How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

by Maria Ressa

As a famous philosopher once said, there is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

The world we once knew is decimated. Now we have to decide what we want to create.

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.

Democracy is fragile. You have to fight for every bit, every law, every safeguard, every institution, every story. You must know how dangerous it is to suffer even the tiniest cut. This is why I say to us all: we must hold the line.

Meaning is not something you stumble across or what someone gives you; you build it through every choice you make, the commitments you choose, the people you love, and the values you hold dear.

The first was always to make the choice to learn. That meant embracing change and mustering the courage to fail; success and failure are two sides of the same coin. You cannot succeed if at some point you haven’t failed. Most people, I realized, chose comfort, remaining in what was familiar: old friends, routines, habits.

When you take a risk, you have to trust that someone will come to your aid; and when it’s your turn, you will help someone else. It’s better to face your fear than to run from it because running won’t make the problem go away. When you face it, you have the chance to conquer it. That was how I began to define courage.

All it takes is one person to stand up and fight because a bully doesn’t like to be challenged publicly.

Above all, books were what explained everything to me that people couldn’t—or answered questions I couldn’t ask.

In the end, I didn’t really know who I was, but I felt I needed to achieve. Something. Anything.

that in order to have a clear view of the world, you have to ask yourself the toughest questions.

Staying silent or compliant changed nothing. Speaking up was an act of creation.

The person I am is an act of creation; I can seize the past and transform all I have learned and turn it into something new. I control who I am and who I want to be.

how to understand the world and my place in it, and how to build my confidence while controlling my ego.

I look at what I’m afraid of, downplay my ego, then follow the Golden Rule and the Honor Code.

It was always easy to spot self-censorship in an anchor read because the phrasing was angled to please the boss, at best, or avoid angering power, at worst.

In my mind, that was the mindset of mediocrity, when you settle for what you can get instead of pushing for more.

That is why I grasped how important the news media were, how existential their survival and integrity were for a democracy.

I made the choice to learn, but it was more than that—I learned to trust: to drop my shields and be vulnerable. I have rarely been disappointed when I do. That, to me, is strength and why I believe in the goodness of human nature. When you’re vulnerable, you create the strongest bonds and the most inspiring possibilities.

that you can succeed without compromising your ideals. It was a choice; so choose to be better.

“So if anybody comes and says that we cannot air a piece or wants to preview a piece, that to us is tantamount to muzzling our freedom of the press. . . . And we will never, never, never agree to be intimidated by anyone, no matter who he is.”

But it was more than that. What you choose to do shapes the person you become.

The most important choice you make is the person you will spend your life with. That person’s values and choices will sway you as you create yourself, as you make the most important decisions about who you are.

but the lesson he gave me that day was always to hold power to account, even if it nearly wrecks your career. Hold the line; that is the journalist’s duty.

Marcos and Suharto left behind similar problems that lay just beneath the surface. In the Philippines, it was cronyism and patronage politics. In Indonesia, it was called KKN (pronounced “ka-ka-en”): corruption, collusion, and nepotism. That top-down oppressive, controlling political system took its toll on the people. Their leaders’ biggest sin was that they failed to educate their people.

When there was a challenge to power, the leader tried to shape the narrative by controlling the press.

A nation’s budget line item for education is an investment in its people.

The ability to discern and question, which is crucial to both journalism and democracy, is also determined by education. Journalists and news organizations are a reflection of the people’s power to hold its leaders accountable. That means that ultimately the quality of a democracy can also be seen in the quality of its journalists.

I walked into every situation ready to listen and learn; to be open; to be vulnerable—because good journalism starts with trust. Your subjects must trust you, and your stories over time must build trust with your audience.

When you bear witness to senseless deaths, violence, and cruelty, you’re forced to confront the existence of God.

Being a journalist taught me to have faith in myself and our shared humanity.

The goal was not to win an argument or win a popularity contest; it was to create the more informed citizenry necessary for a democracy to work. Journalists were part of a shared culture of democracy: to listen, debate, and compromise.

I knew that someday I wanted to retire in the Philippines. Somehow, viscerally, this country, imperfect and flawed as it was, had become home.

That process strengthened my conviction that the hardest decisions are the ones that you must communicate yourself. If you don’t have the courage to deliver the news to the people affected by your decision, think twice.

If you try to change a culture, it will fight back. You have to have the stomach for it.

The goal is to tell your story first, especially if it’s about you, not only to gain control of the narrative but to protect the people at risk. If you handle that well, almost everything else follows. This is how an organization survives threats to its integrity and its people.

When you don’t know what’s going to happen next, being vulnerable and open is the first step to bring everyone together.

because we decided to make it cool to love our country.7

Three Degrees of Influence idea, that everything we say or do impacts our friends, our friends’ friends, and even our friends’ friends’ friends.

When you try to change the system, it fights back.

I wasn’t sure what I would do in that meeting, but if your lines are clear, so are your points of action.

I told them to value and protect their editorial independence. I wished them clarity of thought, stamina, and the courage to fight for what is right. I reminded them to avoid the compromise of mediocrity.

When I looked out at that audience that day, I warned them not to become the generation that couldn’t focus.11

It was my old mantra again: trust until they prove they can’t be trusted.

Now we got our answer: no, we didn’t have real political parties based on ideology; we had personality-driven political parties.

The dangers of “more” and “faster” have led us to dystopia: the suffocation of our minds by junk, a loss of clarity of thought and a lack of concentration, and the empowerment of individual over collective thinking.

Lies repeated over and over become facts in this online ecosystem.

If you read something that makes you emotional and prone to share or act, slow down; think slow, not fast.

I followed the serenity prayer: to accept the things I could not change, find the courage to change the things I could, and have the wisdom to know the difference.32

“the use of targeted, State-sponsored online hate and harassment campaigns leveraged to silence and intimidate individuals.”53