The Death of Trotsky

15th March 2026

Cheery Friday: The Ecstasy of Certainty

I just finished a book I couldn’t put down—Josh Ireland’s The Death of Trotsky—and it gave me a new way of thinking about patterns I’ve noticed in the world of education.

A bit of context: Leon Trotsky was one of the architects of the Soviet state, once second only to Lenin. Joseph Stalin, who eventually seized power, considered Trotsky his greatest rival—and spent years methodically hunting him down across two continents before finally having him murdered in Mexico in 1940.

Ireland gave me something I hadn’t quite seen so vividly before: just how akin to religious conversion the experience of becoming a communist could be. He quotes one fellow believer describing the moment of conversion as a “mental explosion”—new light pouring in from every direction, the entire universe suddenly snapping into pattern like a jigsaw puzzle assembled in a single stroke. Every question answered. Every former doubt revealed as mere ignorance. The colorless world of non-believers left behind forever. And once inside that feeling, almost nothing could touch them.

Whittaker Chambers’ memoir Witness captures this with one unforgettable image. Chambers had done his best to convey to Alger Hiss what was really happening inside the Soviet Union—the show trials, the mass executions, the machinery of terror grinding through the very people who had built the revolution. Now they are parting for what both men sense may be the last time, standing on opposite sides of what Chambers calls “a molten torrent—the revolution and the Communist Party.” And as they hesitate, tears come into Hiss’s eyes. What is devastating about that moment, read alongside Ireland’s portrait of the true believers, is what those tears don’t mean. They aren’t doubt. They aren’t horror breaking through. The cause Hiss had given himself to—so total, so morally consuming, so much like a religious conversion—could absorb even the knowledge of atrocity and hold firm. The tears were the cost of devotion, not its undoing.

This is what a truly unfalsifiable belief system looks like from the inside. The horror doesn’t refute the vision—it gets folded into it, becomes part of the necessary price, even a dark confirmation of how serious and world-historical the whole enterprise must be. It doesn’t feel like ideology. It feels like the one clear thing in a compromised world.

I’ve seen this mechanism up close. In the early 1980s, having learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute, I worked as a Russian translator for the Soviets. What struck me wasn’t so much the crude propaganda—it was the tap, tap, tap of a thousand smaller messages, so constant and so ambient that my communist colleagues didn’t experience them as messages at all. The beauties of communism, the evils of capitalism: not slogans, just reality. A worldview so thoroughly absorbed it had become indistinguishable from perception itself.

Which is why a video essay I stumbled across recently stopped me cold. It argues that Hollywood’s decades-long habit of portraying businesspeople as villains has quietly done something similar in the West—not through state decree but through the steady accumulation of images and stories until the conclusion feels self-evident. Researchers call the mechanism “narrative transportation”: we don’t experience it as persuasion, we experience it as seeing clearly. The uncomfortable corollary is this: the same tap, tap, tap, applied to any institution—science, medicine, education—would produce the same result. It doesn’t require a totalitarian state. It just requires enough repetition. The irony is hard to miss: Hollywood is itself one of the world’s great capitalist enterprises—yet the artists it employs have long chafed at their dependence on the financiers who get a say in their work, and that resentment has a way of showing up on screen, decade after decade, until the next generation of writers grows up taking it for granted.

Grand visions have always worked this way—across every era, every ideology, every cause that promised to finally set things right. What varies is the content. What never varies is the underlying pattern: the moral beauty of the framework, the discomfort that greets any question, the quiet but total insulation from disconfirming evidence. And education, it turns out, is no more immune to this pattern than anything else.

The dominant teaching framework of the last several decades wraps itself in language that is almost impossible to argue with: student-centered, inquiry-based, child-led. Who could object? Raising questions about it feels a bit like kicking puppies. And that feeling—that moral discomfort at even asking—is extraordinarily effective at keeping evidence at bay. When students don’t thrive under discovery-based approaches, the framework is never blamed. The implementation was wrong. The teacher needed more training. The test measured the wrong thing. No result is ever allowed to count against the vision.

That’s not science. That’s a belief system so morally beautiful it has become immune to disconfirmation—which is precisely the pattern Ireland illuminates so vividly in a very different context.

I wrote about this recently in my Substack piece “The Teaching Method That Can’t Fail (and Why That’s the Problem).” One reader who had worked across science, engineering, and finance wrote that of all those fields, education alone had shocked him—not for lack of intelligence among its practitioners, but for how often conclusions rested on moral conviction rather than evidence, and how reliably that conviction kept the evidence at bay. Regular Cheery Friday readers will recognize him: he’s Yellow Heights, author of Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher—last week’s book pick, and well worth your time if you missed it.

Spotlight: The Mill Institute and the Case for Constructive Disagreement

If you care about open inquiry in K-12 education, the Mill Institute is doing work worth knowing about. Founded on the conviction that students need practice wrestling seriously with competing ideas—not just exposure to them—the Institute partners with schools to build the institutional structures, norms, and classroom practices that make constructive disagreement genuinely teachable.

Their current focus includes helping school leaders manage conversations about misinformation, broaden the range of perspectives in discussions of current events, and help teachers and students break out of intellectual echo chambers together. The data from their school partnerships are encouraging: teachers report measurable shifts in how students engage with views that differ from their own.

They’re now planning fall programming and looking to connect with K-12 leaders who want support in exactly these areas. Learn more at mill-institute.org or reach out directly at info@mill-institute.org.

The Ireland book is riveting, by the way. Start at page one and try to stop.

Still cheery, despite all of the above—

Barb Oakley

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