and command. Let us build a world where law listens before it dictates, where power is always checked by participation, and where the true source of social legitimacy is not the state’s monopoly on violence, but the community’s capacity for meaning, care, and deliberation.

Culture, in this vision, becomes not a static relic but a living, evolving commons. A space where ethics are nurtured, where identity is shaped, and where freedom is understood not as atomized independence but as the shared right to co-create the terms of our life together.
This is not utopia. It is a politics of presence—where power is always in question, and culture is always in motion.

Few words in political life are as overused, romanticized, and misunderstood as the word "nation." We invoke it in songs, wave it on flags, and spill blood in its name. We whisper it when mourning a homeland lost, and scream it when fighting for independence. The nation is everywhere. It sits in the speeches of presidents and the graffiti of revolutionaries. And yet, for something so central, it is deeply, tragically misunderstood.

We often speak of nations as though they are mountains—ancient, immovable, inevitable. But the truth is more subtle. Nations are not geological formations. They are constructed realities, shaped not by nature but by humans—through stories, struggles, fears, and hopes. They are more like gardens than mountains: planted, cultivated, pruned, sometimes overgrown or burned down, always needing care and attention.

There is no one road a nation must take to become itself. The nation is not a singular truth waiting to be discovered; it is a collective choice waiting to be made.

One of the greatest intellectual shortcuts of modern times has been the quiet merging of two distinct things: the nation and the state. Today, we say "nation-state" so casually that we forget to ask whether the terms even belong together. They do not—at least not automatically.

A state is a bureaucratic structure, a political machine of borders, laws, armies, and passports. It collects taxes and polices streets. A nation, by contrast, is a deeply emotional construct. It is about belonging, shared memory, trauma, and destiny. It is about who we believe we are, and who we want to become—together.

The United States, for example, is a state made up of many nations—Black, Indigenous, settler, diasporic, religious, linguistic, ideological. The official narrative claims they form a single nation, "one nation under God," but the lived experience tells a more fractured, contested story. There are communities within the U.S. that feel they were never invited into the national story, or worse, were written into it only as footnotes or villains.

This confusion—mistaking the machinery of the state for the soul of a nation—has consequences. It allows the powerful to claim that their rule is not just legal but emotionally sacred. It makes dissent feel like betrayal. It makes alternatives unthinkable.

Constructing a Nation: Not Nature, but NegotiationIf we peel away the myth, we begin to see the nation for what it truly is: a construction. But let us be careful. To say a nation is constructed is not to say it is fake or meaningless. Money, family, and art are also human constructions. Yet they shape our lives profoundly. The nation, similarly, is real because people act as if it is.

I do not believe that nations emerge from some eternal essence—be it race, blood, or even language. Instead, nations form when people decide, together or under pressure, to tell a shared political story. They arise through the repetition of memory and the ritualization of difference. A nation is not a fact—it is a commitment, one that must be renewed constantly.

And I recognize that in a world full of isolation, domination, and global rootlessness, the nation can serve as a form of strategic essentialism—a useful fiction to protect the vulnerable, assert dignity, and claim space in a hostile world. Sometimes, communities essentialize themselves—must speak as one—to be heard at all. But this must be done consciously, not as a doctrine, but as a strategy. Essentialism, if we use it, must always come with an internal warning label.

There is no one way to become a nation. The French path, through a common language and strong state institutions, is not the Kurdish path. The American path of pluralism and contradiction is not the Tibetan path of cultural endurance. The Swiss model of federal compromise and linguistic diversity is not the same as the Japanese model of monoethnic imagination.

This is why critical view matters. When we stop asking what a nation is and begin asking what a nation does—who it includes, who it protects, who it empowers—we find more useful answers. A nation that elevates a single group and erases all others may be strong, but it is not just. A nation that honors its diversity and negotiates its internal contradictions may be fragile, but it is more human.

In this view, we must stop worshipping nations and begin crafting them. And we must allow multiple stories, multiple timelines, multiple futures.

Nations do not emerge from nowhere. They are rooted in what I call political heritage. It is related to being a community and political friendship. That heritage includes the songs we sing, the injustices we remember, the myths we challenge, and the futures we imagine. It includes the names of our ancestors and the ruins of our homes. It includes the rebellions, the treaties, the languages suppressed and revived.

Political heritage is not always glorious. Sometimes it is painful, shameful, and contested. But it is the material from which nations are made. Without it, there is no continuity—only slogans.

To be a nation is not to inherit purity. It is often to inherit responsibility—to carry forward a heritage, to argue over it, and to make something better out of it.

If we must rethink the nation, let us ask different questions.
Not: Is this a “real” nation?
But: Is this a nation that makes people more human, or less?
Not: What makes us unique?
But: What makes us just?
Not: Do we have a right to be a nation?
But: How will we exercise that right without erasing others?

The most beautiful nations are not the ones that glorify sameness, but those that build homes for differences. They are not the loudest on battlefields, but the most generous in conversation. They are not fixed in time, but open to change. They are not sacred—because nothing human should be sacred—but they are precious, because they hold the fragile hope that strangers can become neighbors.

So let us stop looking for the one fixed essence of a nation. It doesn’t exist. But let us start building nations worth belonging to—nations built on trust, recognition, and shared political heritage, not myth or blood.

Because in the end, the question is not whether we belong to one single particular nation. The real question is whether our nation still belongs to us.

We often imagine democracy as something to be achieved; a final product, gleaming and perfect, waiting at the end of history. This vision sees a form of governance untouched by error, immune to corruption, and filled only with virtuous participation and rational debate. But this perspective, seductive as it may be, has led us astray. It burdens us with an impossible ideal and blinds us to the deeper truth: democracy is not a destination but a method. It is not an immaculate statue, but a living workshop, and in its truest form, it is a network of political laboratories, messy, evolving, and adaptive.

To imagine democracy as a laboratory is to adopt a humbler, more grounded perspective. A scientist does not begin an experiment expecting flawlessness; they begin with questions. They test, observe, recalibrate, and often fail. And yet, through this very process, through its openness to uncertainty and trial, science advances. Why shouldn’t politics work the same way?

In many ways, the desire for a perfect democracy is a legacy of essentialist thinking: the belief that there is one true form, one universal standard, one final blueprint. We romanticize certain models, export them across vastly different cultures, and criticize deviations as if they were diseases. But what if these deviations are, in fact, adaptations? What if the path forward for democracy is not standardization, but differentiation?

Human societies are not identical. Their histories, traumas, hopes, and capacities differ, and so must their political arrangements. In this view, democracy ceases to be a monolith and becomes an ecosystem: fragile, interdependent, and responsive. Its strength lies not in uniformity, but in its capacity to evolve locally and resonate globally.

Consider federal systems. These structures, when designed with care and integrity, allow regions, states, or territories to experiment. One area may test a participatory budgeting model; another may prioritize indigenous self-governance. If a model succeeds, others can learn. If it fails, the damage is contained. This is not political fragmentation; it is a process of strategic diversification, a way to safeguard both unity and adaptability.

This is especially vital in countries emerging from conflict or grappling with deep diversity. The temptation to impose a centralized order, usually in the name of national identity or efficiency, is strong. But such approaches often silence local needs, erase cultural plurality, and generate resistance. A more hopeful path lies in embracing subsidiarity: letting decisions be made as close to the people as possible, while holding shared principles in common. This leads not to one democracy, but many democracies, held in delicate balance.

And this is where the metaphor of the political laboratory becomes most powerful. It reminds us that democracy is not holy; it is not above revision. It is a practice, a deeply human one, that requires intellectual humility and institutional curiosity. It thrives when we ask: “What is working, and why?” “What is failing, and for whom?” It matures when we shift from protecting appearances to investigating realities.

This approach also resists the authoritarian drift of trying to engineer political perfection. While autocracy promises order and coherence by crushing contradiction, democracy, by contrast, lives with contradiction. It tolerates mess, moves incrementally, and fails publicly. And that is its moral strength, not its weakness.

Of course, not every local experiment is noble, and not every deviation is just. There must be ethical boundaries, lines that protect dignity, rights, and fundamental freedoms. But within those lines, democracy must be allowed to breathe. It must be given the space to make mistakes, to apologize, to begin again. Just as a person matures not by always being right but by learning from being wrong, so too must democratic systems be allowed to grow in this way.

In Myanmar, for instance, the vision of federal democracy often falls prey to two extremes: romanticizing an untested ideal or fearing any decentralization as chaos. But what if federalism is precisely what democracy needs to survive and evolve in such contexts? Not as a magic cure, but as a framework for experimentation, where ethnic regions, border territories, and liberated zones act as laboratories of governance. Here, communities can test what justice, inclusion, and participation mean on their own terms, while remaining connected to a wider political whole.

These laboratories are not utopias. They are flawed, improvised, and constrained, but they are also real. And in a world too often governed by abstract ideologies and distant technocrats, they offer something rare: grounded, participatory learning. They allow people to own their politics, not just rhetorically but practically.

To embrace the laboratory model of democracy is to shift from being disciples of an unreachable ideal to being stewards of a living process. It means valuing feedback over perfection, process over purity, and learning over domination. It is recognizing that the strength of a democratic society lies not in how closely it imitates a model, but in how creatively and responsibly it adapts to its context.

Ultimately, this is a philosophy of care. It calls on us to care for our institutions not as rigid temples but as evolving organisms. It invites our participation not just as voters, but as co-creators. It asks us to see our homes, communities, and regions not as passive recipients of national decisions, but as vibrant sites of democratic inquiry.

Democracy, then, is not a script to be followed. It is an art to be practiced, and like all arts, it flourishes not in the shadow of perfection, but in the light of possibility.

Powerful people often tell powerful stories. Politicians, especially in fragile or wounded nations, often rise not on humility, but on grandiosity. They speak as if they are saviors. They behave as if they are destiny. And most dangerously, they claim to be the very embodiment of the nation itself.

We must pause and ask: Why does this performance work? And what lies beneath it?

From our point of view, we cannot objectively see the world as made up of fixed essences: no one is born a savior, no nation is born superior. Instead, power, identity, and meaning are constructed, often through history, trauma, struggle, and narrative. Yet, we are not idealists who believe we can wish these stories away. These constructs have real effects—they shape laws, institutions, armies, and lives.

So when a politician stands on a podium and speaks with divine certainty, we must ask: what is being constructed? And at what cost?

Grandiosity is not simply "ego". It is a technology of power. It works by inflating the self, exaggerating certainty, and projecting invincibility. The politician ceases to be human and becomes a symbol—a father/mother of the nation, a chosen one, a strongman who knows best. This projection comforts a society in fear. People, uncertain about their future, often welcome those who sound most sure, even when that certainty is built on lies.

In conflict countries like Myanmar, where identity wounds run deep and where collective trauma remains unresolved, grandiosity offers a shortcut. It replaces hard truths with simple slogans. It masks complexity with confidence. It silences dissent with the aura of righteousness.
But what does it cost?

It costs empathy. It cost friendship. It costs listening. It costs humility. And it often costs justice. These are all sacrificed for "righteousness".

In grandiose politics, there is usually a second layer called "supremacy". Not just of the self, but of a group, a culture, or a nation. The politician begins to say, “Our people are unique. Our way of doing things are special.” And then, “Others are less.” And eventually, “They must be corrected, controlled, or removed.”

Supremacy turns belonging into a weapon. It builds a staircase where some are allowed to rise and others are locked below.

We know these supremacist categories are constructed—they were made by someone, for something. The idea of a “pure nation” or “one bloodline” is not a truth, but a tool. It’s often built during imperial reign of kings or in colonial rule, continued in post-colonial nationalism, and passed down through rituals, textbooks, and flags. One of the example being "Three Empires of Burma" was spread by nationalists school teachers who thought some people were getting use to the British rule. It was strategic move against the British but it entrenched later and weaponized against internal nations.

Though these ideas are made, they are dangerous precisely because people live as if they are real. They kill for them. They exclude with them. They die defending them.

At the center of grandiosity and supremacy lies a deep insecurity. The insecure nation does not love itself with depth. It only loves its image. It does not accept its flaws. It cannot admit its failures. So it compensates—by building myths of greatness, by rewriting history, by demanding worship instead of loyalty.

This is national narcissism.

It is not the love of "a people". it is the love of a fantasy about the people. And the more fragile that fantasy becomes, the more aggressive the leaders becomes in protecting it.

From our philosophical stance, we rather treat this narcissism not as madness, but as a political formation. It is produced through years of fear, humiliation, and lost dignity. Especially in formerly colonized countries, where elites inherited broken states, national narcissism often becomes a way of coping with the weight of history.

But we must ask: Is this coping strategy helping us build a better future, or is it just a grand lie to protect wounded pride?

Realism, for us, does not mean surrender. It means clarity. And clarity begins with humility.

We must teach ourselves and our societies that strength does not come from pretending to be superior. It comes from the courage to listen, the honesty to admit mistakes, and the willingness to negotiate with those who are different. It comes from resisting the seduction of supremacy—and choosing instead the harder path of solidarity.

Politicians must be seen not as saints or saviors, but as stewards. They are not to be worshipped. They are to be held accountable. Grandiosity must be replaced by grounded responsibility. Supremacy must give way to equality. And national narcissism must be challenged by a politics of honest care.

Our philosophy does not reject identity. We understand it as a strategy—for survival, for meaning, for community. Identity is just inevitable. But we insist that identity must never be used as a weapon to dominate others or elevate one above all.

A mature politics is not about building the tallest statue of a leader or the loudest anthem for a nation. It is about building a shared home where many truths can live side by side, where wounds can be seen and not hidden, and where people are valued. They are valued not for fitting the myth, but for being political friends.

So let us put down the mirror. Let us stop admiring illusions. And let us begin the difficult, realistic, and amazing work of co-constructing a future that includes us all.

We live in a noisy world, don’t we? Our days are filled with personal dreams, endless to-do lists, and the constant buzz of screens promising connection but often leaving us feeling alone. Amid this rush, the idea of the "Common Good" might sound old-fashioned, like a faded postcard from a simpler time. We hear it in speeches or read it in hopeful articles, and part of us wonders: Is this just a nice phrase, empty of meaning? Yet, when we pause and look at our shared struggles—inequality, division, a warming planet, trust that frays like old fabric—we feel a quiet longing. We yearn for a way to live together, not just as strangers sharing space, but as neighbors building a good life side by side.
The Common Good is not a new idea, nor is it a vague dream. It’s a practical, living hope—a way to balance our individual desires with the truth that we need each other. (We also discussed this here.)

For centuries, people have asked: How do we live well together? In ancient Greece, thinkers like Aristotle didn’t focus on individual rights as we do now. Instead, they imagined cities thriving through what Aristotle called "Political Friendship"—not warm fuzzies, but a practical trust among citizens. It was the idea that even people who disagree can cooperate for the sake of their shared home. Later, Roman and Christian thinkers like Cicero and Aquinas wove this into visions of peace and justice, tying the Common Good to fairness and the dignity of all.

The Enlightenment brought a shift. Philosophers like Locke and Bentham saw society as a collection of individuals chasing their own goals. The Common Good, they thought, would emerge naturally from everyone’s self-interest. This idea sparked progress but also planted seeds of disconnection, leaving us with a world where personal gain often overshadows shared purpose.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Catholic Church revived the Common Good as a counterpoint to unchecked individualism. Popes like Leo XIII spoke of workers’ rights and social justice, while later thinkers like John Rawls offered modern tools—ideas like fairness and cooperation across differences—to build just societies. The Common Good, they all agreed, is not a fixed answer but a living project. It asks us to negotiate, to balance our freedom with our responsibility to each other.
These ideas are not relics. They are a map for navigating our messy, interconnected world—a reminder that our happiness depends on the happiness of others.

Now, imagine a place where this map has been torn apart, where the Common Good is not just neglected but actively crushed. This is Myanmar today, a failed Nation-State project whose story reveals what happens when trust, fairness, and cooperation are replaced by control and division.

For decades, Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, has held a tight grip on power, starting with a coup in 1962. Instead of building a place for all its peoples, internal nations and ethnic groups, the military chased a narrow vision of control. However, here is nuance. Even before the military came to have full blown power, the Burmese politicians tried to centralize power and created problems among its people. Myanmar has never been an accountable normative state since then. The military favored its own survival and a Bamar-centric idea of unity, sidelining minorities and their dreams of equality. This wasn’t Political Friendship; it was domination. The result was not a Common Good but a fractured society, marked by poverty, distrust, and endless civil wars.

The military’s rule created a system where resources flowed to the elite and their allies, leaving millions behind. Ethnic groups, promised a federal union at independence, faced marginalization or violence instead. The economy served the state, not the people, deepening inequality. Trust eroded, not just between citizens and the state, but among communities pitted against each other by a system that thrived on division.

A brief hope flickered in 2011, when Myanmar began a fragile liberalization. For a moment, it seemed the country might pursue a broader Common Good—fairer elections, open dialogue, a chance to heal old wounds. But the military never fully let go, and deep grievances, like the persecution of the Kachin, Karen, Shan, Rohingya, and others, remained unresolved. The dream of inclusivity and cooperation stayed out of reach. The civilian leaders (mainly statists) tried to reached negotiation with the military but in the process the ethnic institutions were largely marginalized.

Then came the 2021 coup, a brutal turning point. The military seized power again, shattering any pretense of working for the common good. Since then, Myanmar has plunged into a crisis that feels like a betrayal of everything the Common Good stands for.

• No Benefit for All: The military’s focus is control, not care. It has killed over thousands and thousands civilians, bombed villages, and destroyed schools and hospitals. Nearly half the population now lives in intense poverty, a stark reversal of earlier progress.
• No Fairness: Power and wealth are hoarded by the military and its cronies. Since the last coup, estimated over 20,000 political prisoners languish in jails, punished for speaking out. Resources are weaponized, not shared.
• No Inclusivity: The military silences dissent with bullets and arrests. Ethnic minorities, from the Karen to the Chin, face renewed violence, while the Rohingya remain stateless, their suffering is largely ignored and even weaponized. Even Bamar civilians protesting the coup are now targets. No one is invited to the table.
• No Sustainability: The economy is collapsing, with millions food insecure. Conflict scars the land, from deforested hills to polluted rivers. The future is being stolen from generations not even yet born.
• No Cooperation: Trust is impossible when fear rules. The military’s terror—torture, airstrikes, mass arrests—destroys any chance of Political Friendship. Even in the recent devastating earthquake, military was continuing bombing civilians. Communities, under pressure, struggle to unite, though many resist bravely, but still far away from success. The international community is not helping effectively.

The numbers tell a grim story. 2.5 to 3 million people displaced, millions hungry, countless lives lost or caged. But beyond the statistics is a deeper loss. It is the loss of hope that Myanmar could be a place where all its people matter. The military is even frankly bombing schools, hospitals, markets and places of worship. The military’s actions are not just a failure to pursue the Common Good; they are an attack on its very possibility. Every bomb dropped, every voice silenced, is a choice to prioritize power over people, division over trust.

Remember Myanmar is not a normative state that is accountable. The military has never listened to anyone and never empathized minorities in good faith. The central problem lies in its narrative of guardian ruler of the Nation State - the institutional narcissism and grandiosity.

What makes Myanmar’s tragedy so severe is not just this active destruction but the long, stubborn refusal to commit to the Common Good in the first place. For decades, the military could have chosen dialogue, federalism, or justice. It could have built schools instead of barracks, listened to ethnic voices instead of suppressing them. Even after 2011, it (and statist politicians) could have embraced democracy’s fragile promise. Instead, it chose control, sowing seeds of distrust that now bear bitter fruit. This lack of commitment—rooted in a refusal to see all Myanmar’s people as equally worthy—has left a nation not just divided, but broken.

Yet, even in this darkness, there are communities of resistance. Across Myanmar, ordinary people, like students, farmers, monks, ethnic fighters, defy the military, forming local councils, sharing food, protecting each other. These acts, small as they seem, echo the Common Good’s spirit: a belief that no one should be left behind. They remind us that the Common Good is not dead in Myanmar, only buried alive, waiting for a time when trust can grow again.

The Common Good is not a grand solution or a perfect utopia. It’s a humble invitation—to remember that our lives are woven together, that our joys and sorrows are shared. In a world that celebrates individual triumphs, it asks us to pause and consider what we owe each other. Myanmar’s pain shows us the cost of forgetting this: a society torn apart, a future dimmed. But the Common Good also offers hope. It reminds us that we can choose differently—to build trust, to share fairly, to listen to every voice. It’s a project we undertake together, not with certainty, but with care. Perhaps, we can build a future with a commitment to live not just for ourselves, but for each other.

We often think of hierarchy as either something we must accept or something we must fight. But the truth is less dramatic. Hierarchies are not carved into the nature of things. They don’t fall from the sky or rise up from the earth. They are made by people, for reasons that often seem sensible at the time: to bring order, to divide work, to avoid chaos. Of course, they may sometimes be created by of certain people for certain tasks resulting inclusions and exclusions.

To think clearly in a world like ours is to grow comfortable with the idea that many things we treat as permanent are, in fact, temporary. Hierarchies included. They are not natural laws but human decisions, built on customs, symbols, habits, and shared expectations. Some peoples need to construct them for their struggles. And if we built them, we can question them too—not always to destroy, but to understand, to improve, and sometimes to let go. They may be "tools", but not "truths".

Being skeptical of hierarchy doesn’t mean we must rebel against every system. It means we develop a calm and honest curiosity. We ask: What is this structure doing? Who is it helping? Who is being left out?

Sometimes, hierarchies help. They offer clarity and organization in complex situations. But they can also become rigid. Titles can replace understanding. Traditions can be mistaken for truth. And when that happens, a gentle kind of questioning becomes necessary. We might ask: What story is this hierarchy telling us? Who gets to speak and be heard? Who is invisible in this arrangement?

A thoughtful skeptic doesn’t blindly say all hierarchies are good or bad. Nor do they rush to replace one system with another, equally fixed. Instead, they stay close to the messiness of human life. They understand that power is always shifting, always partial, and always needs to be examined with care. This kind of questioning is not a political slogan or a moral rulebook. It is a habit of attention. A way of noticing when authority starts to feel untouchable, when confidence turns into arrogance, or when leadership forgets to serve.

In this way, skepticism is not chaos. It is a form of care. A way of protecting the complexity of human experience from being flattened into one single version of the truth. It reminds us that good leadership listens. That rules are only as good as the dignity they preserve. Still, we do not need to despair. Power doesn’t have to mean control when properly used. Structures don’t have to be prisons all the times. With reflection and effort, we can shape more open and honest systems—ones that are clear rather than confusing, flexible rather than frozen.

To question hierarchies is to demand accountable flexibility. To question hierarchies is to improve structures that serve evolving needs in designing systems where power is earned through ongoing consent, not inherited as natural law. To question a hierarchy is to show that we care. It is to want something better for everyone, not just those at the top. And it creates space for what might be the most generous kind of relationship: political friendship. Political friendship is built on mutual respect, shared purpose, and room for disagreement. We live in society for our survival, safety and growth. Thus, we must care.

The healthiest societies are not those without leadership, but those where leadership is transparent, accountable, and responsive to real human needs. In these places, power isn’t inherited—it’s earned, again and again, through trust, attentiveness, and fairness. When the old ways stop working and new ones are still forming, it’s tempting to reach for certainty with a quick fix. But perhaps the better path is to listen a little more and ask the quieter but braver questions.

Question everything. Critique hierarchy with care. Build bridges.

Negotiation and mediation are not just tools for diplomats or conflict resolution experts. At their core, they are the practices through which people—often with differing needs, fears, and aspirations—attempt to live together without domination. They are the language of political life in its most honest form: not the imposition of one will over another, but the patient effort to craft a future from disagreement.

To negotiate is to recognize that no single person or group holds the full truth. It is to acknowledge that others have claims, that those claims may not vanish through force or denial, and that something better might emerge through dialogue. Mediation builds on this. It introduces a third space, a process or a person that helps facilitate understanding—not by erasing differences, but by holding space for them in a way that still moves toward resolution.

But these practices only work under one essential condition: a relative equality of political bargaining power. Without this, negotiation becomes theatre. Mediation becomes manipulation. The weaker party is pressured to accept terms not because they are just or wise, but because they have no choice. This is not peace—it is submission repackaged.

Bargaining power does not only come from money or military force. It includes voice, visibility, recognition, and the ability to walk away. In societies where some groups are routinely denied these things—due to history, structure, or prejudice—talks may occur, but they are not truly negotiations. They are performances in which the outcome was already decided by unequal starting points.
For a society to be just, this must be addressed.

A good society is not built on the illusion of harmony, but on the ability to confront real tensions with fairness. This requires that communities, especially those historically marginalized, are equipped with the power to bargain meaningfully. This includes access to knowledge, platforms to speak, time to organize, and security from retaliation.

Only when power is rebalanced can negotiation fulfill its deeper purpose: not just to end conflict, but to generate a shared future that no one group could have imagined alone.

What makes this process even more fragile is that power rarely confesses itself. It hides behind politeness, behind procedures, behind appeals to neutrality. Mediation, then, must also be skeptical. It must question the silence in the room, the invisible hierarchies that shape who gets to speak and who gets to decide what “reasonable” looks like. It must ask: Who benefits from the current arrangement? Who pays the cost of peace?

To mediate well is not to be above the fray, but to lean into the complexity with care. It is to listen deeply, to amplify the voices that have been muted, and to build outcomes that reflect not the will of the strongest, but the dignity of all.

The idea of the common good emerges from this kind of work—not as a blueprint from above, but as a rough, negotiated space from below. It is not perfect or final. It is a process. A promise that justice is never complete, but always in motion—reshaped by each new act of dialogue and each new generation’s participation.

In societies marked by deep division or recent wounds, this task becomes even more vital. There, negotiation and mediation are not only about compromise. They are about rehumanizing those who have been made enemies, rebalancing systems that have been made unfair, and reconstructing trust where it has been betrayed.

Equality in bargaining power is not a luxury—it is the ground on which hope is built. Without it, even the best-designed agreements will fall apart. With it, even the most painful histories can begin to heal.

Let us then treat negotiation not as a tactic, but as a philosophy of shared life. Let us approach mediation not as neutrality, but as responsibility. And let us remember that in the long journey toward a good society, the question is not who wins—but whether we have created a way of living together that no longer requires winners and losers at all.

The heart of a just society is not found in grand speeches or majestic flags. It is built, piece by piece, in the quiet architecture of its institutions—those everyday structures that shape who gets to speak, who is heard, and how decisions are made. If we want a politics rooted in fairness, dignity, and the common good, then we must turn our attention not just to outcomes, but to the design of the places where negotiation and deliberation happen.

For negotiation to be fair, and deliberation to be meaningful, the space in which they occur must resist inherited imbalances. Institutions are not neutral by default; they are often born from history, shaped by power, and maintained by habits that favor the familiar. This is why deliberate design matters. Without intentionality, the table at which we all supposedly sit is already tilted.

To begin, institutions must ensure inclusion without tokenism. This means that diverse groups, especially those historically marginalized, are not only invited to speak but empowered to shape the agenda, influence the framing, and challenge the premises. Representation is not just about presence—it is about voice, leverage, and the freedom to dissent.

Secondly, time and resources must be equalized. Those with privilege can often afford to negotiate endlessly; the oppressed may be pressured by survival. A fair institution provides translation, accessibility, stipends, and safe spaces. It knows that justice is not just about ideals but about logistics.

Deliberation also demands rules of engagement that guard against domination. No one should be allowed to speak over others, to weaponize expertise, or to drown out discomfort with procedural jargon. Fairness is not just about equal time—it is about relational equality: the sense that your words carry weight and your presence matters.

Moreover, institutions must embrace slow thinking. In a world addicted to speed, deliberation suffers. Genuine dialogue takes time. It requires the space to reflect, to listen deeply, and to change one’s mind without losing face. Rushed consensus is often a disguised coercion. Good institutions build in pauses, revisits, and multiple rounds—because wisdom rarely arrives on a single deadline.

Importantly, institutions must be transparent and accountable. Decisions should be traceable. Power must be visible. If something is decided, people must be able to see how, by whom, and with what justification. Without this, even the fairest processes become opaque rituals that lose the trust of the public.

A just institution also values conflict not as failure but as signal. When tensions arise, the task is not to suppress but to inquire: what truth is trying to surface here? The best-designed institutions are those that know disagreement is a teacher. They turn arguments into insight, and friction into fuel for collective thinking.

Crucially, institutions that support fair negotiation must themselves be open to revision. No structure is sacred. Feedback loops, sunset clauses, rotating leadership, and experimental spaces must be built in. This creates a living institution, one that evolves with the people it serves.

And finally, behind all this is a cultural foundation: a shared ethic of mutual regard. Institutions alone cannot guarantee justice. But they can nurture the habits that make it possible. By setting standards for respect, curiosity, humility, and collective responsibility, they cultivate not just agreement—but understanding.

We do not need perfect institutions. We need responsive ones. Institutions that understand their own limitations. That learn. That adapt. That do not pretend to be the answer, but commit to holding the question well.

When negotiation and deliberation are rooted in such structures, society begins to transform. People no longer see politics as war, but as dialogue. They no longer fear difference, but meet it with readiness. And slowly, trust becomes not just a memory or a dream—but a practice, made real through design.

This is not idealism. It is architecture. And like all good architecture, it begins not with concrete or stone, but with a clear intention: to make space for each other.