Two Equilibria
Freedom and Fear in the Academic World and How Three Days Changed my Life
I still remember Tel Aviv as if I had left yesterday.
Not in the way one remembers a conference, workshop or a campus tour, but in the way one remembers a climate: intellectual, human, atmospheric. Three days were enough. Three days at Tel Aviv University were sufficient to recalibrate what a working academic life can feel like when institutions are designed to multiply, rather than tax, human capital.
The mornings began early, not out of obligation but out of anticipation. I would wake while the Mediterranean air was still cool, lace my running shoes, and head south toward Yafo. The city was already awake, not anxiously, but purposefully. Runners, cyclists, quiet conversations in cafés opening their shutters. No one seemed to be hiding, and no one seemed to be watching anyone else for signs of excess ambition.
Running along the sea does something subtle to the mind. It compresses noise and expands focus. By the time I returned, showered, and walked toward campus, the day already felt earned. At the university, the density was immediate. Offices with open doors. Hallways where conversations began without introductions and ended with citations scribbled on scrap paper. Scholars who listened carefully and disagreed openly. There was no ritualized modesty, no need to downplay one’s work to avoid social penalties. Excellence was not interpreted as an accusation.
The seminar room confirmed it. The questions were demanding, sometimes sharp, but never defensive. They assumed good faith. They assumed competence. They assumed that disagreement was a joint search rather than a territorial incursion. When the seminar ended, it did not dissolve into silence. It migrated to coffee, to lunch, to further debate. Ideas were not exhausted but metabolized. By evening, the city took over again. A Mediterranean dinner, simple, healthy, unapologetically social. Conversation flowed from law to economics to politics without self-censorship or fear of misinterpretation. Arguments were not weaponized. They were enjoyed. By the time I returned to my hotel, I felt something that had become unfamiliar: productive fatigue. The kind that follows a day in which intellectual energy has been converted into output rather than friction.
Only afterward did I realize how stark the contrast was. Back in Ljubljana, the day begins differently. I arrive at the office at the University of Ljubljana in the morning, often to silence. Doors closed. Corridors empty or deliberately inattentive. Conversations, when they happen, are guarded. Information is rationed. Curiosity is cautious. Here, productivity does not circulate. It isolates. Good teaching evaluations are not a shared asset but a warning signal. Strong publications do not elevate the department. They disturb its internal equilibrium. External recognition, advisory work for the European Commission, or coauthorship with scholars such as former chief economist of World Bank does not generate institutional pride. It generates suspicion. Why him? Why now? Visibility is interpreted as threat.
The logic is perverse but consistent. If someone advances too fast, too visibly, the system must slow them down. Not formally, that would require justification, but informally, through isolation, withholding, and the quiet normalization of hostility. Over time, this equilibrium becomes self-enforcing. Colleagues learn that disengagement is safer than engagement, that silence is rewarded, that initiative attracts scrutiny. The institution does not need to punish excellence explicitly. It merely needs to stop protecting it.
In such an environment, even the non-academic seeps in. When my car was vandalized with antisemitic symbols, it did not feel like an aberration. It felt like an extreme but coherent expression of an underlying culture of diffuse hostility toward difference, visibility, and external affiliation. A culture in which success must be explained away, preferably as illegitimate. This is not about personal grievance. It is about institutional incentives. Tel Aviv operates in a high-trust equilibrium. Ljubljana, increasingly, operates in a low-trust one. In the former, excellence compounds. In the latter, it depreciates. And in the long run, such equilibria diverge, not linearly, but exponentially.
The Political Economy of Academic Mediocrity
Academic systems, like economies, converge to equilibria. This is uncomfortable to admit because it strips individuals of moral alibis. When mediocrity persists, it is tempting to attribute it to bad luck, underfunding, or isolated personalities. But persistent patterns are never accidental. They are the predictable outcome of incentives, constraints, and informal norms interacting over time. In low-growth academic environments, mediocrity is not the absence of talent. It is the rational response to institutional design. The core problem is not that excellence is impossible, but that it is costly in non-obvious ways. Publishing well, teaching well, attracting external recognition generate negative externalities for peers operating close to their competence frontier. They raise benchmarks. They invite comparison. They destabilize internal hierarchies that were never meant to be tested.
In such systems, the dominant strategy becomes defensive. Colleagues learn, often unconsciously, that it is safer to disengage than to collaborate, safer to criticize ambition than to emulate it, safer to interpret external success as illegitimate rather than aspirational. Over time, this defensive posture hardens into culture. This is how academic mediocrity becomes self-sustaining. Formal rules rarely enforce this equilibrium. On paper, everything looks meritocratic. Committees exist. Evaluations are conducted. Excellence is praised in abstract language. But the real enforcement mechanism is informal: silence, exclusion, reputational whispering, the slow withdrawal of collegial oxygen. The effect is not dramatic. It is cumulative.
A promising young scholar learns to publish less visibly. A productive mid-career academic stops proposing new initiatives. A senior scholar disengages entirely. What remains is a stable core of low-variance output and high-variance suspicion. Contrast this with Tel Aviv. At Tel Aviv University, the political economy runs in the opposite direction. Excellence generates positive externalities. A strong seminar raises the department’s profile. A successful grant expands opportunities for others. External recognition feeds internal legitimacy rather than undermining it. The key difference is density.
High-density academic ecosystems behave like innovation clusters. Talent is concentrated enough that no single individual’s success threatens the system. Competition exists, but it is buffered by abundance. When many people are strong, strength is not destabilizing but normal. Small, low-density systems behave differently. There, variance is dangerous. One outlier shifts the distribution. One highly visible scholar alters the reference point. Instead of adapting upward, the system adapts defensively. This explains a paradox I encounter repeatedly in Ljubljana: the more externally validated my work became, the narrower my internal academic space grew. Good teaching evaluations were not met with curiosity but with distance. Prestigious publications did not trigger discussion but avoidance. Advisory work for the European Commission did not strengthen institutional ties, it weakened them.
These reactions were not coordinated. No one needed to conspire. The equilibrium enforced itself. In such settings, even personal attributes become politicized. Visibility, confidence, international networks, and yes, even physical appearance, are reframed as provocations. Anything that cannot be quietly assimilated must be neutralized. What emerges is not overt repression, but ambient hostility. A sense that one is always slightly out of place, always slightly watched, always slightly suspect. Over time, this ambient pressure does what formal sanctions cannot: it exhausts. Tel Aviv, by contrast, operates on a radically different assumption that talent is a public good.
There, disagreement is not interpreted as threat. Speed is not mistaken for recklessness. Success does not need to be explained away. The default posture is curiosity rather than suspicion. This is not cultural romanticism. It is institutional economics. Systems that punish outliers select for conformity. Systems that reward variance select for discovery. Over time, the selection effect dominates initial conditions. Places that once had similar starting points diverge, not because one had better people, but because one treated people better.
Ljubljana did not become stagnant because it lacked intelligence. It became stagnant because it made intelligence expensive. And Tel Aviv did not become dynamic because it was utopian. It became dynamic because it aligned incentives with output, recognition with legitimacy, and ambition with belonging. The tragedy of low-trust academic equilibria is not that they fail loudly. It is that they succeed quietly at suppressing precisely the qualities universities were designed to cultivate.
Why Small Systems Punish Outliers?
Small systems are not cruel by nature. They become cruel by arithmetic. When the number of actors is limited, relative position matters more than absolute output. Status becomes positional rather than expandable. In such environments, every visible success reallocates prestige, attention, and implicit authority. Someone must move down for someone else to move up. This is why small academic systems tend to be anxious systems. In a large, high-density ecosystem like Tel Aviv, the success of one scholar barely registers as a threat. There are too many seminars, too many grants, too many journals, too many reference groups. Prestige is not zero-sum because the field of comparison is wide. A productive colleague does not collapse the hierarchy; they simply occupy one more node in a vast network.
In small systems, by contrast, hierarchies are thin and brittle. Visibility compresses status differences rather than diffusing them. One paper in a top journal can dominate an entire department’s output profile. One successful seminar can recalibrate internal rankings overnight. One internationally visible collaboration can expose how provincial the rest of the system has become. The response is rarely admiration. Instead, the system activates informal defenses. Not because individuals are malicious, but because the equilibrium demands it. Outliers create cognitive dissonance: if excellence is possible here, then why is it not more common? If someone can do this, why didn’t I? The easiest resolution is to delegitimize the signal.
Thus begins the slow reinterpretation of success. Strong publications become “niche.” International recognition becomes “political.” External collaborations become “self-promotional.” Teaching excellence becomes “performative.” Nothing is attacked directly and everything is subtly reclassified. This process is sociologically elegant and morally evasive. It allows the system to preserve its self-image while neutralizing destabilizing variance. Over time, scholars internalize the lesson. They learn that being slightly above average is safe, but being clearly excellent is dangerous. They learn to modulate ambition, to downplay speed, to avoid sharp edges. Not consciously, but adaptively. This is how systems select.
Tel Aviv selects for risk tolerance. In my brief time there, I noticed something striking: people were not afraid of being wrong. They argued boldly, proposed unfinished ideas, exposed half-formed intuitions to public scrutiny. Failure did not carry stigma. Stagnation did. This cultural trait is often described as “Israeli directness” or “chutzpah,” but that misses the institutional logic. When systems reward output rather than conformity, psychological safety follows. When disagreement does not threaten belonging, intellectual courage becomes rational.
At Tel Aviv University, disagreement felt like an invitation. In Ljubljana, it often feels like a provocation. The difference is not temperament. It is selection pressure. In Ljubljana, the optimal strategy is caution. Do not move too fast. Do not appear too confident. Do not accumulate too much external validation. Do not disturb the implicit hierarchy. Over time, those who cannot or will not adapt either leave, disengage, or are pushed to the margins. Those who remain are not necessarily less intelligent. They are simply more compliant.
This dynamic also explains why isolation becomes normalized. When collaboration carries reputational risk, solitude becomes rational. Closed doors are not a sign of busyness. They are a defensive architecture. Silence becomes a shield. In such an environment, even hostility can masquerade as virtue. Skepticism is reframed as rigor. Obstruction is reframed as collegial concern. Cynicism is reframed as sophistication. What looks from the outside like dysfunction looks from the inside like prudence.
The system stabilizes but at a low level. What makes this particularly corrosive is that it erodes not only productivity, but identity. Scholars stop seeing themselves as participants in a collective intellectual project and start seeing themselves as custodians of personal survival strategies. The university becomes a workplace, not a vocation. This is why moments of contrast are so jarring. After Tel Aviv, returning to Ljubljana felt like moving from color to grayscale. Not because of material deprivation, but because of affective compression. The air felt heavier. Conversations shorter. Ambition more carefully disguised. The cost of standing out became palpable again.
And when antisemitic vandalism appeared, crude, anonymous, unmistakable, it did not feel like a rupture. It felt like an extreme manifestation of the same underlying logic of hostility toward difference, toward external affiliation, toward anything that disrupts the local equilibrium. Hatred, in such systems, is rarely ideological. It is instrumental. It targets what cannot be absorbed. Small systems do not punish outliers because they hate excellence. They punish outliers because excellence reveals fragility. And systems that cannot tolerate variance cannot innovate, cannot regenerate, and cannot retain talent in the long run. They do not collapse. They simply empty out.
Freedom, Risk, and the Israeli Academic Ethos
Freedom in Tel Aviv is not romantic. It is operational. This distinction matters. In many European academic systems, freedom is treated as a symbolic good, something to be proclaimed, defended rhetorically, and occasionally weaponized in internal disputes. In Israel, and particularly in places like Tel Aviv University, freedom is closer to a technology: a set of practices that allow a small, exposed society to continuously regenerate knowledge under pressure.
This difference is immediately visible in how risk is handled. Israeli academia is built on the assumption that error is inevitable and delay is fatal. Arguments must be tested quickly, ideas must circulate early, and hierarchies must remain permeable enough to allow correction. The worst outcome is not embarrassment. It is stagnation. This ethos did not emerge accidentally. Israel is a country without the luxury of institutional complacency. Its universities were forged under conditions of demographic pressure, geopolitical uncertainty, and resource constraint. In such an environment, intellectual redundancy is not merely inefficient but dangerous. The result is an academic culture that treats dissent as signal rather than noise.
During my seminar in Tel Aviv, disagreement was immediate and explicit. People did not wait for permission to challenge assumptions. Junior scholars spoke with confidence, not because they were arrogant, but because they were expected to contribute. Senior scholars listened not out of politeness, but because authority there is earned continuously, not stored. This is what freedom looks like when it is instrumentally necessary.
By contrast, in Ljubljana, freedom is often understood defensively. It is invoked to protect existing positions rather than to test them. Risk is framed as recklessness. Speed is conflated with superficiality. Strong claims are interpreted as breaches of decorum rather than invitations to scrutiny. The irony is profound. Systems that talk most about academic freedom often fear it most in practice.
Freedom that does not tolerate discomfort is not freedom. It is insulation. Tel Aviv tolerates discomfort because it has learned to metabolize it. Debate is sharp, but not personal. Criticism is direct, but not exclusionary. The line between intellectual conflict and social belonging is carefully protected. You can lose an argument without losing your place. This is why the city itself feels aligned with the university.
Tel Aviv is fast, loud, unapologetically plural. It does not aspire to consensus. It aspires to motion. People argue in cafés, interrupt each other mid-sentence, abandon conversations and resume them hours later. Ideas are provisional. Positions are negotiable. Identity is not fragile. In the evening, after seminars and meetings, this ethos continues. Dinner is not an escape from thinking. It is an extension of it. A Mediterranean table becomes a forum. Disagreement is not sanitized. Politics, law, economics, history, everything is on the table, literally and figuratively.
What struck me most was not ideological alignment, but epistemic confidence. People trusted the process of argument. They did not fear that disagreement would metastasize into institutional punishment. That trust is rare and precious. In Ljubljana, by contrast, freedom is brittle. Debate is cautious. Topics are filtered. Associations are scrutinized. External affiliations are quietly policed. The line between disagreement and disloyalty is dangerously thin. This is why isolation becomes normal. When freedom is uncertain, scholars retreat inward. They protect themselves by reducing exposure. Doors close. Conversations shrink. Intellectual life becomes solitary by necessity, not preference. The consequences are cumulative. Over time, such systems lose not only productivity, but elasticity. They become unable to absorb new ideas, new methods, new people. What remains is a narrow corridor of acceptable work, guarded by informal veto players who mistake stability for rigor.
Tel Aviv, for all its tensions and contradictions, remains elastic. It absorbs immigrants, arguments, and innovations at speed. Its academic institutions mirror this capacity. They do not require conformity to belong. Instead, they require contribution. Belonging is conditional on engagement, not obedience. This is why productivity there feels effortless. Not because the work is easy, but because the environment removes unnecessary friction. Energy goes into ideas, not into self-monitoring. Ambition does not need camouflage. In such a system, human capital compounds. In systems like Ljubljana’s, it depreciates. The difference is not cultural mysticism. It is institutional choice, reinforced over decades. One system learned to live with risk. The other learned to fear it. And fear, once institutionalized, is extraordinarily difficult to dislodge.
Antisemitism as a Symptom, Not a Cause
It would be comforting to treat antisemitism as an explanation. A clear culprit offers moral clarity. It allows one to locate hostility in ideology rather than in structure, in hatred rather than in incentives. But doing so would miss the deeper, and more unsettling truth.
What I experienced in Ljubljana was not primarily ideological antisemitism. It was something more banal, and therefore more durable: instrumental hostility toward difference that could not be domesticated. The vandalism of my car with antisemitic symbols was not an isolated eruption of hatred in an otherwise neutral environment. It was an extreme expression of a broader pattern of a system that had already normalized suspicion toward external affiliation, visibility, and success that did not originate within its own narrow circuits.
Antisemitism, in this context, functioned less as belief and more as language. It provided a ready-made vocabulary for exclusion. It marked someone as foreign, as excessive, as disloyal not because of theology or politics, but because the symbol itself carried historical weight. It condensed difference into stigma. This is why such symbols reappear precisely in environments where institutions are weakly self-confident.
Strong systems do not need scapegoats. Weak ones do. In Tel Aviv, Jewish identity is unremarkable. It does not carry explanatory power. It cannot be weaponized because it does not distinguish. At Tel Aviv University, affiliation with Israel, with Jewishness, or with Israeli institutions does not mark one as suspect. It marks one as normal. In Ljubljana, the same affiliation becomes legible as excess.
The difference lies not in ideology, but in contextual salience. Where institutions are open and elastic, identity fades into background noise. Where institutions are closed and anxious, identity becomes a handle. This is why antisemitism often emerges not in overtly ideological settings, but in stagnant ones. It thrives where explanation is needed for divergence, where difference must be made intelligible, where success requires delegitimation. The same mechanism has appeared repeatedly across history. Jewish success in commerce, science, or culture has rarely been tolerated when systems were confident. It became intolerable when systems felt exposed. What matters here is not the symbol itself, but what it signals about institutional decay.
By the time antisemitic language appears, the system has already failed. It has failed to integrate variance. It has failed to reward excellence. It has failed to generate legitimacy internally. Hatred enters not as cause, but as byproduct. This is why the vandalism did not surprise me as much as it should have. Long before the symbols appeared, the ambient conditions were already in place: academic isolation, withdrawal of collegial engagement, quiet questioning of legitimacy, subtle signaling that external recognition was inappropriate. The vandalism simply made visible what had already been normalized.
Importantly, this is not an accusation against individuals. Most people participate in such systems passively. They do not initiate hostility. They adapt to it. Silence becomes a way to avoid risk. Indifference becomes a shield. But systems do not require malice to reproduce harm. They require only acquiescence. In Tel Aviv, the same mechanisms operate in reverse. Difference is absorbed rather than expelled. External affiliation strengthens internal legitimacy. Visibility is interpreted as opportunity rather than threat. As a result, there is no incentive to reach for stigmatizing language. The system has better tools.
This is the deeper lesson. Antisemitism is not an anomaly in academic systems under stress. It is a diagnostic indicator. It signals that the system has lost confidence in its own evaluative capacity. Unable to rank ideas effectively, it ranks identities instead. Once this shift occurs, recovery becomes difficult. Trust erodes. Talent exits. Those who remain adapt further. The equilibrium hardens. This is why the long-run consequences are so severe. Institutions that tolerate symbolic hostility, even in subtle or sporadic forms, are not merely unjust. They are inefficient. They leak human capital. They convert potential into resentment and innovation into emigration. And they rarely notice until it is too late.
Long-Run Divergence: What Institutions Select For?
Institutions do not merely allocate resources. They allocate futures. Over time, they select for certain traits and against others. They reward some behaviors, penalize others, and most importantly, shape who stays and who leaves. The cumulative effect is not linear. It is evolutionary.
This is why places that look superficially similar at one point in time can diverge dramatically over a generation. The contrast between Tel Aviv and Ljubljana is not primarily about current output. It is about selection effects. Tel Aviv selects for speed, openness, resilience, and intellectual risk-taking. It rewards people who move fast, speak clearly, argue publicly, and revise quickly. Those who thrive in such environments are rarely flawless, but they are adaptive. Over time, the ecosystem becomes populated by individuals who are comfortable with exposure and disagreement. This produces compounding returns. When risk-tolerant scholars cluster, collaboration becomes easier. When openness is normalized, information flows faster. When excellence is visible and legitimate, aspiration replaces envy. The system does not eliminate conflict. Instead, it channels it productively.
Ljubljana selects differently. It selects for caution, discretion, political sensitivity, and the ability to navigate informal constraints. Scholars who remain are often highly intelligent, but strategically muted. They learn to minimize variance, to avoid visibility, to treat ambition as something to be carefully rationed. This too compounds but in the opposite direction. As ambitious scholars disengage or exit, the reference group narrows. Benchmarks decline quietly. Innovation slows not because ideas are absent, but because incentives no longer support their articulation. Over time, the institution becomes less attractive to precisely those it would most benefit from retaining.
This is the tragedy of low-trust equilibria. They hollow out from the top while preserving formal continuity. What remains is an institution that looks stable but feels inert. It continues to function administratively. Courses are taught. Committees meet. Reports are filed. But the margin where discovery, ambition, and renewal occur, thins out. In Tel Aviv, by contrast, margins are thick. At Tel Aviv University, the boundary between junior and senior, between visitor and insider, between idea and execution, is porous. This permeability allows the system to continuously refresh itself. New people bring new methods. New methods challenge old assumptions. Old assumptions are revised rather than defended.
This is how ecosystems stay young. The difference becomes most visible when external pressure increases. Systems like Tel Aviv’s have learned to function under constraint: political, fiscal, demographic. They respond to pressure by increasing density and speed. Systems like Ljubljana’s respond by narrowing scope and increasing control. One expands outward, the other contracts inward. The long-run implications are stark. High-trust, high-variance systems attract global talent. They become nodes in international networks. Their scholars publish earlier, collaborate more broadly, and shape agendas rather than respond to them. Even when individuals leave, they remain connected. Exit does not sever ties. It extends them.
Low-trust systems experience exit as loss. Departure is interpreted as betrayal rather than circulation. Networks weaken. Replacement becomes difficult. Over time, the institution becomes provincial not by choice, but by default. This divergence is not inevitable. It is the result of accumulated decisions, often small, often informal, often justified as prudence. But once selection effects take hold, reversal becomes costly. Restoring trust requires more than new rules. It requires new norms. And norms cannot be legislated. They must be lived. This is why moments of exposure matter so much.
Visiting Tel Aviv has not been inspiring because it was pleasant. It was clarifying. It revealed what an academic life can look like when institutions align incentives with human capital rather than against it. It showed that productivity and well-being are not trade-offs. They are complements. Returning to Ljubljana made visible what had slowly been normalized: friction where there need not be any, suspicion where curiosity should dominate, isolation where collaboration should be routine. The divergence is already underway. The only remaining question is whether it will be acknowledged, or quietly accepted.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: A Personal Equilibrium
Albert Hirschman’s framework of exit, voice, and loyalty is often taught as an abstract model of organizational behavior. In practice, it is lived. Every institution implicitly forces its members to choose among these options. Voice is costly. Loyalty is conditional. Exit is final. The equilibrium depends not on formal rules, but on whether the system makes any of these strategies rational. For a long time, I chose voice. I invested in teaching. I published ambitiously. I collaborated internationally. I advised institutions beyond national borders. I assumed, perhaps naively, that excellence would eventually translate into legitimacy, that contribution would generate belonging, that the university would recognize value even if it disrupted internal comfort.
That assumption was wrong. Voice in low-trust systems is asymmetrically costly. It exposes the speaker without guaranteeing response. Over time, it becomes indistinguishable from provocation. Each additional signal of competence raises the price of staying. Loyalty, too, becomes strained under such conditions. Loyalty presumes reciprocity, a sense that commitment is met with protection, that effort is not penalized, that success does not require apology. When loyalty becomes one-sided, it turns into inertia rather than virtue.
This leaves exit. Exit does not always mean departure. Sometimes it means psychological withdrawal, intellectual disengagement, or the redirection of energy elsewhere. But once the logic of exit becomes dominant, the institution has already lost something irretrievable. Tel Aviv clarified this for me. Not because it offered escape, but because it offered contrast. It revealed that academic life does not have to be defensive, that productivity does not require self-erasure, that recognition does not have to be negotiated in whispers. In Tel Aviv, at Tel Aviv University, the default assumption was not suspicion but contribution. The question was not “why are you here?” but “what are you working on?” That single shift, from legitimacy to substance, changes everything.
Returning to Ljubljana forced a reckoning. At the University of Ljubljana, I encountered once again the quiet architecture of exclusion: the closed doors, the cautious glances, the normalization of isolation. I encountered a system that had learned to survive by minimizing variance, even at the cost of vitality. The vandalism of my car, marked with antisemitic symbols, was not the breaking point. It was confirmation. It signaled that the institution’s immune system had failed, that it could no longer distinguish between threat and difference, between disruption and contribution.
At that point, the model resolves. Voice becomes futile when it is systematically discounted. Loyalty becomes irrational when it is not reciprocated. Exit, in one form or another, becomes the dominant strategy. This is not a personal tragedy. It is an institutional one. Universities that cannot retain those who are externally validated, internally productive, and intellectually restless do not merely lose individuals. They lose trajectories. They forfeit futures. They lock themselves into equilibria that are stable but sterile.
Tel Aviv, by contrast, remains unstable and therefore alive. It is noisy, argumentative, unfinished. It tolerates discomfort because it has learned that comfort is not a growth strategy. Its academic culture reflects its city: fast-moving, plural, unapologetic. It does not promise safety. It promises meaning. The divergence between these two places will widen over time, not because one is morally superior, but because one aligns institutions with human capital while the other taxes it. In the long run, talent goes where it can breathe.
That is not ideology. It is economics. And it is why the memory of Tel Aviv lingers, not as nostalgia, but as evidence. Evidence that another equilibrium exists. Evidence that academic life can be generous without being soft, demanding without being cruel, free without being chaotic.
Once seen, such evidence cannot be unseen.