Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist logician, spent his career doing something most thinkers avoid: systematically destroying the foundations of his own philosophical predecessors — not to replace them with better foundations, but to demonstrate that all fixed conceptual structures eventually collapse under their own weight. His method, called prasanga — reductio ad absurdum applied until nothing is left standing — wasn't nihilism. It was a tool for staying agile when the map has become more real than the territory. Here's why this matters for anyone who relies heavily on mental models: the models you reach for fastest are the ones most likely to have quietly calcified into doctrine. The framework that once generated insight now generates only familiar-feeling answers. Nagarjuna's move isn't to swap one model for another — it's to press any model until it breaks, specifically at the point where you find yourself unable to articulate what evidence would falsify it. That breakage point is diagnostic. It tells you whether you're still using a model as an instrument or whether it has become the implicit architecture of your thinking, invisible precisely because it's load-bearing. The practical application is uncomfortable: pick your most confident current judgment about a product or team situation and ask not 'is this right?' but 'what would have to be true for this entire way of framing the situation to be wrong?' If that question feels somehow illegitimate — if it produces irritation rather than curiosity — the model has become doctrine.

In the last week, which judgment did you make where you never once considered whether your framing of the situation was the problem rather than the situation itself?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE)