“Gaza Is Complicated!” No It Isn’t. Grow Up.

It’s false to say that conflicts in the middle east are hard to understand. They’re not. What can be hard is opening your mind to the possibility that everything you’ve been told about the world is a lie, and that everyone you know and respect has been brainwashed by propaganda.

Once you’ve done that, understanding conflicts in the middle east becomes easy — because the entire framework we’re indoctrinated with for understanding them is a lie.

So much abusive bullshit hides behind the false modesty of “This issue is too complicated for me to understand.” You see it with Gaza, where westerners act like an empire-backed military force dropping bombs on a giant concentration camp and systematically using rape as a weapon of torture and deliberately starving civilians is just way too compwicated for a dumb widdle baby wike me, goo goo ga ga.

People act like they’re being humble about their own intellect and understanding, but really they’re just lying and psychologically compartmentalizing away from self-evident reality. It’s not humility, it’s just another kind of dishonesty.

You see this fraudulent act all the time with the average westerner’s general incuriosity about the behavior of their government and its allies throughout the world. “Oh I’m too dumb to know anything about foreign policy, I leave that to the experts.” No actually you’re just compartmentalizing away from the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise lead to the destruction of your mainstream worldview once you really looked at the publicly available information about what your government and its allies are doing to people in other countries.

It’s the same as people who deep down know that the couple they’re friends with is an abusive relationship and know damn well which one the abuser is, but refuse to take sides after a breakup because oh, there’s two sides to every story and who’s to judge anyway. Abusive dynamics run throughout our entire society that people just refuse to squarely examine, placating that inner voice of discomfort with thoughts that say “nobody knows anything for sure” and “it’s for God to sort out, tra la la la.” The entire Catholic Church molestation scandal hid behind this dynamic for generations, until it couldn’t anymore.

There absolutely is a benefit to having real humility about the limits of your own understanding, and to knowing that from a certain point of view everything about this strange reality we were birthed into is mysterious and ungraspable. But if you use this fact to hide from your own responsibility toward understanding your world, your society and your interpersonal relationships, it’s just cowardice and dishonesty. If you use this truth to hide from reality, it becomes a lie.

If you accept that we all have a responsibility to act in an ethical way, then you must also accept that we have a responsibility to form a mature understanding of our world and our surroundings, because all of our actions necessarily flow from our understanding. This won’t always be convenient or comfortable, just conducting one’s behavior in an ethical way isn’t always convenient or comfortable, but that’s what being a responsible adult is. You can’t discern responsible action without having a responsible relationship with your understanding of the world.

Gaza isn’t complicated. Those who says it is are just running from their own intellectual adulthood. Stop shirking your responsibility, learn the facts, take a stand, and grow up.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):