@kazani

Admiration is where blind spots are born. It starts clean enough. Someone earns your respect honestly: their work, their thinking, the way they carry themselves. Legitimate. Deserved. Then something shifts underneath it, so quietly you don't notice. The person stops being a person and becomes a symbol. And symbols don't get questioned the way people do. Symbols get protected. Notice what happens the next time someone you venerate gets credibly criticized. The same evidence hits differently than it would for a stranger. With a stranger you'd weigh it fairly. With the symbol, you're already building the defense before you've even looked at the claim, finding the hole in the argument, doubting the critic's motives, circling the wagons. Not because you're being dishonest. Because you're being human. The admiration got there first and rewired how the evaluation runs.

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