Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, built an entire philosophical system around a single uncomfortable move: he refused to let any concept stand as independently real, including the concept of 'emptiness' itself. His method — called prasanga, or the reductio-by-implication — wasn't about tearing ideas down but about exposing the hidden dependencies inside claims that looked self-sufficient. What he found applies with uncomfortable precision to how humans behave under pressure: we don't reason from principles, we reason from the network of dependencies those principles quietly assume. Strip one dependency, and the confident position collapses — not because someone proved it wrong, but because it was never free-standing. In practice, this means the most brittle beliefs in any organization or in any person are not the ones people argue about loudly. They're the ones that have never been separated from the adjacent assumptions propping them up. The move worth practicing is Nagarjuna's: take a view you hold firmly and ask not 'is this true?' but 'what else would have to be true for this to hold?' That second question is almost never asked. It's usually where the interesting thing is hiding.

Take one assumption you've been acting on this week — about a person, a plan, or a situation. What is the one adjacent belief that assumption silently requires? Is that adjacent belief actually solid?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy — Nagarjuna