The Terror of Moral Clarity

On selective outrage, tribal epistemology, and the courage to see clearly in a poisoned discourse

I've never spent so much time perseverating over every word as I am right now. The terror I feel about writing on this subject is itself a fascinating and horrifying epistemic object that deserves careful attention. There's something there—something in the way my hands hesitate over the keyboard, something in the way I calculate every syllable for potential tribal attack—that reveals the complete breakdown of our capacity for moral reasoning.

The fact that I can't write about human suffering without this hypervigilance is itself evidence of what I'm about to diagnose: the collapse of love as an epistemic force in our approach to the most basic questions of human dignity.

We live in an age of selective moral attention, where the intensity of our outrage seems determined not by the scale of suffering but by factors that have nothing to do with human dignity itself. Media coverage, political utility, tribal identity—these shape our moral focus more than the actual magnitude of human pain.

This is the first time I've publicly dared to wade into the profoundly complex situation in Gaza—not for lack of opinions, but from an abiding sense of humility about my ability to meaningfully contribute to a space filled with intense moral confusion. Yet, silence can itself become complicity in moral distortion. And the terror I feel about breaking that silence? That terror is the symptom of something much larger and more dangerous than any particular geopolitical crisis.

Let me name what's happening as I write this. I'm trying to see clearly, to apply consistent moral standards, to acknowledge complexity without abandoning principles. This should be the most natural thing in the world for a thinking person. Instead, it feels like defusing a bomb.

That terror is the internalized knowledge that in our current discourse, any attempt at genuine moral reasoning will be weaponized. The left will scan for insufficient condemnation of Israel. The right will scan for insufficient condemnation of Hamas. The center will scan for insufficient both-sidesism. Everyone is looking for the phrase that proves I'm really one of them.

So I find myself not writing from love—from the sustained attention to what actually serves human flourishing—but from fear. Fear of being misread, misrepresented, tribally sorted. The very care with which I'm choosing words becomes evidence of how thoroughly the discourse has been poisoned.

This is what it looks like when love as an epistemic force breaks down completely. When we can't approach human suffering with the simple question “what does care require here?” but must instead navigate a minefield of tribal signaling and ideological positioning.

Sam Harris

today made a compelling intellectual intervention about this very phenomenon. He pointed out, with characteristic honesty, the disturbing asymmetry in how we focus outrage. Why, he rightly asks, does our collective consciousness prioritize the suffering in Gaza while largely ignoring even greater human catastrophes such as the brutal civil wars in Syria and Yemen?

The atrocities in Yemen and Syria are unfathomable. The Syrian regime's brutal tactics against civilians have resulted in unimaginable suffering. The Yemeni civil war has left millions facing starvation and displacement, a humanitarian disaster of staggering proportions. These are real tragedies involving real human lives—lives that, we claim, possess inherent and equal worth. Yet, our moral calculus does not seem to reflect this fundamental truth.

Harris's challenge is fundamentally fair and intellectually honest: he is not diminishing Palestinian suffering but highlighting the cognitive dissonance in our selective moral attention. This is something those of us who value moral clarity and coherence must confront openly and seriously.

What we're witnessing isn't just inconsistent moral attention—it's the collapse of love as an epistemic force in our approach to human suffering. When we care selectively based on factors other than the suffering itself, we're no longer seeing through love but through ideology, through tribal allegiance, through the distorting lens of political convenience.

This collapse is so complete that it's literally confusing villains for heroes. Hamas—a far-right terrorist organization that deliberately targets civilians and governs through violence and fear—gets romanticized as freedom fighters. Not that there are any heroes in this story, but the inability to see moral reality clearly is stunning.

Real moral seeing requires the kind of sustained, patient attention that love makes possible—attention that can hold multiple tragedies simultaneously without requiring one to cancel out another, that can perceive human dignity wherever it's threatened without demanding we choose sides rather than uphold standards.

Love as an epistemic force would allow us to see that Palestinian children deserve protection without requiring us to pretend their government isn't a terrorist organization. It would allow us to criticize Israeli policy without needing to excuse Hamas terrorism. It would let us acknowledge Syrian and Yemeni suffering without diminishing Palestinian pain.

But this is exactly what our current discourse prevents. We're systematically trained away from the patient, caring attention that could actually perceive moral reality clearly. Instead, we get tribal sorting that mistakes political utility for moral truth.

And here I am, feeling that systematic training in my own terror about writing these words.

Let me be absolutely clear about something before proceeding further, even though the very need to say this reveals how poisoned our discourse has become. Any suggestion that my stance emerges from antisemitic sentiment is categorically false and profoundly insulting. I write with reverence for the words of Hannah Arendt and Elie Wiesel in these Notes from the Circus. Their insights into the nature of evil, the fragility of human dignity, and the moral requirements of conscious living inform everything I do here.

At the same time, I insist to my friends on the left that providing quarter to the opportunistic evil of Hamas and religious radicals is a profound moral reasoning error of the highest order. Hamas are not freedom fighters. They are far-right radicals who govern through violence and fear, who deliberately target civilians, who use their own population as human shields.

No matter what view you take of the broader Israel-Palestine situation, Hamas's moral status is not somehow insulated by their relative powerlessness compared to the Israeli state. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were vastly inferior in power to the American state, yet this fact didn't morally excuse the fundamentally evil orientation of their actions. This is, I'd argue, a profoundly fair comparison.

Being the weaker party in a conflict does not grant moral immunity for targeting civilians, for deliberate brutality, for the kind of ideological extremism that Hamas represents. The fact that Palestinians have legitimate grievances does not transform Hamas into heroes. The fact that Israel possesses superior military power does not grant Hamas moral immunity for terrorism.

I can feel my heart racing as I write these paragraphs, knowing they will be parsed for tribal loyalty rather than moral reasoning. This is the epistemic environment we've created—where clear moral statements feel dangerous because they threaten the simplified narratives that political tribes require for solidarity.

But even here—and this is crucial—recognizing Hamas's moral bankruptcy doesn't foreclose us from taking moral judgment on Israel's conduct. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has made this point with devastating clarity in recent remarks: “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of annihilation: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians. We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit—but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly. Yes, we are committing war crimes.”

This is the voice of someone who understands Israeli security concerns intimately, yet refuses to let those concerns excuse what he sees as fundamental moral failure. There seem to be very few angels haunting the holy lands, in my view.

This is precisely what genuine moral reasoning requires: the courage to apply consistent standards regardless of tribal pressure from any direction. Antisemitism is evil. Hamas terrorism is evil. And as Olmert courageously acknowledges, war crimes committed by any state—including Israel—are evil.

These truths do not cancel each other out. They coexist in the complex moral landscape that adults are supposed to be capable of navigating. The failure to hold multiple moral truths simultaneously is exactly what allows extremism to flourish on all sides.

This isn't a retreat into the comforting nihilism of bothsidesism, where all actions become equivalent. It's an insistence that honest engagement with this subject requires us to apply principles consistently—to Palestinians and Israelis alike.

And yet I can feel the weight of how this will be read, how these words will be weaponized, how the very attempt to hold complexity will be treated as betrayal by multiple tribes simultaneously.

This brings me to the terrifying thing I'm looking at: we've created a discourse environment so toxic that genuine moral reasoning feels dangerous. Where trying to see clearly requires more courage than it should. Where the very attempt to hold complexity is treated as betrayal by all sides.

That's not just about Israel-Palestine. That's about the systematic destruction of the conditions where truth-telling is possible. The terror I feel while writing this—that's love as an epistemic force grieving for itself.

Think about what's happening: I'm trying to approach human suffering with the simple question “what does care require here?” But I can't write from that place of sustained, loving attention because I've been trained to write from fear—fear of tribal misreading, fear of ideological sorting, fear that my words will be twisted into weapons rather than received as attempts at understanding.

This is the collapse of love as an epistemic force made visceral. When moral reasoning becomes an exercise in defensive positioning rather than patient attention to what actually serves human flourishing.

This crisis of selective moral attention connects directly to the broader breakdown of democratic capacity I've been writing about. If citizens can't engage complex moral questions without falling into tribal simplification, how can they engage complex political questions? The same forces that create selective moral outrage create selective democratic attention.

The sophistication required here—the ability to criticize Israeli actions while condemning Hamas terrorism, to recognize bias in global attention while maintaining moral standards, to hold multiple moral truths simultaneously—this is exactly the kind of cognitive work democracy requires but that our information environment systematically undermines.

We're being trained away from what genuine moral reasoning demands: the capacity to see suffering clearly wherever it occurs, to apply consistent standards across different contexts, to resist the binary thinking that demands we choose teams rather than uphold principles.

The same forces that make us defer to algorithms rather than developing our own judgment are making us defer to tribal narratives rather than seeing human suffering clearly. This is the collapse of love as an epistemic force playing out in real time, with devastating consequences for both moral reasoning and democratic capacity.

And the fear I feel while writing about this? That's evidence of how thoroughly we've internalized this collapse. When approaching human suffering with genuine care feels dangerous, we've lost something essential about what it means to be human in relationship with other humans.

The answer isn't moral relativism—the claim that all positions are equally valid—but what I might call comprehensive love: the commitment to seeing human dignity wherever it's threatened, regardless of the political inconvenience or tribal discomfort such seeing might create.

This doesn't mean false equivalencies. It means applying the same quality of moral attention to Syrian children and Yemeni families that we apply to Palestinian suffering. It means holding Israeli actions to the same standards we hold Syrian actions, and Hamas actions to the same standards we hold any terrorist organization. It means recognizing that the selectivity of our attention is itself a moral failing that distorts our capacity for genuine moral reasoning.

We are collectively failing on multiple moral fronts simultaneously. Our selective attention is a moral failing, just as acts of terrorism and war crimes are moral failings. Recognizing one does not require ignoring the other.

This is precisely why navigating this moral landscape demands not just humility, clarity, and courage, but the willingness to feel the terror of truth-telling and speak anyway. To acknowledge that our discourse has become so poisoned that genuine moral reasoning feels dangerous—and to engage in it nonetheless.

We must resist the seductive simplicity of moral binaries that our discourse constantly offers us. This moment calls for something more difficult and more necessary: a comprehensive moral accounting that refuses to let political convenience, tribal identity, or even our own fear determine the boundaries of our compassion.

If we claim that all lives matter equally, our attention, advocacy, and moral outrage should reflect this truth consistently, even if doing so challenges our comfortable narratives, threatens our tribal standing, and demands more courage than we thought we possessed.

This is the work of remaining morally human in an age designed to make such humanity impossible. It requires us to love—not sentimentally, but as an epistemic practice—enough to see clearly, to think complexly, to hold multiple truths simultaneously without being paralyzed by their tension or the social cost of holding them.

This is our moral work now. It is difficult, essential, and long overdue. It is also the foundation without which democratic wisdom becomes impossible, citizenship becomes mere tribalism, and human dignity becomes just another political football.

The terror I feel while writing this—that's the price of consciousness in an age that profits from our confusion. But consciousness is worth the terror. Truth-telling is worth the risk. Love as an epistemic force is worth defending, even when—especially when—that defense feels dangerous.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And human suffering demands our attention wherever it occurs, not because it's politically convenient or tribally safe, but because consciousness recognizing consciousness across difference is what makes us human in the first place.

The center must be held. Even here. Especially here. Even when holding it makes our hands shake.