Looking back across the decades, it is easy to see where the world draws its boundaries between wisdom and foolishness. Society has always operated on a series of unwritten rules where we are expected to protect our own interests, speak in the polite double-talk of institutional compliance and look at data or systems rather than the individual human beings caught inside them. To navigate life with an unyielding belief in plain truth, radical transparency and the dignity of the ordinary person is often to invite a specific kind of label from those who find comfort in the machinery of bureaucracy.
In his novel The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky gave this label a name through the character of Prince Myshkin. Myshkin arrives in St Petersburg entirely without a social mask because he does not understand the cynical currency of leverage or status that the elites use to measure human worth. He simply speaks the truth exactly as it is, treats the vulnerable with unconditional dignity and acts with a kindness that the ruling class immediately misinterprets as a lack of intelligence. They call him an idiot because he refuses to play the games that keep their transactional world turning and because his sheer presence exposes the hidden vanities and greed of their everyday lives.
When I look back at my own journey as a consumer advocate, I recognise the moments where I too chose to play the fool in the eyes of rigid systems. To stand up against powerful institutions, to challenge the convoluted jargon used by corporations to keep everyday citizens in the dark or to spend years digging through old records to humanise static columns of data is rarely seen as a path of least resistance. Diogenes carried a lantern in broad daylight looking for an honest man, and Socrates was condemned for asking questions that disrupted the comfortable illusions of the state. A pragmatic observer might look at these philosophical parallels and ask why one would choose to absorb the friction of fighting rigid administrative walls or why one would insist on plain, direct language when the world prefers the safety of corporate camouflage.
The true tragedy of Myshkin’s story is his ultimate isolation. He gave so much of his own energy to healing and fixing the broken world around him that his mind eventually collapsed under the weight of empathy burnout, and he was returned to the Swiss asylum entirely broken and silent. For a long time, the fear of that specific despair is what haunts the modern advocate. When you find yourself facing your own struggles and make the vulnerable decision to step out from behind the professional shield to share your own immediate problems openly on social media and Facebook, you half expect the world to respond with the same cold indifference that broke the Prince.
But it is precisely here that my path departs from Dostoevsky’s tragedy. Where Myshkin found an empty void, I found an overwhelming show of support from the community. This collective embrace shatters the myth of the isolated fool and reveals a profound difference. Myshkin’s journey ended in the despair of the asylum because his world refused to change, but in our everyday reality, the returns are tangible. They are visible every time a forgotten name is pulled from a static database and an ordinary person is directly helped in claiming their own monies from the Guardian’s Fund. These are not abstract metrics or high-level compliance theories but real victories where families recover what is rightfully theirs.
Today I continue to be the idiot. I choose to remain a person who asks why who prefers longer flowing thoughts over performative soundbites and who measures the value of any grand system by whether it serves humanity or crushes it. If refusing to wear the mask of corporate indifference makes one an idiot then it is a title worth wearing because the support of the community proves we are not fighting alone and every reclaimed life is proof that the machinery can be broken.
