A Just Council manifesto
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
Matt 16:24
I. The question that remains
The other person. The one nearest to us. The one who lives on the other side of the wall. The one who stands in front of me in the queue. The one who wrote something I disagree with.
For thousands of years it was he who was the measure. Not the one we know from the newspapers. Not the one we see on the screen. The one with whom we share a corridor, a lift, a car park, bread.
Today that measure has disappeared. Not because the neighbour has disappeared. The neighbour is where he has always been. What has disappeared is our contact with him — and someone else has appeared, whom the algorithm calls a neighbour, though he is not one.
II. Two kinds of neighbour
The tradition from which we grow — the Torah and the Bible as one, unified source of human values — knows only one answer to the question “who is my neighbour?” It is the one who is beside me. Not an abstraction. Not a banner. Not an opponent in a debate. A human being of flesh and blood, whose face I see, whose voice I hear, whose suffering costs me something.
The algorithm has built us a substitute neighbour. Someone who arouses emotions without any obligation to respond. Someone towards whom one can be everything: prosecutor, judge, advocate — but not a neighbour.
The difference is simple and painful:
The real neighbour demands patience of me. The digital neighbour offers me superiority.
III. To deny oneself — in the age of the mirror
“Let him deny himself.”
This is not a call to self-hatred. It is a call to dethrone the self from the position of the centre. To step out of the role of the protagonist of one’s own world.
Social media are the precise negation of this call. They are a machine whose sole task is to make each of us the protagonist. Every post is a micro-coronation. Every like is a confirmation of royal dignity. Every view of a comment is a court that listens to us.
Neuroscience has described this mechanism with painful precision. Dopamine feedback, rapid reward loops, a shrunken attention span, a growing intolerance of ambiguity. A person who trains every day at being king of his own feed loses the capacity to be a neighbour to the one next door.
And here a call from two thousand years ago suddenly sounds not like a religious voice but like a civilisational diagnosis: deny yourself. Step down from the throne that the algorithm has set beneath your feet. Without this movement everything else — justice, compassion, solidarity — is mere decoration.
IV. The cross — a burden one does not choose
“And take up his cross.”
The cross is not a metaphor for difficulty. The cross in this tradition is a concrete, irrevocable burden — something that is not comfortable, but without which the path loses its meaning.
The neighbour is a cross. In the best possible sense.
The neighbour makes noise at the wrong time. The neighbour votes differently. The neighbour leaves a bicycle in the corridor. The neighbour asks you something when you are in a hurry. The neighbour grows old and needs help with the shopping. The neighbour loses a job. The neighbour lives alone and has no one to ring on a Friday evening.
Social media have taught us one fundamental escape: one can have a thousand close friends and no neighbour. One can be in solidarity with the whole planet and indifferent to one’s own floor. One can declare compassion in a way that costs nothing — and lose the capacity for real compassion, which always costs something.
The cross spoken of here is the test of this difference. I do not ask: “Did you write something supportive?” I ask: “Did you carry the shopping up for the lady on the third floor?”
V. A proportionality the algorithm does not know
One of the values that Just Council treats as foundational is proportionality. It is an ancient, European virtue — without it justice becomes a caricature.
The algorithm is by definition incapable of proportionality. It rewards the extreme. It punishes moderation. It elevates outrage. It extinguishes nuance. It systematically trains us in the opposite of what being a neighbour requires.
To be a neighbour means to be able to weigh the presence of another human being without exaggeration in either direction. Not to idolise. Not to condemn. To see in real proportions.
When did you last look at someone like that?
VI. Responsibility instead of position
Just Council grows from a simple conviction: values are not a set of declarations but a network of obligations. Responsibility is not the same as guilt. It is the capacity to respond. To be present where the question has been asked.
Today’s digital culture produces an epidemic of positions and a deficit of responsibility. Everyone has a view. Few respond. Everyone is an expert. Few are neighbours.
To take up one’s cross is to take upon oneself that part of life which is not photogenic. Which will not be displayed. Which no one will like. And which built Europe over the centuries, before anyone invented the feed.
VII. Learning, humility, dignity — three answers to the atrophy of attention
Attention is the currency with which we love. There is no other. Where we do not direct our attention, we do not direct our love — however beautiful the sentences we write about it.
Social media are an economy of stolen attention. They distract in order to retain. This is a structural logic, not a moral choice of the platform.
The answer of Just Council is threefold — it grows from the classical, European and biblical tradition:
- Learning — the capacity to stay with a subject longer than is pleasant. A neighbour cannot be known in thirty seconds.
- Humility — the readiness to admit that my perspective is one of many. The algorithm will never tell you this. It will confirm you in your views.
- Dignity — seeing in another human being an infinite worth before you have even learnt how he votes.
VIII. “And follow me” — a direction, not a faction
The third part of the call reads: “and follow me”. Come after me.
In Polish and European debate every such sentence is immediately appropriated — either towards a political alliance or towards a religious camp. Just Council rejects both of these readings as reductive.
“To follow” does not mean to vote for. “To follow” does not mean to join a party. It means: to choose the direction taken by one who gave his life for another human being — and to begin living according to that geometry of values. Even when you gain nothing from it in public.
This is the test of courage. Courage is not an exclamation mark. It is quiet consistency.
IX. Hope — a value the algorithm does not produce
The algorithm feeds us fear, because fear gets more clicks. It feeds us outrage, because outrage gets shared more. It feeds us anxiety about the future, because anxiety holds attention better.
Hope — the crowning value of Just Council — is not naivety. It is a decision. It is a daily, repeated act of contradicting the machinery of despair.
Hope lives where the real neighbour lives. On the floor above. On the other side of the wall. In the queue for bread. Where one can still greet another without an ideological declaration.
X. Manifesto — Just Council and the neighbour
This is not a text about religion. This is not a text about politics. It is a text about what remains when one subtracts both: about the person beside us.
Just Council — my manifesto — advances three theses:
The first. The neighbour is the last, the most difficult and the most important measure of our civilisation. Not the forum. Not the feed. Not the screen. A human being whom we did not choose.
The second. Social media are not a neutral tool. They are a structure that favours the negation of self-denial. Awareness of this structure is the condition of freedom in relation to it.
The third. The Torah and the Bible — treated as one, common source of human values — say here exactly the same as the thousand-year-old European tradition of a culture of attention and presence. To deny oneself. To take up the cross. To follow what is greater.
These are the three axes of this manifesto. Not a programme. Not a faction. A line along which I wish to walk — and which I propose to everyone who feels that something has been lost between us.
A neighbour is not a contact on a list. It is the person against whom your life is measured.
— Just Council
