Exploring politics, ethics, and history beyond the headlines
This piece first appeared on Substack. I republish it here voluntarily — not as repetition, but as trace; a place where words can rest after their first flight 👉🏻 rftjon.substack.com
Prologue
I do not write to decorate the present with clever words, nor to reassure power with familiar arguments. I write to disturb certainties, to draw light into corners where silence has settled. This requires patience, clarity, and the steady flame of resolve.
My path has often crossed the forbidden and the difficult—territories most avoid. Yet it is precisely there, among taboos and contradictions, that truth flickers most brightly. Each encounter has forged in me a duty: to question dogma, dismantle propaganda, and protect the fragile flame of inquiry.
The Dance of Worldviews
The world, in its essence, is a dance of forces—sometimes harmonious, often dissonant. In Palestine, this dance takes form not merely as a quarrel over land or religion, but as the echo of worldviews colliding across centuries. It is a spiral of occupation and resistance, of memory and erasure, of stories that insist on being heard even as power tries to silence them.
What we call the ‘modern world’ is itself a triad of spirals:
• The Sinic worldview, rising with the patience of bamboo, drawing on Confucian roots and long horizons.
• The Occidental worldview, once radiant in its Enlightenment ideals, now fraying at the edges as its authority wanes.
• The Indic worldview, slower in its ascent, yet carrying ancient seeds of dharma and ahimsa—ethical duty and non-violence.
The Bass Note of Growth
And beneath them all, like the bass note of an old song, hums industrial economism—our obsession with endless growth. It swallows invention, neutralises rebellion, commodifies even compassion. It is a system that does not simply build but consumes, does not simply promise but binds.
To break free, we must return to deeper architectures of knowing and being:
• Epistemology, the ways we know. Beyond measurement and data, we need to honor interconnectedness and intuition.
• Ontology, the ways we believe reality is. Beyond materialism and anthropocentrism, we must see ourselves as threads in a larger weave.
The Middle East as Mirror
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just a quarrel between two peoples. It is a mirror of the world’s deepest fractures. If humanity cannot shift how it frames this struggle, it risks repeating its patterns of domination elsewhere, endlessly.
Patterns Within Patterns
• Beyond news events: The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, was not a sudden rupture. It was the outcome of loops of oppression, resistance, and retaliation.
• Worldviews in collision: Western narratives cast binaries of good versus evil. Yet beneath these simplifications lie ontologies of land as sacred inheritance, not property. China’s emphasis on harmony suggests another path, though its sincerity remains untested.
• Technology as weapon: Algorithms, drones, and AI tools from Silicon Valley become part of Gaza’s surveillance net. Capitalism absorbs invention, turning neutrality into control.
• The environment’s cry: Scarcity of food & water, creeping deserts—these are not side stories. They reveal the flaw of anthropocentrism: believing we stand above what sustains us.
• Youth at the edge: Across Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Tehran, and beyond, young voices rise against corruption and endless war. They are weak signals of another future, fragile but insistent.
• Capitalism’s trap: Promises of shared prosperity through accords and treaties hide growing seas of dispossession. Wealth is concentrated; inequality deepens.
• Alternative threads: Sumud, steadfastness in the face of erasure. Islamic finance, rejecting usury. Rojava’s grassroots governance—each a glimpse of worlds beyond endless growth.
Invitation and Warning
The Middle East is both warning and invitation. Warning of what happens when spirals of power coil tighter, binding us to repetition. Invitation to imagine new systems where reciprocity replaces conquest, and relational knowing replaces domination.
Lasting peace will not come from two-state blueprints or economic peace plans. These are surface answers to structural questions. The real work is deeper: dismantling the source code of industrial economism, loosening the grip of anthropocentrism, and remembering that humanity is not the center but a participant in the wider web of existence.
Robert F. Tjón
August 2025
Legend
• Epistemology = how we know what is true
• Ontology = what we believe reality is
• Industrial economism = the global system focused on endless economic growth
• Worldview = a culture’s way of seeing and understanding life
• Sumud = Arabic for steadfastness (resistance by staying rooted to the land)
Original from Richard David Hames, “Breaking Through the Source Code”
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