People Don’t See You As You Are, They See You As They Are
Jul 08, 2025
There exists a peculiar blindness that affects every human being, yet few recognize its presence in their daily interactions. When we encounter another person, we believe we are seeing them clearly, objectively, as they truly are. We form opinions, make judgments, and react based on what we perceive to be their character, their intentions, their very essence. But this perception is far from the clear mirror we imagine it to be.
What we actually see when we look at another person is a complex projection of our own inner landscape. Our past experiences, accumulated memories, fears and desires, cultural conditioning, and psychological makeup all act as filters through which we interpret the other person’s words, actions, and presence. The mind, shaped by countless experiences, cannot help but translate every encounter through its own particular lens.
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Consider how differently two people might perceive the same individual. One sees confidence where another sees arrogance. One perceives kindness where another detects manipulation. These varying perceptions arise not because the person being observed is fundamentally different in each encounter, but because each observer brings their own psychological framework to the interaction. We are essentially looking at a reflection of our own inner world, mistaking it for objective reality.
The images we create of others are constructed from our own mental material. When someone speaks with authority, we might see them as domineering if we have struggled with authoritarian figures, or we might admire their leadership if we value strength. Our response reveals more about our own conditioning than about the person before us. These mental constructions become so real that we begin to relate to the image rather than the living person, creating elaborate expectations based on our interpretations.
This phenomenon extends into our most intimate relationships, where we build complex pictures of who we think our partners, friends, and family members are. When they act outside these mental parameters, we feel confused or betrayed. The tragedy is that genuine encounter becomes impossible when we meet someone through the screen of our preconceptions. We end up having a relationship with our own thoughts about them rather than with their actual being.
Fear plays a significant role in shaping perception. Our psychological defenses influence every interaction – if we fear rejection, we might see hostility where none exists; if we fear intimacy, we might perceive others as invasive when they simply seek connection. These fears create the very experiences we seek to avoid, as neutral actions get interpreted through the lens of our anxieties. The mind, caught in fear, lives in confusion and conflict, breeding violence and distortion in its perception of others.
The desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain also color what we see. Someone who might help us achieve our goals appears attractive and trustworthy, while someone who threatens our security seems suspicious. Our personal agenda shapes perception, making objectivity nearly impossible. We see people in ways that either support our desires or confirm our fears, caught in the endless pursuit of satisfaction that dictates the quality of our experiences.
Cultural background, family upbringing, and social environment contribute to our particular way of interpreting human behavior. From childhood, we are conditioned by nationality, caste, class, tradition, religion, language, education, and countless other influences. These shape our responses to every human encounter, yet we rarely question whether our perspective might be limited, assuming our viewpoint represents universal truth rather than personal conditioning.
Breaking free from this pattern requires a fundamental understanding of how awareness itself functions. The very act of watching this process – observing how we create images of others, begins to dissolve the mechanism. When we give complete attention to how we project our own conditioning onto others, something extraordinary happens: the observer and the observed merge, and the space between them disappears.
This is not about controlling our thoughts or trying to see differently through willpower. Any effort to change perception through force creates conflict and actually strengthens the very pattern we wish to escape. Instead, it requires a quality of attention that neither condemns nor justifies our projections, but simply watches their movement with total awareness.
The breakthrough comes when we realize that the observer who judges others is itself made up of memories, experiences, and accumulated knowledge – all products of the past. This observer, who seems so permanent and real, is actually just another image, another construction of thought. When this truth becomes clear, the authority of our judgments begins to crumble.
In relationships, this understanding transforms everything. Instead of two people relating through their respective images of each other, there can be direct contact. This doesn’t mean we lose discernment or become naïve about human behavior. Rather, we develop a different quality of perception that can recognize practical realities while remaining open to the living truth of each moment.
The space between people – that psychological distance created by our image-making dissolves when there is complete attention. In such moments, comparison ceases because there is no separate self doing the comparing. The mind becomes extraordinarily quiet, not through suppression but through understanding its own movement.
This transformation cannot be practiced as a technique or cultivated through gradual effort. It happens in the instant of seeing how we create separation through our constant interpretation and judgment. When we truly understand that our perception of others is a reflection of our own conditioning, the whole structure of image-making begins to collapse.
Much of human conflict arises from this fundamental misperception. Nations, religions, and cultures see each other through the distorted lens of their own conditioning, creating enemies where there are simply people with different experiences. The resolution of conflict begins with this understanding of how we project our own psychological material onto others.
What emerges from this insight is a quality of love that has nothing to do with emotion or sentiment. It is the natural outcome of seeing clearly, without the interference of our psychological accumulations. When the barriers created by our conditioning dissolve, there is an immediate intimacy with life that transforms every relationship.
This clarity of perception brings with it an extraordinary sensitivity to the present moment. Without the weight of past knowledge dominating our awareness, we can respond to what is actually happening rather than to our interpretations of what is happening. This creates possibilities for communication and understanding that were previously impossible.
In this state of clear seeing, relationships become a constant discovery. Each encounter becomes fresh because we are no longer burdened by our accumulated knowledge about the other person. There is a quality of attention that can meet each moment without the interference of memory, creating space for genuine intimacy and understanding.
The beauty of this understanding is that it frees both ourselves and others from the prison of our projections. When we stop insisting that others conform to our images of them, they have space to be themselves. When we stop defending our own image, we become available for authentic relationship. In this freedom, something entirely new becomes possible in human connection – a quality of love and understanding that transcends the boundaries created by our conditioned minds.
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All this Worrying, just to Die Anyway
Jun 28, 2025
The mind is a restless place. From the moment we wake up, there’s a hum beneath everything — a low, persistent current of unease. We worry about things left undone, words we said, or should have said. We worry about the bills, the career we haven’t figured out yet, the body we don’t feel at home in, the people who may or may not love us the way we need to be loved. We worry about losing what we have, or never getting what we long for. It’s endless like a war we fight within ourselves, every single day.
And it’s not entirely our fault. We live in a world that profits off our anxiety. A world that equates productivity with worth, busyness with purpose, and perfection with love. So we try to hold it all together—to control, to fix, to figure it all out before something breaks. We live in our heads, preparing for disasters that may never come, bargaining with a future we can’t predict, haunted by pasts we can’t undo.
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But then, once in a while, life shakes us. It can be anything like a funeral, a life threatening disease, heartbreak etc. that pierces the noise and reminds us of a truth we try to keep at the edge of awareness: WE ARE GOING TO DIE one day, maybe sooner than we think.
At first, the thought feels grim, even nihilistic. That all of this — every fear, every effort, every dream, every memory, everything ends in death. It can even feel cruel. But if you stay with the truth of it long enough, something starts to shift into something more real, more honest. There is a strange kind of liberation in knowing that no one of us gets out of this alive. It puts things in perspective like suddenly, the small stuff feels smaller, the noise softens and the pressure to make everything perfect loses its grip.
Death, in its own brutal way, strips the unnecessary. It clarifies. Because once you face the truth of your mortality like not just knowing about it, but actually see it, feel it then you start to question everything. Why am I holding back my laughter? Why am I afraid to say “I love you”? Why am I keeping this grudge, walking on eggshells, dimming myself to fit into spaces I’ve outgrown? Why am I numbing my life with screens and distractions, when there’s a world waiting to be felt?
Worry shrinks us. It keeps us rehearsing life instead of living it. It makes us believe we’ll start enjoying life once everything is “settled,” as if peace is waiting for us in some distant, perfect version of the future. But peace is not found in any future. Peace is presence. It lives here — in this breath, in this body, in this quiet, ordinary moment you’re already in. It lives in the pause, in the noticing, in the way you show up for your own life without trying to control every second of it.
And yes, it’s true—we’re all going to die. That’s the part no one escapes. And that’s not something to fear, rather it’s the very reason to stop holding back. To stop postponing joy, love, softness, connection. Maybe the fact that this ends is what makes it all matter.
We could waste our whole life trying to secure a life we’ll never feel. We could spend decades worrying about all the ways life could go wrong and miss how it’s already going by. But in the end, the point was never to control life, it was to experience it.
Maybe, the greatest tragedy isn’t that we die, but that we forget to live while we’re still alive.
Does Time Exist?
Oct 03, 2025
Time is one of the most peculiar aspects of existence. It seems so obvious, so fundamental to everything we experience, yet when we examine it closely, it reveals itself to be far more mysterious than we imagine.
Time in Physics: The Fourth Dimension
From the perspective of physics, time is undeniably real. It’s not just a human perception, it’s woven into the very structure of the universe. Einstein’s theory of relativity fundamentally changed how we understand time. Before Einstein, people thought of time as absolute, like a cosmic clock ticking uniformly throughout the universe. But relativity showed us something extraordinary: time is relative. It bends, stretches, and dilates depending on velocity and gravitational fields.
A clock on a GPS satellite orbiting Earth ticks at a different rate than a clock on the ground. An astronaut traveling at high speeds ages more slowly than someone stationary on Earth. Time near a black hole moves so slowly that what seems like minutes to someone close to the event horizon could be years for someone far away. These aren’t just theoretical ideas, they’re measurable, proven facts that our technology relies on every day.
In physics, time is the fourth dimension, inseparable from the three dimensions of space. Together, they form spacetime, the stage upon which all events occur. Time has direction, entropy increases, causes precede effects, and the universe evolves from past to future. This is the scientific reality of time, and it’s as real as matter and energy.
Time in Experience: The Mind’s Construction
But there’s another way to look at time, not through equations and experiments, but through direct observation of our own experience. And here, something remarkable emerges: experientially, time reveals itself as a construct of the mind.
Consider this fundamental question: Where is the past right now? Not as a concept, but as an actual, tangible reality, where is it? You cannot point to it. You cannot touch it. You cannot see it. The past exists nowhere in your direct experience except as memory—thoughts, images, and feelings arising in this present moment. When you remember your childhood, that memory is happening now. The emotions you feel about past events are emotions you’re feeling now.
The Buddha understood this deeply. He taught that suffering arises largely from our mental relationship with time, dwelling in regret over the past or anxiety about the future. He said, “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” This wasn’t just moral advice; it was an observation about the nature of reality. The past and future, he recognized, exist only as thoughts arising now.
But here’s what makes this truly profound: when those moments you now call “the past” were actually occurring, they weren’t happening in the past. They were happening in the present moment. Your first day of school, your first love, every significant moment of your life, they all arrived as “now.” Not as past or future, but as the living present. There has never been a moment in your entire life that came labeled as “past” or “future.” Every single moment arrived as this: the present.
The Future: Tomorrow Never Comes
The same is true for the future. Where is tomorrow? Where is next year? You might say, “Well, it hasn’t happened yet.” But think about what that means experientially. The future exists only as imagination, projection, anticipation—all mental activities happening now, in the present. You’re thinking now about what might happen later. You’re planning now for tomorrow. You’re worrying now about next week.
And here’s the paradox: tomorrow never actually comes. When what you call “tomorrow” arrives, it doesn’t arrive as “tomorrow”, it arrives as another today, another now, another present moment. You will never experience tomorrow. You will only ever experience now.
J. Krishnamurti spent much of his life pointing this out to people. He would ask his audiences: “Is there such a thing as tomorrow psychologically?” He challenged the notion that we actually live in time at all. Krishnamurti observed that chronological time; clock time, the time needed to get from one place to another, to learn a skill, to grow a plant, is obviously real and necessary. But psychological time, he argued, is an illusion created by thought.
We create this illusion by constantly comparing what is with what was or what should be. “I was happier in the past.” “I will be better in the future.” “If only I had done things differently.” “When I achieve this, then I’ll be content.” All of this is the mind creating a sense of time, a narrative of “me” moving through past, present, and future. But Krishnamurti insisted that this psychological time is the root of conflict and suffering because it takes us away from the only reality there is: what is, now.
The Mystics’ Vision: Eternity in the Present
The Sufi mystics understood this intimately. Rumi wrote, “Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.” For Rumi, the divine, reality itself exists only in the present moment. When we’re lost in memories or fantasies, we’re veiled from truth. He also wrote, “The moment you entered this world of form, an escape ladder was put out for you.” That ladder, in Sufi teaching, is presence, the ability to rest in the now, free from the tyranny of mental time.
Eckhart Tolle, a modern spiritual teacher, built his entire teaching around this insight. He wrote, “The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.” Our sense of self, our story of who we are, is constructed from memories, the past. Our hope, our drive, our anxiety, these come from imagining the future. But both are mental constructs. The actual living reality is always and only now.
Time as the Organization of Change
So what is time, experientially? It’s the mind’s way of organizing and making sense of change. We observe change constantly; the sun rises and sets, seasons turn, our bodies age, thoughts come and go. The mind, trying to make sense of this flux, creates a framework: a timeline with a past behind us and a future ahead. This is an incredibly useful fiction. It allows us to learn from experience, plan for survival, coordinate with others, and build civilizations.
Memory is essential, without it, we couldn’t function. Anticipation is essential; without it, we couldn’t prepare or protect ourselves. The concept of time allows us to navigate life. But that doesn’t make it ultimately real in terms of direct experience. It’s a mental overlay on reality, a story we tell about change and causation.
Consider a film reel. It’s made of individual frames, each one a still image. But when played at the right speed, it creates the illusion of continuous movement, of time passing. Our experience might be similar; discrete moments of consciousness, strung together by memory and anticipation, creating the illusion of a continuous “me” moving through time.
Living in Both Truths
This creates a fascinating paradox. Time is real in physics; measurable, relative, fundamental to the structure of the universe. And time is a mental construct in experience, the past and future exist only as present-moment thoughts.
Both are true, but in different contexts. The physicist needs time to understand the cosmos, to make predictions, to build technology. Without the concept of time, science would be impossible. The human being needs time to function in the world; to remember, to plan, to learn, to grow.
But the sage, the mystic, the one who investigates the nature of consciousness itself, discovers something else: that beneath all our concepts and constructions, there is only this eternal present moment. Change happens within it. Thoughts arise within it. The entire universe unfolds within it. But the now itself never becomes past or future, it is the constant, unchanging background against which all change occurs.
The Buddha called it “the deathless.” Krishnamurti called it “the timeless.” Rumi called it “the eternal now.” Regardless of the name, they were pointing to the same discovery: that when you look directly at experience, without the filter of thought, you find yourself always and already in a present moment that has no beginning or end.
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How the Global food economy is killing children: The Twenty-Eighth Newsletter (2026)
By Vijay Prashad (Posted Jul 10, 2026)
Originally published: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research on July 9, 2026 (more by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research) |
Agriculture, Global Economic Crisis, Health, InequalityGlobalNewswireTricontinental Newsletter
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 4 June 2026, the World Health Organisation (WHO) released a devastating assessment of the state of the world’s food systems. According to the new estimates, which draw on data up to 2021, unsafe food causes approximately 866 million illnesses and 1.5 million deaths every year. Nearly one in nine people globally falls ill from contaminated food, with the African and Southeast Asian regions together accounting for nearly three-quarters of all foodborne illnesses and 60% of global deaths. The burden falls most heavily on those who have contributed least to the crisis: children.
Young children face almost three times the risk of illness from unsafe food compared to older children and adults. Despite making up only 9% of the global population, children under the age of five suffer nearly one-third of all cases of foodborne diseases; in 2021, unsafe food killed 143,000 of them. These are not mere statistics. They represent lives cut short by preventable diseases, families pushed into grief, and societies deprived of the future embodied in their youngest members.
K. K. Hebbar (India), Hungry Soul, 1952.
The conventional response to such findings is technical. We are told that food safety is a matter of better inspection, stronger regulation, improved hygiene, and effective monitoring. These measures are important and necessary. Yet they do not explain why hundreds of millions of people continue to consume unsafe food despite decades of accumulated knowledge about how to prevent contamination. To understand the persistence of foodborne disease, we must move beyond technical explanations and examine the structure of the global food system itself.
The dominant food system is organised around the pursuit of profit, not the right to food. Across much of the world, food production has been transformed into a highly concentrated industry dominated by large agribusiness corporations, supermarket chains, food processors, logistics companies, and financial institutions. This system, which primarily seeks to maximise returns on investment, generates contradictions that directly affect food safety in at least three key ways.
First, the pressure to reduce costs encourages shortcuts throughout the supply chain. Workers are frequently employed under precarious conditions (more than 80% of agricultural jobs in Latin America lack formal protection and social security), inspection systems are underfunded, and producers face intense pressure to increase output while reducing expenditure. Food travels ever-greater distances through increasingly complex global supply chains, creating more opportunities for contamination and obscuring the conditions under which it was produced.
Second, capitalist food systems tend to externalise costs. Environmental degradation, water contamination, unsafe working conditions, and public health consequences are often treated as someone else’s problem rather than the responsibility of private firms. The social costs are borne by workers, consumers, and public health systems, while profits remain private.
Third, global inequalities shape patterns of food safety. It is no surprise that the highest burdens of foodborne disease are concentrated in Africa and Southeast Asia since these regions continue to experience the long-term effects of colonial underdevelopment, debt dependency, inadequate public infrastructure, and unequal integration into the global economy. Unsafe food is therefore not merely a health issue: it is a manifestation of uneven development.
Gobardhan Ash (India), Bengal Famine, 1943.
The deaths of tens of thousands of children every year reveal the moral bankruptcy of this arrangement. A society that allows children to die from preventable foodborne diseases has failed in one of its most fundamental obligations. These deaths are especially tragic because the solutions are largely known. The WHO identifies access to clean water, sanitation, food safety practices, healthcare, and effective public regulation as critical tools for reducing mortality. These interventions require public investment and political commitment and cannot be left solely to market forces. Yet institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation continue to promote public-private partnership models that have failed to confront the structural roots of hunger and unsafe food.
The issue is not only contamination by bacteria and viruses. Contemporary food systems expose populations to a wider range of hazards, including toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and industrial pollutants. New WHO estimates increasingly recognise the long-term burden of chronic diseases linked to harmful substances in food supplies. The consequences extend beyond immediate illness to lifelong disabilities, developmental impairments, and reduced quality of life.
Cheong Soo Pieng (Singapore), Satay Sellers, 1958.
Moreover, food safety cannot be separated from the broader crisis of food systems. Around the world, millions suffer from hunger while others face obesity and diet-related diseases. Farmers are driven into debt while food corporations accumulate unprecedented market power. Agricultural production contributes to ecological destruction even as climate change threatens harvests. The same system that generates food insecurity also generates unsafe food. The contradiction is striking. Humanity possesses the scientific knowledge, productive capacity, and technological means to ensure safe food for all. Yet under prevailing economic arrangements, these capacities are subordinated to profitability rather than human need.
The WHO’s findings should be read not only as a warning about contamination but as an indictment of a global food order that continues to expose millions to preventable illness and death. When a child dies because food is unsafe, the cause is never simply a contaminated meal. Behind that meal lies a chain of political and economic decisions about investment, regulation, infrastructure, ownership, and social priorities. Foodborne disease is biological in its immediate manifestation but social in its origins. The challenge before humanity is not merely to make food safer. It is to build food systems organised around care rather than profit, public health rather than private accumulation, and human dignity rather than market efficiency. Only then can the promise of safe food for all become a reality rather than a slogan.
Uche Okeke (Nigeria), Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead), 1961.
Here are five simple reforms of the current system to create a safe and just food system:
- Universal public investment in water, sanitation, and healthcare: Guarantee access to clean water, sanitation infrastructure, and primary healthcare, especially in rural and low-income communities where foodborne disease burdens are highest.
- Strengthen public food safety institutions: Expand food inspection systems, laboratory capacity, disease surveillance networks, and regulatory agencies while protecting them from budget cuts and corporate influence.
- Support territorial and small-scale food systems: Invest in local farmers, cooperatives, public procurement programmes, and shorter supply chains that increase transparency, resilience, and accountability.
- Democratise food system governance: Reduce corporate concentration in agribusiness and food retail, strengthen worker and farmer participation, and ensure public oversight of food production and distribution.
- Recognise safe food as a human right: Establish binding national and international commitments that treat access to safe, nutritious food as a fundamental social right rather than a market commodity.
Taken together, these reforms are rooted in a simple principle: food is a social good, not merely a commodity. They recognise that the right to safe food is inseparable from the right to life.
It is easy to dismiss this approach as naïve. But is it mere idealism to insist that no child should die from preventable foodborne disease?
Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (Mozambique), Última Ceia (Last Supper), 1964.
The World Health Organisation report deepened my bitterness towards the callousness of the capitalist system. I was reminded of ‘Civilisation’, a short poem by the great Mozambican journalist and poet José Craveirinha (1922—2003):
| Antigamente (antes de Jesus Cristo) os homens erguiam estádios e templos e morriam na arena como cães. Agora… também já constroem Cadillacs. | In ancient times (before the time of Jesus) men built temples and stadiums and died in the arena like dogs. Now… they build Cadillacs too. |
Warmly,
Vijay
Conversation Starters #1 with Yanis Varoufakis
How to resist authoritarianism and regain our independence
Kritikos Institute, Deepak Khemchandani, and Susan de Groot Heupner
Jun 21, 2026
Welcome to our Conversation Starters: a new dialogue series with some of the most illuminating voices about the tech, politics, language and cognitive habits that threaten what makes us social and human. We covered all this and more in our first conversation with Yanis Varoufakis—one of the sharpest minds laying bare the perversions and powers behind our current crises.
Image Credit: The Greek Herald
You have explained that without intellectual freedom, true democracy is impossible. People seem to be increasingly conscious of their own enslavement to the psycho-digital forces of technofeudalism. Despite this awareness, the addictive nature of these technologies creates compulsive behaviours that prevent decisions protecting individual and societal wellbeing.
Why does our conditioned individualism override collective wellbeing and why do governments—despite clear evidence—ignore the exploitative business models behind our digital enslavement?
This is the great paradox of our time: we know we are being played, yet we cannot stop playing along. It is not a failure of our individual will; it is a triumph of false consciousness as updated and weaponised in the technofeudal age. Our conditioned individualism is not natural—it is manufactured. The cloud lords have built hyper-weapons of behavioural modification that short-circuit our capacity for collective reasoning. Every swipe, every like, every notification triggers a dopamine loop that feels like personal desire but is in fact algorithmic capture. We mistake addiction for freedom.
Why do governments ignore this? Because they are no longer sovereign. Your Australian parliament, like my Greek one once was, is a debtor’s court. The state’s fiscal capacity depends on the cloud lords’ platforms for tax collection, communication, and even welfare distribution. To regulate Amazon, Google, or Meta would be to risk capital strike or digital exile. So they perform theatre—hearings and fines that amount to parking tickets—while the business model of surveillance capitalism remains sacred.
The exploited are not just us; the state is also a serf.
So the dissonance persists: clarity without action, awareness without agency.
You have explained how tech giants have created a digital society through “hyper-weapons of behavioural modification” that have eroded our intellectual independence, removed our agency, and reduced the majority to “silent idiots”.
How do you suggest we can regain our independence and our faculty of reason in an age of technofeudalism and deteriorating democracy?
Regaining our faculty of reason demands first recognising that we have been reduced to silent idiots—not because we are stupid, but because our voice has been algorithmically silenced.
The first step is dispossession of the digital self. I propose a simple, radical act: treat your data as an extension of your labour. We must join forces to demand payment for every click, every location ping, every scroll. When tech giants refuse, as they will, we must build techno-commons—decentralised, cooperatively owned platforms for social interaction, search, and commerce.
Second, we need a new Luddite consciousness—not smashing machines, but reclaiming the power to switch them off collectively. Civil disobedience in the digital age means going on data strikes: coordinated blackouts from cloud platforms, reverting to peer-to-peer tools. Education must be rebuilt around dialectical reasoning, not memorisation. Teach children to ask: “Who benefits from my attention?” Agency returns when we break the feedback loop of instant gratification. It requires pain—like withdrawal from any addiction—but pain is the birthplace of freedom.
We must become difficult subjects again, refusing the smooth seduction of the algorithm.
Your father was a resistance fighter during Greece’s civil war. What does it mean to have courage and integrity in an age of renewed authoritarianism? How did you find the courage to speak out with integrity?
My father resisted fascism and authoritarianism as a student, ending up in a concentration camp. For him, courage was physical, immediate, mortal. Today’s authoritarianism is soft, smiling, cloud-based—but no less lethal to the soul. Political and intellectual courage now means refusing to succumb to the blackmail on central and private banks, declining to optimise for the algorithm.
It means speaking truth not when it is viral, but when it is inconvenient. Integrity is not shouting louder; it is refusing to let the platform turn your dissent into content.
How did I find courage? I nearly lost it. As finance minister, I faced the Eurogroup’s bullying—not tanks, but checklists put together to follow the path of my humiliating subjugation. In the end I said: “No!”. The courage came from remembering that my father’s generation did not fight fascism so that I could defect to the financiers and the pseudo-technocrats. I spoke out to break the silence that has become the default state of the professional politician.
I say to young people: courage is not bravery; it is habit. Start small. Tell it how you see it over dinner. Disagree with your own side. When you fail—and you will—forgive yourself and try again.
The new authoritarianism crumbles when ordinary people risk ridicule more than prison. Ridicule is cheap; democracy is not.
You have a large global online audience—who do you think is missing from your audience? Do you feel excluded from any necessary segments of society given your stance? Is the working class able to hear you?
My online audience is large, but it is a mirror of technofeudalism’s distortion field. The missing are not just voices; they are entire social strata. Where are the precariat? The warehouse picker, the Uber driver, the call centre worker in Manila? They cannot hear me because they are too exhausted, too surveilled, too algorithmically channelled into outrage loops or cat videos. The working class is fragmented into micro-segments, each fed a different reality.
Do I feel excluded? Yes, from the corridors of governmental quasi-power and the editorial boards of captured media. But that exclusion is my badge of honour. The real tragedy is not my exclusion—it is that the working class cannot afford the attention span to listen.
I am not defeated; I adapt. I speak on podcasts, on radio, in union halls. But the cloud lords decide who sees me. To truly reach the missing audience, we must build off-grid agora—public squares, physical assemblies, worker co-ops with their own media.
Until then, I am another voice in the cloud, and the cloud has a mute button controlled by shareholders.
We have mainstream media that is captured and controlled while our online platforms algorithmically manufacture consent, embedding doubt and burying the truth. Investigative journalists continue to be targeted, threatened and killed.
What is next for true journalism and access to ‘the truth’ ?
True journalism is dying twice: once by the sword (assassinations, imprisonment) and once by the algorithm (manufactured consent, clickbait equivalence).
The next phase is not a rescue of legacy media—that ship has sunk. What comes next is micro-journalism: decentralised, encrypted, reader-owned collectives. Think of Novara Media, Double Down News, the Blocked and Reported podcast, or Drop Site News—tiny, agile, unafraid. But even these struggle because the truth now requires verification without central authority.
We need a new institution: a Citizens’ Truth Commission, composed of randomly selected laypeople, forensic accountants, and whistleblowers, empowered by civil society, not the state. Their reports would be published via blockchain to prevent tampering. Investigative journalists would feed them evidence under digital dead-man’s switches. The model is the ancient Greek graphē paranómōn—a public indictment of unconstitutional acts. The truth will not come from CNN or Fox; it will come from leak networks, anonymous collaboratives, and tech-savvy citizen auditors. Journalism becomes guerrilla warfare against entropy.
The price will be high. But the alternative is a permanent fog of war.
Privacy and freedoms have continuously been eroded in the name of safety and security, and now, in Australia, ‘social cohesion’. For example, laws in Australia have been placing citizens under ever-expanding surveillance, such as the recent anti-hate speech laws. The result is to dismantle the guardrails that protect civil liberties by labelling intellectual critique as dissidence and dissidence itself as crime. Despite public sentiment and public protests, the Australian government has continued to push through these laws.
For Australia, what can the concerned minority do when many are apathetic and governments are influenced by private interests and foreign states?
Australia’s turn to surveillance in the name of ‘social cohesion’ is the classic authoritarian move: rebrand control as care. When the concerned minority faces apathy and state-private collusion, you must abandon the illusion that legislation is the only arena. The state has a monopoly on violence, but not on disobedience.
First, build transparent, encrypted affinity groups—neighbourhood assemblies that meet offline, with no digital trace. Use Signal, but assume compromise.
Second, weaponise the law’s own contradictions. Every surveillance law creates exemptions. Demand those exemptions for journalists, activists, and indigenous communities. File test cases. Crowdfund legal defence for every arrest. The goal is not to win but to increase the cost of enforcement.
Third, and most radically, declare digital sanctuary. Refuse to carry identity-verifying devices in public. Use cash. Create mesh networks. When the state labels critique as crime, you must make crime so widespread that it becomes normal. The apathetic majority will move when the surveillance touches their lives—when a parent is fined for a Facebook post, when a worker is fired for a like.
Your job is to accelerate that moment through nonviolent, relentless, creative friction.
Do not ask for permission. Just do it.
Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, academic, politician and former Greek Minister of Finance. He is the co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement, DiEM25—a pan-European, progressive movement that aims to democratise Europe by overthrowing the oligarchy. His political ambitions are further crystallised in the European Realistic Disobedience Front, MeRA25—a group of electoral parties across Europe with an ecological left agenda. His latest book is Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance, a telling of his own political awakening, told through the lives of five women, which acts as a warning of the relentless forces of authoritarianism and fascism.
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Britain’s responsibility in Palestine
Randa Achmawi, Friday 12 Sep 2025
Britain has a direct responsibility for the creation of today’s situation in Gaza, says UK author William Dalrymple in an interview with Ahram Weekly.
A Palestinian refugee camp after Nakba in 1948
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William Dalrymple is a British historian and bestselling author who specialises in the history of empires and their legacy. He has covered the Middle East and South Asia in his writings, and he has also been vocal on Britain’s historic responsibility in the Middle East, including in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
He is an advocate of the recognition of a state of Palestine “given how our grandparents’ generation treated the Palestinians as expendable,” he said in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly at his home in Scotland.
You have written several books on the British colonial presence in parts of Asia, particularly focusing on India and South-East Asia. How did you become interested in Palestine?
Just by travelling there. When I was 20, I think, I paid my first visit to Palestine. I went on a journey after having received a grant from my university to hitchhike on the route of the Crusaders, as if I were a mediaeval historian studying the Crusades. I ended up travelling through France, Italy, across the Balkans, through Turkey, down to Syria, Jordan, and then crossed the Allenby Bridge for the first time, in 1985, and on to Jerusalem. I immediately fell into the company of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
I became interested in the whole business of Eastern Christians. I went back in 1994 and wrote a book called From the Holy Mountain, which was about the different Middle Eastern Christians, starting in Mount Athos (the Greek Orthodox descendants of the Byzantines), in Istanbul, the Suryani in eastern Turkey, the many different Christian groups in Syria, in Jordan, and in Palestine, Israel, and to the Copts in Egypt. The book came out in 1998 and involved four or five years living in the Middle East and travelling through it. I also spent a lot of time in Egypt, going all the way from Alexandria down to Assiut in Upper Egypt. I became aware of the politics but also of the arts and the different religious strands in the region.
After the Holy Mountain was published, I very consciously moved towards India and away from the Middle East, partly because I found so much of the politics so upsetting. Anyone knows that when you get emotionally involved in the politics, particularly the Palestinian conflict, it is a burden.
I remember once talking to Mahmoud Darwish about this. He told me that “I wish I could just write love poems that were not political. I wish I could write about landscapes and old age. I’m sick of politics, I don’t want to be primarily a political poet.” I very much feel the same way he did. Feeling passionately about the Palestinians takes a toll on one’s life. But at this moment I feel that we have no option.
What kind of impact did your first encounter with Jerusalem have on you?
After travelling there and talking to Palestinians and Israelis and beginning to understand the basics of the situation there, a very important moment for me was being given a book and asked to review it by a Palestinian novelist called Soraya Antonius, who is the daughter of George Antonius, the great author of The Arab Awakening [an early book on Arab nationalism]. Soraya’s book was called Where the Jinn Consult, which was about the Nakba in Palestine. Until then, I was completely ignorant about what happened. The issue had never come across in my education. Hers is a very beautiful book, and I strongly recommend it.
That was the first time I became aware of the scale of horrors of what happened to the Palestinians, of what they had suffered, of what it meant to suddenly become stateless, to lose your house, to lose your bank account, to lose everything that had given you security and roots in the world. To suddenly find yourself stateless and penniless. Reading her book got me into reading and learning more about the subject. So, I’ve built my awareness and understanding partly by reading and partly by travelling, and partly by conversations with people I encountered.
You first travelled to the region in 1985. Could you explain why you didn’t have any information or education about what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948 during the Nakba?
I should say that I attended a Roman Catholic school. And you might have thought that a Catholic education might have informed [me] at some point about the existence of the Palestinian Christians, but it really didn’t. I remember, in fact, geography books that I studied when I was about 10 or 11 years old which was the first time I probably came across textbooks on the state of Israel. They were very much giving the line that there was a desert that was made to “flower and bloom” by the creation of the state of Israel.
I remember the pictures and the words in those books all those years later. It was the first time that I came across the story. We were literally taught that it was a desert and that brilliant desert farmers that came along planted olive groves, etc. I was from the generation that was given not just a lack of information about the Palestinians, but who in many ways were actively misinformed about the history. And I think many of my contemporaries or compatriots just don’t know about this or the real history. What I see is that there is a combination of ignorance, prejudice, and a lack of education.
For the Palestinians who were Nakba survivors and their descendants who ended up living in Western countries, this is particularly painful, since their narrative was always denied. Only now is the Palestinian side of the story being more widely heard. Why do you think this happened?
I think there are several factors here. One factor is the history of anti-Semitism and our guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust, which is an important thing that we do need to know. And it is a historical fact that the Holocaust took place, that six million Jews were killed. But the fact is that they weren’t killed by the Palestinians, and they weren’t killed by the Arabs. They were killed by the Germans. But it is the Arabs and Palestinians who have paid the price. There is rightly a great sensitivity and a sense of guilt in Europe about this. That is one factor.
A second factor, I think, is that while there was a large-scale immigration of Pakistanis, Indians, and Caribbean families into Britain in 1950s, there was never a substantial Palestinian population here. The Palestinian refugees did not come here [Britain]. They went to Gaza, they went to the West Bank, they went to Beirut. We have never had the constituency of a Palestinian group exerting any pressure. Democracies work by groups who are passionate about subjects that pressurise their MPs. Now the subject has started to gain traction among the Muslim population of Pakistani descent who are starting to change the prevailing old narrative. Up to now there hasn’t been a big enough democratic pressure from the Palestinian side.
But we are talking about education and history. Can anyone say that the Palestinian narrative was falsified?
It’s not only about Palestine. There is an absence of teaching in our schools about any of Britain’s imperial responsibilities.
I think that at a popular level of school education one could say that there is an absence rather than misinformation. But in terms of the general historical record, I think there has been an active effort among Israeli historians to erase Palestinians from the historical record, as much as there has been a record on the ground to bulldozing, destroying Palestinian villages, and of expelling and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the landscape.
Let’s go back to the contradictory promises which are at the root of this conflict today. Palestine was promised at the same time to the Arabs who fought on the ground alongside the British troops to expel the Ottomans [in World War I] and to the Jews through the Balfour Declaration. Seen from the Arab perspective, there was an obvious betrayal, since they were convinced they were fighting for their own liberation from the Ottomans, just to see themselves once again colonised.
The British entry in the Middle East was via World War I. And during that time, through a series of accidents, Britain entered a conflict with the Ottomans, which was not a given. It is very easy to imagine a slightly different set of circumstances, whereby the Ottomans didn’t enter the war at all. They were late to join, and they took the side of Germany. There was every possibility that the Ottomans could have entered World War I on the side of the Allies or just remained neutral. All these are entirely feasible historical possibilities.
By the end of the war, you had a situation in which the British had promised Palestine – or promised greater Syria, to be accurate – to three different groups. First to the French, with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, secondly to the Sherif of Mecca, and thirdly to the World Zionist Congress. In the end, again through a series of accidents, thanks to Chaim Weizmann who had access to [then UK prime minister] Lloyd George and to [then UK foreign secretary Arthur Balfour], and thanks partly to anti-Semitism – Balfour didn’t want Jews settling in Britain and believed in stereotypes about the Jews – he was persuaded to back the idea of a Jewish homeland [in Palestine]. But it was very clear that he didn’t understand or have any knowledge of the makeup of Palestine at this point. The Balfour Declaration airily speaks about the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, as if it were a Jewish majority area.
But that was not the whole story, and Britain played a role in allowing the problem to grow to the situation we have today. How did it do so during its Mandate in Palestine?
I think it is very probable that there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict had it not been for flat-footed, ignorant British interventions towards the end of World War I.
When he made the Balfour Declaration, Arthur Balfour had never been to Palestine. He knew very little about its history, knew no Arabs socially, and seemed to be completely ignorant about the makeup of Palestine. At the time when he was growing up, when Zionist immigration to Palestine was still in its infancy, probably about five per cent of the Palestinian population was Jewish.
At the time of the declaration, in 1917, the population was about 10 per cent Jewish. Another 10 per cent was Christian Palestinian, who are often ignored, but who are the descendants of the very first Christians, many of them no doubt converted from Judaism in the early centuries of Christianity. And then the remaining 80 per cent of the Palestine population was Muslim. We know quite clearly from various notes taken by the Peel Commission a generation later that there were initial signs of tension in the region.
The Palestinians, quite understandably, showed anxiety about the level of immigration in Palestine. The original team that issued the declaration had no concept of what they called “the non-Jewish communities” in Palestine; they were dismissed as if they were a small minority when, in fact, they were the overwhelming majority of the population. They were at least 90 per cent of the Palestinian population. As early as the 1920s, there was widespread recognition in Britain that the ignorance of the British political establishment of that region and of its makeup had laid the foundations for the conflict, which, of course, is raging every day today.
It was British policy that led first to the massive immigration of European and some Middle Eastern Jews into Palestine and then put down, very violently, Palestinian resistance to that immigration. It is only now, I think, that it is coming out… the sheer horror of the British anti-insurgency techniques which were used by people like Orde Wingate and Arthur “Bomber” Harris. In the case of Harris, he strafed Palestinian villages and bombed them from the air. In the case of Wingate, he led night raids and developed torture techniques like an early version of waterboarding which would leave no subsequent injuries to illustrate what had taken place.
So, what you get with the Palestinian revolt in the 1930s is that it was not only put down with extreme violence and torture, torture of the sort we, my generation, have come to associate with the Gestapo, but never thought that our own people had inflicted on their subjects, their colonial subjects, the subjects of their Empire. At the same time as bombing, strafing, torturing, frightening, terrorising the Palestinians into submission, they disarmed the Palestinian population, exiled its leadership to places like Cyprus and the Seychelles and trained up the underground of the Jewish population in military techniques of torture and subjugation.
Orde Wingate is now recognised as one of the fathers of the Israeli army in a memorial put up in London. [Britain was responsible] both in terms of creating a very large Jewish population in the Mandate of Palestine, then by organising violence and the subjugation of those who resisted it. Then finally, and most critically, they walked out and left Palestine, providing absolutely no safeguards for the indigenous Palestinian population.
If one reads political writings from the early 1920s, by people like Tawfiq Canaan, one gets the impression of a very cosmopolitan world, one that was internally very coherent, with very established traditions in each different urban centre. In those days, people often identified, as well as by their religious identity, by their city. So, there were the Jerusalemites, for example. And that was a way of identifying with their geographical identity. These cities were very mixed. They all got on very well.
How can we right these wrongs today?
After the Nabka in 1948, 75 per cent of the indigenous Palestinian population were made refugees. Many of those went to Lebanon and to Beirut to refugee camps there. Some were internally displaced to places like Nazareth, then into the West Bank, but the great majority went to Gaza. It is the refugees of 1948 who are the parents and grandparents of the kids we see every morning on our screens [today].
So, there is a direct responsibility of the British in all that is happening. The great tragedy is that while we are now very well educated about the horrors such as the Holocaust, the deaths of six million Jews in concentration camps at the hands of the Nazis, almost no one has learned about the suffering of the Palestinians. So, there is inherently at large in Britain an extreme sympathy with the position of Jews who suffered for centuries, with that culminating in the Holocaust, but a complete lack of awareness of the horrors suffered by the Palestinians at British hands.
The public is completely ignorant about who the Palestinians are, why they are in Gaza in the first place, why they are suffering, what their grievances are. And the less well educated [people are], the more they tend to assume that Palestinians are troublemakers, terrorists, and so on.
I think Britain has a massive responsibility to right the wrongs and Britain is unaware of its responsibility. People do not know in this country about the Balfour Declaration or about the makeup of Mandate Palestine. The Nakba is a word which draws a blank stare from 99 per cent of British people. Not only is there nothing in their school education, but the BBC does nothing to educate them in terms of documentary; there is massive ignorance about this.
You said earlier that you are preparing a podcast on Gaza. Can you tell us more about it?
We have already had a 20-part Ottoman series all the way from the Seljuk Turks through to the creation of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s. So, our Empire podcast already dived into the matter, and we had one episode on the Balfour Declaration. But it seems that there is a great need for more in-depth knowledge of Palestinian history. So, we decided to have 12 hours, 12 parts, on the history of Palestine, right from the Peleset and Palashtu to our times.
[It is available] on all podcast carriers, Spotify, Apple, and so on, and it is called Empire Pod.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Evaluating the work of others – how Marxists should read Substack posts and articles
A step-by-step guide to critically evaluating the strength of someone else’s argument
Jul 04, 2026
There’s a way of reading political writing that most of us default to: you open an article, you read it, you form an opinion about whether you agree or disagree, and you either share it or close the tab. If you’re a bit more careful, you might check whether the author cited any sources, or whether the argument felt logical, or whether the tone was too polemical to take seriously. But even that version of critical reading is operating on the surface, because the question it’s answering is “does this argument seem good?” rather than “what material reality is this argument embedded in, and what does it obscure?”
This post is about a different way of reading. Not whether it feels persuasive, but whether it’s grounded in material reality or floating on assumptions that serve particular interests.
The method is simple enough that you can use it the next time you open Substack, and it works on everything from a 500-word opinion piece to a 4,000-word deep dive. It’s a two-read method, and the reason there are two reads is important.
Why you read it twice
You can’t evaluate an argument you haven’t understood, and you can’t understand an argument if you’re already fighting it while you read. These two activities, comprehension and critical evaluation, use different parts of your analytical attention, and when you try to do both at once, both suffer. You end up half-understanding the argument and half-critiquing something that isn’t quite what the author said.
The principle behind the first read is clear: if you can’t articulate the opposing position in a way that its proponents would recognise, you haven’t understood it yet. That applies to reading too. If you can’t state back what the author is arguing, in terms they would accept, you’re not ready to evaluate it. You’re reacting, and reaction is not analysis.
Dialectical Materialism – How to actually analyse something
·
May 24
So you separate the two. First read for comprehension. Second read for critical materialist evaluation. The second read will be sharper, more precise, and more honest for having waited.
The first read
The first time through, you are reading to understand. Not to agree, not to disagree, not to mentally compose your reply. You’re reconstructing the argument as the author intended it. This is harder than it sounds, because if you have strong political commitments, your mind will start generating objections almost immediately, and you have to let those objections sit without acting on them.
By the end of the first read you should be able to answer 4 questions. What is the author’s central claim? What evidence do they offer for it? How do they get from the evidence to the conclusion, what is the logical chain that connects them? And what do they want the reader to walk away believing or doing?
If you can’t answer all 4, read it again. Not because you’re a slow reader, but because the author may not have made their argument clearly, and recognising that is itself useful information. An argument that can’t be clearly restated might be confused, or it might be deliberately vague because precision would expose weaknesses.
Here you are actively working to reconstruct someone else’s reasoning on their terms. The discipline is in keeping your own framework out of it for now. The arguing comes in the second read.
The second read
Now you go back through the article with a different set of questions. Each one corresponds to a dimension of dialectical materialist analysis, and together they give you a way of seeing the argument that goes far deeper than “do I agree with this?”
Who is this person, materially?
This is not an ad hominem and it’s not a purity test. You’re not asking “who pays them, therefore they’re wrong.” You’re asking what material conditions shape this person’s perspective, because material position shapes what you can see and what you’re incentivised to overlook. What class position does the author occupy? What institutions are they connected to? What audience are they writing for, and what does that audience want to hear?
An economics columnist at the Financial Times and a trade union researcher can look at the same data on wage growth and produce completely different analyses, not because one of them is lying but because their material positions give them different vantage points and different incentive structures. The FT columnist writes for an audience of investors and policymakers who experience wage growth as a cost pressure. The union researcher writes for an audience of workers who experience it as their material conditions improving. Neither is making things up. Both are shaped by where they stand.
Understanding this doesn’t tell you whether the argument is right or wrong. What it tells you is which directions the argument is unlikely to go, which questions it’s unlikely to ask, and whose interests it’s unlikely to challenge. That’s useful context for everything that follows.
What counts as evidence here?
This is where a lot of apparently well-sourced writing starts to look thinner than it seemed on first read. You want to distinguish between types of evidence, because not all evidence is doing the same work.
Primary sources, things like legislation, financial disclosures, court judgments, official statistics, Hansard records, are the closest you can get to material reality. They tell you what actually happened or what was actually decided. Secondary sources, things like journalism, think tank reports, academic commentary, other Substack posts, are someone else’s interpretation of what happened. Both have a place, but they are not the same thing, and an argument that rests entirely on secondary interpretation without ever touching the primary material is an argument that is relying on other people’s framing.
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When an author cites data, look at where it comes from. A statistic from the Office for National Statistics is doing different evidentiary work than a number pulled from a think tank report, because the think tank has a political orientation and funding structure that shapes what it measures and how it presents findings. This doesn’t mean think tank data is useless, but it means you need to know whose think tank it is and what they’re funded to conclude. An article on housing affordability that cites only data from a property industry lobby group is telling you something, even if the individual numbers are accurate, because the selection and framing of data is itself an analytical act.
The question to keep asking is: am I being shown the thing itself, or someone else’s interpretation of the thing? And if it’s an interpretation, whose interpretation is it, and what interests shape it?
What is missing, and does the absence serve an interest?
This is often the most revealing question you can ask, because what an author leaves out of an argument can tell you more than what they put in.
Absences are data. An article about housing that discusses planning reform, building targets, and mortgage rates but never mentions who owns the land and what happens to their wealth if house prices fall significantly has carved the class dimension out of the analysis. An article about a strike that focuses on disruption to commuters and economic cost but never explains why the workers are striking has made an editorial decision about whose experience matters. An article about a war that begins with this year’s events without tracing the historical development that produced them has, whether deliberately or not, made the present look like it arrived out of nowhere.
The question we are asking is “who benefits from this being left out?”. Sometimes things are omitted because of word count or scope, and that’s fine. But when the omission consistently removes the class interests, the ownership relations, or the historical context that would complicate the argument’s conclusions, the pattern is meaningful. You’re looking at an argument that has been shaped by what it excludes, and the shape it takes usually serves somebody’s interests, even if the author isn’t consciously aware of doing it.
Does it treat the present as natural or as historically produced?
This is the historical materialism test, and it’s one of the sharpest tools you have for distinguishing analysis from ideology.
Writing that treats the current state of affairs as simply the way things are, as a fixed reality to be managed rather than a historical product to be explained, is almost always doing ideological work. When an article discusses the gig economy as a fact of modern life and asks how to make it fairer without asking what material conditions and class interests produced it, the naturalisation is doing political work. It takes a historically specific arrangement, one that emerged from the defeat of organised labour, the deregulation of employment law, and the platform monopolies that followed the 2008 crisis, and presents it as if it were weather. Something you adapt to, not something that was built by identifiable people for identifiable reasons.
The dialectical materialist question is always: how did this come to be? What prior structures, decisions, and material conditions produced this moment? Nothing that exists today fell from the sky. Every institution, every policy arrangement, every set of power relations is the product of historical development, and tracing that development is what turns description into explanation. An article that skips this step can describe what’s happening perfectly well. What it can’t do is explain why, and the gap between description and explanation is where ideology lives.
Where are the contradictions in the argument itself?
This is different from “do I disagree with the conclusion.” You’re asking whether the argument is internally coherent on its own terms, whether the author’s own evidence and premises hold together or pull apart.
An article that argues for the efficiency of free markets while also lamenting that corporations have too much power contains a contradiction the author hasn’t resolved, because the concentration of corporate power is a product of market dynamics, not an aberration from them. An article that celebrates liberal democracy as the best system of governance while also acknowledging that public opinion consistently favours policies that never get implemented contains a contradiction between its premise and its evidence. They are analytically significant because they tell you where the argument is under stress, where the framework the author is using can’t account for what the author’s own evidence is showing.
Mao’s work on contradiction is useful here. He distinguished between the principal contradiction and secondary contradictions in any situation, and the same applies to a text. An article might have several internal tensions, but usually one of them is doing the most damage to the argument’s coherence. Finding that principal contradiction is what lets you identify the structural weakness in the analysis rather than picking at minor inconsistencies.
When you find a contradiction in someone’s argument, it doesn’t necessarily mean the author is wrong about everything. It often means they’re working within a framework that can’t contain what they’ve observed, and the contradiction is the point where the framework is breaking. That’s analytically interesting in its own right, because it tells you something about the limits of the framework, not just the limits of the article.
What you do with all of this
The point of this method is not to find reasons to dismiss everything you read. If you use it honestly, you will sometimes find that an article you expected to disagree with is actually well-grounded in material reality and hard to refute, and that’s good, because it means the method is working. You will also sometimes find that an article you broadly agree with is resting on ideological assumptions rather than material analysis, and that’s harder to sit with but more important, because the writing that confirms your existing beliefs is where your guard is lowest and ideology slides through most easily.
The hardest application of this method is to your own side. It is very easy to apply rigorous materialist analysis to writing you already disagree with and very difficult to apply it to writing that tells you what you want to hear. But the method doesn’t care about your preferences. It asks the same questions regardless of the author’s politics, and it gives you the same answers. If a Marxist Substack post is making claims without evidence, naturalising the present, or ignoring material conditions that complicate its argument, the method will show you that too. And it should.
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The other thing worth saying is that this method makes you a better writer, not just a better reader. Every question you learn to ask of someone else’s writing is a question you should be asking of your own. Am I grounding this in material reality or in assumptions? Am I tracing the historical development or treating the present as given? Am I acknowledging the contradictions in my own analysis or smoothing them over? Does my evidence actually show what I’m claiming it shows? The method is the same in both directions, and the discipline of applying it to other people’s work is practice for applying it to your own.
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