When Amitav Acharya, a renowned international relations scholar at American University, published his recent book, "The Once and Future World Order," he did something deceptively simple yet intellectually courageous: He questioned what most of us, including myself, had long taken for granted. His central argument, that the foundations of world order and the modern international system were never an exclusively Western achievement, but a shared enterprise built across five millennia of non-Western civilizations, ignited considerable debate in academic circles and on social media alike. The historical accounts are astounding in their own right, but what particularly struck me was the act itself, the willingness to interrogate assumptions that had long calcified into common sense. That intellectual daring is exactly what this moment demands of us as well. Humans are, by nature, resistant to revising their worldviews. The psychologist Leon Festinger famously identified cognitive dissonance — the discomfort we feel when presented with evidence that challenges our existing beliefs — as o