Powerful speech! (Btw it’s Prashad not Prishad)

Even outside of what people normally think of “politics”, the difference between investigating with a framework behind it and trying to theorize alone is night and day. Or as Mao put it:

Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to “find solution” or “evolve an idea” without making any investigation.

There are not a few comrades doing inspection work, as well as guerrilla leaders and cadres newly in office, who like to make political pronouncements the moment they arrive at a place and who strut about, criticizing this and condemning that when they have only seen the surface of things or minor details. Such purely subjective nonsensical talk is indeed detestable. These people are bound to make a mess of things, lose the confidence of the masses and prove incapable of solving any problem at all.

Bold emphasis mine. Even if not in the same exact capacity as what Mao describes, I’ve been that blockhead plenty of times throughout my own life.

I figure people who end up there generally mean well and sometimes they have a good point, but even then, there’s a discernible difference between criticism based on hypothesizing and criticism based on investigation.

Anyway, it’s a good speech. We do what we can with what we have and from that, we try to form something that can do more and better than what we were doing before. That’s all we can do. And sometimes it’s learning how to form something that is itself part of the struggle. We don’t know what we don’t know and can’t find it via thinking alone.