NEW ESSAY: Rethinking Power: From Marx Through Critical Theoryto the New Paradigm of Complexity3/6/2026  This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
When faced with conflict, we often reach for blame. It feels natural to look for a culprit—someone responsible for harm, someone who caused things to go wrong. This instinct shapes everything from personal arguments to political struggles. Yet across cultures and centuries, thinkers have repeatedly questioned whether suffering can really be explained so simply. Again and again, they have asked why life together produces pain at all, and whether the problem lies not in particular people but in deeper patterns of human existence. Across both Eastern and Western traditions, thinkers have offered strikingly different explanations for why harm exists. Some located suffering in desire and attachment; others in failures of virtue, imbalance, fear, or inequality; still others in divine order, moral corruption, or the limits of human reason. Philosophers debated whether human beings are fundamentally good or dangerous, free or constrained, responsible for their actions or shaped by forces beyond their control. What unites these otherwise divergent approaches is not agreement about human nature, but a shared effort to explain suffering in general terms. Even when thinkers viewed humans as deeply flawed, they tended to locate the source of harm in recurring moral, psychological, social, or structural conditions—not in the moral failure of particular groups of people singled out as uniquely to blame. Yet for all their depth, these reflections largely remained within scholarly, philosophical, or religious conversations. They influenced how people thought, but only indirectly how societies organized themselves. There was not yet a widely shared public framework that translated these insights into a broadly accessible explanation of social conflict—one capable of naming injustice at scale and mobilizing collective action. That shift would come later, with Karl Marx. Marx offered a way of explaining suffering and conflict that was at once simple, compelling, and politically actionable. By framing social life in terms of struggle between classes—between those who benefit from existing arrangements and those who are harmed by them—he provided a language that could travel far beyond philosophy. His ideas inspired revolutions, shaped political regimes, and informed experiments in social organization across the globe, from the Soviet Union to China and beyond. The consequences were mixed and often tragic, particularly where abstract ideals were imposed on real human lives. At the same time, Marxist ideas also helped fuel movements for labor rights and social protections that many now consider essential. Whether embraced or rejected, Marx’s influence is difficult to overstate. His framework did something earlier traditions had not: it turned suffering into a political problem with identifiable causes and possible remedies. In doing so, it transformed how societies talk about harm, injustice, and responsibility—and laid the groundwork for later theories that would place power at the center of social analysis. Continue reading here. [This essay will be included in Newsletter#22.]
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 Image credit: Butterfly and Pinkerton; screenshot from the film by Frédéric Mitterrand (1995)
This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. My work in recent years has been concerned with exploring a simple but demanding claim: power and powerlessness are always intertwined in any person and in any action. They do not coexist evenly, symmetrically, or justly, and they do not cancel each other out. I am using these terms not as fixed identities—powerful or powerless—but as a way to describe how agency and constraint coexist in lived situations. Power is always exercised under constraint, and powerlessness rarely (if ever) means the total disappearance of agency. This claim matters because common ways of talking about power simplify human relationships and human beings themselves. People are often sorted into categories—e.g., villains or victims—as if these were stable, internally coherent states. Such framings can be morally clarifying, but they are often analytically blunt. They obscure the uneven, relational dynamics through which agency and constraint take shape in lived situations, often in ways that become visible only in retrospect. And when we rely on such blunt categories, we also oversimplify our responses to conflict and harm, making it harder to understand what sustains suffering and what might actually interrupt it. As I searched for a case that could make this paradox visible, I found it easier to begin with someone conventionally understood as powerful. That is why I chose Louis XIV. In writing about him, I examined how even a ruler associated with absolute monarchy lived within dense webs of dependence, fear, limitation, and loss of control. That analysis relied on biography, archival detail, and historical distance. In this essay, I take a different route. I turn to a work of fiction—Puccini’s Italian opera Madama Butterfly—not to reverse the argument or to offer a symmetrical counterpart, but to explore a different problem: how power can still appear within lives that are overwhelmingly defined by powerlessness. This approach is based on the assumption that fiction can sometimes illuminate inner logic and constrained agency in ways that the historical record cannot. This essay discusses major plot developments in Madama Butterfly (spoilers) and includes reference to suicide. Continue reading here. [This essay will be included in Newsletter#21.] NEW BLOG FOR MEDIA EDUCATION LAB: Good vs. Evil and the Limits of Empathy in K-Pop Demon Hunters2/22/2026  Image credit: TV Tropes Here is my latest essay for Media Education Lab: Narratives of good and evil are everywhere. They run deep in human storytelling, from ancient myths and fairy tales to modern movies and news headlines. We seem drawn to stories that divide the world into heroes and villains. The appeal is obvious: such narratives make moral dilemmas, which abound in our lives, easier to process. Yet this clarity comes at a cost. By simplifying people into categories of good and bad, these stories obscure the complexity of motives, causes, and relationships. When we see the world this way, it becomes harder to resolve conflicts—whether in society or in our personal lives—because we stop asking what drives people and start treating “badness” as a complete explanation. It also makes self-reflection harder: if we reserve moral ambiguity for “them,” we are less likely to notice our own mixed motives, rationalizations, and capacity to cause harm. Media literacy educators have long examined how stereotypes, misinformation, and ideology shape our understanding of the world. But the deeper narrative structure—the good-versus-evil moral binary that underpins so much storytelling—often goes unquestioned. This essay offers one concrete way to address that gap by briefly analyzing a widely watched media text, K-Pop Demon Hunters (KPDH), with a simple lesson-plan sketch at the end. Keep reading here.  This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
Writing about how power and powerlessness are intertwined, I can almost predict one specific critical response: But the language of powerful and powerless groups has helped us name real injustices and move toward equality. Are you trying to undo that? No. I think that language has been useful—sometimes essential. It offers a clear moral and political signal: some patterns of social life reliably disadvantage some people. If we can’t name those patterns, we can’t contest them. At the same time, I think the language of “powerful” and “powerless” has a built-in risk: it can harden into a story that flattens reality. And when it flattens reality, it can be used in two opposite—and equally unhelpful—ways. One is to treat a group as uniformly dominant and therefore uniformly suspect. The other is to seize on complexity as proof that inequality isn’t real, or that efforts toward equality are unnecessary or oppressive in themselves. This essay is my attempt to hold onto what the simplification helps us see, without letting it erase what it hides. Continue reading here. [This essay will be included via a link in Newsletter#21.] Here’s a new kind of post I’ll be mixing in between updates about new essays and projects: POEM (REVISITED). From time to time, I’ll be returning to poems I shared a few years ago, and posting them here again so they’re easier to find, read, and live with in a new moment. Butterfly One day, between the flowers and the sky, I met the most amazing butterfly. It sat in my hand, waiting to be caught, And all I knew was that it caught my heart. This butterfly became my precious friend, Our happiness, I felt, would never end. First, I carried my friend around. Her feet were still unsteady on the ground. I fed her and I slowly watched her grow. I taught her things that she did not yet know. My friend became as strong and tall as me. She could explore all things that she could be. My work was done, and now it was my turn To take the love she offered in return. She fed me patiently as I was growing small. She taught me things that I could not recall. My feet were now unsteady on the ground. She smiled to me and carried me around. It was so warm and cozy in her hand. Our happiness, I felt, would never end. One day, between the flowers and the sky, It was my turn to be a butterfly.  This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
“Power” is one of the concepts we rely on most heavily to make sense of moral conflict. In everyday conversations, in political debates, and in activist language, power is usually understood as something people either have or lack. Some people are seen as powerful: they make decisions, influence outcomes, and shape the lives of others. Other people are seen as powerless: constrained, acted upon, deprived of meaningful choice. This way of thinking about power feels intuitive. It helps us explain injustice, assign responsibility, and draw moral boundaries. It also supports a familiar narrative structure: those with power cause harm, those without power suffer it. From this perspective, wrongdoing appears as the result of freely chosen actions by people who could have acted differently but did not. I want to argue that this understanding of power is incomplete. Power is not a simple possession, and it is not distributed in clean moral or social categories. Human beings do not fall neatly into groups of the powerful and the powerless. Instead, power and powerlessness are intertwined in every person, including those who appear to hold great authority and those who appear to have very little. This claim does not deny that power differences are real or that harm matters. It does not suggest that responsibility disappears once we acknowledge constraint. Rather, it points to a more accurate description of how human action actually works. People act from a mixture of capacity and limitation, agency and confusion, influence and constraint. Ignoring this mixture leads to moral oversimplification and distorted explanations of conflict. To understand power more clearly, we need to move away from binary thinking and toward a view of power as situational, partial, and always intertwined with powerlessness. Continue reading here. [This essay will be included via a link in Newsletter#21.]  I’ve just published a new essay on Medium: it’s a lightly reworked version of a piece I originally published on this blog in September 2024, revisited in light of how relevant these questions still feel.
If you live in the United States, as I do, you run into political and cultural polarization almost everywhere. But polarization is not unique to this country. If anything, one could argue that as the world becomes more interconnected, it is also becoming more divided, with rifts within and between countries deepening over time. Polarization is the opposite of connection, and connection has been a central theme in my scholarship and writing for nearly a decade. I keep returning to a basic question: What would it look like to emphasize connection—seriously, consistently—while people struggle with the problems of today’s world? Back in 2020, as I was finishing my book Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame, I found a song that seemed to encapsulate (albeit cryptically) many of my thoughts about polarization, connection, the human condition, empathy, and self-awareness. I am referring to “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. My goal here is not to argue that my interpretation is the correct one. We will probably never know exactly what Queen and Bowie meant, and perhaps it is not even essential to pin down what they consciously intended. Some would say that real masterpieces emerge when artists let something larger than the individual speak through them. My goal is simpler: to explain why, in an age of intensifying polarization, “Under Pressure” feels like an anthem for empathy. Continue reading here. [This essay is not going to be included in the newsletter.]  This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
We are born into constraints so ordinary that they become invisible: a particular nervous system, a particular family story, a language, a culture, a body that wants and fears before “I” can even form a sentence. Add to this the constraint that we don’t fully understand ourselves—our motives, triggers, blind spots—and the fantasy of unlimited freedom becomes hard to defend. And yet the opposite fantasy—that we are merely programmed—fails too. It doesn’t match lived experience, and it invites fatalism. What seems truer is something narrower and stranger: a small, shifting space inside the constraints where choice can occur. Not a wide-open field. Wiggle room. The phrase matters because it forces a more honest scale. In many moments, agency is not a grand power to redesign one’s life at will. It is the ability to make a small adjustment inside a much larger pressure. It is a narrow opening in a crowded room. It is a few degrees of movement inside a system that doesn’t budge easily. When we call it “wiggle room,” we acknowledge two things at once: the constraints are real, and they are not the whole story... Keep reading here. [This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20 on January 13.]  This is the latest essay I published in my project Me, Looking for Meaning.
I watched Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon not long after it came out in 2021, and I remember being surprised by how directly it spoke to a problem that usually gets flattened in mainstream storytelling: polarization. The film’s premise is blunt and timely—Kumandra is a land broken into five rival groups, and the fracture is sustained as much by fear and suspicion as by anything material. The first time I saw it, I was genuinely moved by the climactic moment when Raya finally understands that repair and connection won’t happen unless someone risks being the first to step forward. The emotional logic was simple but powerful: if everyone waits for proof of safety before reaching out, the stalemate never ends. I liked that the film insisted, in a very Disney way, that repair begins with an inner movement—a loosening of the grip of certainty, a willingness to risk being wrong, and a refusal to reduce the other side to a permanent enemy. Even then, I felt a hesitation. The ending arrived with dragons, reunification, and a kind of visual fireworks: reconciliation as spectacle. That kind of closure can be beautiful, but it also implies that unity will look beautiful—obvious, luminous, unmistakable. In real life, when people overcome hatred or rebuild relationships, it often looks… ordinary. It can look awkward. It can look like small adjustments, uncomfortable conversations, and cautious experiments with closeness. But I still liked the movie overall. When I rewatched the film recently, what stood out was the film’s near-constant insistence on one particular remedy: trust. I realized that treating trust as the central solution for conflict made the message feel less convincing to me, even though I was still touched by the film’s intent to tackle polarization. Keep reading here. [This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20, which will be sent out around mid January.]  Image credit: Annie Spratt This is the latest essay I published in my project Me, Looking for Meaning.
Why do people see and understand the world so differently? We share the same planet, breathe the same air, sometimes even live in the same houses, and yet the realities we inhabit can feel worlds apart. What one person finds obvious, another finds incomprehensible. What feels true to one may seem absurd to another. These differences shape everything—from politics and art to the smallest misunderstandings between friends. I’ve come to think that each of us lives at the intersection of three coordinates. Together, they greatly impact how we perceive and interpret the world. The coordinates are human nature, individual characteristics, and experience. These three coordinates can scatter us across different worlds of meaning, yet awareness of them may also help us navigate toward one another. Keep reading here. [This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20, which will be sent out around mid January.] |