_{In this post, I switch back and forth between the author’s perspective and my own variables, as the purpose of reading it is not just to learn, but to eventually apply this knowledge where needed. I am not translating Martín-Baró into a formal model to replace his work, but to carry forward the constraints he identified into design questions he did not live long enough to address.}

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From my perspective, in the book “Writings For a Liberation Psychology,” Ignacio Martín-Baró maps failure modes of collective agency when subjectivity can’t be repaired and exit itself becomes catastrophic. Martín-Baró’s work can be read as a pre-repair diagnostic theory of the coerced commons.

At the time, some right-wing flyers read, “Be a patriot, kill a priest.”

Martín-Baró worked during El Salvador’s civil war, a period in which a U.S.-backed military government ruled through terror, assassinating priests, teachers, union organizers, and anyone who helped the poor organize or name their oppression. He argued that fear, silence, and fatalism were not accidental byproducts of violence but politically useful outcomes, and that psychology should be used to help communities recover agency and historical memory rather than adapt to domination.

He describes psychological adaptations at the meso level of communities facing domination imposed from the macro level. Working in a context where exit, revision, and institutional repair were structurally unavailable, his analysis focuses on how communities psychologically adapt to terror rather than on how they recover from it. His project was cut short when he was assassinated by government soldiers in 1989.

Where Ostrom’s work assumes negotiable rules, retained agency, and the possibility of trust repair, Martín-Baró documents the psychological consequences of their absence: splitting, alienation, hypervigilance, and moral absolutism. His writing stands as a record of communal life under domination, and an effort to preserve human dignity where repair was not yet possible.

His work ends with diagnosis under terror; mine begins with the design problem of restoring agency once terror no longer defines the horizon of action. The diagnostic record still matters, because durable systems cannot be designed under the assumption that peaceful conditions will always hold.

Interpreting the Introduction Through My Lens

Martín-Baró was trying to increase p_self (internal legibility of one’s own agency and situation) in order to stabilize subjectivity under conditions where agency was structurally constrained. Agency restoration or expansion were unavailable, but he attempted to prevent the collapse or distortion of subjectivity by restoring interpretive truth.

Mainstream psychology abstracted individuals and assumed stable agency. p_self was artificially flattened and p_socialᵍ didn’t align with reality. He believed subjectivity (U) collapses or freezes because identity becomes stereotyped or immutable, experience did not equal interpretation, and suffering had no intelligible cause.

When agency is blocked, the danger isn’t just helplessness — it’s internalization of domination.

He posited that historicity (you are in time), social legibility (your suffering is shared and patterned), and truthful reflection (your reality exists and can be named) preserve subjectivity by increasing p_self, regardless of low agency. In other words, you’re unable to change things, but you can understand what is happening to you, and why it is not a personal defect.

p_socialᵍ is social legibility of agency within group g. It is what the social group says is possible for people like you, what outcomes are normal, and which are deserved or inevitable. Healthy p_social supports coordination and repair by reflecting lived reality and allowing shared interpretation and revision. Unhealthy p_social converts domination into “nature,” misrepresents reality, freezes roles, and isolates individuals.

When suffering was absent in Salvadoran media, the state was manufacturing a false p_socialᵍ at scale, which devastated subjectivity. False p_socialᵍ forces p_self to absorb domination internally. If reality is not socially mirrored, interpretation collapses inward.

Martín-Baró argued that if psychologists do not develop a critical consciousness that will move them to a new praxis, their efforts will not address the actual problems people face.

He spoke of himself as living in a limit situation alongside the people of El Salvador. The limit marked the limits of human possibility, where all possibilities begin. He saw it as a frontier of being to being more. Despite the suffering of the people, through their brave acts of resistance, he said that he saw “tremendous faith in the human capacity to change the world, and their hope for a tomorrow that keeps being violently denied to them.”

For a time, Martín-Baró appealed to those in power:

The government was delighted with Ignacio Martín-Baró’s proposal for a University Institute of Public Opinion, which he, the only doctoral-level psychologist in the country, would head. It suited the vanities of the ruling powers, giving them something progressive and scientific to show off to their fellow Latin Americans. And it would please their sponsors in Washington as well, who were getting restless about human rights violations and needed a sweetener to keep the money flowing. The only stipulation was that the military high command be shown the contents of each survey before it was conducted—a demand that Martín-Baró simply ignored.

People were of course afraid to answer some of the questions in the Institute’s polls. But Martín-Baró the social psychologist knew how to make a statistical analysis of the refusals, and could report that whereas 40 percent of the rich feel free to express their opinions in public, the figure drops to under 20 percent for the poor. When the government claimed that the people were opposed to a dialogue with the FMLN, the Institute’s polls proved otherwise. If anyone was so misguided as to think that television novellas of middle class life had anything to do with the Salvadoran reality, they could learn from the Institute’s publications that 38.4 percent of the country’s urban population in 1987 had a monthly family income of less than 45 U.S. dollars, with more than half of that group having no income whatsoever. And, in direct contradiction to claims of improvements in human rights, the polls gathered clear evidence that government soldiers practiced systematic sexual abuse of women in the countryside. Martín-Baró found in survey research a powerful tool for de-ideologizing reality.

Martín-Baró sought not only to reflect Salvadorans’ lived realities back to them, but also to confront citizens of the United States with the fact that their government was underwriting state terror abroad. He insisted that we reckon with the predictable consequences of injustice, and recognize that our own sense of security carries no lifetime guarantee.

Marx treated struggle as the condition under which class consciousness emerges, leaving subjectivity largely implicit. Lenin resolved this ambiguity by installing consciousness in the party, not the subject. Mao’s Cultural Revolution shows the endpoint of that logic: the forced destruction of “false” p_socialᵍ, absent any protection of p_self, produces terror and collapse rather than liberation. Martín-Baró demonstrates that under such conditions, consciousness must be actively named and safeguarded, not assumed.

To Martín-Baró, data is not merely a record of what is, but an account of what demands response.