It has been a long time since I stopped using social media to engage in political discourse. The need to be heard and to have serious conversations about political ideas kept colliding with my mental and emotional well-being. Being Cuban, I found myself constantly in the middle of a noisy conversation in which everyone seemed to know what to do and what the future of my country should look like.
So, many years ago, I decided that if I wanted to be serious about political discourse and social engagement, it was better to do so outside social media—in face-to-face conversations, on different platforms, away from X and Facebook. It has been challenging to find those spaces, and in an era that moves faster than our thoughts, it sometimes feels impossible. But I hold on to the conviction that, in the long run, none of the noise surrounding us will ultimately determine the course of current political developments.
This kind of bracketing operation—something I learned from my readings and education in phenomenology, bracketing the noise and the incoherent political arguments that seek only attention—has lately been challenged by recent political developments.
The election of Donald Trump has signaled a new momentum in political analysis worldwide, representing a further step in the rising tensions across the globe. His adoption of the Monroe Doctrine and the assertive positioning of the United States as an imperial power—with Russia and China as the only valid interlocutors—has complicated the situation of democratic forces across the world. However, rather than analyzing those broader dynamics, I want to point to a more specific and basic issue that sits at the center of many discussions today: the consistency test, and more precisely, the consistency trap.
Take the Iran crisis as an example. For the sake of brevity, let’s focus on recent developments rather than the long and complicated history of relations between Iran and the United States, or between Iran, Israel, and Iran’s neighbors.
Several weeks ago, social media accounts were flooded with images of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets in Tehran and other Iranian cities. Many immediately shared the few pictures circulating online to denounce the repression of the Iranian regime. Images, memes, and photographs flooded the political metaverse with messages of support and condemnation directed at the Ayatollah, the country’s major political figures, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The narrative was ready—sides assigned, a moral arc established, and a clear conclusion drawn: the regime must fall.
Yet, in the middle of this visual and political narrative, one could see many voices clearly condemning the political left because of an alleged double standard—that is, after years of criticizing Israel for the genocide in Gaza, “the left” was now silent in the face of the atrocities of the Iranian regime. Or so the argument went.
If one wants to be serious about this, one has to recognize that these political events are not so simple. During those days, I actually surveyed many friends, researchers, and political scientists, and an overwhelming majority aligned with a more complex vision of the conflict—one that criticized the repressive nature of the Iranian regime while simultaneously recognizing the geopolitical complexity of recent events. The developments that followed confirmed exactly that complexity, with the military operation carried out by the United States and Israel against Iran. And yet, once again, the criticism spread widely: the left was allegedly silent, failing to back an operation that would supposedly free the Iranian people from their repressive government.
Let’s take a step back and think about this whole process. As I said, I am not interested at this point in answering the more superficial questions for myself—whether this event is real or not, or who has the right or not. I am interested in the epistemological operation behind it, and in the implications it will have in the long run. This does not mean that the analysis of current political events lacks morality, or should lack it. It simply means that such events need time, distance, deconstruction, and a multilayered approach if we are to understand the long-term implications of everything that happens today.
The real problem is that we are applying a consistency test that only works if we have complete information and transparent motivations. In geopolitics, we never do.
The consistency trap is a discursive practice that demands political actors respond symmetrically to asymmetrical events. It works like this: Group A criticizes an action taken by Group B. Group B then accuses Group A of hypocrisy because Group A did not criticize a comparable action by its own side, or celebrate it, or stay silent. It has the surface logic of a principled argument. But beneath the surface, it conceals a set of deeply problematic assumptions.
First, silence is not a single thing. It can mean agreement, tactical neutrality, moral confusion, or simply not having enough information yet. The consistency trap collapses all of these into one interpretation—hypocrisy—because that is the most rhetorically useful reading.
Second, information is never complete. State actors, intelligence services, and military institutions operate with knowledge the public never has access to. Any public political judgment is formed on the basis of incomplete, filtered, and often deliberately managed information. The consistency test assumes both sides are working from the same factual baseline. They never are.
Third, not all events are equivalent. Cuba is not Venezuela. Venezuela is not Iran. Treating them as interchangeable instances of ideological inconsistency flattens real historical and geopolitical specificity in order to score a rhetorical point.
Finally, there is a neurological dimension that we rarely acknowledge. There is a clear gap between the immense amount of stimuli entering our cognitive system and our limited capacity to organize them into meaningful experiences. In the age of constant notifications and fragmented news, we may be missing crucial pieces of a vast puzzle. So how can we be so certain about our political judgments?
The real problem is that we are applying a consistency test that only works if we have complete information and transparent motivations. In geopolitics, we never do.
So before accusing someone of hypocrisy, ask instead: What information were they working with? What were they actually trying to achieve? Was their silence strategic or principled? Are these events genuinely comparable? And perhaps most importantly, who benefits from framing this as hypocrisy?
Ultimately, the consistency trap proves once again that political events do not appear as isolated simplifications but are immersed in a system of relationships. Perhaps the trap, in its ontological sense, is the representation of events as unique, transparent, and independent when in reality they are complex systems.
