To say that Eritrean Muslims have been disproportionately disadvantaged is not to say that Eritrean Christians live comfortably or freely. The entire country has been devastated by dictatorship, militarization and poverty. But general suffering does not eliminate patterned suffering. If poverty, displacement, illiteracy, exclusion from public institutions and loss of land are concentrated among particular populations, then the concentration itself requires explanation. Religion may not be the only cause. Geography, ecology, patterns of settlement, war, state policy and historical access to education may all be involved. Still, when these disadvantages repeatedly overlap with Muslim communities, Muslim identity becomes an important lens through which the pattern can be seen.

But a lens for seeing an injustice is not necessarily the mechanism through which that injustice should be repaired. This is where I think Eritrean political discussion frequently becomes trapped. A community documents its suffering and presents it to the country as a moral demand: recognize what happened to us, be fair to us, give us our proper share. The grievance may be entirely legitimate. Yet the proposed remedy often remains at the level of recognition, goodwill or communal bargaining. We are asked to become fair without agreeing on what fairness requires institutionally, how it will be measured, who owes what to whom, or how a citizen can enforce the obligation.

Suppose we agree that residents of a remote Lowland community are among the poorest people in Eritrea. What follows politically? Do we merely ask the next government to care more about Muslims? Do Muslim representatives negotiate a share of the national budget? Do we assign public positions according to religious proportions? And who represents the Muslim citizen who disagrees with those representatives? A grievance becomes politically vulnerable when its remedy depends on the morality of future rulers or on the bargaining strength of people claiming to speak for an entire community. The weaker the community is, the less likely it is to win that bargain.

There is another way for the grievance to enter politics. Before arguing over which community deserves what share, Eritreans can agree on public obligations that attach to citizenship itself. We can agree, for example, that no Eritrean should live below a defined minimum standard of material security. We can debate what that standard should include: food, clean water, primary healthcare, education, shelter, transportation and access to basic public administration. We can calculate how many citizens fall below it, where they live, what prevents them from crossing it, and what proportion of national revenue should be committed to reaching them. We can require the government to publish the figures, disclose regional allocations and explain why one area receives more or less than another.

Under such a system, a poor Hedareb pastoralist would not have to prove that his community deserves sympathy from Christian Highlanders. He would enter the public calculation as an Eritrean citizen whose government has accepted a measurable obligation toward him. If Muslim communities are in fact the most disadvantaged, an honestly administered citizenship-based policy will direct more resources toward them, not because the state has distributed favors among religions, but because their citizens have the strongest claims under the agreed rule. The pattern can be religious or regional in its history while the remedy remains civic and legal in its operation.

This does not require us to stop talking about Muslim discrimination, Hedareb marginalization, Kunama land, Afar displacement or the destruction of Lowland communities. On the contrary, those identities help us detect what a formally neutral system might otherwise conceal. If almost everyone left below the national minimum comes from the same regions or communities, that is evidence that something structural is occurring. We should investigate it directly. Civic equality should never become a language for refusing to see group patterns. But group identity should help us diagnose the failure, not become the only legal gate through which a person can claim protection.

The distinction is important. If every grievance can enter politics only through ethnic or religious representation, citizens become dependent on communal gatekeepers. A person first has to arrive as Muslim, Christian, Saho, Kunama, Hedareb or Tigrinya before the state can recognize what is owed to him. Political organizations then compete to define the authentic interests of those groups, and public resources become the object of negotiation among elites. The ordinary individual disappears inside the category supposedly protecting him.

A civic framework reverses that relationship. The individual does not receive rights because a communal representative successfully negotiated for them. The representative has a case because identifiable citizens are being denied rights or resources already guaranteed to them. The evidence may show that a whole community has been systematically harmed, and the remedy may therefore require concentrated regional investment, restitution, language access or temporary corrective policies. But those measures must be justified through a public rule that can be examined, challenged and applied consistently.

Land provides another example. Saying that Muslim land has been taken may describe an important historical pattern, but it does not by itself tell us how the dispute will be adjudicated. A civic settlement would have to define possession, communal use, pastoral access, unlawful confiscation, restitution, compensation and the evidentiary standards by which claims are decided. The same law must protect a pastoral community whose grazing routes do not resemble individual titled property and an individual farmer whose plot was confiscated. Otherwise, a declaration that “land belongs to the people” or “land belongs to the state” will once again allow whoever controls the government to decide whose relationship to the land counts.

The same applies to language. Arabic should not depend on the cultural generosity of a future government. Eritreans need to negotiate what access a citizen is entitled to in education, courts, administration and public information, and which languages the state must use to provide that access. Once that obligation is specified, a citizen does not have to plead for cultural recognition each time he encounters a public institution. The obligation precedes the official.

This is where civic consensus becomes critical to transition. Eritreans should not wait until one opposition coalition, military faction or returning political organization occupies the state and then ask it to distribute justice. We should negotiate some of these rules while no claimant has yet acquired the recognized right to rule. Everyone within Eritrea’s accepted political boundary must enter as an equal Eritrean citizen. Refugees and dispersed Eritreans must also be included as members of the same political public, not treated as outsiders offering assistance to the people inside. From there, we can argue about the minimum conditions of citizenship, the allocation of taxes, regional development, land adjudication, language access and the public evidence required to demonstrate discrimination.

Consensus does not mean that we will agree on every policy or erase every identity. It means reaching prior agreement about what no future ruler may leave entirely to discretion. How poor are we willing to allow an Eritrean to remain? What services must reach every locality? When should unequal allocation be required to correct unequal conditions? What information must the state publish? How can a citizen challenge a decision? Which rights cannot be suspended because a government calls the country unstable? These are less emotionally satisfying than declarations of unity and justice, but they are closer to the machinery through which justice becomes real.

The Eritrean Covenant is right to insist that the grievances of Muslims cannot simply be postponed until after PFDJ. By then, the institutional structure of the next order may already have been captured. But the challenge is not only to place Muslim grievances on the transitional agenda. It is to translate historically specific suffering into public obligations that do not depend upon permanent communal bargaining. That translation does not weaken the Muslim case. It makes the demand less vulnerable to denial, token representation and the goodwill of whoever happens to govern.

The question, then, is not whether we should speak as Muslims, Christians, Kunama, Hedareb, Afar, Saho or Tigrinya. People will and should describe the histories through which they have suffered. The political question is what happens after the suffering has been named. Does it remain a moral appeal from one community to another, or does it become a claim that a citizen can make against a government under rules all of us established in advance?

Eritrea does not need a politics that becomes blind to identity. It needs a politics capable of seeing patterned injustice without imprisoning the citizen inside the pattern. Identity can show us where the country has failed. Citizenship must tell the state what it is required to do about it.

That decision is part of the work. Every act of production contains an implicit contract: something is expected, something is produced, and someone must determine whether the actual has come close enough to the expected. Even people who claim not to care about perfection must make this judgment. They may accept a large gap between intention and result, but they still decide that the gap is acceptable. What we call perfectionism, then, cannot simply be the existence of a standard or the desire to meet it. That structure belongs to everyone who makes anything.

Perfectionism begins when the decision cannot be completed.

The perfectionist has an expected product and an actual product, just like everyone else. The difficulty lies in deciding whether the distance between them has become small enough. The work may already be good. It may even be better than what most readers, viewers, or users expect. But objective quality does not settle the question because the relevant comparison is taking place inside the creator’s mind. The actual work is being measured against an internally imagined version whose dimensions may never have been stated clearly, even to the person who imagined it.

This is why perfectionism is often described as having high standards, but I do not think that description reaches the mechanism. A high standard can still produce decisive action. Someone can demand exceptional work, meet that demand, and release it without difficulty. Another person can produce something ordinary and remain trapped for months, unable to decide whether it is ready. The difference is not necessarily the height of the standard. It is the capacity to declare the remaining distance acceptable.

Even the distance itself is not objectively available. A person must decide whether the work has improved substantially or only slightly, whether another revision would clarify the argument or merely rearrange it, whether the remaining flaw is consequential or visible only because the creator has stared at it too long. These are judgments, but perfectionism does not allow them to settle anything. Each judgment produces another judgment that must also be examined. Is the work good enough? Am I evaluating it honestly? Have I become tired and lowered my standard? Am I rushing because I want relief? If I can still identify an improvement, how can I justify stopping?

The process becomes a loop of subjective judgment upon subjective judgment. The mind creates the expectation, measures the actual against it, evaluates the size of the gap, and then questions its own evaluation. Nothing outside the loop can conclusively end it because the standard, the distance, and the meaning of “close enough” are all being generated within the same private world.

This also explains why progress does not necessarily relieve perfectionism. The product may improve while the sense of incompletion remains. Every improvement can sharpen the creator’s vision of what the product could become, moving the expectation forward at the same time that the actual moves toward it. The gap is not simply being closed. It is being recalculated. The person can work indefinitely without experiencing arrival because the destination is being revised by the same process meant to reach it.

The word perfectionism obscures this. In ordinary conversation, it sounds as though perfectionists are pursuing a shared and objective condition called perfection. When someone says, “I am a perfectionist,” others often imagine unusually high quality, almost as if the person sees a standard of greatness that ordinary people are willing to ignore. The label can therefore sound like disguised praise. It presents the perfectionist as someone whose problem is caring too much about excellence.

But perfectionism does not tell us how good the work is. It tells us something about the person’s relationship to the distance that remains. An excellent work can be released without perfectionism, while an unremarkable one can be held indefinitely because its creator cannot authorize its completion. The perfectionist is not necessarily closer to perfection than anyone else. The perfectionist may simply be less able to decide that further movement is no longer necessary.

This is also why the word cannot carry exactly the same meaning from one person to another. The standard against which the work is being measured is privately held. So is the perceived distance from it. Two people may both call themselves perfectionists while imagining different goals, tolerating different imperfections, and assigning completely different consequences to failure. One may fear embarrassment. Another may fear misrepresentation. Another may feel that releasing imperfect work reveals an imperfect self. The shared word gives the impression that they are pursuing the same thing when each is caught inside a different system of expectation and judgment.

This is one reason I have always hesitated to call myself a perfectionist, even when I know that I am one. The word makes it sound as though I believe in some objective perfection located outside me and that I am heroically, or foolishly, trying to reach it. That is not the experience. I am not looking at perfection. I am looking at a gap that only I can see in exactly the way I see it, then trying to determine whether I have the right to leave it there.

Other people can help, but their reassurance has limits. Someone may read the work and say it is ready. The perfectionist can always reply, even if only internally, that the reader does not know what the work was supposed to become. Because the expectation is private, external approval cannot fully answer it. Yet that same privacy protects the standard from correction. If nobody else can see the intended destination, nobody else can conclusively say that the work has reached it or that the destination itself has become unreasonable.

Eventually, completion requires something that further revision cannot provide. It requires a decision. The creator must assume authority over the standard that has been exercising authority over the creator. This does not mean pretending that the work perfectly matches the expectation. It means seeing the remaining distance and deciding that the distance is now safe enough, small enough, or simply no longer worth the cost of closing.

Finishing is therefore not the discovery that nothing more can be improved. Almost everything can be improved. It is the decision that improvement no longer has the right to delay existence. A work becomes finished when its creator stops asking the gap for permission and takes responsibility for choosing where the work will end.

Perfectionism, understood this way, is not an excess of excellence. It is a crisis of authority within the self. The person who created the standard no longer feels authorized to declare that it has been met. The way out is not to eliminate expectations or stop caring about quality. It is to recover the decisiveness concealed inside every completed act: I can see what remains imperfect, and I am releasing it anyway.

The difficulty begins when the response disappears.

A living person may be unable to speak, move, open their eyes, or indicate awareness in any recognizable way. We call that person unresponsive. We may have good medical reasons to believe that they are unconscious, but unresponsiveness alone cannot establish it. The person may be entirely unaware, or awareness may remain while every means of expressing it has been lost. From outside, those conditions can look identical.

The honest description, therefore, is not necessarily that consciousness is absent. It is that no consciousness has become available to us through response. This is not a minor distinction. It separates what we observe from what we conclude.

I began wondering how far that distinction could be carried. Why should it stop at the border we call death?

Medicine defines death through an accumulation of irreversible failures. Breathing has stopped. Circulation has stopped. The brain no longer performs the functions associated with awareness, reflex, or spontaneous respiration. The criteria may be tested repeatedly and carefully. Eventually, the person is declared dead.

I do not dispute what has been observed. I dispute what we quietly add to it.

What has actually been established is that the body has irreversibly lost every known capacity through which consciousness could respond or reveal itself. Yet we translate that into a larger statement: consciousness itself no longer exists. The extinction of every possible response becomes the extinction of the respondent.

Repeating the criteria does not solve this problem. Ten signs of irreversible bodily failure remain ten observations of the body. They may make the inference overwhelmingly persuasive, but they do not transform an inference about consciousness into a direct observation of its absence. Consciousness was never visible even when the person was alive. We knew it through expression. Once expression becomes permanently impossible, we do not suddenly acquire direct access to the thing that was always hidden from us.

I am not claiming that consciousness survives death. I am not proposing a soul, an afterlife, or any continued existence of the respondent beyond the body. Those are additional claims, and I advance none of them. I am making the smaller claim that I am not required to declare consciousness extinct simply because every means by which it could disclose itself has disappeared.

There is a difference between asserting continued consciousness and refusing to certify its absence. The first requires a theory of what consciousness becomes after bodily death. The second requires only intellectual restraint.

The strongest reply to this position is straightforward and powerful. Consciousness, on the best available evidence, appears to depend on the organized activity of the brain. When that activity irreversibly ceases, the most reasonable conclusion is that consciousness ceases with it. The cumulative weight of neurology, anesthesiology, and clinical observation makes this inference highly persuasive. Reasonableness, however, is still not direct observation, and confidence is not access. The inference remains an inference.

Of course, society cannot remain suspended forever. At some point, treatment must stop. A body must be released, buried, cremated, donated, or otherwise cared for. Property must pass to others. Marriages acquire a legal ending. Responsibilities, rights, and obligations must be reassigned. Society therefore needs a boundary, and medicine supplies one. For biological, legal, and administrative purposes, the declaration of death is necessary.

But necessity does not make the boundary metaphysically complete.

A definition becomes an exercise of power when it stops merely organizing public action and begins governing what everyone is permitted to believe. Once death is declared, the body is taken away, placed in a coffin, buried, and allowed to decay. The living are expected to speak as though more than biological life has been settled. The person is not merely unreachable. The person is said to be gone.

But who established that final proposition?

The physician can establish that the body will never answer again. The law can determine that the person no longer has legal standing among the living. The family can consent to burial. Society can organize itself around the certainty that no response will ever return. None of these actions, however necessary, gives the living direct knowledge of the disappearance of subjective existence.

If someone says, “But that is how death is defined,” my response is that a definition tells us where an institution has decided to draw its boundary. It does not necessarily tell us that reality has disclosed everything occurring beyond that boundary. You have defined the point at which the body ceases to count as living. I have not agreed that you have thereby observed the disappearance of the one who lived through it.

This does not prevent me from burying the dead. It does not require me to deny decomposition or preserve a body indefinitely. I can accept every practical consequence of death while withholding agreement from the metaphysical conclusion attached to it. I can sit beside the body, speak to it, bury it, mourn it, and still refuse to pretend that the absence of a reply has given me knowledge of absolute absence.

Perhaps death is exactly what we ordinarily say it is. Perhaps consciousness ends when the organized activity of the brain ends. That may be the most reasonable conclusion available to us. But reasonableness is not observation, and confidence is not access.

The dead may indeed be gone. My point is only that the living are the ones who made that declaration. What we know with certainty is not that the respondent has ceased to exist. It is that the response will never come.

That difficulty interests me because we know perfectly well that a movie is not real. The actors have different names from their characters. We can watch interviews with them, see photographs from the set, and know that there are cameras, scripts, costumes, lighting crews and editors. Yet once the movie begins, much of that knowledge becomes powerless. Someone dies and we become sad. Someone is betrayed and we become angry. Two actors look at each other and we experience them as people in love. We call this immersion, usually as a compliment to the film, but perhaps immersion tells us something deeper about the mind: we can experience something as reality while simultaneously knowing that it is constructed.

In that sense, cinema is almost a laboratory of belief. Intellectually, I know I am watching a performance. Experientially, I inhabit the world being performed. The body reacts before the intellect has much chance to intervene. Suspense tightens the chest. Music produces dread. A facial expression communicates grief. What interests me is the gap between what we know and what we experience.

So sometimes I deliberately resist the movie. I look for the actor beneath the character. I pay attention to the performance, the camera, the arrangement of the scene. I try to keep both things in view at once: the reality being presented and the machinery producing it. The goal is not to ruin the film. The film is supposed to work. The interesting part is discovering just how difficult it is to recover the machinery once the performance has absorbed us.

And once you begin doing that, movies start pointing beyond themselves. How much of ordinary life also reaches us through performances that we have simply stopped recognizing as performances?

Think of a courtroom. The judge wears a robe. Everyone rises. There are designated places to stand, specific forms of address, procedures governing who may speak and when. None of this means that law is fake. The consequences can be brutally real. But authority still has to appear in a recognizable form before other people can respond to it as authority. A president performs presidency. A professor performs professorship. A physician performs medical authority. Lovers perform intimacy. Friends perform friendship. Even rebellion develops its own vocabulary, gestures and recognizable ways of appearing rebellious.

Calling these things performances does not mean that they are false. That is probably where the idea becomes more interesting. Performance may be one of the main ways human beings make reality available to one another. I cannot enter another person’s mind directly. You cannot experience my intention in its raw form. Something has to pass between us: language, facial expression, gesture, ritual, tone, convention. Inner life has to acquire an outward form before another person can recognize it.

Even sincerity needs a performance. If I love someone, love eventually has to become words, attention, touch, sacrifice or action. If I respect someone, respect must appear somehow. Grief becomes visible through gestures and language partly supplied by culture. Culture gives us available ways of being professional, romantic, respectable, masculine, feminine, patriotic, rebellious, religious, sophisticated, humble or powerful. We inherit much of this vocabulary before we ever think critically about it.

Perhaps that is why certain things feel natural. Sometimes what we call natural is simply performance whose rehearsal has been forgotten.

Movies make this unusually easy to see because everyone admits beforehand that there is a camera. Ordinary life is harder because nobody yells “cut.” The costumes are called uniforms. The scripts are called professionalism, etiquette, tradition, protocol, morality or common sense. The stage existed before we arrived. Because everyone around us recognizes the same signals, the performance acquires the solidity of reality.

But saying this does not mean that everything is fake. A courtroom is constructed, but a prison sentence is real. Money is symbolic, but hunger is real. Borders are political constructions, but crossing one can determine the course of a life. Marriage contains rituals and inherited expectations, but love, pain and responsibility are not imaginary. The more interesting question is not whether reality is fake, but how constructed forms acquire real consequences.

That is why I keep returning to the simple act of trying to see the acting in a movie. It is a small exercise in moving between participation and observation. You can enter the story and still occasionally recover the camera. You can experience the scene while asking how the scene is producing that experience.

Perhaps something similar is required in ordinary life. We live inside stories about success, love, nation, morality, identity and authority. Some are necessary, some are beautiful, some are oppressive, and most are mixtures. The danger comes when we lose the ability to move between inhabiting these forms and examining them, when the role becomes indistinguishable from the self or the script becomes indistinguishable from reality.

Cinema gives us an unusually clean demonstration of how easily this can happen. We praise actors precisely when they make us forget that they are acting. Perhaps the viewer should occasionally practice the opposite skill: remembering the performance while it is still working.

Then carry that habit outside the movie. Why does this uniform produce obedience? Why does this sentence sound respectable? Why does this gesture communicate authority? Who taught us the acceptable ways of expressing love, grief, masculinity, patriotism or rebellion? At what point did a repeated performance stop looking like a performance and start looking like reality itself?

The point is not to discover that nothing is real. It is to become more attentive to how reality is made, communicated and sustained between us.

But would God be good among gods?

For us, goodness has a price.

To forgive is to hand back the knife.

To give is to go without.

To love is to tell someone where you sleep.

Maybe cost is the only reason

goodness means anything at all.

So what does it cost Him?

Nothing. Nothing has ever been taken from Him.

He has never stood in a line.

He has never had to wait for a yes.

Perhaps that is why He made us.

Not gods. He could not make gods.

He made a crowd instead,

each one carrying His face,

flung in among the others carrying it too.

A man alone needs no justice.

No mercy. No restraint.

A man alone is only weather.

To be human is to be human among humans.

Perhaps He is watching His own likeness

in the one condition He can never enter:

outnumbered.

Unable to win.

And when one of us is struck

and does not strike,

when one gives up what he could have kept,

when one loves at a price,

God leans closer.

Not to bless it.

To learn it.

Whether goodness survives

among equals.

Here is the claim it produced. What you are capable of knowing depends far less on your intelligence than on your willingness to surrender what you currently take yourself to know. Knowledge has an emotional prerequisite. Most people never meet it.

Is learning addition or subtraction?

We picture learning as accumulation. The mind is a container, ideas go in, the container fills. On that picture the only limits are time and access.

The deepest learning runs the other way. It requires subtraction. It asks you to abandon assumptions, loyalties, identities, and sometimes the beliefs that gave your life its shape. Nothing new can enter a mind where nothing is allowed to move.

So the real question is never how much you can take in. It is how much you can afford to lose. Most of us cannot afford much. So we collect information that confirms what we already hold, and we call that thinking.

Why is changing religion so hard?

Take the largest thing we believe. For many of us religion was not one belief among others. It was the first weather we lived in. It arrived when we were children, when we were radically open, when the mind had not yet learned to defend itself. It entered without resistance because there was nothing yet for it to displace.

Now look at the adult who changes it.

Watch what actually happens to him. His name comes up less at gatherings. His mother starts praying for him in the tone people use for the sick. Old friends stay polite and stop calling, and the ones who do call are working on him. He is not argued with. He is grieved. He has become a thing that happened to his family, and there is no version of the story where he is simply a man who thought about something and reached a different conclusion.

That is the price of admission. Forget whether he was right. Forget which direction he moved, in or out. He had to allow that the thing he built his life on might be false. He had to sit inside that possibility long enough for something else to take hold. He had to survive being wrong about the largest thing he knew, in front of everyone who loved him for being right.

The content of the conversion is almost beside the point. What it proves is that the man could still move.

Most people cannot. Most people would rather be wrong for fifty years than uncertain for one.

What is a fanatic?

We say a fanatic believes too much. That is not it. A fanatic is not someone with an excess of faith. A fanatic is someone whose openness has closed.

Often they were the most open of all. Something broke them apart once and remade them, and the experience was so total that they decided it must be final. They mistook the last thing that moved them for the last thing that could. Then they spent the rest of their life guarding the door they came through.

That is the trap, and it is not a moral failure. It is a cost problem. Being genuinely rearranged is closer to grief than to insight. Nobody can pay that every year. So we do it once, maybe twice, and then we fortify. We tell ourselves the search ended because we found the answer. The search ended because the search hurt.

Institutions do this too. A church keeps the kneeling and the confession and the emptying, but the practices that once loosened a person’s certainty are now performed to confirm an answer decided in advance. The method survives as a ritual. What it was a method for is gone.

Where does God live?

Not in the certainty.

Look at what Christianity tells you before it tells you anything else. Become like a child. Be humble. Confess. Admit you are a sinner. We read these as moral instructions. I think they are cognitive instructions. They describe the state a mind has to enter before it can receive something it does not already contain. They are techniques for dismantling certainty, and they work.

So if the word God still means anything, God is not in the finished worldview. Not in Christianity, not in Islam, not in atheism. God is in the transition. In the stretch where you have let go of who you were and do not yet know who you are becoming. Where humiliation stops being defeat and becomes an opening.

Heaven and hell at the same moment, because they are the same moment. Nothing larger than you arrives as a comfortable addition to what you already believe. It has to cost you something to get in.

What happened in the bar

I did not want to talk to strangers. I said so out loud, to one of them, which is already strange. I told him I did not want to be perceived as weird.

He said just talk to people. Life is short. The worst they can do is say no.

I tried to argue with him. I had material. I have spent years assembling an account of why I am the way I am, and it is a good account, and it has history in it, and it explains everything. He was not interested in any of it. He just repeated himself. Life is short.

He was right, and it took me the rest of the night to stop resenting that he was right. Notice how small the thing that entered was. It was not a theory of race, though they argued about race for an hour and I listened like a child, asking questions without defending myself. Nothing they said about politics changed me. What changed me was a sentence any stranger could have said, which I had been defended against for years, and which only got through because I was in a state where my defenses were not up.

That is the whole mechanism in one night. The insight was not large. The opening was.

And that is where I have to turn on my own argument.

The openness does not come with a brake. The same posture that lets truth in lets anything in. I told those men where I came from and how I think, and then I asked them what they made of how I think, and I would have taken their answer seriously whatever it was.

Consider what a con artist actually needs from you. Not stupidity. He needs you to lower your guard, to trust his account of the situation over your own, to accept that you have been wrong about something and that he is the one who can correct it. That is the identical posture I have spent this entire essay recommending. The convert and the person being conned are running the same operation, and neither one can tell which he is while it is happening. From the inside, being opened and being worked feel exactly the same. Both feel like clarity arriving.

That is not a reason to close. It is a reason to say clearly that being open is not the same as being wise, and that anyone who tells you surrender is sufficient is selling you the thing you are surrendering to.

What is the actual measure?

The largest thing you can hold is set by the largest thing you can drop.

That is the whole argument. Not how much you have read. Not how well you argue. The size of the space you are willing to open is the size of what can arrive in it. Everything else is inventory.

Most people finish opening in their twenties.

I am trying not to.

Yet our moral language remains strangely one-sided. We place nearly all the responsibility on the person being distracted. Turn off your notifications. Develop discipline. Reduce your screen time. Delete the app.

But every captured attention has someone on the other side capturing it.

Suppose a person produces valuable work and gains tens of thousands of subscribers because of it. People followed for a reason. They wanted the essays, videos, analysis, or whatever first justified their attention. Then, after the audience is secured, the person begins posting anything: a photograph of themselves sleeping, a passing thought, an undeveloped observation, or some detail of ordinary life that might otherwise have been shared with a few friends.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. No one is required to be profound all the time. The issue is not whether casual content should exist.

The issue is that acquiring an audience also means acquiring the power to interrupt it.

When you post, notifications appear. Screens light up. People stop what they are doing and look. Perhaps only a small portion of them will care, but the entire audience has been summoned. The interruption may last only seconds, yet those seconds are drawn from thousands of separate lives.

Once we see posting this way, moral responsibility becomes difficult to avoid.

Attention is limited. Many people are already struggling to control where theirs goes. A large audience gives a creator the reliable ability to redirect that attention. And whenever a person gains reliable power over something scarce and vulnerable, some responsibility should follow from possessing that power.

We accept this logic almost everywhere else. Greater reach creates greater responsibility. Greater influence demands greater restraint. Yet online, people often behave as though gaining followers merely expands their freedom to publish. I think it should also expand their obligation to ask whether every passing impulse deserves to become an interruption.

This obligation should increase with scale. Speaking casually among twenty friends is not the same as broadcasting casually to twenty thousand subscribers. The creator may experience both actions as simply “thinking aloud,” but the social effect is different. At some point, a personal account becomes a small broadcasting institution, whether its owner recognizes it or not.

The audience also changes psychologically. It stops being a group gathered around particular work and becomes an atmosphere surrounding the creator. The creator begins posting not because something needs to be communicated, but because silence feels like disappearance. The audience’s attention becomes a resource used to maintain visibility.

This is where expression quietly becomes consumption.

The creator consumes small portions of other people’s attention to reassure themselves that they are still present in their minds. Each individual act looks harmless. But internet addiction is not usually produced by one dramatic interruption. It is produced by the accumulation of countless minor invitations to check.

Platforms designed the machinery, certainly. But creators operate within it, benefit from it, and repeatedly activate it. They cannot claim all the rewards of influence while denying any responsibility for how that influence is exercised.

I include myself in this. I publish because I want to be read. I also ask people to redirect their attention toward me. That does not make posting immoral. It means that posting is not morally neutral.

The question should not be, “Am I allowed to share this?” Of course you are.

The better question is, “Does having the power to interrupt people give me any responsibility not to use it carelessly?”

I think it does.

At a time when so many people are trying to reclaim their minds from the internet, restraint may itself become a form of respect. Sometimes the responsible use of an audience is not to give it more content.

It is to leave it alone.

People congratulated me, as they should. I congratulated myself too. Finishing a doctorate is difficult, and I know what it took to get here. But after the celebrations settled, I found myself returning to a question that has followed me for much longer than these last five years. In truth, it has followed me since I was a child.

What exactly did the university give me?

The obvious answer is a degree. It certified that I know something. It gave me a title that will open doors that were previously closed. That is all true.

But that is not the question I cannot shake.

The question is whether the university deserves credit for what I know.

This is an uncomfortable thing to ask immediately after earning a PhD because it sounds almost ungrateful. It sounds like the kind of thing someone says after failing inside the system rather than succeeding within it. Yet I ask it precisely because I have reached the end. If I could not ask it now, I probably never could.

When I look back on my years as a student, stretching all the way from elementary school to the completion of my doctorate, I do not remember classrooms as the places where knowledge primarily happened. I remember them as places where authority happened.

Knowledge happened somewhere else.

It happened late at night, alone, with books spread across my desk. It happened while reading papers for the third time because I still did not understand a statistical method. It happened while following one citation into another until an entire field slowly revealed itself. It happened while struggling with ideas that no lecture could possibly compress into fifty minutes. It also happened, at times, in conversation—with a generous advisor who asked the right question at the right moment, or in a seminar where a peer’s objection forced me to rethink an assumption. Those moments mattered. But they were rarer, and they almost always pointed me back to the same solitary work.

I have carried this suspicion since seventh grade, although I obviously did not have the language to express it then.

Our teachers would come into the classroom, explain the lesson, and then write the important points on the blackboard. We copied everything into our notebooks. Every single day followed the same ritual. One day I remember thinking, almost innocently, that if everything important was eventually going to be written on the board anyway, and if I already had the textbook waiting for me at home, and if the library contained entire shelves explaining the same subject in greater detail, then what exactly was the classroom for?

I was genuinely confused.

Why did I need someone to spend an hour saying what I could read for myself in twenty minutes?

That question never left me.

It also explains something about me that puzzled many of my teachers.

I rarely listened in class.

Even today, I hesitate to admit that because it sounds disrespectful, but it is simply true. I drifted. I disappeared into my own thoughts. Sometimes I thought about ideas that interested me. Sometimes I stared out the window. Sometimes I read entirely different books. I almost never remember following a lecture from beginning to end.

Then I went home, opened the textbook, studied by myself, asked questions whenever I needed clarification, and did well on the exams.

There is one memory that has remained unusually vivid.

In seventh grade, my English teacher asked everyone to open a particular page. Every student did except me. I had drifted somewhere else entirely. He walked past my desk once, then again, then a third time. Finally he lost his patience. He struck me from behind and beat me in front of the class for refusing to follow instructions.

Months later, I became one of his favorite students. I excelled in English. We developed genuine respect for one another.

Looking back, I sometimes think neither of us understood what had happened that day.

He thought I was refusing to learn.

I was refusing nothing.

I simply learned differently.

That memory has become a metaphor for how I now think about education itself. Our schools are remarkably good at detecting disobedience. They are much less interested in distinguishing it from learning.

For years I assumed that studying after school was the obedient part of education. I now think the opposite is true.

The real act of obedience is showing up, sitting quietly, waiting to be directed, waiting for permission to speak, waiting for permission to leave.

The real act of rebellion begins after everyone goes home.

That is where learning starts.

You read because you are trying to understand something, not because someone is talking. You stop, return to a paragraph, chase a footnote, argue with an author, discover another book, realize you misunderstood the first one, and begin again. Nobody is watching. Nobody is grading your curiosity. Those are the moments that formed me far more than any classroom ever did.

This is why I have always found Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society difficult to dismiss. His argument was not that schools are useless. It was that we have confused learning with schooling and certification with education. We have come to believe that knowledge arrives through institutions when, in reality, institutions often do something much narrower. They create the conditions under which learning is demanded, and then they certify what people have managed to learn.

That distinction has haunted me throughout my PhD.

When I think about those years, I certainly remember learning survival analysis, causal inference, health economics, epidemiology, and policy evaluation. I remember the advisors who pushed me harder than I would have pushed myself, and the conversations that clarified what months of solitary reading could not. But I also remember something else with equal clarity.

I remember deadlines that forced focus.

I remember bureaucracy that consumed time.

I remember the quiet fear that a committee member’s opinion could determine months of my life.

I remember signatures that sometimes mattered more than understanding.

I remember constantly managing expectations, personalities, and the strange emotional economy of academia, where confidence can become entangled with the approval of people who hold real power over your future.

I do not say this to criticize any particular professor. Most of mine wanted me to succeed. Some were remarkably generous. Others challenged me in ways that made my work stronger.

But that is still different from asking where my knowledge came from.

Did it come from the institution?

Or did it come from the books I forced myself to read because I was afraid of failing—and, later, because I needed to understand?

Did it come from the classroom?

Or did it come from the hundreds of nights spent wrestling with ideas until they finally became my own?

These are not the same thing.

The university created the conditions under which I had to learn. It created the deadlines, the examinations, the incentives, the hierarchy, the consequences, and ultimately the certification. It placed me in the path of people and resources I would not otherwise have encountered.

The understanding itself was something I had to build, largely alone.

That is why my feelings at the end of this journey are strangely divided.

I am deeply proud of what I know.

I am much less certain that I am proud of how I was made to acquire it.

There is a difference between being challenged and being worn down. Somewhere along the way, I learned an enormous amount about research. I also learned about fear, hierarchy, the politics of evaluation, and the subtle ways institutions can convince us that our worth depends on someone else’s judgment.

Perhaps all of that was unavoidable.

Perhaps it was not.

I honestly do not know.

What I do know is that now, for the first time in many years, I can return to books that nobody assigned to me. I can follow an idea because it refuses to leave me alone rather than because it will appear on an exam. I can spend an entire afternoon thinking without feeling guilty that I should be producing something for someone else’s approval.

That is not the beginning of my education. It is the end of my supervision.

The university never taught me. It only made it impossible to quit. I am grateful for that. I should not have to be.

Outer Beauty Hiding in the Garbage

A friend of mine made that exact argument in a recent post of hers, and it is what got me thinking about this photo in the first place. Beauty is inside, not outside. It is a fine sentiment, and I do not disagree with it. But I think there is a colder system running underneath that sentiment, one the “beauty is inside” line does not touch.

Here is my real claim: this photo did not spread because people found inner beauty. It spread because people found outer beauty in a place they did not expect it, and outer beauty is worth something. It has value, like money has value. Women wear makeup because looking a certain way earns them something socially. This girl is being shared for the same reason. Her value was just found raw, sitting in poverty, instead of built with product. That is what made her shareable. Not virtue. A find. Someone scrolled past a hundred faces and stopped at hers the way a shopper stops at a good item on a shelf, and the stopping got called reverence. Nobody stops scrolling for a poor girl who is just a poor girl. They stop for a poor girl who is also worth something.

The Real Price of Admission

We only notice a problem in the world when the person suffering it can offer us something back. A poor kid singing on the street gets attention because someone imagines a future star, not because a kid is suffering. Talent is the ticket in. Without it, nobody is filming.

This girl got in on beauty instead of talent, but it is the same door. Everyone looking at her is running the same thought without saying it: she could be a model. She could become something else. She deserves to be pulled out of poverty because she is pretty. That is the part nobody says out loud, but it is in every share. Her looks became the reason to care. As if the exact same poverty, on a less photogenic face, would not have earned a single share.

Poverty Is Only Wrong for the Pretty Ones

Nobody’s attention actually landed on her poverty. It landed on her face, and her poverty was just the background it happened to be sitting in front of. So the reaction underneath all this sharing was never “poverty is wrong.” It was “poverty is wrong for someone like her.” And once you say poverty is only wrong for someone like her, you have quietly said something else too: that everyone standing in that same poverty without her face has not earned the same objection.

Reading the Comments: They’re Not Hiding It

You do not even have to guess at this. Read the comments. “Bring her to Addis Ababa.” Someone is already picturing her somewhere else, photographed against a nicer background. Others write that beauty like hers “shouldn’t have to suffer,” as if the suffering only becomes a real injustice once it happens to someone who qualifies. Nobody is raising money for the kid standing next to her who is just as poor and not smiling for the camera. The comments are not hiding this logic. They are saying it plainly.

The Makeup Shame Game

There is a second insult buried in here too, and it is aimed at women. The whole point of posts like this is to make a comparison: look at her, natural, no effort, beautiful anyway. Not like you, with your makeup. But that comparison breaks its own logic. If a woman does not naturally match this exact standard, and cannot get there through effort alone, she will use makeup to build it herself. That is not vanity. That is someone playing the same game everyone else is already playing. The same crowd that just praised a poor girl for her face is, in the next post, mocking a woman for trying to build the face she was not given.

She Deserves Better - Looks Shouldn’t Matter

So this photo is not really a statement against surface-level beauty standards. It is one more surface-level beauty standard, just wearing a poverty backdrop so it can pass as a moral lesson instead of what it actually is: people sorting a person for what she is worth, and calling the sorting kindness.

She does not need to be beautiful to deserve better than that poverty. That she is only being noticed because she is beautiful, that is the actual problem.

Thanks!

A man believes he is investigating a mystery. He thinks he is a U.S. Marshal sent to a psychiatric hospital on a remote island to find a missing patient. The more he investigates, the more the world around him feels staged. People deny things he is sure he has seen. Conversations seem scripted. Facts move. Everyone around him appears to know something he does not.

The horror is not that he may be losing his mind. The horror is that his reality is being managed by other people.

The film gives this a clinical explanation. The man is a patient. The performance around him is therapy, an attempt to return him to a truth too painful to accept. That makes the story tragic instead of merely paranoid. The manipulation is not done to destroy him. It is done, supposedly, to heal him. But notice what that explanation requires. It requires deciding, on his behalf, that he cannot be trusted with the truth directly. That decision is made by people who love him.

That is the part that survives the plot twist.

Because we do this. Not with doctors and staged investigations. Not with an institution built around one person’s delusion. In softer, quieter, more acceptable ways.

We manage each other’s realities.

We decide what someone can handle. We decide what should be said directly and what should stay unsaid. We soften things. We perform normalcy in front of someone while carrying a different understanding of them in private. We call this tact. Sometimes it is.

And when the person is not there, we speak more freely.

That is where gossip gets interesting.

Gossip is usually treated as a cheap moral failure, and sometimes it is. Boredom looking for a victim. Cruelty dressed as concern. But gossip is also one of the ways human beings verify reality.

You notice something about someone. A contradiction. A pattern. A blindness in them. But you are not sure you are seeing clearly, so you ask someone else, quietly: did you notice that too? Am I wrong, or was that strange?

A small social reality forms. Two people compare perceptions. Then three. A version of the absent person begins to exist in the minds of others. They are interpreted, diagnosed, excused, mocked, protected, managed.

The person at the center of this has no access to any of it.

They do not hear the case against them. They do not get to explain themselves inside the conversation where they are being explained. They become an object of interpretation, not a participant in interpretation.

That is the uncomfortable part. Because in that moment we are not simply talking about someone. We are deciding what reality they are allowed to enter. We are deciding whether they can be trusted with how they are seen.

Sometimes this is not evil. Some people cannot receive criticism without turning it into war. Some people do not want clarity; they want victory. Telling them the truth just hands them another tool to distort yours. So we get careful. We say less. We speak elsewhere.

A world of total honesty would be unbearable. Civilization runs on tact, timing, mercy. There are truths that need softening because people are fragile.

But a world built entirely on management is also unbearable. When everyone is managing everyone, dignity disappears quietly. Nobody is confronted, but nobody is fully respected either. People are protected from the truth, and excluded from it, in the same motion.

Art gives us something life withholds. In the film we see the structure from above. Who knows what. Who is performing. Who is trapped and who is maintaining the trap. We get to look at the architecture without defending ourselves.

In life we are inside the architecture. We do not know which conversations about us are happening elsewhere, which version of us is circulating, when someone is protecting us and when they are simply controlling us.

And naming it does not help. Say “you are managing my reality” and hear back: you are being paranoid. Say “you are hiding what you think of me” and hear back: I am just keeping the peace. Say “you gossip because you will not confront me” and hear back: we are just trying to understand what happened.

The painful thing is they may not be wrong.

That is what makes this so hard. We need other people to confirm the world. None of us lives by private perception alone. We borrow sanity from each other. But the same people who help us verify reality can distort it, exclude us from it, build an interpretation of us and act on it before we ever get a say.

The thing that keeps us sane is the same thing that can make us doubt ourselves.

So the question is not whether we manage each other’s realities. Of course we do, all of us, even when we will not admit it. The question is narrower and harder: when does tact become deception. When does protection become control. When does gossip become a trial the defendant never hears about.

There is no clean line. People cannot survive without concealment. But they cannot flourish when concealment becomes the main language between them either.

Somewhere in there is the actual test, and it is not honesty versus silence. It is whether the silence is still serving the person it claims to protect, or has quietly started serving the person keeping it.

Shutter Island makes this visible because it is extreme: a man surrounded by people who know more about his reality than he does, arranged and performed in the name of his own good.

Ordinary life just runs the same script at a lower volume. A family that never says what everyone already knows. A friend group that has already reached its verdict and still smiles. A workplace where a reputation gets decided in a room someone never enters. A relationship where both people perform peace while building separate versions of what happened.

We watch the movie and see the cruelty instantly.

In life we call it maturity, and go back to editing each other in rooms we do not let each other into.

A thought experiment

I want to explain money in a way that feels intuitive. The usual method starts with money and then explains the economy. I want to do the opposite. I want to imagine an economy before money exists, watch the problems appear, and then introduce money as the solution.

This is not a technical model. It is a thought experiment. The goal is to help you feel what money is doing.

1. The Small Community Without Money

Imagine a large house, a farm, and a small group of people living together.

One person cooks. Another farms. Another builds furniture. Another repairs tools. Another teaches the children. Everybody has a role.

In this small community, money is not necessary. Everybody can see what everybody else is doing. The cook knows the farmer is growing food. The farmer knows the carpenter is building beds. If someone is sick, people know. If someone is lazy, people also know.

The economy runs on memory and trust. People contribute according to their ability and receive according to their needs. The community remembers who is helping.

Money is not yet needed because the community is small enough to act as its own witness.

2. The First Problem: The Community Gets Too Big

Now the community grows. Instead of 10 people, there are 500. Then 5,000. Then 5 million.

The cook no longer knows the carpenter. The shopkeeper does not know whether the person asking for bread has ever contributed anything.

This is the first problem: verification.

If I ask the baker for bread, the baker may ask, "What have you done for the community?"

I may say, "I dug three holes yesterday."

But how does the baker know that is true? Maybe I am lying. Maybe I did the work but already used it to get something else. Maybe my three holes were worth very little, while someone else built a bridge or treated the sick.

The community now faces hard questions. Who contributed? How much? Was it useful? Have they already been paid? How do we compare one kind of work to another?

This is the problem money begins to solve.

3. The Central Office

Before money, imagine the community tries something else. It creates a central office.

Every time someone works, the office records it. Filmon dug three holes. Sara repaired a roof. Dawit treated five patients. Miriam spent six months studying engineering.

When Filmon goes to the baker, the baker calls the office. "Did Filmon contribute?"

"Yes. He dug three holes."

"How much is that worth?"

"Maybe two loaves."

So the baker hands over two loaves. Later, Filmon asks the carpenter for a chair. The carpenter calls the office too.

"Yes, Filmon contributed. But he already spent that contribution on bread."

So the carpenter refuses.

This system could work in theory. In practice it is a nightmare. Every transaction requires a phone call. Every shopkeeper becomes an investigator. Every person must prove themselves again and again. The economy drowns in verification.

The community needs something simpler. It needs a portable record of contribution.

That record is money.

4. What Money Is

Money is not just paper, coins, or numbers in a bank account.

Money is a portable certificate of recognized claim. It is society saying: this person has contributed value, or has been trusted to contribute value, and therefore may claim the work of others.

Money replaces the central office. Instead of the baker calling to verify me, I hand the baker money. The certificate carries the evidence. The baker does not need to know whether I dug holes, taught students, or wrote code. The baker only needs to trust the paper.

One honest caution before going further. Money certifies claims, not virtue. An inheritance, a lucky bet, and a stolen wallet all spend exactly like a surgeon's wages. The certificate records that society owes you something. It does not record why. Keep that gap in mind. Much of politics lives inside it.

Still, in the ordinary run of life, money works as a witness. If I fix your roof and you pay me, you are certifying that I helped you. I then carry that certificate to a stranger and use it to claim bread, medicine, or shelter. My contribution in one corner of society becomes recognizable in every other corner.

That is the power of money. It makes contribution transferable.

5. Money as Portable Trust

In a small community, trust is personal. I know you. You know me.

In a large society, the baker cannot know every customer. The doctor cannot know every farmer. So money becomes trust made portable. It lets strangers cooperate without knowing each other.

And there is something deeper here. I can only pay you because someone previously paid me. The certificate I hand you came from someone who recognized my work. You will pass it to someone who helped you.

Money is a chain of social recognition. Someone helped someone, who helped someone else, and the certificate keeps moving as the witness of every exchange.

6. Value Is Not Equal

Not all contributions are the same. One person digs holes. Another performs surgery. Another spends years training. Another invents a machine that makes everyone's work easier.

The community has to compare them, and this is hard. Some work requires long training. Some carries risk. Some is unpleasant but necessary. Some is rare.

Money is the tool through which society attempts the comparison. It does this imperfectly. Societies often reward useless things too much and vital things too little. But the function remains: money answers the question of how much of society's goods a person can claim.

7. Inflation: Too Many Claims, Not Enough Reality

Inflation is usually explained as prices going up. That describes the symptom, not the disease.

Here is the disease. Inflation happens when claims on goods grow faster than the goods themselves.

Imagine the community holds 100 loaves, 50 chairs, and 10 doctors. But people are walking around with certificates claiming 500 loaves, 200 chairs, and 40 doctors. The paper has multiplied. Reality has not.

So people compete for the limited goods. Prices rise. Each certificate claims less than it used to.

Money says, "I represent value." The economy answers, "Where is the value?" If the value is not there, money weakens. Inflation is what happens when the certificates outgrow the productive reality behind them.

8. Credit: Claims on the Future

Now someone in the community has an idea. "I want to build a telephone."

The telephone does not exist yet. While building it, this person grows no food, makes no furniture, treats no patients. They consume while their contribution is still a promise.

Why would society support them? Because if the telephone works, everyone benefits. The future value may exceed the present cost.

This is credit. Credit is society saying: we will give you a claim now because we believe you will create value later. It treats future contribution as if it already had present weight.

If the telephone succeeds, the whole community gets richer and the strain was worth it. If it fails, society issued a claim against value that never arrived.

Credit is always a bet on the future. It is real as trust. It is not yet real as production. It is justified only if the future actually pays.

9. Investment: Feeding the Future

Investment follows the same logic at every scale. A student trains for years instead of producing. A company borrows to build a factory. A government builds roads before the economy can use them.

In each case, society takes resources from the present and says, "We believe this will create more value later." That is why investment can create growth, and why bad investment creates waste and inflation instead.

The question is never simply, did we spend? The question is: did the spending create real future capacity? If yes, the economy grows. If no, it weakens.

Banks sit inside this machinery. A bank is not a building where money sleeps. It is an institution that moves claims across time, taking certificates that are idle today and lending them to someone who promises production tomorrow. When banks judge well, the future arrives. When they judge badly, the system fills with claims that nothing will ever honor.

Government money runs on the same principle at the largest scale. The state can tax, spend, and declare what counts as legal money. But even the state's certificate depends on trust: trust that others will accept it, that taxes will be collected in it, and that the economy behind it will keep producing.

10. Exchange Rates: Money Between Communities

Now imagine two communities. One grows wheat. The other grows potatoes. Each has its own certificates.

If I work in the potato community, I earn potato certificates. Back home, those papers prove I contributed somewhere else, not here. Why should my community honor them?

Because the potato community produces things we want. If those certificates can be cashed for potatoes, tools, or machines, they become useful to us too.

That is foreign exchange. An exchange rate is a comparison between the trust and usefulness of two communities' certificates. A community that produces what others want, and can be trusted to keep functioning, has strong money. A community that produces little, or cannot be trusted, has weak money.

This is why the dollar is strong. Not because the paper is magical, but because the economy behind it keeps producing, trading, enforcing contracts, and making things the world wants. And it is why people in unstable economies hoard foreign currency. They are not choosing another country's paper. They are choosing another country's reliability.

Trade follows naturally. When communities exchange goods, they are really exchanging claims on each other's productive abilities. Money just makes the exchange fluid.

11. What Money Is Not

Money is not wealth.

Wealth is the food, housing, medicine, machines, roads, skills, and human cooperation that money can command. Money is only the claim on that wealth. Confuse the two and everything else in economics becomes confusing. Keep them separate and everything becomes clearer.

12. The Portable Witness

So here is the best way to think about money.

Money is a portable witness. It testifies that someone has contributed, or that society trusts them to contribute. It lets strangers cooperate. It replaces personal verification with a system. It carries contribution across people, places, and time.

But a witness is only as credible as what it testifies to. If people stop producing, money weakens. If trust collapses, money weakens. If claims multiply without value behind them, money weakens.

Money is not an economic object. It is a social technology. It is society's way of saying: you have helped, or we trust that you will, and therefore you may now ask others to help you.

That is what money is. Not wealth. A certificate of claim on the living productivity of a community.

But I am not sure it is that clean.

When I set a limit, I am not only saying that something has crossed a line. I am also saying that this is as far as I can go. This is the end of my patience. This is the end of my tenderness. This is the end of my ability to remain open.

That part bothers me.

Because life is full of examples where patience reveals something. Some understanding arrives only because we stayed a little longer. Some insight opens the world only because we were patient enough, courageous enough, or vulnerable enough to wait past the first injury.

So what if the limit protected me, but also stopped me from discovering something? What if a little more patience would have opened another door? What if there was something on the other side that I will never know now because I reached the end of myself too early?

I do not know.

Maybe the limit was necessary. Maybe it was also narrow. Maybe both are true. That is the part that makes it feel, to me, like grief and not only protection.

A limit can save us. But it can also show us the border of our own capacity. And sometimes the loss is not only what happened. It is also not knowing what might have happened if we had been able to carry a little more.

I was an annoyingly inquisitive child. I loved asking questions, not because I wanted to make people uncomfortable, at least not at first, but because I genuinely wanted to understand how things worked. Later, of course, I think I also started asking adults questions just to see if I could catch them getting something wrong. There was a little mischief in it. Adults seemed to know everything, so discovering the limits of their answers was its own kind of entertainment.

Some of my earliest memorable questions were the kinds of questions almost every child asks. Like, what happens when we die?

My mom would tell me that if you are righteous, you go to heaven, and if you are not, you go to hell. And I would ask, “What then?”

She would say, “Then you live forever.”

And I would ask, “But what then?”

I do not think foreverness made sense to me. It was supposed to be the end of the explanation, but to me it sounded like another thing that needed explaining. If something continues forever, then surely something is still happening, and if something is still happening, then why can’t I still ask what happens next?

I would do this with other questions too. I remember asking what happens if a person has no father or mother and then dies. Who takes all his property? Someone told me, “The government.” And I was like, okay, fine, the government. Then I would ask what happens to a person who cannot see and cannot hear. How would he live? How would he know things? I do not remember the answer, but I remember pushing it further until I asked, “What happens if a person cannot see, cannot hear, and cannot breathe?”

My mom looked at me and said, “Then he is dead.”

And I was like, oh. Yeah. Fair enough.

But one of the childhood questions that keeps coming back to me began with something we were taught in elementary school. We were told that water is colorless, that it does not have its own color, that it takes the color of whatever contains it or surrounds it. I remember sitting with that explanation and immediately wondering, okay, but if water is colorless, why do lakes and oceans look blue?

The moment I asked that question, I almost answered it for myself. Oh, maybe it is reflecting the sky. That felt satisfying. Water is colorless, the sky is blue, the ocean reflects the sky, and that is why the ocean looks blue. It felt like one of those small childhood victories where the world briefly clicks into place.

But of course, the answer only moved the question upward.

Because then I had to ask: why is the sky blue?

Even before I got to the physics of that, there was another question about the sky that bothered me. If the sky is endless, or at least if it does not have a visible ceiling, why does it look like a dome above us? Why does it appear as if we are sitting under some enormous curved roof?

I did not want to just ask someone and receive an answer. I wanted to see if I could figure it out. And eventually, the answer that made sense to me was that the dome is not necessarily in the sky. It is in the limitation of our perception. We cannot see infinitely in all directions. There is a limit to how far our sight can travel, and because that limit feels roughly equal in every direction from where we stand, the boundary of our vision creates the illusion of a dome. It is almost like standing at the center of a hemisphere whose radius is not a physical wall, but the limit of your own sight.

That fascinated me because it meant the world does not always appear to us simply as it is. Sometimes appearance is produced by the relationship between the world and the limits of our perception. The sky does not need to be shaped like a dome for us to experience it as one. Our seeing gives it that shape.

Then, later, I came across the scientific explanation for why the sky appears blue. Light enters the atmosphere, different wavelengths scatter differently, and blue light, because of its shorter wavelength, scatters more than many other colors. So the sky appears blue to us, not because the sky is blue like a painted wall is blue, but because of the way light behaves in the atmosphere.

That explanation satisfied the science part of my brain for a while, but it also opened another door. Because then the question became: okay, but what is blueness?

What does it actually mean for something to be blue?

That is where the question stopped being about water, or the ocean, or the sky, and became about perception and language. When I say the sky is blue, and you say the sky is blue, how do I know that what you experience inside your mind is the same thing I experience inside mine? I can point to the sky and say “blue,” and you can also say “blue,” and we can agree with each other, but that agreement does not prove that your inner experience of blue is identical to mine. It only proves that we have learned to use the word in a consistent way.

That was the part that eventually led me, in my very limited and probably oversimplified understanding, to Wittgenstein. What struck me was this idea that language does not require us to have identical subjective experiences. It requires shared use. It requires consistency. If my internal experience of what we both call “blue” is actually what you would experience as “red,” communication does not necessarily break down, as long as we both consistently use the word “blue” for the same object in the world.

That was such a strange and beautiful realization to me. Language is not some perfect bridge between identical inner worlds. It is more like a practice, a game, a shared system of reference. We do not need direct access to each other’s minds in order to communicate. We need enough consistency between us so that our words can function.

And I find it funny that I got there from water.

I started with a school lesson: water is colorless. Then I asked why oceans are blue. Then the answer became the sky. Then I asked why the sky is blue. Then the answer became light. Then I asked why the sky looks like a dome. Then the answer became perception. Then I asked what blue even means. Then the question became language.

That is what I love about curiosity. Questions do not stay where they begin. A question can start as a little childhood trick, something you ask your mother just to see where the explanation stops, but if you keep following it, the whole landscape changes underneath you. What begins as a question about water becomes a question about the sky, then about light, then about perception, then about language, and finally about how human beings manage to communicate with one another without ever fully entering each other’s private experience of the world.

Maybe that is why these memories keep returning to me. They remind me that thinking is not just about finding answers. It is about watching a question transform. It is about realizing that the ordinary things we were taught as children are often sitting on top of deeper mysteries, and that sometimes the smallest question, if you follow it honestly enough, can take you much farther than you expected.

Sometimes all of that begins with a child looking at water and wondering why something colorless looks blue.

They send you to the shop. You do not yet have a concept for what you are doing. You are not thinking about familial roles or social reproduction. You just know that if you refuse, something shifts in the house. The air changes. Someone is inconvenienced in a way that is immediately, personally visible to you. That is how responsibility gets built. Not through lectures. Through proximity. Through being inside a circle small enough that you can see how the gears turn and feel when they stop.

That education is real. It is one of the most honest educations a person can receive. It teaches you that labor is actual, that resources are limited, that every mess has a cost and that cost lands on someone specific. It teaches you, without using the word, that you are inside a system, that the system depends on people, and that your presence or absence inside it has weight.

At the same time, something else is being installed.

Through the television, through the way adults lower their voices, through the sheer untouchable distance of them, you are introduced to God and the president. And here is what nobody tells you, because nobody knows to tell you: these figures arrive in your mind through a completely different channel than the family did. The family was legible. You could see the sheets. You could see your mother’s hands. You could trace the line from your action to its consequence. But the president exists at a distance that makes him illegible by design. You cannot see what he does. You cannot see what he cannot do. What fills that gap is not knowledge. It is feeling. And the feeling is omnipotence.

Nobody teaches you this. It is not a lesson. It is an atmosphere. And atmospheres are harder to unlearn than lessons because you never knew you were breathing them.

When I was growing up, I had a friend who was dead serious about becoming president one day. I never understood it at the time. Looking back, I understand it completely. Being president, in the imagination of a child, means unlimited lolly ice. It means saying a thing and watching the world rearrange itself. It means will without friction. That is not a childish misunderstanding of politics. That is the logical conclusion of an education in power that gave you the family on one side and the president on the other and never explained the relationship between them, never said here is what this person can actually do, here is what they cannot, here is the machinery between their decisions and your life.

The circles of our lives kept expanding. Family, neighborhood, school, nation. And at every stage, a real education in power would have expanded with them. It would have said: as the circle gets wider, the accountability gets more complex, the limitations get harder, the distance between a decision and its consequence gets longer. It would have taught us to think institutionally. Instead, the imagination stayed frozen. The circles got bigger. The thinking stayed the same size. We carried the child’s understanding of the president into adult political life and dressed it in more sophisticated language.

You can see it everywhere once you know what you are looking at. The extravagance of the praise when something goes right. The totality of the blame when something goes wrong. The way political analysis in Eritrea collapses almost immediately into questions of character. Is he strong? Is he one of us? Does he want what is good for us? Those are not political questions. They are the questions of a child trying to decide if the adult in charge can be trusted. They keep the analysis at the level of the person and away from the level of the institution. Away from: what are the actual limits of this office, who holds it accountable, what happens when it fails. Those questions require a different education than the one we got.

I did not understand any of this until I graduated and ended up, for the first time, close enough to see inside the machinery. And what I saw was not power. It was people. Confused, constrained, often incompetent people doing their best to maintain a performance of authority in front of a population conditioned since childhood to receive that performance as fact. I had to teach myself economics. I had to teach myself governance and administration from scratch, not out of ambition but because nothing I was seeing made sense until I did. Lowering the price of bread is not a matter of will. Running a country is not a matter of will. It is a negotiation between ten things that cannot all be satisfied at once, with inadequate tools, incomplete information, and real consequences for getting it wrong. None of that was ever said to us.

What hit me hardest was not the incompetence, though there was plenty of it. It was the recognition. Because from inside the machinery, the state looked exactly like the family. People trying to manage something larger than them, with tools that were never quite right, making judgment calls in the dark, sometimes failing badly. The omnipotence was gone. What was left was just difficulty. Ordinary, unglamorous, human difficulty. The same difficulty I had watched the women of my house manage every single day without anyone calling it governance.

That should not have been a revelation. It should have been obvious. It would have been obvious, if the curriculum had ever thought to say it.

Here is what I think that curriculum failure actually costs us. A population that understands power as omnipotence does not ask structural questions. It asks personal ones. And personal questions are safe questions, from the perspective of a system that does not want to be examined. You can debate the character of a leader forever without once threatening the structure that produced him. You can praise him or condemn him, worship him or despise him, and the institution behind him remains exactly as it was, unexamined, unaccountable, intact. The frozen political imagination is not just an intellectual failure. It is a political condition that someone benefits from maintaining.

What we needed was not a different set of figures to admire. We needed a curriculum that kept pace with the world we were actually living in. Not ideology. Just honesty. Here is what this institution does. Here is what it cannot do. Here is where the accountability sits. Here is why the person at the top is not God. Here is why that is not a disappointing fact but a clarifying one. The clarification is the whole point. You cannot hold power accountable if you think power is infinite. You cannot design better institutions if you think the problem is always the individual inside them.

The family taught us the truth about power at the only scale where the truth was unavoidable. It taught us that someone always pays the cost. It taught us that the system needs you, and that your refusal has consequences, and that the labor is real even when it is invisible. That was the beginning of a civic education. The most important beginning. And then it stopped.

We learned that someone washes the sheets. We were never taught to ask who washes the country.

ዳዊት፥ካብ ሶኒ ክሳብ ዓርቢ፥ ፍርቂ መዓልቲ 'ሚነዋለ' እናሰርሐ እዩ፥ ነብሱ ዝጥውር ነይሩ። ኣብ ቀዳመ ሰንበት ክኣ ተወላዊሉ፥ ንተስፋ ብተስፋ ይነብር። ደቀንስትዮ ‘ውን ይፈቱ ነይሩ እዩ። ኩሉ'ኳ እንተዘይተባህለ፥ ብዙሕ ካብ ዕላላትና ብዛዕብአን እዩ ነይሩ 😉። ዝነብረላ ገዛ፥ ጸባብ 3 ብ 3 ሜትሮ ኮይና፥ ክፋል ናይ ሓደ ፍርቁ ተሰሪሑ ዘይተወድአ ህንጻ እያ ነይራ። እቲ ዝነብረሉ ከባቢ መብራህቲ ስለዘይነበሮ፥ ሽምዓን ፋኑስን እናበራረየ እዩ ዝጥቀም። ዕላላቱ ንዝተወሰነ እዋን ዳርጋ ወልፊ ኮይኑኒ ነይሩ።

እዋን ፈተና ኣብ ዝቐርበሉ ግዜ፥ ሓቢርና ክነጽንዕ ይደሊ ነይሩ። ምስ ሰብ ምጽናዕ፥ ከም ከመይ ከም ዝካወን ክሳብ ሕጂ ኣፍልጦ 'ብለይን። ምስ ዓርከ መሓዛ ተራኺብካ፥ ካብ ጥራዝ ምግንጻል፥ ኣብ ዕላልን ወኻዕኻዕን ግዜኻ ምብኻን ይቐልል። ምስ ከም በዓል ዳዊት ዓይነት 'ኣስኳብሊታት' ከኣ ከምኡ ምግባር ዝያዳ የወናውን።

ዳዊት፥ ወረኛ ጥራሕ ኣይነበረን። ንፉዕ ከሻኒ'ውን እዩ ነይሩ። ሓቂ 'ሓይሽ፥ ዳርጋ ኩሉ ግዜ፥ ሓንቲ ዓይነት መግቢ እዩ ዝሰርሕ። ንዓኣ ግን ግርም ገይሩ እዩ ዝመልካ።ብቐጣና ምስ ባኒ ይፍትፍታ። ክብርሆ እንከሎ፥ ብፍላይ ኣነ ኣብ ዝመጸሉ እዋን፥ ክልተ ወይ ሰለስተ እንቋቕሖ ወቒዑ ብላዕሊ ይደፍኣላ። ዋጋ ኮሚደረን ሽጉቲን ክቕንስ እንከሎ ድማ፥ ኣሕፊሱ ይኽሽና። ሽዑ ከም 'ስጎ' መሰነይታ ፓስታ ትኸውን። ፓስታ፥ ብብዙሓት ከም መግቢ 'ኣስካቡሊ' እዩ ዝቑጸር ። ኣነ ግን በዚ ኣይሰማማዕን እየ። ብዓይነትን መቛስይትን ብዝተፈላለየ መልክዕ ክቀርብ ይኽእል ይኸውን። መግቢ 'ኣስካቡሊታት' ግን፥ ብዓንደ ርእሱ ስልሲ እዩ!

ግዜ ሓሊፉ ድሕሪ ነዊሕ ፥ ብሰበሰብ ኣብ ኣዲስ ኣበባ ከም ዘሎ ሰሚዐ። ነገር ዕድል ኮይኑ፥ ወረኡን ቁጽሪ ቴለፎንን ብሓደ ረኺበ። ድሕሪ ነዊሕ ዓመታት ካልኣይ ግዜ ተራኺብና። ናብ ገዝኡ ዓዲሙኒ። ሰዓታት ምሳሕ ስለዝነበረ፥ ካብ ኣብ ደገ፥ ኣብ ገዛ ክነዕልል ወሰንና። እታ ዝነብረላ ገዛ፥ ዘይከምታ ናይ ኣስመራ፥ ገፋሕ ስቱድዮ ኮይና፥ ማይን መብራህትን ውን ሳሕቲ እንተዘይኮይኑ ከም ዘየቋርጽ ነጊሩኒ። ኣብታ ናይ ኣስመራ ገዝኡ፥ 'ቡሉኬቲ' ከም መንበር ይጥቀም ነይሩ። ሕጂ ግን ከም ሰቡ 'L-shaped’ ኣብ ኣዲስ ኣበባ ልሙድ ዝኾነ ዓይነት ሶፋ እዩ ዝጥቀም። ፊት ንፊቱ ድማ ንእሽቶ 'ፍላት ስክሪን' ተለቭዥን ትርአ። ርኡይ ለውጢ!

'ምሳሕ'ዶ ንኣክል ፊሊ ዓርከይ? ጀዊዑካ ከይህሉ?' ሓተተኒ። 'ኮይሶም' መለስክሉ። ሽዑ፥ ምሳሕ ክቀራርብ፥ ምስ ጀመረ፥ ቀደም ዝፈልጣ ሽታ ገዝኡ ሃንገፍ በለትኒ። ሽታ ስልሲ!

"ኣታ ዳዊት፥ ክሳብ ሕጂ ነዛ ስልሲ ኣይፋረግካያን?" ከም ሓውሲ ዳእላ ሰሓቅ ኣሰንየ ክድህሎ ፈተንኩ።

"ኦይ . . . ፊሊ ዓርከይ፥ ናብራ ስደት ብዙሕ መለሳ የቡሉን። እታ ስልሲ ንሳ እያ። ኣብኡ ቀጣን፥ ኣብዚ ሓፋስ። ንሱ ጥራሕ'ዩ እቲ ፍልልይ።" መለሰለይ።

ከስሕቐኒ ድዩ ፈቲኑ ወይስ የስተማስል ርግጸኛ ኣይነበርኩን። "ሓቅኻ ንሱስ" መለስኩሉ።

ኣፍኲሰ ድማ ሰሓቕኩ!

I have always wanted to write about one of those things. Not as a historian. Not as someone trying to correct the official record. But as someone who grew up inside one of the silences produced by that history.

I was born after the long war for Eritrean independence, at a time when the country was still learning how to narrate itself. The story around us was clear: the fighters had returned victorious, the martyrs had given everything, the Derg had been defeated, Ethiopia had been expelled, and Eritrea had finally become itself.

That was the public story.

But there were children like me who lived in the shadow of that story.

We were children born to Eritrean mothers and Ethiopian fathers, or fathers who were assumed to be Ethiopian soldiers, civil servants, teachers, or men who had come during the previous political order and later disappeared. Some left before we were born. Some were killed. Some returned to Ethiopia. Some were simply erased from the child’s life. In many cases, the mothers stayed behind and raised the children alone.

There was no official law that marked us. No document that said we were less Eritrean. No government form that named our wound. But society does not need a law to produce shame. Sometimes all it needs is a story powerful enough to decide who belongs fully and who belongs with hesitation.

We were called Wodi Amharay

The son of the Amhara. The son of Ethiopia. The son of the defeated side.

It did not matter whether the father was actually Amhara. It did not matter whether he was a soldier or a teacher. It did not matter whether the child had ever met him. It did not matter whether the child knew a single street in Ethiopia, spoke Amharic, or felt any emotional connection to Ethiopia at all. The category was already waiting.

And once that category existed, childhood became complicated.

For other children, Eritrean identity was celebratory. It came with pride, flags, songs, martyrs, heroes, victory, and the moral clarity of liberation. To be Eritrean was to belong to the side that had sacrificed, endured, and won.

But what does that story do to a child whose father is associated, even vaguely, with the defeated enemy?

What does national pride feel like when the enemy in the story has your father’s face, even if you never knew that face?

I did not know my father. My mother was pregnant when he left. I grew up with her, like many children in similar situations. She was Eritrean. My life was Eritrean. My language, my neighborhood, my memories, my suffering, my schooling, my imagination, all of it was Eritrean. And yet there was always a limit. There was always some invisible border beyond which I could not claim belonging without feeling exposed.

The strange thing is that I did not feel Ethiopian either. I never did. In fact, as a child, I hated that part of me because it felt imposed. It felt like a stain I did not earn, did not choose, and could not remove. I was not confused because I did not know who I was. That is not what identity crisis means to me anymore.

Identity crisis is not simply confusion about the self.

Sometimes identity crisis means society has no dignified category for you to stand in.

You know who you are, but the available categories are humiliating. You exist, but the story has no honorable place for your existence. You belong biologically, socially, and emotionally to a place, but symbolically you are treated as a problem.

That was the crisis.

In school, the question of fatherhood was always dangerous. Teachers could casually ask, “Where is your father?” or “Call your father.” For many children, that question was normal. For me, it opened a hole in the floor.

What was I supposed to say?

That I did not know him?

That he was Ethiopian?

That he was dead, even though I did not know if he was dead?

Sometimes I said he was dead because death was easier than explanation. Death gave the story dignity. Ethiopia did not.

Everyone in the neighborhood knew, of course. These things were rarely spoken directly, but they were known. That was part of the cruelty. The knowledge stayed in the background, waiting. People did not always use it, but you knew it could be used. It was your vulnerability, stored quietly in the community.

There is one memory that stayed with me, even though I only understood its full meaning much later.

In junior school, there was a family event. Parents came to the school. My mother was there. That day, I was one of the children being celebrated. I had received three prestigious awards consecutively. People were surprised and proud. Neighbors were happy. Some hugged me. One older man even gave me money out of joy. To the outside eye, it was a beautiful moment.

Recently, my mother told me what she overheard that day. The same old man, after celebrating me, said something like: “But that child, nobody knows who his father is.”

That sentence stayed with her. And when she told me, it explained something I had carried for years without fully naming it.

I have never loved the spotlight, even when I did well. From elementary school onward, I was often seen as a smart kid. I received praise. I stood out. But standing out also meant being seen, and being seen meant inviting the question behind the praise: Who is this child? Whose son is he?

Achievement did not protect me from shame. Sometimes achievement brought shame closer, because it made people curious about lineage.

That is a very specific kind of wound. You are praised for what you do, but reminded that your origin is still questionable. You are celebrated as a child, but not fully situated as someone’s legitimate continuation. Even success becomes unstable because it exposes the missing father.

And this was not only a private family issue. It was connected to the national atmosphere.

After independence, Eritrea built much of its identity around the memory of struggle and victory. That was understandable. A country had been born through sacrifice. People had died. Families had lost everything. The martyrs deserved remembrance. The fighters deserved recognition.

But national stories can become cruel when they leave no space for those who do not fit neatly inside them.

There were children of fighters, children of martyrs, children whose family history placed them comfortably inside the heroic national narrative. I went to school with many of them. Their fathers’ absence, when present, could be turned into honor. A dead fighter father could become a source of pride.

But what about the child whose absent father belonged to the wrong side of the story?

What kind of silence is that child supposed to inherit?

The war with Ethiopia made this even worse. During those moments, suspicion sharpened. Ethiopian identity became not just foreign, but dangerous. People who were known to be Ethiopian or associated with Ethiopia were watched, questioned, or socially marked. Even when nothing official happened to children like me, the cultural atmosphere became unbearable.

It was not only the state. It was the public sphere itself. People explained betrayal through blood. They spoke of lineage as destiny. Even the president, Isaias Afwerki, was often attacked through claims about Ethiopian ancestry. The political accusation was not only that someone was wrong, authoritarian, cruel, or destructive. The deeper insult was that he was not truly Eritrean.

That kind of politics does something devastating to a child.

It teaches you that belonging can always be revoked by origin.

It teaches you that citizenship is not enough, place is not enough, language is not enough, memory is not enough, even love is not enough. Somewhere behind all of that, blood is waiting as a weapon.

I think this is one reason I developed such a deep aversion to nationalist symbolism. Not because I hate Eritrea. I do not. My relationship with Eritrea is complicated precisely because it is the place that made me, wounded me, raised me, excluded me, and gave me the language through which I now think.

But I could never easily participate in the emotional rituals of nationalism. I could not simply hug the flag and feel complete. I could not hear the heroic story and feel only pride. I could not think of politics mainly through betrayal, sacrifice, martyrs, enemies, flags, and victory.

Those things were not emotionally accessible to me in the same way they were to others.

So I had to find another way to understand the country.

In 12th grade, I began thinking seriously about politics, but not through nationalism. I came to politics through economics. I remember reading basic economic ideas: supply and demand, banking, interest rates, employment, production, institutions. Something opened in my mind. I thought: this is how a country should be understood.

A country is not only a flag.

A country is not only a graveyard of martyrs.

A country is not only a memory of victory.

A country is an arrangement of human life. It is how people eat, work, learn, move, speak, disagree, heal, trade, build, and imagine the future. Politics began to make sense to me when I saw it through institutions, fairness, economic life, democratic systems, inclusion, and human dignity.

That became my way out.

Not out of Eritrea, but out of the prison of symbolic Eritreanism.

I could not locate myself emotionally inside the triumphant national story, but I could locate myself inside the question of how human beings should be treated. I could not build my politics on inherited pride, but I could build it on fairness. I could not worship the nation as an identity, but I could care deeply about the country as a shared human project.

This is why I am suspicious of political language that depends too much on symbolism. I do not trust politics that asks people to perform belonging before it gives them dignity. I do not trust nationalism that turns citizenship into blood purity. I do not trust public discourse that treats people as extensions of ancestry rather than as human beings with their own moral standing.

My childhood taught me that identity can be a cage when society makes it one.

It also taught me that the most honest politics begins where symbolic belonging fails.

Maybe that is why I see Eritrean politics differently. I do not ask first: Who betrayed the martyrs? Who is pure? Who is real? Who has the correct lineage? Who loves the flag enough?

I ask: What kind of society are we building? Can a child stand inside it without shame? Can a mother raise her child without carrying society’s suspicion on her back? Can citizenship be stronger than blood? Can a country make room for those born from complicated histories? Can politics become a system of dignity rather than a theater of belonging?

That is where I come from.

My politics is not detached from pain. It is born from pain. But it is also born from the refusal to let pain become hatred.

I later met my father and his family. Even then, I did not suddenly feel Ethiopian. I did not find another national identity waiting to rescue me. Ethiopia did not become home simply because blood pointed there. I see Ethiopian politics too with the same distance, the same suspicion of myth, the same refusal to confuse identity with justice.

In that sense, the wound gave me something. It stripped nationalism of its magic. It made me unable to romanticize belonging. It forced me to understand politics not as emotional inheritance, but as moral construction.

I wish I had learned that lesson more gently.

But this is the truth: some of us became politically clear because the national story never fully embraced us. We had to search for a deeper foundation than pride. We had to ask what remains when the songs, flags, fathers, martyrs, and enemies do not give you a safe place to stand.

For me, what remained was the human being.

The child before the category.

The citizen before the lineage.

The person before the nation.

That is why I write the way I write. That is why I resist the intoxication of symbolic politics. That is why I keep returning to institutions, economics, fairness, rights, and dignity. Not because these are abstract ideas, but because they are the only things that can protect people when identity becomes a weapon.

I am Eritrean. But I am not Eritrean in the simple celebratory way that some people expect. My Eritreanism passed through shame, silence, suspicion, and distance. It had to survive the fact that the nation’s emotional grammar did not know what to do with children like me.

And maybe that is why I cannot accept a politics that demands worship.

I need a politics that makes room.

Because somewhere, even now, there is a child sitting in a classroom, afraid of a simple question: “Where is your father?”

And if our national story cannot protect that child from humiliation, then the story is not complete.

ኣብ ልብ-ልብይ ቆጻሪት ሰዓት ኣላትኒ። ምስ ናይ ኢደይ ሰዓት፥ ተቐራራቢ ክበሃል ብዝከኣል ርሕቀተ-ህሞት ልፉናት እየን። ናይ ውሽጠይ ቆጻሪት፥ ምስ ሰዓት ኢደይ፥ ተጋማጋሚ ፍቕዲ እያ ትሕዘለይ። ናይ ሎሚ ግን ተፈልዩኒ።

እቲ ዘለኹዎ ክፍሊ ኣይተቐየረንን። ኮፊ ኢለዮ ዘለኹ መንበር እውን ክብደተይ ንምጻር ዛጊት ኣይሓንገደን። ፊት ንፍተይ ንዝነበረ ፈኻኽ ናይቲ መስኮት በሲዑ ዝኣቱ ዝነበረ ብርሃን፥ ኣንፍቱ ንሽሙ ጥራሕ እዩ ካብ ዝነበሮ ዛዝዩ። ይኹን'ምበር፥ ኣነ ከይፈልጥኩ፥ ፍቃደይ ከይሓተተ ገለ ዝተቐየረ ነገር ከም ዘሎ ተሰምዓኒ። ሽዑ፥ ምስ ነብሰይ ከምዚ ብምባል ኣውካእኩ . . .

"ሓደ ሓደ እዋን፥ ግዜ፥ ኣብ ምንቅስቓስ ናይ ነገራት ኣሰሩ ከይገደፈልና ክምርሽ ይኽእል'ዩ። ሓደ ሓደ እዋን፥ ስቕታና ስቕታ ግዜ እውን  ኮይኑ ዝሰማዓና እመስለኒ። ኣብቲ ዘለናዮ፥ ክንጸንሕ ብምምራጽና ጥራሕ፥ ካብ ለዋጢ ሓይሊ ህይወት እነምልጥ ይመስለና። ይጽንሑለይ ዝበልናዮም ውሳኔታት፥ ዘናዋሕናዮም መገሻታት፥ ዝሰሓቱና ናይ ፍቕሪ ወስታታት. . . ንሶም ውን ምሳና ተዓኒዶም ይጽበዩና ይኾኑ እምበሪ? ኣይፋሉን። ከምኡ፥ ክኸውን ኣይክእልን'ዩ። ርግኣትና፥ ስቕታናን ደውታናን፥ ንግዜ ቀለቡ እዩ። ነዳዲኡ እዩ።

የጻብየና እምበር: ኣይጽበየናን'ዩ ለካ። ግዜ!”

(ቅድሚ 10 ዓመት፥ ኣብ ከተማ ምጽዋዕ፥ ዓርከይ፥ ከየዳለወ ዝወሰዳ ስእሊ። ‘ታይ ኮን ይሓስብ ኔረ?)።

Rome did not wake up one morning and decide to become Rome. Expansion worked. Military organization worked. Administrative control worked. Wealth extraction worked. Imperial confidence worked. Every victory reinforced the logic of the previous victory. Every success deepened the cultural belief that the system itself possessed permanence. The empire did not merely become powerful. It became psychologically unable to imagine the limits of the very principles that produced its strength.

And perhaps that is the deeper tragedy of civilizations: success produces blindness.

The more something works, the harder it becomes to interrogate it. The harder it becomes to imagine alternatives. Success slowly transforms strategies into assumptions, assumptions into culture, and culture into destiny. At some point, a civilization no longer experiences its own organizing principles as historical constructions. They begin to feel natural. Eternal. Self-evident.

This is why civilizations often carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction long before they visibly decline.

I was listening to a lecture on St. Augustine reflecting on Rome, and I could not stop thinking about how every civilization develops a recursive faith in itself. Not merely confidence, but an inability to see beyond the horizon of its own successful habits. The Romans believed in Rome the same way modern civilizations believe in markets, democracy, technological progress, liberalism, nationalism, or endless economic growth. Not simply as systems, but as civilizational truths.

And the terrifying thing is that this faith is not entirely irrational. These systems did work. They generated stability, wealth, expansion, innovation, legitimacy. But the very evidence of their success becomes the mechanism through which societies stop questioning them.

The more a civilization succeeds, the less meta-conscious it becomes about the limits of its own logic.

This is why I sometimes think that civilizations are structurally incapable of recognizing the moment their strengths begin mutating into liabilities. Because internally, nothing feels broken. The machine is still producing results. The symbols still command loyalty. The institutions still function. The language of legitimacy still sounds convincing to the people inside it.

But underneath, exhaustion accumulates invisibly.

Even democracy, perhaps the most morally celebrated political system in the modern world, is not exempt from this. Democracy works partly because people believe in it. But when belief becomes sacred rather than reflective, democracy can slowly lose the ability to examine the conditions that make it viable in the first place. It begins assuming that procedural continuity alone guarantees civilizational continuity. It stops asking whether its own psychological, informational, economic, and technological conditions are eroding underneath it.

A civilization that cannot critically imagine its own failure becomes vulnerable precisely because it cannot emotionally process the possibility that its dominant logic has limits.

And maybe this is why history keeps moving in cycles that surprise the people living through them. Every civilization thinks it has transcended history while unknowingly repeating its structure. Every era believes it has finally discovered permanence. Every dominant order eventually mistakes historical success for metaphysical truth.

But no civilization escapes contingency.

At some point, every organizing principle is pushed beyond the conditions that made it adaptive. Expansion becomes overextension. Stability becomes stagnation. Freedom becomes fragmentation. Confidence becomes arrogance. Efficiency becomes dehumanization. Growth becomes exhaustion.

And by the time societies realize this, the culture itself has often become too psychologically invested in the old logic to imagine another one without first passing through crisis.

Perhaps this is why collapse so often feels impossible until suddenly it feels obvious in retrospect.

Civilizations do not merely fall because enemies attack them from outside. They often fall because they become trapped inside the momentum of their own success.

The state, noticing this drift, adjusted its machinery.

Initially, you stood straight with your arms pinned to your sides. Then, a new directive arrived. A teacher stood in front of us, demonstrating a revised choreography of loyalty: your right hand had to be placed firmly over your left chest, directly over your heart. That small change mattered. A song was no longer enough because the body had to be arranged too. The child had to be made visibly sincere.

Later, in junior school, the administration found a workaround born of efficiency or exhaustion. They stopped making us sing altogether, blasting the anthem through a radio speaker while we stood in silent compliance.

By the time I reached Red Sea Secondary School, the performance had become a negotiation between authority and adolescent dignity. Nobody wanted to look like an enthusiastic child, so we murmured. I vividly remember our director at the time, Wedi Andu (ወዲ ዓንዱ), standing in front of us at full volume, shouting the anthem at the top of his lungs, trying by sheer force of example to drag the melody out of our stubborn throats. Years later, a friend told me Wedi Andu was still doing the exact same thing at his next posting. He had committed to the performance long after it had stopped working.

The Architecture of the Instrument

Beneath the schoolyard comedy of murmuring teenagers and a desperate director lies a profound philosophical betrayal. To understand it, we must look past the lazy assumption that propaganda is merely a machine designed to brainwash people. It is not. Propaganda is primarily an instrument of order, not enlightenment.

Consider the writer of the anthem. I imagine him alone at a desk, crossing out words, rearranging stanzas, and deleting lines. To be generous, I assume he arrived at his conviction through rigorous means, built on intense political reading, historical analysis, or personal sacrifice. He was genuinely convinced of what Eritrea should be.

But the moment he finished writing, he faced a dangerous fork in the road of human communication. He could have chosen to share the raw material, the contradictions, and the cognitive mechanisms that led him to his conclusion, inviting the public to think alongside him. Instead, he chose to refine his message into an emotional compound designed solely to produce a specific behavioral output.

Choosing this second path is the exact moment an intellectual becomes a propagandist. The anthem is not designed to communicate an argument. It is designed to bypass the intellect and strike directly at the nervous system. It is a shortcut around thought, meant to make the listener act as if they understood the logic that inspired the writer, without ever inviting them into the room where that logic was built.

The Insult Before the Brainwashing

This is where the argument sharpens into its true gravity. Propaganda is an insult before it is ever a tool for brainwashing. To present the public with an emotional product stripped of its reasoning is to make a damning, structural assumption: it assumes the public is an idiot.

The maker thinks, selects, and encodes, while the public is expected only to repeat, feel, and obey. The intellectual stands above the people as one who understands the machinery of emotion, treating the population as raw material to be managed into stability. It establishes a relationship where the public is perpetually talked down to, invited to participate through song but never invited to think.

The great hypocrisy here lies in the biography of the intellectual himself. No genius is born fully formed. We all enter this world as children, unformed and unwritten. If the intellectual managed to arrive at his grand convictions, it was only because he was nurtured by a slow, patient process of learning, rational communication, and honesty.

Yet, when facing the public, that honesty vanishes. The intellectual turns around and denies the masses the very process that made his own mind possible. He decides that the people need a stabilizing feeling more than the truth, opting for the functional utility of the myth because it is more efficient than treating citizens as equals.

The Incurable Cycle

Saint Augustine, in The City of God, recognized this exact dishonesty in the civic religions of Rome. The philosophers knew the gods were illusions, yet they defended them because the myths organized public feeling and maintained social order. What disturbed Augustine was that the educated classes knowingly preserved the falsehood simply because it worked.

An anthem, or any piece of state propaganda, that explains itself is already losing the argument. When understanding is the goal, you communicate; when compliance is the goal, you sing.

But the human mind is not an entirely passive surface, and this is where the state's machinery inevitably breaks down. The public possesses an innate awareness of when it is being managed. When a population realizes that propaganda is the state's only mode of communication, an inevitable psychological self-defense mechanism kicks in: systemic suspicion. When honest, rational communication is withheld by the authorities, distrust becomes the public's only available outlet. Suspicion becomes the only tool left to dismantle the illusion or force accountability.

The Intellectual as Perpetrator

This brings us to the most devastating realization of all, the true tragedy of the intellectual's game. We like to believe that enlightenment is the cure for propaganda. We think that once a person sees through the psychological architecture behind the songs, the postures, and the symbols, the spell is broken and liberation follows.

But it does not.

The terrifying truth is that the cure is almost impossible to achieve because the virus of the intellectual's audacity is highly contagious. Once the victim becomes enlightened to the propaganda, they do not destroy the machine. Instead, they look out at the rest of the public, experience the exact same failure of nerve as the original writer, and arrive at the very same cynical conclusion: the myth is too useful to destroy.

The breakthrough of understanding does not breed liberation; it breeds the next generation of managers. Instead of breaking the machinery, the newly enlightened thinker steps into the role of the perpetrator. They continue to broadcast the song, enforce the posture, and preserve the illusion, trapped in a loop that permanently prioritizes the functional utility of order over the dignity of human minds.

If a nation is worth loving, it should survive explanation. If a political idea is worth defending, it should survive questioning. True belonging should not require the choreography of children’s bodies before they know what they are pledging themselves to.

As we stood there in the courtyard of Red Sea Secondary School, murmuring over the shouting voice of Wedi Andu, we weren't just being rebellious teenagers. In our own quiet, stubborn way, we were rejecting the functional utility of the myth. We were waiting to be respected, and we are still waiting for the intellectuals to have the courage to meet us there.

ሃገር፥ ደኣ 'ህዝቢ' ማለት እንዳኣሉ። ቀልጢፉ፥ ኣብ ሓሳባተይ ቦሎኽ ዝበለ መልሲ እዩ ነይሩ። ኣይጸናሕኩን፥ "ዘይ-እንታይ" ዝበሃል ትግርኛ'ኸ ኣሎ ድዩ?' ንሕቶይ ዝኸውን ሕቶ ፈጢረ ካልእ ጓል መንገዲ ጸረግኩ። "ዘይ-እንታይ ማለት ደኣ . . . “ ናይ እንግሊዘኛ ቃላት ተጠቒመ ንጻረ ክደሊ ትንዕ በልኩ። "ነዚኣስ ብትግርኛ፥ ጀሚረ ብትግርኛ ክውድኣ ኣለኒ" ምስ ነብሰይ ሓውሲ ህልኽ ሓዘኒ።

" ‘ዘይ-እንታይ’ ደኣ፥ ሓደ ነገር እንታይ እዩ፥ ንኽትርዳእ፥ እንታይ እዩ'ኸ ዘይኮነ ንምንጻር ክለዓል ዘለዎ ሓጋዚ ሕቶ እዩ መስለኒ። ምኽንያቱ፥ ብዙሕ ካብቲ እንፈልጦ ዝመስለና፥ ካብቲ ካልእ (ዘይንሱ) ፈሊና ክንግንዘቦ እንተዘይክኢልና፥ ከመቢልና ፈሊጥናዮ'ለና ክንብል ንኽእል?" ንርእሰይ ከእምን ጀመርኩ። መልሲ ረኺበ‘ይለ ክቕጽል ምስ ተበገስኩ ግን፥ ከም ብሓድሽ፥ ካልእ ሕቶ መጻኒ። "ሓደ ነገር፥ "እዚ" እዩ ንምባል "እዚ ድማ ኣይኮነን" ክንብል ዘድለየና እንተኾይኑ፥ ካብ ክንደይ ዘይንሱ ኢና ክንፈልዮ ዘለና? ንኣብነት፥ "ቀዪሕ" ዝብል ቃል ትርጉሙ ንምፍላጥ፥ ካብ ኩሉ ዘይ-ቀይሕ ክንፈልዮ ከድሊ እዩ ማለተ ድዩ? ቀዪሕ፥ ዓይነት ሕብሪ እዩ ኢልና ቅድሚ ምብጋስና፥ ካብ ኣድገ-ፈረስ ክንፈልዮ ዘድልየና እንተኾይኑ፥ መዓስን ብኸመይን ደኣልና'ሞ እንታይነቱ ክንፈልጥ?...” ንነብሰይ ኣዋጠርኩዋ። ከም እንደገና "ካብ ኩሉ" ማለት ከኣ ናይ ግድን ኣይኮነን "ኩሉ" ቃል ብቃሉ ከስምዕ። ናብ ኣድገ-ፈረስ ከይከድና፥ ካብ ወሰናስን ናይቲ ቃል ዘይርሕቁ ሓሳባት ኣለሊና፥ ካብኦም ፈሊና ኣነጽር እንተበልናዮ፥ እኹል 'መስለኒ።" ምስ ሓሳባተይ፥ ኣብ ሸመተ ቃላት፥ ዋጋ ዕዳጋ ናብ ምግባር ኣተኹ።

ከይተረድኣኒ፥ ደቓይቅ፥ ናብ ሰዓታት ሓኾሩ። ዝተሳፈርኩዎ ባቡር ሓሳብ፥ ከም ኣመሉ ሕጂ'ውን ናብ ዘይፈልጦ ቦታ ሒዙኒ ተዓዝረ። ብዛዕባ፥ ሃገር ክሓስብ፥ ኣብ ዓለም ሓሳባት ሃገር-ኣልቦ ዝኾንኩ ኮይኑ ተሰማዓኒ።

ብዛዓባ ሃገረይ ክሓስብ፥ "ሃገር፥ እንታይ እዩ" ኢለ ዘበገስኩዎ ሕቶ፥ ደድሕሪ ቃላትን ንጹርነትን ክጋልብ፥ ብዙሕ እዋን'የ ኣርሒቐ ዝዕዘር። ዝፈልጦም ቃላት፥ ነቶም ዝሃድኖም ሓሳባት ምጻሮም ግዲ ይኸብዶም ኮይኑስ፥ "ነዚባ ነቲ በሎ" እናበሉ ሓሳረይ እዮም ዘብልዑኒ።

ንሓሳባተይ ዝጸሩ ቃላት ንምንድይ ኣርሒቀ ዝገሸሉ እዋናት ኣመና ብዙሕ እዩ። ራሕቂ ዝኸድኩዎ መንገዲ ሳሕቲ ኣብ ኾይጢታት የቐምጠኒ  እዩ። ብእኡ እየ ድማ ዝውለፎ። ካብቲ በረኽቲ፥ ዝመጻኹዎ ርሕቀት ምስ ጥውይዋይ መንገድታቱ ነጺሩ ይረኣየኒ። ግን ሽዑ፥ ክምለሶ ካልእ ጻዕረ ሞት ከይኮነኒ እሰግእ። እህከ ድማ።

ኩሉ ግዜ ግን እፈርሕ። ንዘንትእለት፥ ናይ ቃላት ስደተኛ ኮይነ ከይነብር!