The Axiom I Refuse to Grant
There is an unspoken axiom shaping much of our political discourse right now, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
It goes something like this:
If you are on the wrong side, you are not merely mistaken—you are stupid, uneducated, uncultured, morally suspect, possibly racist, and unworthy of serious engagement.
Once that axiom is accepted, everything else follows effortlessly.
Asymmetry becomes “reality.”
Moral hierarchy feels justified.
Inquiry narrows “appropriately.”
And boundaries quietly replace tragedy.
I refuse that axiom.
Not because I believe all positions are equally right.
Not because I deny harm, abuse of power, or real danger.
But because frameworks that begin by declaring whole groups of people morally illegitimate do something far more corrosive than argue—they foreclose understanding.
And once understanding is foreclosed, almost anything can be justified.
Moral certainty is not the same as moral strength
One of the great temptations of our time is to mistake certainty for confidence.
Certainty feels strong.
It feels clean.
It feels like standing on solid ground.
But certainty is cheap if it’s purchased by dehumanization.
When you start from the premise that your opponents are ignorant, evil, uncritical, or morally deficient by default, you no longer need to listen. Evidence becomes ornamental. Debate becomes theater. Disagreement becomes pathology.
At that point, you’re not persuading.
You’re sorting.
And sorted people don’t need to be understood—only managed, contained, or defeated.
History is very clear about where that road leads.
People can be wrong without being evil
This is the line I will not cross.
People can hold views I strongly oppose without being stupid.
They can defend borders, laws, traditions, or limits without being racist.
They can distrust institutions without being uneducated.
They can vote differently without forfeiting moral seriousness.
Once we collapse disagreement into defect—uncultured, dumb, immoral—we are no longer doing ethics. We are doing excommunication.
And excommunication has a body count.
Why this posture has always felt “weak”
For most of my life, this refusal felt like weakness.
I watched others speak with absolute certainty, draw hard moral lines, name villains, and receive applause. Meanwhile, I hesitated. I paused. I wanted to understand before condemning.
That hesitation was framed—by others and by myself—as lack of confidence.
I see now that it wasn’t.
It was restraint.
It was a refusal to grant myself permission to hate in advance.
That kind of restraint doesn’t feel powerful in a culture addicted to outrage and moral sorting. But it preserves something far more important than dominance:
the human field itself.
The difference between confidence and approval-seeking
Here’s the shift that changed everything for me:
I stopped writing to secure approval.
I started writing from moral self-trust.
Approval-seeking asks:
Will this keep me safe? Will they accept me? Will I be attacked?
Moral self-trust asks:
Is this true to what I refuse to abandon, even if it costs me something?
When you write from moral self-trust, you don’t need to convince.
You don’t need consensus.
You don’t even need to respond.
You simply stand.
That kind of confidence is often labeled “dangerous”—not because it is violent, but because it cannot be steered by shame.
The axiom I refuse
So I’ll name it plainly:
I refuse frameworks that require me to declare my neighbors stupid, evil, racist, or morally illegitimate before I am allowed to understand them.
I refuse moral systems that turn disagreement into defect.
I refuse certainty that justifies dehumanization.
I refuse the idea that compassion and limits are opposites.
This refusal doesn’t make me neutral.
It doesn’t make me soft.
And it doesn’t make me naïve.
It makes me unwilling to trade my humanity for the comfort of certainty.
And that’s a trade I’m no longer willing to make.