Almost everyone arrives at Hegel already carrying two beliefs about him, and both are wrong. These ideas need to be named and dismantled before anything positive can be built, because otherwise every new idea gets quietly translated back into the old cliché.

The First Myth: Hegel's dialectic runs thesis → antithesis → synthesis.

This is the single most repeated sentence about Hegel in the world, and Hegel himself never uses these three words to describe his own dialectic method anywhere in his writing. This is a huge oversimplification and a fundamental betrayal of what Hegel actually does. This formula makes him sound like a tidy optimist for whom every conflict eventually resolves into harmony. Hegel's actual method is a self-unfolding process, where a concept's internal contradiction forces it to collapse into its opposite, which then resolves into a new, richer truth that contains the whole history of that collapse within it.

The "thesis → antithesis → synthesis" triad, actually originated with the philosopher Johann Fichte. It was an attempt by Fichte to map how self-consciousness realizes its own freedom, using the Self (thesis), the Not-Self (antithesis), and their Limitation (Synthesis). Even Fichte abandoned this rigid framework in his later years, because it treated the dialectic method like a formulaic math problem rather than a living, continuous movement of knowledge.

Later readers of Hegel adopted the triad anyway and pinned it onto his philosophy. Here is where the "thesis → antithesis → synthesis" triad fails on all three of its own terms.

There is no stable thesis, because for Hegel no position is ever simply itself, sitting quietly waiting for an opponent to show up before any trouble starts. Take a position seriously enough, follow its own internal logic far enough, and it will undo itself without any outside help. Take someone who insists "you can never really know anything for certain." The moment they say it, they've just claimed to know one thing for certain, that nothing is certain. They didn't need an opponent to argue them into that corner. They walked into it on their own, just by taking their own position seriously.
There is no external antithesis either. What looks like a clash between two opposed camps is very often one contradiction. Opposition is what a contradiction looks like once it has been given a face and a name, an enemy you can point at, rather than a problem you have to inhabit. To take one of McGowan's examples, global capitalism and religious fundamentalism are usually treated as opposing camps. Looked at more closely, each is the symptom the other produces: capitalism promises universal inclusion while requiring systematic exclusion in order to function at all, and fundamentalism's "traditional values" only mean anything because capitalism has already hollowed them out. Neither is really the other's opponent. Each is what the other's internal contradiction looks like but from a distance.
And there is no synthesis, if synthesis means the contradiction disappearing into a higher unity where the tension is gone. Hegel does use a word for what happens instead, Aufhebung, sometimes translated as "sublation", but its most important companion term is Versöhnung, reconciliation, and reconciliation is not elimination. What actually happens, movement after movement, is that one contradiction resolves only by handing off to a more stubborn, more resistant one. The dialectic does not travel toward peace. It travels toward increasingly intractable contradiction, all the way to what Hegel calls the Absolute.

The Second Myth: "What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational"

This line, from the Philosophy of Right, is probably the second most quoted Hegel sentence, and almost everyone who quotes it reads it as conservative fatalism, that whatever currently exists must be justified simply because it exists, so there's no real point in trying to change anything. The misreading survives because two of Hegel's key terms, actual and rational, carry technical meanings that have nothing to do with their ordinary use in everyday speech. Unpacking that fully requires the distinction between Understanding and Reason, which is substantial enough to deserve its own section. For now, just hold onto the sentence and the discomfort it causes. It will come back in this section, and by the time it does, it will read less like an endorsement of the status quo and more like one of the most quietly radical lines Hegel ever wrote.