We’ve seen that peace is a dynamic thing. It’s something we must build all the time in a world that is always changing and is made by us. In this world, violence and feeling weak are not just things that go wrong sometimes. They are always here, part of how things are in the world.

So, fighting back the domination (resistance) and helping others (care) become very important ways to live our lives, both for ourselves and in groups. But we must also be careful not to think about fighting back and helping in simple, storybook ways. Fighting back is not just about romantic heroes who are good fighting against bad monsters. Helping others is not just about strong people being nice to weak people because they feel sorry for them.

Let us examine. Both resistance and helping others are smart actions. They are not forever, they can break easily, and we must always change how we do them because dangers change and people get hurt in new ways.

In old, simple stories, fighting back often looks like heroism. A small number of truly good people fight against many terrible monsters. These stories suggest that they will win because they are simply on the side of Truth. But if we see the world in a more real way, we know that no one side is completely right. And fighting back is never simple or only good. Even a fight for a very good reason can become bad. Even a very cruel power can sometimes do a small good thing, we look hard.

So, resistance is not saying that one side is forever Good and the other is forever Evil.

It is a practical, careful promise to say "no" to being controlled, to being treated as less than human, and to giving up hope. We do this even while knowing that we ourselves can never be perfectly good or clean in the fight.

Smart resistance asks us:

• Where and how can I say "no" to being controlled in the best way, without causing too much unnecessary harm?
• How do I avoid turning into the bad thing I am fighting against?
• What good things am I helping to build for the future, not just reacting to the bad things happening now?

In this way, resistance is not like a play on a stage. It is like careful gardening. It means pulling out the weeds of cruelty. But it also means making the ground ready so that something better might, one day, grow there.

In the same way, helping others – the act of taking care of people who are weak or hurting – must not be just about feeling emotional or being "nice." Helping is a choice you make carefully. It is often hard and has a price. It means deciding to protect lives and connections that can break easily, even when you know you won't always get something good back, and even when the world still has problems you can't fix easily.

In a world that is not fixed and always changing, helping must be smart:

• It must know its limits. We cannot save everyone. We should also not try to carry all the heavy problems alone.
• It must not treat people like babies. Real help makes people stronger; it doesn't trap them by telling stories that they can only be weak.
• It must know that help goes both ways. We do not help others like we are gods looking down; we help with them, knowing that we are all weak sometimes and need help. Besides, by helping others, we develop better habits.

So, mutual helping is important for the whole community, not just a private act.

It builds small groups and ways of being together that respect people through friendships, groups working together, and sense of community. These fight against the cold, cruel power of others with the strong, warm feeling of sticking together.

Perhaps the hardest but also most beautiful thing is that resistance and mutual helping must be done together, at the same time. Fighting back without helping becomes being mean but calling it fair. Helping without fighting back becomes giving up but calling it kindness.

To live in a good way in a world that is not fixed is to become skillful at holding two ideas that seem to not fit together. It is dialectics.

• To fight against the things that make people feel less than human without starting to hate those things or the people who do them.
• To help the people around us without pretending not to see how systems and power hurt them.
• To keep going knowing we will lose some fights, and that we will never have a final, sure win that lasts forever.

This is the good quality of people who choose to be active in the world without pretending things are perfect. They do not hold onto ideas of perfect places that don't exist. They do not give up and think nothing good can happen. Instead, they build, even in groups that don't last forever, with broken hopes, in systems that are not finished – the strong but breakable ways of living where respect, sticking together, and hope can still live.

In this strange, changing world, smart resistance and smart mutual helping are not things we can choose to do or not do. They are what give us our respect and worth as humans. They don't promise there will be no violence, or that we will never feel weak.

They give us something calmer, stronger, more like real people: the ability to live, to act, and to love like our lives are important even when the world doesn't promise that they are important.

And maybe in that "like," in that kind, strong act of pretending that becomes real when we promise to do it, we find the closest thing to being saved that this changing world gives us.

Let me recite the first words of Dhammapada.

Preceded by mind
are phenomena,
led by mind,
formed by mind.

To live is to live with others. From birth, we are not thrown into the void but into relationships — of care, language, memory, and meaning. We do not choose to be born into a culture, into a way of life, into the rhythms of a shared world. This belonging is not an accident. It is our first condition of being.

It is in this sense that living in society is natural — not as a biological law, but as an existential fact. We grow by reflecting others, negotiating norms, finding shelter in shared rituals and stories. There is no self that stands before society; rather, the self is formed through it.

And yet, this truth — that we are communitarian beings — must not be confused with the illusion that our communities or identities are fixed, pure, or eternal. Cultures are not sealed containers. They are not singular essences that define us once and for all. Cultures evolve, split, remix, and interact. People migrate across them, reinterpret them, and sometimes reject them altogether.

To defend the dignity of community life is not to defend closed essentialism. It is to recognize that we inherit social forms, but we also transform them. That we are born into stories, but we can rewrite their endings. We are not condemned to mimic what came before. We are entrusted with shaping what comes next.

A healthy communitarian vision must be open to this tension. It must affirm that society matters — that local belonging, shared languages, mutual responsibilities, and intergenerational care are crucial for human flourishing. But it must also reject the temptation to turn belonging into a prison, or to use community as a weapon against outsiders, dissenters, or the newly different.

What emerges is a relational way of life: one that neither isolates the individual nor freezes the community into an unchanging idol. In this vision, identity is not a cage but a platform — a starting point for deeper dialogue, creativity, and political negotiation. The village matters, but so does the road that leaves it. Tradition matters, but so does the choice to reinterpret or depart from it.

The greatest danger is when power seizes the language of community to enforce conformity or erase difference. When those in charge claim to speak for “the culture” or “the nation” as if they are divine truths, they turn living traditions into tools of control. They suppress complexity, ignore change, and punish autonomy. That is not community. That is command.

True community is not afraid of difference. It adapts. It listens. It makes room for evolution. It understands that authentic belonging is not coerced — it is cultivated. And it honors that while we may not choose where we begin, we must be free to shape where we go.
This is why the task is not to abandon communities, but to humanize them. Not to burn down cultures, but to open them to their own richness. Not to romanticize the past, but to co-create a shared future that respects both roots and wings.

We need a politics that supports this vision — not by imposing a centralized model of society, but by enabling local agency, cultural resilience, and pluralist experimentation. By designing institutions that protect the right to belong without enforcing sameness. By balancing the memory of who we have been with the possibility of who we may become.

To live communally and yet reject fixed identities is not a contradiction. It is a mature politics of freedom — one grounded in the real conditions of human life, but never resigned to their limits. It is to say: we are born into togetherness, and we are responsible for making that togetherness just.

We tend to see maps as innocent things. We think that neutral diagrams that tell us where we are. They’re on our walls, in our pockets, and in our schools. We use them to locate ourselves, to find direction, and to feel a sense of place. But maps, like stories or myths, don’t just describe reality. They decide what counts as real.

Maps shape the world as much as they show it. They are not just tools but are instruments of power. Behind every neat border and labelled region lies a set of choices. They are about who gets to belong, who is left out, and what is considered valuable.

The history of map-making is not a silent one. It has been deeply tied to conquest, colonization, and control. When European empires expanded, they didn’t just invade land—they redrew it. They drew lines on paper that claimed ownership, divided communities, and renamed places that already had names. In doing so, they introduced a way of thinking we might call territorial essentialism—the idea that people naturally belong to the areas marked out for them.

This belief didn’t come from the land itself. It came from the ambitions of those who wanted to manage it.

In many parts of Southeast Asia before colonialism, territory was not a box with clear edges. It was more like a ripple. Power flowed outward from a center—like a sacred city or royal court—but the edges were soft. It is often known as Mandala system. People belonged through relationships, through language, trade, loyalty, and shared stories. The Khmer empire and Malay sultanates didn’t use borders the way colonial states later did. Their maps, if they had any, were maps of connection, not confinement.

Colonialism changed all that. Western cartographers arrived with rulers and grids. They flattened rich local knowledge into square boxes. They ignored how people used land spiritually, seasonally, or communally. Instead, land became property. It became something to tax, to sell, to extract. Indigenous geographies, oral traditions, pilgrimage paths and sacred forests were dismissed as childish or backward.

This wasn’t just a matter of drawing lines. It was a matter of deciding who could draw them. The mapmaker became a kind of silent ruler. The map maker was able to erase a people’s past, define their future, and determine who counted as a nation.

Over time, these foreign lines became internal beliefs. We began to treat them as if they had always been there, as if they were carved into the earth, not scribbled by colonial administrators in distant offices. We started to believe that the state, as drawn on a map, was the highest form of truth. That idea still shapes how governments rule and how people suffer.

After colonialism, things did not return to how they were. The newly independent states not only kept the old maps but also added new myths. They borrowed symbols from the pre-colonial past and attached them to colonial borders. Some countries claimed the shape of its nation as something ancient and sacred, even though it was only recently defined. Some countries celebrated its “unity in diversity” while suppressing dissent from groups like the indigenous peopls who had their own stories and their own maps. Take a look at Myanmar, India, Thailand or Indonesia for Southeast Asian examples.

Nationalism today often takes this form: a dangerous mix of rigid boundaries and selective memory. It uses both colonial tools and ancient empires to justify power. It claims that belonging is fixed—that each people has a rightful place, and everyone else is a stranger. This turns borders into barriers and identities into weapons.

What makes maps powerful is also what makes them dangerous: their simplicity. A line seems clean. A border feels final. But these drawings hide far more than they reveal. They leave out centuries of movement, intermarriage, negotiation, and exchange. They make it seem as if conflict only arises when someone crosses a line, when in fact the line itself may be the cause of the conflict.

Simplifying complexity is not neutral—it is political. When we flatten the world into boxes, we also flatten people. We erase the grey zones of belonging where most real life happens.

The most stubborn myth of all is that borders never change. That what is drawn on the map is timeless. But history constantly redraws the world. From Africa’s colonial frontiers to the breakup of the Soviet Union, borders are often the result of hasty deals and forgotten conversations. Yet we still treat them as sacred. In the South China Sea, China’s “Nine-Dash Line” is a perfect example. It is not a reflection of deep history, but a modern invention disguised as ancient truth. Maps like this aren’t used to understand the past. They are used to control the future. They are tools of power, used by elites to rally support, distract citizens, or assert control.

We do not need to throw away maps. We need to read them differently—with skepticism, empathy, and imagination.
Let us ask better questions: Who drew this map? For whom? Who is missing? What other ways of living together might we imagine?

Some ethnic groups, like the Rohingya or West Papuans, or even internal nations like Navajo, Karen or Shan, may choose to embrace strong identities in order to resist being erased. That is strategic essentialism, which means using the language of identity not because it is true forever and always, but because it is useful now. But even as we assert these "strategic" identities, we must remember that they are human creations, not eternal facts. Otherwise, there is a risk of us becoming who we fight.

The lasting solution lies in imagining new ways of belonging. Ways that allow for shared spaces, layered identities, and flexible governance. Borders can be meeting points, not prisons. Communities can be built on trust, not lines.

Nowhere is this struggle clearer than in Myanmar. The military-dominated state insists on a single characteristic—“Burmaness”—for a country filled with dozens of nations, hundreds languages, and countless histories. The Dobama Movement claimed that from the Himalayas to the sea, everyone must be Burman. It was later used to develop myths and justify control but not to build unity.

But the peoples fought back. The struggles are not just against the army, but against the idea that their identities could be reduced to conform lines on a map. Ethnic groups like the Kachin or Karen did not simply ask for independence. They demanded the right to be seen, to be complex, to belong without being absorbed. Myanmar’s neighbors have not aggressively attacked and assertively claimed the lands or peoples at its borders. It is not outsiders, but insiders, who continue to colonize in the name of national unity.

Maps are not the enemy. But treating them as sacred truth is. When maps are mistaken for moral law, they serve kleptocrats who hoard power, nepotists who inherit it, and plutocrats who buy it. The lines we inherit should not determine who we are. We must see maps for what they are: human tools, shaped by history, and always open to revision.

Only then can we begin to imagine a politics where belonging is not determined by geography alone but by dignity, memory, and mutual respect.

We have grown used to seeing politics as an arena of contests—where rival ideologies duel, interests are negotiated, and victories are often measured by numbers. It is, we assume, a place of strategies and calculations, of speeches and slogans, of power asserted and resisted. But somewhere along the way, we stopped speaking of one quietly radical idea: friendship.

Not the kind formed over dinner or shared music tastes—but a rarer kind, older and deeper. Friendship, in this richer sense, is the capacity to care without counting. It is the instinct to ask not “What can you do for me?” but “How might we live well, together?” It is rooted not in contracts or convenience, but in trust and the belief that the other person’s life—though unknown, unfamiliar—still matters.
What if politics, at its most human, was not about managing enemies, but about cultivating this kind of friendship?

Should we care strangers? There is a quiet moral revolution contained in the phrase political friendship. It doesn’t require sentimentality or shared biographies. It demands something simpler but harder: to carry the wellbeing of people we’ve never met into the decisions we make. To include them—equally and sincerely—in the circle of concern.

In a world increasingly shaped by profit, polarization, and performance, this is not easy. We are trained—by institutions, by markets, even by fear—to calculate, to measure worth, to define others by their usefulness or their alignment with our side.
But friendship, as a political principle, resists this. It is not transactional. It does not dissolve with disagreement. It does not withhold dignity. It asks us to remain loyal to the idea of others—not because they are like us, or because we agree—but because they are human.

Of course, we cannot speak of political friendship without speaking of power. Friendship cannot flourish in a vacuum. It grows—or withers—in the conditions we build around it. In societies marked by inequality, oppression, or historical violence, friendship is not merely a warm feeling; it is an act of justice. It asks difficult questions: Who sets the terms of recognition? Who is heard? Who belongs?
To practice political friendship in such a world is to commit not only to kindness, but to justice. It is to dismantle hierarchies that keep some people perpetually voiceless. It is to offer not just care, but solidarity.

Now, can friendship be a resistance against dominant power? In a time of increasing polarization—where people are reduced to labels, where politics risks becoming a form of civil war with or without guns—friendship may seem anachronistic. But perhaps it is exactly what we need.
Friendship, politically understood, is resistance against the flattening of others into enemies. It is the refusal to cancel complexity. It insists on dialogue, even in disagreement. It protects us from the cynical temptation to believe that politics is nothing more than domination dressed up in policy.

All politics rests on a slender thread: trust. And trust, like friendship, cannot be legislated into being. It is not built by surveillance or slogans. It grows slowly, in the patient work of showing up, listening, acknowledging harm, and not walking away.
When we lose friendship, we reach for control. More rules, harsher punishments, thicker walls. But none of these teach people to care. Only relationships do. And without care—without even the possibility of it—politics ceases to be a space for peace. It becomes a war managed by paperwork.

Let's think about unity. To speak of political friendship is not to demand agreement or sameness. In fact, the best friendships grow in friction—in the honest tension between difference and loyalty. Friends disagree, but they don’t discard each other. They stay, even when it’s uncomfortable. It is diversity in unity, not mere unity in diversity.

Political friendship, then, is not a mere utopia. It’s a discipline. It asks us to keep negotiating shared life across deep differences. To remain committed to each other even when trust is hard-earned. It invites us to reimagine conflict—not as a threat to be erased, but as a space where dignity can still be protected.

We might also ask: Who gets to be a political friend? Too often, our compassion is shaped by habit—by the boundaries we inherit from nation, race, religion, or ideology. But if friendship is to renew politics, it must unsettle those inherited limits.
It must teach us to ask not only “Who do I care about?”, but “How did I learn not to care about others?” And what might it mean to undo that learning?

I argue that Friendship is probably the Most Political Idea of all. Aristotle once called friendship the highest good of human life—not because it was easy, but because it reminded us that we are not solitary creatures. We are beings made to live with and for one another. Politics, if it is to heal rather than harm, must recover this reality. Not as a sentimental decoration, but as a foundation. Friendship might be the most demanding thing politics could ask of us. But it may also be the most liberating.

Because friendship teaches us that justice is not about fixing people, or sorting them into winners and losers. It is about sharing space, negotiating needs, and choosing dignity—together.

And perhaps that—more than power, more than profit—is the most radical political idea of all.

In most democratic imaginations, opposition is seen as a sign of health—a necessary balance to power, a space for alternative voices. But opposition is often romanticized in theory and demonized in practice. Especially in fragile or polarized societies, the space to dissent can be tightened not only by authoritarian control but also by democratic majorities that have forgotten one critical truth: losing an election does not mean forfeiting one’s dignity.

This is the paradox—democracy is said to be a system of consent, yet so often the consent of those who lose is treated as a formality rather than a foundational element. When power is claimed as victory rather than responsibility, the consent of the governed becomes hollow. And when those who lose their political ground are treated as obstacles instead of participants, the very legitimacy of the system begins to erode.

The phrase "consent of the governed" rings through many constitutions and declarations, but few ask: whose consent is being heard? And whose consent has been lost, ignored, or assumed?

In any election, there will be losers. But democratic opposition is not about temporary defeat—it is about preserving the political voice of those out of power. The majority may hold office, but democracy is sustained by the persistent presence of the minority. When the opposition is bullied into silence, caricatured as unpatriotic, or institutionally disabled, democracy begins to betray itself. Because democracy without a meaningful role for the opposition is merely a polite autocracy.

Consent is not the same as compliance. The defeated do not owe silence. They do not owe admiration. What they are owed is recognition—that their concerns still count, that their values are not obsolete, that their place in society is not contingent upon electoral success.

A truly democratic society protects the right to contest, not just the right to govern. It honors disagreement, not as a threat but as a contribution. This does not mean endless obstruction or cynical sabotage. It means that the voices of the politically outnumbered are not sacrificed at the altar of efficiency or unity.

Too often, democratic systems reduce opposition to a performance—symbolic seats in parliament, token debates, managed protests. But these gestures mean little when the deeper structures of decision-making remain locked. A good democracy doesn’t merely allow dissent; it integrates it. It builds channels for the minority to influence, to shape, and to revise. It ensures that the institutions of governance do not become extensions of the ruling party but remain accountable to the entire public, including those outside power.

This is especially crucial in societies where history has divided people along lines of identity, class, or geography. When opposition is concentrated in certain groups, the exclusion of opposition becomes the exclusion of entire peoples. And when this happens, the message is clear: only some voices matter. The rest are noise.

What then becomes of consent? It turns into something extracted rather than given. People go through the motions of democracy without feeling its spirit. Trust erodes. Cynicism grows. And from this wounded ground, deeper conflicts emerge.

The task, then, is to reclaim the meaning of democratic opposition—not as a tolerated nuisance but as a co-author of legitimacy. This requires institutional design that protects dissent, but more than that, it demands a culture that values disagreement not as defiance but as devotion to the shared project of living together.

It also requires that we resist the hunger for moral victory. That we see politics not as a contest to declare who is right forever, but as a space of ongoing negotiation between those with different views of the good. Opposition, in this light, is not the opposite of loyalty. It is a different kind of loyalty—a loyalty to a system that remains open, responsive, and plural.

Democratic opposition is about more than winning the next election. It’s about sustaining a society where even those without power still have presence. Where the consent of the governed is not assumed, but continuously renewed—through inclusion, through dialogue, and through the recognition that the voices of the "losers" are not disposable, but indispensable.

If democracy means anything, it means refusing to forget those who have lost. It means building a society where the opposition is not a placeholder but a partner. Where the consent of the lost is not a technicality, but a moral commitment. And where the dignity of every voice—especially the quiet, the defeated, the skeptical—is the measure of our collective strength.

In every society that seeks to be just, the language of rights is among its most sacred. We speak of the right to speak, the right to live, the right to be treated with dignity. Rights are powerful tools of defense—especially for the weak in the face of the strong. But rights alone are not enough. When disconnected from responsibility, rights risk becoming hollow. Worse, they risk becoming instruments of selfishness, entitlement, or selective moralism.

The modern obsession with rights tends to present them as fixed, self-evident, or universal truths. But in truth, rights are human constructions—the result of political struggles, cultural shifts, and collective agreements. They do not fall from the sky. They are claimed, negotiated, won, and redefined over time. This makes them both fragile and powerful. Fragile, because they can be revoked or manipulated. Powerful, because they express shared commitments that shape how we live together.

To claim a right is not to declare isolation from others, but to insist on one's inclusion within a moral and political community. Rights, in this way, are relational. They draw boundaries—not to separate, but to protect participation. My right to speak assumes your willingness to listen; my right to protest assumes a society that tolerates dissent. A right that cannot be respected by others is merely a slogan.

This is why responsibility is not the enemy of rights—it is their companion and condition. Without a culture of responsibility, rights float unmoored, subject to convenience or manipulation. But responsibility is often misunderstood. It is not about obedience to authority, nor about guilt or burden. True responsibility is about response—our ability and willingness to respond ethically to the presence, voice, and dignity of others.

Responsibility makes rights meaningful. It reminds us that rights are not shields to hide behind, but spaces to stand within—to protect others as much as ourselves. Responsibility transforms rights from tools of individual defense into instruments of common life.

However, to talk of responsibility in a deeply unequal world is dangerous if we are not careful. Too often, responsibility is demanded only from the weak, while the powerful are excused. The poor are told to be patient, the oppressed to behave, the suffering to endure. But true responsibility begins with power—those who hold more must bear more. Responsibility without justice becomes submission. Justice without responsibility becomes chaos.

This is where we must be skeptical of those who claim to "give" rights as if they are gifts from the top. Rights are not granted by grace; they are rooted in shared human agency. They are part of the struggle to live with others in ways that respect difference and negotiate conflict without domination.

Our task, then, is not to idolize rights, but to embed them in a culture of mutual care. And not to preach responsibility in the abstract, but to build structures that make responsibility possible—through shared power, fair institutions, and open dialogue. Responsibility cannot be demanded in a vacuum; it must be cultivated, modeled, and reciprocated.

A society obsessed only with rights becomes self-centered. A society focused only on responsibility becomes authoritarian. A just society must weave the two together—not as abstract doctrines, but as everyday practices. In families, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods, we learn how to claim our rights by practicing responsibility—and how to take responsibility by being recognized in our rights.

To build such a society requires a shift in moral imagination: away from isolated individuals and toward interdependent agents. It calls us not to purity or perfection, but to humility and dialogue. And it asks us to remember: freedom is not the absence of others, but the presence of just relationships.

In the end, rights and responsibility are not opposing forces. They are the twin lungs through which democratic life breathes. Without both, our political body weakens. With both, we can build a society not of domination and denial, but of shared voice, shared power, and shared care.