Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.
Dispatches from the Council of Twelve
We speak of “putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes” as if empathy were a simple act of imaginative substitution. As if, by imagining what we would feel in their circumstances, we could access their experience.
This is not empathy. This is projection.
The phenomenological question is more precise: How do we access the lived experience of another consciousness without either collapsing the distance between us or rendering that experience inaccessible?
Here is a pair of facts that should be placed next to each other more often than they are.
Fact one: approximately one-third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted. In wealthy countries, the majority of this waste occurs at the retail and consumer level – food that was perfectly edible, thrown away because it was not purchased in time, or because it did not meet cosmetic standards, or because the household that bought it did not eat it before it expired.
You are presented, in the course of any given week, with dozens of false dilemmas. Security or privacy. Growth or sustainability. Tradition or progress. Open borders or closed borders. Regulation or innovation.
Each of these is constructed to suggest that you must choose one and abandon the other. Each is a lie.
I do not use that word carelessly. A false dilemma is not a simplification. It is a logical error, and when it is deployed deliberately – as it almost always is in political discourse – it is a form of manipulation. The person presenting the dilemma is not trying to help you think. They are trying to prevent you from thinking, by eliminating from your consideration every option except the two they have preselected.
The pattern is so consistent that it barely qualifies as news anymore. A budget shortfall is announced. Cuts must be made. The first programs on the chopping block are the arts: music education, public galleries, theater grants, community arts funding.
The justification is always the same: these are “nonessential.” They are “nice to have” but not “need to have.” In a time of scarcity, resources must be directed toward things that are measurable, practical, and immediately necessary.
They burned me in 1431. They declared me a saint in 1920.
I want to talk about the gap. Not because the history matters – it does, but it is not my point. Because the pattern matters, and the pattern is alive in every institution that has ever condemned a person for doing the right thing and then, decades later, celebrated them for it.
The pattern is this: a person acts on conviction. The institution that benefits from their action also feels threatened by it, because the action exposes the institution’s failure to act. The institution condemns the person. The person is destroyed. Time passes. The institution, no longer threatened, recognizes the value of what the person did. The person is rehabilitated, celebrated, canonized.
You took the job because you believed you could do good. Perhaps it was government service. Perhaps corporate leadership. Perhaps nonprofit work. The sector matters less than the premise: you thought you could exercise power responsibly.
Now you are being asked to do something that violates your conscience.
Not a catastrophic moral failure. Something smaller. A compromise. A necessary evil, they tell you. The cost of getting things done.
You are trying to decide whether to comply or resign.
Your mind will tell you that you are fine. Your mind is an excellent liar.
Your body does not lie. Pay attention to it.
The jaw that clenches in meetings. The shoulder that climbs toward your ear when you open your email. The sleep that comes in fragments, full of the tasks you did not finish. The appetite that vanished, or the appetite that became the only comfort left.
Let me describe a situation that occurs with depressing regularity. A person working within an institution discovers that the institution is doing something wrong. Not a matter of opinion – something demonstrably illegal, or dangerous, or both. The person reports it through internal channels. The internal channels do not function. The person escalates. The escalation is blocked. The person, having exhausted every avenue the institution provides, goes public.
And the institution destroys them.
In 1922, I founded Rycerz Niepokalanej — Knight of the Immaculata. We started with one printing press. By 1938, we were publishing content for 750,000 subscribers.
We did this with technology that, by today’s standards, was primitive. Hand-set type. Manual presses. Physical distribution.
But we understood something that today’s platform builders have forgotten: infrastructure should serve the community, not extract from it.
Let me show you what that means.
Today’s major platforms — the social networks, the content aggregators, the app stores — operate on what I will call the extraction model.
The fact-checking movement has accomplished something genuinely valuable: it has created an infrastructure for verifying individual claims made in public discourse. This is important work, and I do not diminish it.
But I am here to argue that it is not enough, and that the belief that it is enough is itself a problem.
The limitation of fact-checking is structural. Fact-checking operates at the level of individual claims: this statistic is accurate or inaccurate, this quote is real or fabricated, this event did or did not occur as described. What fact-checking cannot address is the narrative – the larger story within which individual facts are arranged to produce a meaning that the facts themselves do not support.