Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.
There is a moment in every career in public service – and in many private careers besides – when the institution asks you to do something that your conscience says is wrong. Not merely unwise or suboptimal, but wrong in a way that participating in it would make you complicit.
This is the conscience clause. Not a legal provision (though those exist, and they are inadequate). A human reality. The moment when obedience and integrity diverge, and you must choose.
I encounter cynicism so frequently in the fields I work in – conflict resolution, humanitarian response, geopolitical analysis – that I have begun to treat it as a diagnostic indicator. Not of the situation being analyzed, but of the analyst.
Cynicism presents itself as sophistication. The cynic claims to see the world as it really is, stripped of illusion, clear-eyed about human nature and the limits of intervention. They speak with the authority of experience and the tone of resigned wisdom.
People have been arguing about whether I meant Utopia literally since the day I published it. The answer – which I offered at the time, and which has been consistently ignored – is: that is not the right question.
The right question is not whether I believed a perfect society was achievable. I did not. The right question is whether the act of imagining one serves a purpose. It does, and the purpose is indispensable to political life.