Narges Mohammadi is one of the most well-known human rights activists in Iran. As PEN America reports, she was first arrested in 2009 for her affiliation with the human rights organization, Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC).

She was arrested in Iran shortly after publishing her book, White Torture, a book chronicling the mistreatment of Iranian prisoners, many of whom are in prison for advocating for human rights.

She was arrested in 2010, but was released on bail. In 2014, she gave a speech criticizing the conditions of Evin Prison. After the speech, she was arrested again and charged with:

• Spreading propaganda against the system

• Gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security

• Membership of an illegal organization whose aim is to harm national security

The membership charge came from her work with an Iranian organization working to abolish the country’s death penalty.

Today, she remains in prison after another arrest in 2022, where she is forbidden from seeing doctors to treat her neurological condition.

Reporting on Cruelty is Not a Crime

Mohammadi is living proof that authoritarian systems are unable to accommodate compassionate citizens.

While authoritarians must suppress dissent in any form, ordinary citizens are the ones who risk speaking out to improve conditions for their fellow countrymen and women.

Suppressing dissent by force is an ugly business, so anyone who advocates compassion becomes a criminal. It’s one of the darkest inversions that dictators force upon their country’s moral reasoning. Dictators make the army enforce a backwards moral code that criminalizes kindness and rewards the arbitrary cruelty of the state.

It may sound trite to call for governments to reward compassion. But Iran’s crackdown on dissidents like Mohammadi, one of the stubbornest voices for kindness, shows the danger of a government permitting itself to treat people with the most depraved cruelty.

It’s one thing to develop a government that can serve its people, but maintaining it is a never-ending project.

Francis Fukuyama’s book Political Order and Political Decay explores the ways that modern governments have been able to develop and endure. He also shows how elites capture state institutions for their benefit and erode the kinds of impersonal structures that ensure every citizen is treated equally. Fukuyama also has a specific definition of political order in mind:

“Political order is not just about constraining abusive governments. It is more often about getting governments to actually do the things expected of them, like providing citizen security, protecting property rights, making available education and public health services, and building the infrastructure that is necessary for private economic activity to occur.”

Public schools and robust public health responses are only some of the things that citizens expect from their governments. Much opposition to things like public school funding comes from dissatisfaction with the state of public education rather than a belief that the government shouldn’t be involved at all. (Although, that point of view has its adherents, too.)

The aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis also shows how government failures can pave the way for more extreme leaders who will target traditional institutions. Voters noticed that banks recieved government bailouts while support for ordinary people was lacking. The percieved capture of institutions by the most elite class paved the way for Donald Trump to not only come to power, but to use it as an instrument of revenge against the government.

Why US Government Became Stable in the First Place

One of the reasons the United States had stable institutions in the first place was its ability to bring people together under a single banner. Fukuyama explained:

“Americans in some sense worshipped their Constitution, which embodied universalist values making the assimilation of new, culturally different immigrants relatively easy. As Seymour Martin Lipset used to point out, in the United States one could be accused of being ‘un-American’ in a way that one could not be ‘un-German’ or ‘un-Greek,’ since Americanism constituted a set of values that could be adopted voluntarily rather than an inherited ethnic characteristic.”

Americans can subscribe to the ideals articulated in the Constitution. Latvia, which has a similar constitution to the United States, has a large ethnic Latvian population. That additional loyalty to an in-group means that immigrants can be accused of being un-Latvian for having a different background.

Being able to remove that layer of loyalty made room for Americans to be loyal to the state being built alongside immigrants from around the world. It’s one less point of tension that created a buffer between civil conflicts like the Balkanization of the 1990s.

It doesn’t prevent all violence—the United States still experienced a civil war—but its a source of stability that contrasts with other parts of the world that have struggled to build stable governments.

Coming Out of Colonialism

Large parts of sub-Saharan Africa were colonized by European governments without any investment from the Europeans. They got what they wanted from these countries and left. That approach had important consequences for post-colonial stability:

“Due to the late start of colonialism and its short duration, the colonial rulers succeeded in undermining existing traditional sources of authority while failing to implant anything like a modern state that could survive the transition to independence…Colonialism on the cheap left Africa with very little by way of modern political institutions when the Europeans decided to leave in the decades after World War II.”

In contrast, the British invested in government infrastructure in India. It was a civil service that Indians worked in during the colonial years. After the British finally left, there were experienced civil servants and the outline of a government for India to run.

That doesn’t mean that colonialism was a gift to India. The British could’ve brought railroads to India without stealing the country’s wealth or suppressing its culture. What India does show is the difference between investing in a government and failing to do so.

Getting the government to do what its people want is difficult. Institutions may be flawed, but they shouldn’t be taken for granted, either. It’s a fine line to walk that will be more difficult to balance on as voters continue to feel the world’s instability and take it out on leaders who fail to ground them.

It’s been two years since Applied Knowledge began. We’ve reviewed 105 books and briefly profiled 92 dissidents from across the world.

This upcoming week will be the publication’s final one.

It’s been wonderful to watch this newsletter grow, but my career is growing elsewhere. I’m split between covering the prediction market industry and pursuing other career opportunities.

It’s good news for my career, but something had to give, and this was it.

Books are always going to be a crucial part of my work. They remain the best sources of authoritative deep dives that contrast with the histrionic hot takes of social media.

Dissidents remain a crucial part of learning to think more clearly about politics. It’s instructive to see what people are fighting for abroad and what real tyranny looks like. Cultural war nonsense doesn’t stack up to the real fights being waged against actual dictators.

Thank you for supporting Applied Knowledge Book Reviews. It’s been fun to dive back into some of my favorite books with you.

Abdelkabir Al-Hor founded a website called Rassd Maroc that covered the Moroccan government’s corruption and policy failures.

Stories included coverage of the Al Hirak protests. These were a series of protests that erupted in the city of Al Hoceima in October 2016. Protesters complained of poverty and neglect from policymakers more interested in lining their pockets than giving ordinary Moroccans support to build comfortable lives.

In 2017, Rassd Maroc’s Facebook page featured a post encouraging readers to join the protests. Al-Hor was arrested shortly afterwards and charged with “insulting state authority,” “inciting disobedience,” and “condoning terrorism.”

According to The New Arab, the charge concerning terrorism came from the site’s coverage of “the assassination of Russia's ambassador to Turkey last year and violent protests in the city of al-Hoceimah.”

He was sentenced to four years in prison in 2018. Al-Hor was finally released in 2022 after serving his full sentence.

When Alternative Points of View Become Crimes

Moroccan authorities didn’t really believe Al-Hor was involved in terrorism or condoning violence by posting about violent incidents. The goal was to silence Al-Hor’s influential criticism and cut him off from his followers. Allowing dissident groups to organize is a threat to autocratic rulers.

Even “condoning terrorism” is a ridiculous charge. In a country with free speech, people are free to condone terrorism as long as they don’t materially support terrorist groups or organize terrorist acts.

The United States is even free to have its own overtly biased news sources. Sites like Breitbart and Newsmax have political agendas they use their platforms to spin stories to fit. They enjoy the legal right to do so regardless of who occupies the White House or controls Congress.

Al-Hor is a reminder that we in the West have the freedom to report the news as we see it.

The Delusions of Crowds examines periods of group madness to understand how groups go wrong. Ideas catch on and spread like viruses, and they’re not limited to one area of life.

Author William Bernstein argues that group manias like the witch hunts and the 1920s stock market bubble are more alike than they may appear:

“While religious and financial manias might seem to have little in common, the underlying forces that give them rise are identical: the desire to improve one’s well-being in this life or the next. And the factors that amplify the contagion of financial and religious mass delusions are also similar: the hardwired human propensity to imitate, to fabricate and consume compelling narratives, and to seek status.”

The witch hunts began with religious fears of ungodly witches and horrific stories about cursed children. Searching for these witches led to neighbors accusing each other to avoid the wrath of the crowds hungry for a witch to burn.

The stock market bubble was a collection of stories about assets that could only go up in value and a new age that would never again know poverty. Traders who continued buying stocks and pushing their values unrealistically higher led to a crash that would impoverish millions of Americans and people across the globe.

The simple ingredient to igniting a new wave of mass hysteria is a compelling story.

How Stories Slip Past Our Thinking Minds

That stories are more convincing than facts or figures isn’t new information. What Bernstein found was much more interesting:

“Not only do people respond more to narratives than to facts and data, but preliminary studies demonstrate that the more compelling the story, the more it erodes our critical-thinking skills. This research suggests, in addition, an inherent conflict of interest between the suppliers and consumers of opinion: the former wish to convince and will devise the most compelling narratives possible, whereas the latter, if they are rational, should intentionally avoid those narratives and rely only on data, facts, and analytical discipline.”

The conflict of interest is crucial to understanding how mass panics spread.

There is so much to gain from a media career built on scaring people into following one writer’s prognostications. Being the go-to source of information for dedicated groups of people is profitable for anyone who’s able to swing it.

Church fathers or leaders of high finance may be able to capture large audiences with wild promises and grand stories. But today, an online warlord like Nick Fuentes can use his charisma to build a passionate and profitable following. We’re flooded with information and stories trying to organize it all. Worse still, stories are targeted at us based on what is most likely to resonate with us.

We have access to more information than we’ve ever had, and we’ve made ourselves more susceptible to hysteria.

Extreme Predictions Are a Tell

In an age of easily scalable hysteria, there’s no shortage of extreme predictions about the world. Those predictions are more than just mistakes. In certain industries, they’re symptoms of bubbles:

“The fourth and final symptom of a bubble is the appearance of extreme predictions, such as the South Sea forecasts of Spain miraculously ceding its New World trade monopoly to England, investments of £100 yielding hundreds in annual dividends, the railway’s impending ‘lordship over time and space,’ or Raskob’s implicit projection of 25 percent annual market returns.”

It’s easy to believe that the world will continue going in the same direction. Whether it’s a continuing boom or unfathomable despair, the world seems like it will never change until it does.

Rarely does that feel hopeful. Change is scary. We like our patterns and our routines. Even a positive upheaval is filled with uncertainty.

There’s no single way to confront this uncertainty. But we know the one mistake to avoid is to form a mob against innocent people as we rail in fear and anger at a world we demand conform to our vision of it.

In 2013, Australia’s Labor Party adopted a new policy to harden its stance on immigration. The party leader, Kevin Rudd, decided that asylum seekers must be processed in a detention center in Papua New Guinea. They would be processed and resettled there, keeping them out of Australia.

Behrouz Boochani arrived in Papua New Guinea seeking asylum and was detained on Manus Island for six years. The detention center was closed four years into Boochani’s sentence, but he wasn’t resettled for another two.

Boochani wrote about his journey from Kurdish-Iranian refugee to detainee to his path to citizenship in New Zealand through articles and messages he wrote through WhatsApp on a smuggled phone.

During his internment, Boochani alleged abuses, including beatings, solitary confinement, and was targeted for describing the bleak conditions of the detention facility.

He was able to flee from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 2013. The detention camp guards had him under their thumbs for six years.

Modern Doesn’t Mean Humane

Boochani was not a criminal. He was neither charged nor convicted of a crime. He legally sought asylum, but Australia’s Labor Party, its center-left “liberal” government, locked him and several hundred other asylum seekers in an offshore prison.

It wasn’t just a temporary processing center. It was a prison where detainees were kept for years under violent conditions. At least a dozen people died while they were under Australia’s responsibility, including from suicide and delayed medical care.

Liberal, tolerant societies are built to protect their people’s rights to view the world as they see it. Diverse worldviews coexist, and governments deplore the human rights violations in countries like Iran, Russia, and China.

But there’s always an underclass of people for whom that dignity does not apply. Prisoners of all kinds are often exempted from the kindness and tolerance we extend to people out in the world. Not all prisoners are sympathetic, but that’s no excuse for governments to treat them inhumanely.

Liberal democracies are only good places to live because of the effort put into protecting individual rights. Refusing governments the permission to carve out exceptions is a never-ending struggle.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is one of the most powerful political parties in history, but it didn’t begin that way. It and its leader, Mao Zedong, were almost wiped out in the 1930s.

However, the CCP benefited from a war with Japan and incompetent opponents. The Nationalists did most of the fighting against the Japanese while the CCP consolidated its position in northern China. The Nationalists also threw their weight against the CCP, spending too many troops on an unbreakable region.

Tony Saich’s book From Rebel to Ruler tells the story of the CCP from its humble roots in the countryside to the totalitarian behemoth it is today. Learning from its rise isn’t an endorsement of the party, its beliefs, or its tactics. Instead, it’s a way to identify the shortfalls of political movements today that could be effective if they could focus on acquiring power rather than only railing against it.

Flexibility in Surprising Places

The CCP may not be known as an ideologically flexible organization, but it has gone through periods during which the party drifted far from the doctrine of communism it hoped to implement. Saich wrote:

“Before 1949, the CCP survived where it dealt with local politics and adapted central dictates to suit the local environment. In fact, local Communist Party leaders went even further by using traditional rituals and symbols to attract the residents to their cause and to oppose the traditional powerholders. By contrast, the party was unsuccessful, often with disastrous consequences, when ideology and central dictate dominated and attempts were made to change reality on the ground too quickly or too radically.”

Millions died during the Great Leap Forward, when Mao starved the countryside to feed the cities, which were forced to produce greater amounts of steel and industrial material. The Cultural Revolution was completely detached from any real wrongdoing beyond imagined infractions from the CCP.

However, Saich points out that the reform period following 1979 and even the days of China’s civil war were periods of greater success for the party. Locals were able to live under the CCP without being crushed by the whims of the party’s chairman.

That’s a valuable lesson for political parties in democratic societies to learn. The United States has had leaders obsessed with imposing their own vision of society on American voters, whether they liked it or not. Whether it’s party activists in charge of strategy or a president drunk on power and enablers, disconnects with voters are surefire ways to either remove a party from office or keep a well-meaning party out of power.

Ideology Should Be Built from the Ground Up

By the mid-1910s, China had lost a war against Japan, and the proud empire of China was re-evaluating the foundations of its civilization. Saich credits that period of re-evaluation with allowing the communists to gain such a strong foothold before the Long March.

China had several champions of liberalism during this time, including Hu Shi. Saich recounts a debate that Hu had with an early CCP partisan:

“Rejecting the Bolshevik total solution, Hu wrote about the need for ‘more study of problems, less talk of isms.’ He rejected the all-embracing solutions proposed by the radicals, as he felt that China’s problems stemmed from many different causes. For Hu, the adoption of such all-embracing ideologies would lead to disaster. Any doctrine had to be based on an in-depth analysis of specific practical problems.”

Hu’s criticisms would be vindicated decades later. Communism as practiced by the Bolsheviks made party doctrine a solution to all policy problems and all ideological differences. If societies would just properly collectivize and people fell in line, then an egalitarian utopia would emerge.

However, that accounting of human nature leaves out every important detail for decision-making. No country will ever get total compliance with an ideology. There’s also no “theory of everything” that can solve every novel problem that comes across a leader’s desk.

Politics Has No Theory of Everything

Seeking a “total” solution to politics is a lost cause, and while totalitarian ideologies can always find support, many voters in democratic countries remain allergic to leaders professing to have all the answers to unrelated problems.

But many voters are also allergic to bureaucrats who can’t express why the narrow solution they have proposed will benefit their countrymen.

Finding a balance between policy and messaging shouldn’t be a novel insight, but several modern political leaders have failed to do it. Hillary Clinton ran on the message that she thought she’d do a good job without tying her campaign to some greater meaning. Donald Trump thinks only of himself and has lost touch with a country relearning that it values competence in its federal bureaucrats.

The CCP is not a model for American politcal parties. But its history should be informative to whoever takes power in an election cycle in which both parties will have to rally around new leaders.

I write about named dissidents who are arrested, harassed, and sometimes murdered by authoritarian regimes. The names are given media attention in part because of the severity of the consequences they suffer for exercising rights we take for granted in the United States.

Americans enjoy the right to vote for politicians who promise to carry out certain policies. Every two years, we have elections for some portion of these leaders. We can judge their performance based on whatever we want. Did they carry out our desired policies? Did they achieve results?

Even leaders who pursue policies we want enacted can fail us by implementing them badly. As a political reporter, I knew that President Biden’s failure to crack down on migration over the Southern border was a political liability for him. That failure was one of the reasons Donald Trump won re-election. A CNN exit poll found that immigration was the most important issue to 89% of Republicans.

But Trump’s answer to the crisis that Biden failed to meet on the Southern border was a crackdown on the American duty to hold its government to high standards instead.

Do What I Say and How I Choose

When Christopher Hitchens defended his decision to support the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, he was simultaneously named in a lawsuit against the administration over its widespread use and sanction of torture.

He reminded his audiences that the American government must not only carry out the policies demanded of its people. The government must also conduct itself with the standards it has been ordered to.

Trump’s encouragement of aggressive ICE tactics, alongside the blessing of the Secretary of Homeland Security, has led to the murder of American citizens.

Renee Good was shot by an ICE agent as she was turning away from them as instructed by at least some of the agents surrounding her car. The agent who killed her was never in danger of being hit by her car.

Alex Pretti was helping a peaceful protester up from the ground before he was tackled by over half a dozen agents, then shot in the back.

In other Dissident Spotlight articles, there’s rarely video available of the abuses that dissidents endure. The United States is still free enough to not only have video, but even multiple angles so we can see the federal government betraying its service.

Dissent isn’t Opposition

Healthy democracies have multiple parties. It’s legal to oppose the party in power, even expected and encouraged in normal times.

But Trump has turned ordinary Americans, lining the streets of cities under siege, documenting ICE’s violations of the rights to protest and record public spaces, into dissidents, who incur risk during the normal course of exercising their inherent rights to freedom of speech and conscience.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti have suffered the greatest consequences for confronting ICE agents and their abuses in their communities. They are the named dissidents who represent the greater struggle for freedom under an administration that believes freedom comes with conditions.

It’s up to the rest of us to show our fellow Americans how ICE operates in our communities. Showing the world can come later. We still need to prove that our country is a haven for people who dare to see the world as it is and describe it publicly.

Whether its the Greeks facing the Underworld or Jesus rescuing the Old Testament prophets, the world’s mythology is filled with accounts of the descent into Hell.

R. F. Kuang’s novel Katabasis follows graduate students Alice and Peter as they travel to Hell to rescue their advisor. Their advisor is the key to both their careers and, from Kuang’s telling, appears to be worth the journey.

At least, he does at the beginning. There are many reasons he belonged in Hell.

But Alice’s and Peter’s sojourn to Hell has practical lessons for those of us in our own Hells right now. Soe of those lessons are tidbits about shoddy thinking. Others are spiritual lessons that can fuel us through our own journies through Hell.

Bad Group Thinking

There are plenty of ways to harness the wisdom of crowds, but stuffing a group of undergraduates in Hell together isn’t it. One of Alice and Peter’s first encounters in Hell is with the shades of several students killed in an accident early in their professor’s career.

As Alice tried to ask them about where the professor could be and how to proceed next, the undergrads argued among themselves about whether they should pass on or remain shades. Alice noticed:

“Undergraduates did this often—they worked each other up over the wrong ideas, compared problem sets and confused themselves so much that untangling their thoughts took twice the work. Undergraduates were five blind men and an elephant; were three blind mice leading one another in a circle.”

These undergraduates were unable to keep their focus on the crucial problem at hand. They lost themselves in arguments that had little to do with the central problem before them. Questions about whether the new life they would be reincarnated into was preferable to the lifetime they knew were distractions from the questions Alice had for them. They didn’t have the skills the graduate students had honed to focus on the correct problem and argue about the proper things.

Leaders dodging responsibility for confronting difficult problems can always find refuge in new questions. If undergrads can do it, surely high-ranking government officials can master this evasive skill as well.

On the other side, followers who wish to avoid confronting ugly realities have their own trick available to them.

Belief is Always Optional

In Kuang’s telling, Hell is a university campus. (At least, the upper levels with structure are. The more traditional deserts and swamps lie deeper in Kuang’s Hell.)

In one trap laid by demons, Alice and Peter must complete essays to escape the building and move on to the next level of Hell. Peter confounds the demon by trapping him in an infinite logic loop. He uses modus ponens, a foundational logical pattern: if P, then Q. If one fact is true, then it should lead to a reasonable conclusion.

However, Peter pointed out a structural challenge equally foundational to logic:

”‘Why should any two premises compel the conclusion, valid though they might be? No one has a good solution. You actually can’t prove modus ponens. But if we don’t have modus ponens, then we might as well be in the Stone Age, because modus ponens is the foundation of everything else…’”

Alice cut Peter off before he spiraled into his own infinite loop of explanations. But the truth Peter observed is all around us. It doesn’t matter how many reasons we give to support a conclusion. There is always another piece of evidence we can add to support our reasoning. We never actually have to draw a conclusion that we don’t want to reach.

Contrived uncertainty is a useful refuge for anyone who hopes to avoid seeing the world in front of their eyes. There’s always another fact or point of view that could be considered. We can always pine for more evidence to appear high-minded and fair. That same whining for more can also be a feint to avoid assigning blame on a worshiped political leader or valued friend.

Reflexive doubt is corrosive to serious thought, but so is the refusual to draw hard conclusions.

No Way Out But Through

The practical lessons get Alice and Peter through Hell, but there’s one overarching truth that Alice identifies early in the novel.

In Kuang’s universe, Lord Yama, the Buddhist lord of Hell, rules over the domain. Alice’s ruminations over his plan points to universal questions about what the point of Hell is:

”For all our theories and stories and myths, Lord Yama’s design remains an utter mystery. No one knows for certain what precisely happens in those courts, or why; least of all the Shades within them. If it is a test, no one knowns how to pass. If it is mere torture, no one knows how long it will go on for. One cannot anticipate, cheat, or find a shortcut through redemption. We cross the Lethe and reincarnate whenever Hell deems us ready. It happens when it happens. Until then, we get what’s coming.”

It’s no coincidence that Dante’s exit from Hell was through the Ninth Circle at Hell’s lowest depths. The only way to escape Hell is to push through the trials until they end.

Back in the real world, struggles can begin for mysterious reasons. Their endings can be equally arbitrary and inexplicable. The only way to end them is to struggle against whatever the world has lined up against us.

Even if these challenges can’t be overcome by purely individual effort, the struggle against them is the only path to their end.

Dictators are famously petty people. Their sensitivity to threats to their power leads to attacks on dissidents that are awful.

But sometimes, those attempts can be hilarious.

In September 2023, journalist Newton Barry moved from Burkina Faso to live in exile in France after threats to him and his family. Barry continued reporting on Burkina Faso’s military junta run by Capt. Ibrahim Traoré.

In December 2023, Barry was found guilty of defamation for something critical of the Defense Minister that he posted on his Facebook page. Barry was still living in France, so he was charged in absentia.

Barry didn’t know about his conviction until he read about it in an online newspaper later. While it’s one of the humorous dissident outcomes, there is still a frightening reality for dissidents in their countries.

Danger Remains Real

Burkina Faso’s over-the-top reaction to a journalist shows the two faces of dictators. They go to absurd lengths to secure their power, and sometimes, that absurdity can’t help but be funny.

But Barry had to flee the country due to credible death threats to him and his family. Even in exile, he has received threatening messages from dangerous people representing the regime.

The absurdity of dictatorships comes in part from desperation. Authoritarian regimes can crumble before organized opposition movements with clear leaders. Fareed Zakaria notes that elites who peel off in support of the opposition can turn an unstable regime into one whose final days are upon it.

So, dictators are incentivized to go to absurd lengths to silence voices that could explain what they’re doing wrong and how they could be replaced. Authoritarians rarely get the luxury of retiring peacefully. Dissident movements often fight oppressive leaders with similar brutality as their leaders inflict on the people they’re holding hostage.

It’s not wrong to laugh at an authoritarian’s bizarre behavior. Strangeness is part of the authoritarian package.

However, it is imperative not to let the humor inherent in a dictator’s absurdity mask the extreme cruelty that odd behavior also enables.

The information-rich world we live in seems new, and in many ways, it is. More information has never been more available to more people than it has in the Internet age.

However, more information hasn’t made us smarter. The abundance of information has made it easier for ideological groups to join insular tribes with their own facts.

Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus is a history of information networks in human societies. He launches out of the gate with criticism of the mass of information available to us, observing that it has been weaponized by political movements, most recently, populists. His comparison to Marxists may surprise some readers:

“Just as Marxism claimed that the media functions as a mouthpiece for the capitalist class, and that scientific institutions like universities spread disinformation in order to perpetuate capitalist control, populists accuse these same institutions of working ot advance the interests of the ‘corrupt elites’ at the expense of ‘the people.’”

Harari has good reason to pan political movements that rely on information warlords to corral supporters. He describes information as “something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network.” Facts—or “facts”—about economic conditions or who’s pulling a society’s strings form the basis of many political movements.

But the content of those facts and the story they’re used to tell can lead to any conclusion. So, more information doesn’t lead to more informed societies. It must be filtered.

Information isn’t Truth

Information can include true facts, like the amount of economic growth a country has experienced or the number of people who voted in an election. But stories are information, too, as Harari laments:

“…what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network.”

If I hear a rumor that a giant peach has floated into New York, then I’m given information. But I don’t necessarily have a credible account of what happened in New York. The person sharing the rumor could have included pictures and reporting that proved the peach’s flight and very existence.

However, information about the giant peach could have also come from a raving man who imagined the whole thing and wanted someone to tell about it while he came out of his latest delusion. It’s an important lesson that Harari hopes to impart:

“Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation. Horoscopes put lovers in astrological formations, propaganda broadcasts put voters in political formations, and marching songs put soldiers in military formations.”

Truth vs. Order

Harari identified a tension between information systems. Some are uniquely able to cancel errors to arrive at what is most likely true. Great news organizations do this when editors demand better sourcing or clearer connections between a story’s ideas. Other systems tell a story that brings order to a group, but order doesn’t make such a system a truth machine.

“We have now seen that information networks don’t maximize truth, but rather seek to find a balance between truth and order. Bureaucracy and mythology are both essential for maintaining order, and both are happy to sacrifice truth for the sake of order.”

Inspirational stories or founding myths can give meaning to information and organize people around a shared goal. However, these organizing stories may not only be false, but may even inspire large groups of people to harm others or stifle reasonable dissent.

The outcomes that systems produce need to matter more to us than the amount of information they make available. All the information in the world isn’t valuable if it is used to inflict new cruelties based on falsehoods.

In 2019, Abdul Kalam Azad posted a poem online. This poem was written by Hafiz Ahmed, a Bengali Muslim in northeastern India.

While Muslims have faced persecution throughout India’s modern history, the Bengali Muslims face unique challenges. They migrated from Bangladesh during the British colonial era and remain viewed as outsiders or illegal immigrants. Since partition, many of these people remain undocumented, having no way to prove they have lived in India for several generations.

Ahmed’s poem, Write Down ‘I am Miyah’, challenges the ongoing discrimination these Muslims face. It reads in part:

Write

I am a Miyah

Of the Brahmaputra

Your torture

Has burnt my body black

Reddened my eyes with fire.

Beware!

I have nothing but anger in stock.

Keep away!

Or

Turn to Ashes.

For posting this poem, Azad and nine other poets were charged under India’s criminal code for “inciting hatred between communities.”

Thin Skin in Government

Write Down ‘I am Miyah’ pointed out how intolerant the community these Muslims live in has been to them. The northeastern Indian state of Assam decided that noticing the generational prejudice is the real crime.

The term “Miya” is a pejorative way to refer to Bengali Muslims, one the poet repurposed to criticize a society that has continued to persecute his community. That included the 1983 Nellie Massacre, in which over 1,800 Miya Muslims were murdered.

The Nellie Massacre came during the Assam Movement, an anti-immigrant uprising that included many instances of ethnic violence, though the Nellie Massacre was the most infamous.

The Assam Movement drew a sharp line between “indigenous” Assam Indians, who were supposedly losing land and jobs to Bengali Muslims, and the Miya Muslims, who are targeted by the state’s Hindu majority.

Azad was released on anticipatory bail the next month. But the prejudice that made his relationship to a poem he did not write a crime remains rampant in Modi’s India.

The Iranian revolutionary regime may claim the exclusive right to rule Iran and interpret Islam. However, Islam in the Persian Empire deviates even from the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that remains the law of the land in modern-day Iran.

Non-Iranians probably don’t know that even ancient Islamic poets wouldn’t recognize the Islam enforced in Iran today. Persian poet Omar Khayyam was a prolific poet whose poem, the Rubaiyat, remains illegal to recite in Iran under the regime.

Even if he were alive today instead of the 1100s, Khayyam would be hung for blasphemy under Iran’s regime. He, like other Islamic poets in Persia, wrote about the fleeting nature of life and praised wine in verse. He prioritized earthly pleasures at the expense of the ideological purity demanded of modern theocrats.

Amid the protests against Iran’s repressive regime, it’s worth remembering what early Islamic rulers were willing to allow and even celebrate.

Life’s Impermanence in Verse

Khayyam’s poetry celebrates life on earth and is equally eloquent about how temporary its pleasures are. He wrote:

"The Worldly Hope men set their

Hearts upon

Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,

Like snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face

Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone.”

Khayyam understood how fleeting human life was. We last no longer than snow on the desert, no matter how grand or humble our earthly ambitions.

Modern theocrats argue that this world is a temporary holding pen used to prepare for the next life. Khayyam had a different view. This world’s earthly joys should be appreciated while we’re here, even if holy men disapprove.

Enjoy Life, Even if the Clerics Disagree

Khayyam writes of the indulgence of wine and song, two earthly pleasures that are banned in modern Iran. Khayyam refers to these two things as “Idols” that have cost him his reputation among certain “Men”:

“Indeed the Idols I have loved so long

Have done my Credit in Men’s Eye much

wrong!

Have drown’d my Honour in a shallow

Cup,

And sold my Reputation for a Song.”

He is happy to admit that he has indulged in drink and song at the expense of his reputation. In the 1100s, in the wake of Nizam al-Mulk’s efforts to institutionalize the most conservative Islamic judicial schools, Khayyam would have been scrutinized by his society’s clerical class for his earthly revelries.

Khayyam is an inconvenient voice for modern Islamic theocrats. His defense of earthly pleasures is a direct challenge to the morality imposed by authoritarians today. It’s why Khayyam is one of many classic Persian literary figures who are forbidden by law to be read or celebrated publicly. It’s the equivalent of Shakespeare being outlawed in England or the United States.

Khayyam typifies one genre of Islamic poetry that irks the Iranian regime: wine poetry.

The Joys of Wine in Islamic Persia

Ancient Persia has a long history of enjoying wine. Wine poetry is its own genre that celebrates the taste and social effects of great wine. Even after the Islamic armies conquered Persia, the region’s long-standing appreciation of wine in both practice and verse remained. Khayyam dedicated several passages to wine, including this one:

“The Grape that can with Logic absolute

The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects

confute:

The subtle Alchemist that in a Trice

Life’s leaden Metal into Gold transmute.”

Poking fun at the 72 “jarring Sects” would be particularly inflammatory today. According to the Hadith, Islam will split into 73 sects. Seventy-two will be hellbound, while one will ascend to Heaven.

“The Grape’s” logic could indeed leave these warring sects of Islam unable to argue the fine points of theology. The image of drunk theologians bound for Hell would be unwelcome by Iran’s current leaders—although it could inspire a fantastic protest sign.

In Khayyam’s telling, wine is also an “Alchemist” that transmutes “Life’s leaden Metal into Gold.” Wine turns everything heavy and dull into a valuable substance sought by people from all walks of life. It’s not characterized as the sinful poison that conservative clerics believe it is.

Khayyam’s writing may be 1,000 years old, but he remains proof that clerics in power do not have a monopoly on how their religion is practiced. There are alternatives to the vision of Islam that Iran’s rulers impose on the country’s people. Anyone articulate enough to describe an alternative vision of Islam to that of Iran’s Supreme Leader is a threat, regardless of how much time has passed.

That threat makes Khayyam a read almost as enjoyable as an exquisite bottle of wine.

Eduardo Peña is a Venezuelan writer and political dissident. His journalism included criticisms of Nicolas Maduro’s regime, which starved Venezuelans while Maduro and his inner circle profited from over-priced food parcels imported into the country.

In 2020, Peña was arrested by the National Anti-Extortion and Kidnapping Command. This organization investigates extortion and kidnapping cases. So, in a rich twist of irony, Peña was charged with “providing false information, creating public uncertainty, and resisting authority.” His wife and nephew were also arrested alongside him.

For about two years, Peña had to report to the police every 15 days. He finally caught a break in 2022 after state prosecutors failed to meet a judicial deadline. While the case against him was dismissed, it shows how Maduro’s regime is weaponized against journalists trying to clarify how the government is run.

Names and Opposites

Totalitarian regimes may not be democratic or representative, but they feel the need to adopt the language of liberal democracies. Monarchs are out, and presidents are in.

“National Anti-Extortion and Kidnapping Command” is a particularly flagrant abuse of language. Blaming a journalist for facts published on his website and arresting him for seeing what’s in front of him is extortion by any other name. Dragging him and his family to a police station would be kidnapping if a private citizen committed the same crime.

Names are the first line of defense that authoritarians deploy to mask the sinister intentions of the organizations carrying out the leader’s wishes. They may not seem like much, but names do the heavy lifting for people who want to look the other way.

It’s why Peña and people like him are so important. Their work reveals the gap between what the government says it does and how it really operates. If Maduro’s vice president remains in power, then the free Venezuela will remain a distant hope for people who know they deserve better leadership.

In modern political arguments, it’s easy to lose track of what politics is for in the first place. Yes, there are important problems that demand respondes, but why is “politics” an issue to begin with?

Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order is a reminder of what the alternative to modern politics is. We came from small tribal bands subject to the violence of larger groups surrounding us.

China, the world’s first organized state, came together in part out of military necessity. Small groups along the river had two choices when they encountered a hostile group: fight or leave. When they finally ran out of room to fight, larger organizations of force became ways to free ordinary people from arbitrary violence.

Freedom from the warrior bigger than you was the benefit in theory. It would take about 5,000 years of political development to form liberal democracies, where people with diverse points of view could co-exist as long as they were all committed to the same project of not killing one another for arbitrary differences.

Three Ingredients for Modern Liberal Democracies

Fukuyama argues that as we moved from monarchies to democracies, the main political goal changed from coming up with new ways to practice politics to “implement[ing] them [existing political principles] through larger and larger parts of the world.

One country combined a strong state, a rule of law that all citizens were equally subjected to, and accountability of those in power: England.

”England was the first large country in which all these elements came together at once…Without a strong early state, there would not have been a rule of law and a broad perception of legitimate property rights. Without a strong rule of law and legitimate property rights, the Commons would never have been motivated to come together to impose accountability on the English monarchy. And wihtout hte principle of accountability, the British state would never have emerged as the great power it became by the time of the French Revolution.”

That does not mean that the British Empire’s crimes of colonialism were spreading democracy around the world. It does mean that England became one of the world’s most prosperous countries because it could coordinate its country’s resources without exerting totalitarian control over its citizens. It was a powerful player on the world stage and a good place to live.

Society Plays a Role in Great States

A country isn’t just it’s government. It’s also its people and how they choose to organize themselves. The elite class always plays an outsized role in government, but common spaces that give different people chances to mingle can bridge divides that would have been oppressive 400 years ago.

“…successful liberal democracy requires both a state that is strong, unified, and able to enforce laws on its own territory, and a society that is strong and cohesive and able to impose accountability on the state,” Fukuyama wrote. “It is the balance between a strong state and a strong society that makes democracy work, not just in seventeenth-century England but in contemporary developed democracies as well.”

Ensuring the ruling class remains responsive to the people it governs is a difficult challenge that strong states like China have been unable to overcome. Xi Jinping has purged political opponents under the guise of accountability, but he faces no serious threat to his rule from the rule of law as the Chinese Communist Party’s Chairman.

The political fights we have remain crucial to have. But there’s a reason we’re free to have them instead of being made to arrive at the right answer by force.

Ayşe Zarakolu was a political writer and author in Türkiye. Some of the topics Zarakolu wrote about included corruption in the government and the history of the Armenian genocide.

The Armenian genocide began under the Ottoman Empire but was continued by Turkish nationals until 1923, after the Turkish War of Independence, which made Türkiye an independent country. The Armenian genocide also made Türkiye an ethnically homogeneous country, with thousands of years of Armenian history destroyed.

Türkiye remains reluctant to acknowledge its role in the Armenian genocide, imprisoning writers for analyzing the genocide’s place in Türkiye’s founding.

While many writers are arrested while they’re alive, Zarakolu had new charges brought against her after she died. She died in January 2002, and two weeks later, she received a summons to appear in court. Zarakolu published The Song of Liberty by an exiled Kurdish author. The government also took issue with The Culture of Pontas, which explores the influence of ancient Greeks on the area.

Both cases were eventually dropped, but it shows how threatening ideas are to Türkiye’s leaders.

Dictators Only Allow One Founding Myth

Countries have complicated, bloodthirsty histories. Healthy views of those histories can acknowledge the darkest periods of a country’s founding while celebrating the progress that country’s civil society has made possible. The United States struggles with its heritage of racial discrimination, but Ibram X. Kendi isn’t hunted by the government on terrorism or separatism charges.

In contrast, Türkiye’s leaders are unable to grapple with its past the way its greatest writers and citizens routinely do. It’s not in the authoritarian’s interest to allow deviant histories. It undermines the idea of the state he has sold to legitimize his rule.

For Türkiye, admitting fault in the Armenian genocide would also undermine Turkish nationalists, who have dominated Turkish politics since the country’s founding. A century of denial has entrenched that view, making it even more difficult for a nationalist politician to do the difficult work of reconciling the country with its early crimes.

Despite their best efforts, Türkiye’s leaders can’t stop its citizens from doing the hard work that its leaders have refused to do generation after generation.

Every member of a free society must find their own source of meaning to decide how they wish to live. That ongoing search is a welcome distraction from everyday routine, but the absence of an answer can be a painful ache in an otherwise comfortable life.

The Moviegoer follows one person who spends much of his time drifting between his day-to-day responsibilities, to the extent that he fulfills them, only to find meaning in film. Binx Bolling identifies what it is about movies that feel more real than the casual sex he spends much of his time having:

“The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place—but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.”

Bolling sees characters in movies who settle down into that same life as the kind of tragedy he seeks to escape when he enters the theater. There’s a higher lesson to be learned from great films that is designed to move us. That sensation of glimpsing some greater truth about what it means to be alive is absent from the hum-drum of day-to-day living.

It’s not just high-level meaning Bolling finds in movies. Ordinary places matter more when they’re featured in film, too.

Movies Make the World More Real

Bolling moves from the tragedy of movie characters settling into the kinds of lives he hopes to escape and notices how movies change the way places featured in the films are percieved in the real world. He expounds on the change during a movie he sees with his cousin:

“Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

Movies give ordinary places the significance of celebrity. They become part of the tapestry of meaning that great films weave for their audiences. By becoming a part of a greater, more meaningful whole, a building takes on the same significance in real life as it did in the movie.

Art elevates ordinary sights that we may be used to walking past in our daze. Bolling’s tragedy is that he can’t find that same meaning in the intimate relationships he’s having outside of the movie theater that he does in a well-packaged story.

Even worse, he’d be recognzied as a member of high culture despite his shortcomings with the people he’s becoming close to then casting aside. There’s no point for finding meaning for him beyond the neverending search for it.

Anyone Can Create Meaning

Near the novel’s end, Bolling gets into a fight with his aunt. She laments the decline of morality in society, and leads up to this startling observation:

”What is new is that in our time liars and thieves and whores and adulterers wish also to be congratulated and are congratulated by the great public, if their confession is sufficiently psychological or strikes a sufficiently heartfelt and authentic note of sincerity.”

The Moviegoer was published in 1961, well before podcasts brought any and all perspectives to mass audiences. The era of mass media had long since begun, which made anyone with a compelling story a potentailly captivating subject of a story that could reach millions.

The search for “something” authentic hasn’t gone away and the absense of an answer isn’t a product of a particularly decadent society. Meaning-making is a constant challenge that chaplains, therapists, and politicians attempt to overcome for the people who place trust in them.

It’s easy to look back at an event from decades ago and place it into a grand arc of history. Placing our morning dog walk or dead end job into the same place is far more difficult. But anyone with a compelling answer to “what are we doing here” can gain an audience today, regardless of their morals.

We had better hope we pay attention to the right people.

Park Sang-Hak was born in North Korea in 1968 and didn’t learn how much better the outside world was until his grandma came back from Japan and he encountered other students who had been sent to study in other communist countries.

In 1997, Park’s father arranged to have his family cross into China, get picked up by a car, then flown to South Korea to escape a feared party purge. Park led the operation and has since lost extended family members. The lucky ones had their wealth confiscated.

After studying in South Korea, Park became an activist on behalf of North Koreans who remain imprisoned in the country’s borders. Park seems like the quintessential democratic champion, escaping autocracy to embrace an open society and fight for his country’s rights to the same privileges.

However, Park was inconvenient to South Korean President Moon Jae-In.

Moon became president after Kim Jong Un rose to power and after the Kim family began making overtures to South Korea. President Moon hoped that he could begin the process of reunification, a long-sought goal of both Koreas. (As Sung-Yoon Lee describes in The Sister, one vision is shared democracy, and the other is dominion under the Kim family.)

Kim Jong Un was really leading President Moon on, so North Korea could extract tribute, making peace appear closer than it really was.

Defending Democracy When it’s Inconvenient

The Kim family’s gambit worked so well that South Korea passed a law prohibiting its citizens from launching balloons filled with aid and reading material over the North Korean border. Park was among the most prominent activists arrested and charged under the new Gag Law, prompting criticism from Europe, the United States, and the United Nations.

Park has had other run-ins with South Korean authorities, including reporting issues with his non-profit’s finances. But Moon’s willingness to suppress democratic activism in his country for the sake of appeasing a regime that proved uninterested in peace is a troubling lesson for democratic citizens abroad.

It’s easy to speak the language of liberalism and free choice in elections. Democratic leaders must be willing to defend democracy even when it’s inconvenient. President Moon showed how a country’s leader can fall to the temptation to take an easier way out of a conflict instead of defending the rights he was elected to champion.

The federal government is a giant bureaucracy that performs tasks that many of us will never know about. Several writers noticed the same thing and, as DOGE was cutting programs, published Who is Government?

The book is a short series of essays that highlight interesting people solving unique problems in the federal government. Among them is a man who cleaned up a radioactive spill under budget, ahead of schedule, and transformed the area into a safe, clean park.

Problems like these are unprofitable to solve, but valuable to the people affected by them. Another of those problems was solved by a coal miner named Christopher Mark.

Keeping Coal Miners Alive

For decades, coal miners had to support their tunnels by keeping pillars throughout their tunnels. The problem was that the more coal they mined, the weaker these pillars became, increasing the risk of cave ins.

Mark’s insight came from working in a coal mine before dedicating himself to the hard problem of why cave ins happen. Different mines have different rock compositions, which makes a standard solution difficult. Mark created an algorithmic solution that too into account the Earth’s tectonic shifts and other factors to help mine designers plan ahead to keep miners safe.

His efforts paid off. In 2016, no American miner was killed by a falling roof. It was the first time in history that milestone had been reached. Mark’s expertise was vital, but so was another crucial shortcoming that he addressed:

“The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it. People facing a complicated problem measure wheatever they can easily measure. But hte measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.”

Data is Only as Good as its Application

Mark solved a common management mistake that large organizations are prone to. Collecting data is a crucial first step to solving a problem. But once it’s collected, new priorities can take over the original project the data was for. A solution may not be obvious without the relevant expertise, either.

Practical application was so important to Mark that he bristled at the idea that he wrote “academic papers” in publishing his work. When the author Michael Lewis asked about Mark’s publications, Lewis was surprised at Mark’s initial reaction:

“‘I never wrote an academic paper,’ he said, a bit sharply. ‘Not one. They’re technical papers.’ He caught himself and explained that he saw himself not as an academic but a solver of practical problems. ‘I have an absolute allergy to academic elitism,’ he said, but finally added, ‘No, it’s not normal [for someone in his job to write acadmeic history papers].’”

Mark considered a career in academia but didn’t like the disconnect between research and the people it was supposed to impact. Instead, he found his calling saving lives in the federal government.

Each story in Who is Government? is similarly rich and surprising. It’s a great humanizing look at a bureaucracy that even those of us who cover politics for work know little about.

Kuwait has been rebuilding since the end of Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1992. The small country has a government with the same three branches of government as the United States. However, it also has an Emir, the member of the royal family who runs the country. For all its modernization efforts, Kuwait still has no separation of powers.

So, critics of the government, like Jamal Al-Sayer, place themselves in danger by criticizing Kuwait's leaders. He was arrested in July 2021 for making this post on X:

“Your highness...the situation has become unbearable. You have allowed the government to disrupt and violate the constitution, defying the parliament and the people’s will.”

He was stepping into a conflict between the royal family and parliament. Kuwait is unusual in that it has a more influential parliament than surrounding theocracies. There was not enough separation between the Emir and parliament to protect him.

Al-Sayer was arrested for “spreading fake news” and “insulting the emir.” He was released three weeks after his arrest.

Royal Reality Distortion

However secure his position, the Emir cannot afford to allow criticism even in a political environment with institutional pushback.

It’s one thing to grapple with a parliament that the Emir still enjoys substantial influence over. Dissidents who demand more from their political systems aren’t so easily controlled. These dissidents can also gain support from enough people to overthrow the regime.

“Fake” is any opinion the leader finds objectionable, a transparent pretense to discredit critics in civil society. The Emir can use the power of the state to punish those who view the world differently than he does, which even Kuwait’s parliament can’t counter.

It’s a haunting lesson for even developed countries with overpowered presidents and a feeble Congress.