Use when analyzing a policy, contract, or doctrine whose benevolence everyone assumes. Use when you must expose hypocrisy without adding your own spin. Use when a sacred text or founding myth is being used to justify coercion.

Defenders of any canon depend on you importing its intended, sympathetic meaning. Refuse the sympathetic reading — ask 'what would this character be, if this sentence were true and taken literally?' — and the authority's own words become evidence against it. One text, two readings, opposite verdicts. This is how you dethrone a narrative everyone has been trained to read charitably.