In an era defined by convenience and hyper-accessibility, human lives are increasingly shaped by the consumption of values through media, education, cultural norms, or economic goods. From political ideologies to personal identities, many individuals passively absorb ready-made meaning systems. This trend, while seemingly benign, poses a threat to the integrity of human agency. For a person to truly be free, not just legally but existentially, they must not only consume values but also engage in the more difficult, vital task of creating values. This essay argues that value consumption alone makes humans reactive and dependent, while value creation is fundamental to autonomy, dignity, and the full expression of human agency.

From childhood, we are immersed in layers of social, cultural, and political meanings that tell us who we are, what to believe, how to behave, and what to desire. These values (such as nationalism, religious morality, economic success, or romantic love) are rarely interrogated but often internalized. To consume values is to inherit a worldview without deliberate authorship. While this process is a necessary starting point for human development, it becomes a trap when individuals stop there. Without critical engagement or transformation, the consumer of values becomes a vessel, not an author, of meaning.

When we rely solely on consumption, we outsource our moral compass to authority, tradition, or fashion. We react to social expectations, trending ideologies, or charismatic leaders rather than shaping our own direction. This reactivity is particularly dangerous in political life, where citizens may follow slogans instead of principles or react to fear and resentment rather than engage in thoughtful deliberation. The result is not freedom, but conformity wrapped in the illusion of choice.

Agency is the capacity to initiate, to reflect, to choose deliberately, and to act with intention. A person who merely consumes values lacks this capacity in a deep sense; they follow scripts written by others. Value creation, on the other hand, is the deliberate crafting of one’s own meaning systems based on lived experience, reflection, and critical engagement. It means asking: What do I believe? Why does this matter to me? What do I want to stand for in the world?

This is not the same as relativism or creating values arbitrarily. True value creation is both personal and social, for everyone is interconnected. No one creates values from vacuum. It draws from history, community, and language, but it refuses to be defined only by them. It tests inherited values, modifies them, or rejects them when they conflict with one’s deeper understanding of the world. A free person is one who does not merely inherit values but shapes them in dialogue with others and in alignment with their own integrity.

Value creation is therefore about ownership. It’s not freedom from values; it’s freedom with values that one has consciously shaped. It is in this way that value creation becomes an exercise of sovereignty, self-determination, a declaration that one is not merely a recipient of the world but also a co-author of its meanings.

A society of value consumers tends to become fragile, polarized, or easily manipulated. Why so? Because unexamined values can become rigid dogmas or tools for domination. People cling to them as identities rather than use them as frameworks for thoughtful living. This rigidity undermines pluralism, solidarity, and democracy.

By contrast, a society that encourages value creation fosters citizens who are capable of disagreement without dehumanization, who see others as fellow meaning-makers rather than enemies or converts. This is essential in democratic life, where diverse values must coexist, conflict, and be negotiated toward a shared common good.

Moreover, value creators are more resilient. They do not collapse when their inherited frameworks fail; they are practiced in rebuilding meaning from the ground up. In political struggle, resistance, or crisis, it is the value creator who sustains moral clarity, adapts wisely, and leads authentically.

Thinking about how we form our identities and beliefs reveals that they are not fixed essences but constructed strategies, tools for navigating an unstable and complex world. To consume values without creation is to treat strategies as essences: rigid, sacred, and non-negotiable. But to create values is to recognize the strategic nature of meaning-making. It allows one to adapt, resist, collaborate, and transform without losing coherence. Therefore, value creation is not a luxury; it is a discipline. It demands critical thinking, emotional maturity, and a willingness to live with uncertainty. But it is precisely in this space, where values are not given but made, that human beings come closest to freedom.

Freedom is not the absence of constraint; it is the presence of agency. To be free is to author one's life in relation to the world, not merely to exist within it as a passive inheritor of someone else’s values. While value consumption is an inevitable part of social life, it must be balanced—and ultimately transcended—by the deliberate act of value creation. This act affirms not only individual dignity but the very possibility of a meaningful collective life. It transforms politics into dialogue, ethics into practice, and identity into evolution. A truly free person is not one who consumes values that fit them best, but one who dares to craft values worth living, and even dying, for.

Many interpretations of "democracy" exist today, and its practical challenges are often overlooked. Instead of romanticizing the word "democracy" and relying solely on the outcome of votes, imagine a political system where thoughtful dialogue and debate among community members drive decisions. This is the core of deliberative democracy. Let's imagine a model that prioritizes collective reasoning and informed consent over simple majority rule. Let us expand our democracy beyond voting to include debates, dialogues and discussions among the people.

When citizens gather as equals to exchange reasons, weigh evidence and navigate disagreement, they engage in something profoundly different from mere preference aggregation. This deliberation process must honors the complexity of public issues by cultivating spaces where diverse perspectives can be articulated, challenged, and refined.

Think of Rousseau's concept of the General Will. Rousseau distinguished between the mere "will of all"—the sum of individual preferences—and the General Will that emerges when citizens deliberate with the common good in mind. "The General Will alone," Rousseau argued, "can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted." In this interpretation, deliberative democracy might be understood as offering practical mechanisms for discovering this elusive General Will through structured, inclusive dialogue.

Similarly, John Rawls argued that "public reason" provides theoretical underpinning for deliberative approaches. Rawls envisioned citizens engaging in public dialogue by offering reasons that others could reasonably accept, rather than simply advancing claims grounded in their particular comprehensive doctrines. His famous "veil of ignorance" thought experiment—asking us to design principles of justice without knowing our future social position—represents a deliberative ideal that pushes beyond narrow self-interest toward more impartial reasoning.

Our contemporary democratic systems, however, suffer from a troubling short-sightedness. Polarizing electoral mechanisms, with their predictable cycles and emphasis on immediate results, systematically privilege short-term thinking for many people. This "democratic myopia" often renders our governance structures peculiarly flawed to address long-horizon challenges like climate change or intergenerational justice. The majoritarianism also left out the consent of the lost. The political discourses polarize the people and create a soft war within.

When elected officials operate with one focus perpetually on the next election, how can they adequately represent those whose voices remain unheard. Future generations, distant populations, or even non-human species affected by our decisions are left out as well. Deliberative processes offer a potential remedy by creating spaces where participants can temporarily step back from immediate interests to consider more expansive timeframes and communities.

The process of deliberation typically unfolds through several interconnected phases. Communities first identify and frame the issues warranting collective attention—a process that itself benefits from inclusive participation. Information sharing follows, drawing on diverse knowledge sources from expert testimony to lived experience. The heart of the process lies in the ensuing discussion, where participants articulate perspectives, challenge assumptions, and collectively reason toward decisions that reflect their deepened understanding.

Consider how this may play out in citizens' assemblies, where random community members convene over extended periods to deliberate on complex issues. In Ireland, a citizens' assembly helped break decades of political deadlock on abortion rights by creating space for nuanced discussion outside the polarized rhetoric of electoral politics. The recommendations were later endorsed by national referendum. It may be seen as a promising example of how deliberative forums can sometimes navigate contentious terrain more successfully than traditional political institutions. There are other examples, but I think that we got the point.

The deliberative approach fundamentally reimagines citizens' role in governance. Rather than occasional voters or passive recipients of policy, community members become active co-creators of public decisions. This transformation asks more of citizens—requiring time, engagement, and openness to changing views—but also offers more: a deeper form of political agency and connection to one's community.

This vision of active citizenship recalls Rousseau's assertion that freedom comes not from the absence of constraint but from living under laws one has helped author. "The people being subject to the laws," he wrote, "ought to be their author: the conditions of society ought to be regulated solely by those who come together to form it." Deliberative processes embody this principle by making citizens genuine authors of collective decisions, not merely their subjects.

We would be remiss, however, to present deliberative democracy as a panacea without acknowledging its considerable challenges. The deliberative struggle of equal participation collides with stubborn realities of power imbalance, resource constraints, and social inequality. Even in carefully designed forums, certain voices may dominate while others remain marginalized, reproducing rather than remedying existing power disparities.

Reaching meaningful consensus presents another formidable challenge. As societies grow more diverse in values and worldviews, finding common ground becomes increasingly difficult. Here, Rawls's notion of "overlapping consensus" offers a promising direction—suggesting that citizens with different comprehensive doctrines might nonetheless converge on political principles they can affirm for different reasons.

The resource-intensive nature of deliberation raises questions of scale and sustainability. How might deliberative approaches, which typically flourish in smaller settings, address issues requiring national or global coordination? Digital technologies offer intriguing possibilities for expanding deliberative reach, though they bring their own complications regarding access, authenticity, and the quality of exchange.

Despite these challenges, deliberative democracy offers something our political systems desperately need. I mean spaces for collective reflection amidst the noise of modern politics. By reasoned decision-making and creating structured opportunities for listening and learning, deliberative processes can help restore the declining capacity to reason together about our common future. Deliberative democracy doesn't claim perfect outcomes or uncontested truths. Rather, it suggests that decisions improved through inclusive dialogue, while still fallible, carry a legitimacy and wisdom that undeliberated decisions typically lack.

But there is a nuance. Think of deliberation as a lively space where we find ways to cooperate even with different opinions. It is not a place of sermons or producing truths. We don't need everyone to become the same; it's about different groups strategically agreeing on shared goals and ways to communicate so we can all move forward without losing our unique aspirations and our identities. This approach, although seeking to gather people as equals, must also recognize that we are all different and that power isn't always equal. So, when we discuss, we should always ask ourselves the following questions. Who is really being heard? How are we making decisions? And are we making things fairer for everyone? Whom was left out? Deliberative democracy must actively disrupt dominance e.g. active inclusion of marginalized voices. Otherwise, it risks replicating the hierarchies it seeks to replace. Only by being this thoughtful can talking things out help us create a community that respects everyone's differences and is fairer for all.

Might deliberative approaches offer not just a theoretical ideal but a practical necessity? Perhaps the path toward more responsive governance lies not in abandoning our democratic commitments but in reimagining how those commitments are realized through creating spaces where citizens can practice the art of thinking together about the world they share, apply their agency and promise together to create.

On 1 February 2021, the military of Myanmar staged a coup, abruptly halting the democratic trajectory set by its civilian government. Since then, the people have faced not merely political repression, but a calculated campaign of terror. This is not rhetoric—it is legal, definable, documentable terror. The institution once tasked with safeguarding sovereignty now operates like a classic terrorist organization under both domestic and international legal frameworks.

Terrorism, despite lacking a universally binding definition under international law, has achieved conceptual clarity through various UN documents. The 1994 Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism defines it as "criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes." The five critical components—intentional violence, targeting civilians, an audience, political motives, and the generation of fear—serve as a diagnostic lens.

Under Myanmar’s own Counter-Terrorism Law of 2014, the legal bar is even clearer. Section 3 defines terrorism to include acts causing death, serious injury, or destruction with the intent to intimidate or coerce. Critically, the law does not exempt state actors or military institutions from liability—an omission that today holds monumental implications.

In the 36 months following the coup, over 4,700 civilians have been killed and 26,000 arbitrarily detained, according to credible documentation from Amnesty International and the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP). Victims include children as young as 20 months and elderly individuals in their 80s. This is not collateral damage. It is systematic targeting. (The data as in SAC-M report of 2024. Current reported data is much more.)

In one well-documented incident, a five-year-old girl was fatally shot, and in another, a two-year-old lost both legs after junta forces opened fire. In Sagaing Region alone, dozens of villagers were tied, executed, and their corpses set alight—some booby-trapped with landmines, a technique disturbingly reminiscent of tactics used by the ISIS.

These are not isolated excesses. They form a consistent pattern of intentional violence designed to sow fear. Vehicle ramming against peaceful protestors, torture televised on state-controlled media, and hostage-taking of family members when political targets are not found—these are all hallmark terrorist behaviors. And they meet every legal criterion.

The 2014 Myanmar Counter-Terrorism Law, especially Section 5 and 7, explicitly includes acts that “intimidate a population or compel the government” as terrorism. Despite the junta’s attempt to brand the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) as terrorists, the inverse more accurately reflects the law.

Internationally, Myanmar is a signatory to major counter-terrorism conventions—the 1979 Hostages Convention, 1997 Terrorist Bombings Convention, and 1999 Terrorist Financing Convention—yet its military flagrantly violates their spirit and letter. Though these treaties often exclude intra-state military actions, they still set normative standards. Meanwhile, the ASEAN 2007 Convention on Counter Terrorism, to which Myanmar is a party, imposes obligations that are incompatible with state-sanctioned terror.

The National Unity Government (NUG)’s designation of the military as a terrorist organization on 7 June 2021 is more than symbolic. It aligns with domestic law and international moral clarity. Conversely, the military junta’s designation of the NUG’s CRPH as terrorists on 8 May 2021 is a cynical maneuver to cloak aggression under the veil of legality.

The Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M) has compiled overwhelming evidence from UN Special Rapporteurs, the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), and major human rights organizations, urging the global community to act. The call is unequivocal: recognize the military as a terrorist organization, enact comprehensive sanctions, cut arms and cash flows, and employ international legal mechanisms for accountability.

The principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), reaffirmed by the UN in 2005, obliges the international community to prevent mass atrocities when the state fails. Here, the state is the perpetrator. Here, the UN is also failing.

When night raids become routine, when toddlers are maimed, when protest leaders are abducted and tortured, and when entire villages are reduced to ash—then the state has become indistinguishable from the very threats it claims to defend against.

The global hesitation to confront such realities due to concerns over sovereignty or geopolitical balance is understandable—but increasingly untenable. The precedent set here will echo beyond Myanmar. It will speak to every fragile democracy, every authoritarian temptation, and every community pleading for protection under the law.

If the definition of terrorism means anything at all, it must also mean that uniforms and official insignias do not grant impunity. The world must call this military institution what it legally is: a terrorist organization.

(This piece is in reference to Special Advisory Council's Report with the same name)

There is something strange about how quickly we accept the idea of authority. We listen to people because they wear uniforms, because they hold microphones, because they sit behind desks with polished nameplates. Some tell us they were born to lead. Others say they’ve been chosen. But if we pause for just a moment, we might ask: Who gave them that right? And what makes it right at all?

In our view, this question becomes not just academic, but essential to how we live together. We are invited to see that no one has a natural right to rule over others. There is no divine stamp on anyone’s forehead, no eternal truth inscribed in bloodlines or institutions. Authority, in truth, is a human invention. It is something we’ve collectively agreed to, and which we can just as easily reshape or withdraw.

Power, then, is not a gift or an inheritance. It is simply a tool—like a hammer or a pen. In the hands of someone responsible, it can build homes, write laws, and protect the vulnerable. But in the hands of someone careless, it can destroy. We should be slow to glorify power, and quick to question those who wield it. The right to lead must never be assumed; it must be earned and continually re-earned.

This leads us to the idea of the mandate. Mandate is not inherited status or raw force. It is what makes authority legitimate. Mandate does not come from history books or sacred scrolls. It comes from people—from their free, informed, and ongoing consent. We allow others to lead us not because they are better, but because they have shown they are worthy of our trust, at least for a time.

And even then, the mandate is fragile. It is not a one-time permission slip; it is a continuous dialogue. Those who lead must listen. They must explain. They must respond when things go wrong, and be willing to step down when they can no longer serve. Authority that forgets this becomes stale, corrupt, or even violent.

To know whether a leader truly has a mandate, we can look for certain signs. Is their process open and clear, or hidden behind closed doors? Are they willing to be questioned, or do they silence critics? Do they make space for everyone, especially the quiet and the excluded? Do they act with a sense of care—not just for those who voted for them, but for those who didn’t, and even for those who cannot vote at all?

True authority, if it exists, must always serve something larger than itself: the common good. It is not simply about serving people’s preferences. It is about protecting their dignity, their freedom, and their ability to thrive together. It is also about protecting the planet that sustains us. If a leader acts only for a few, or for today alone, they do not have a mandate. They have simply grabbed the steering wheel of the bus we all ride, without asking if we agree on the destination.

This is why skepticism toward hierarchy is not cynicism. It is care. It is the belief that power needs limits, because no one, no matter how wise, should be trusted without question. The more someone holds, the more they must be watched. We do not watch out of hate, but out of love for what could be broken.

These ideas are not new. Rousseau, for instance, imagined something called the “general will”, the shared desire for the good of all. He warned that this is not the same as just adding up everyone’s wishes. Sometimes, it means doing what is fair even when it is unpopular. Rawls asked us to imagine designing society from a place where we didn’t know who we would be in it—rich or poor, powerful or weak. From that place, we might choose justice that is fair, not just convenient.

In the modern world, we often think elections give a mandate. But that only works if the elections are really open, fair, honest and responsive. When they aren’t, the idea of mandate becomes a mask for tyranny. Some communities have tried something else: citizen assemblies, where people discuss and decide together. Others turn to grassroots movements where ordinary people rising up when power forgets its place.

Technology, too, can play a role. It can spread awareness and shift mindsets, though it must be used with care. We have seen how easily it can divide us. But we’ve also seen how it can amplify unheard voices and connect those working for justice.

The future, perhaps, belongs not to those who take power, but to those who are trusted with it. Power should be shared, not hoarded. The best leaders will not be those who shout the loudest, but those who listen, who welcome difference, and who are brave enough to step aside when others must lead.

At the heart of this lies a simple idea: No one owns the world. We walk it together. To lead is not to dominate, but to guide, gently, with love. The planet is not a resource to be consumed, but a companion to be cared for. Authority, if it is to mean anything at all, must be humble. And we, as citizens, must be awake. For not to fight every authority, but to ask the right questions. Thus, when power is given, it is given wisely, and when it is used, it serves us all.