So, the “something new” I posted on an IG story was the third book in the series.
Yes — the one you were supposedly eagerly awaiting, having read the first two.
You do at least remember the name of the series, don’t you?
No?
Ah. Of course not. You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.
Which is impressive, really, given how confidently you claim to know me. To follow my work. To understand me. To be proud of me. What you actually do is collect fragments — wildly out of context, irrelevant, or simply inaccurate — and then curate an opinion that is not merely wrong, but painstakingly prejudiced. Almost artisanal in its epistemic negligence.
And not accidentally so. It is methodical. The process is calibrated — not to understand, but to wound. To press precisely where it hurts, so that when anger follows, you can step back and assume the posture of the injured party.
You do not know me.
This is not rhetoric. It is epistemology.
You do not know a person by collecting fragments. You do not know them through hearsay, partial records, or moments stripped of their context. People are not puzzles to be solved by stacking pieces until they resemble something familiar.
Aristotle understood this plainly: knowing facts — even assuming what one has are facts — is not the same as knowing people. Human beings cannot be understood by rules alone; they require judgement, attention, and time.
Later philosophers echoed this insight. The moment you turn a person into something neat and explainable, you have already stopped seeing them. You have replaced encounter with control. People take what little they know and treat it as sufficient; when something does not fit, they call it a defect, a problem to be managed or dismissed. In doing so, they do not meet a person — they construct a version of one that feels manageable.
Understanding is replaced with interpretation, and interpretation with judgement. Partial information is treated as enough; contradiction is read as defect; complexity is dismissed as inconvenience.
In contemporary terms, this constitutes a form of epistemic injustice. As Miranda Fricker argues, individuals can be wronged specifically in their capacity as knowers when their credibility is unfairly diminished or when imposed interpretive frameworks erase their lived reality (Epistemic Injustice). In such cases, the failure is not merely cognitive, but moral.
What results is not a person but an object — static, simplified, and safely misunderstood. Ludwig Wittgenstein warned against precisely this temptation when he criticised the urge to explain human meaning by stripping it of lived context, reminding us that understanding is grounded in forms of life, not isolated data (Philosophical Investigations). When context is removed, what remains may look orderly, but it is no longer true.
This is why the error here is not innocent. Why it cuts.
When a knower is aware that their understanding is partial, yet proceeds as though it were complete, the failure ceases to be accidental. In epistemic ethics, knowingly acting on insufficient understanding constitutes negligence. The obligation to inquire increases with recognised uncertainty; it does not vanish because inquiry is inconvenient.
This is not error.
It is negligence.
You will not know a person by what others say about them. You will not fully know them by what is written down. You will not even know them completely by their own words. Words shift. Context shifts. Survival shapes what people say.
If you are going to know a person at all, it happens elsewhere: in what they do when no one is watching; in the choices they make when there is nothing to gain; in the care they show when there is no reward, no audience, and no record.
That is where a person becomes answerable to themselves.
Everything else is easier — and wrong.
It conceals rather than reveals.
The following excerpt comes from the poem Called by Its Name: Violence, part of A Rose Written in Verse, written by yours truly — which I’m confident you are downloading at this very moment, in anticipation of reading it. (Yes, the sarcasm continues. Free speech allows it. Democracy protects it. My apologies to no one.)
I am my closest witness.
Not fragments.
Not labels.
Not rumour stitched into a mask.
I am the living record
you never studied,
yet sentenced anyway.So let every judgement
be built from my whole body of truth,
not from echoes
ricocheting off walls
you trust too easily.You want to know me?
Ask me.
Not the shadows.
Ask me—
for once.
© Eirene Evripidou – A Rose Written In Verse:
Shaped In Falsehood, Redeemed By Love
And the final note: If you don’t like what I write, you know where to put your opinions — and how far to push them. No additional guidance will be offered.
