I’ve noticed a new social superstition: if you can see more than one angle, you must be hiding your real one.
Nuance is treated like camouflage. Questions are treated like stalling tactics. The refusal to deliver an instant verdict is framed as cowardice. Or worse—complicity. As if not picking a side is the same as picking the wrong one.
And I get it. The world is loud. The stakes feel permanent. Everyone is tired. We want the clean relief of certainty—the moral dopamine of “at least I’m not them.”
But something has shifted. Quietly. Systemically.
It used to be normal to say:
“I don’t know enough.”
“I might be missing context.”
“Show me what I haven’t seen.”
Now those sentences can trigger suspicion. They sound like betrayal.
The feed doesn’t reward understanding. It rewards alignment.
A feed is not a library. It’s a pressure system.
It doesn’t ask, “Is this true?”
It asks, “Is this reactive?”
It doesn’t ask, “Does this deepen a mind?”
It asks, “Does this keep a thumb moving?”
And the most reliable fuel for motion is identity threat. If an idea can be framed as an attack on your tribe, your values, your safety, your personhood—you will respond. You will comment. You will share. You will defend. You will recruit.
So we get a new cultural default:
- Fast opinion beats slow thought.
- Moral certainty beats epistemic humility.
- Alignment beats accuracy.
The feed doesn’t just distribute beliefs. It trains bodies. It teaches nervous systems what “good” feels like: the hit of righteous clarity, the warm glow of belonging, the relief of a shared enemy.
It’s not that people suddenly became stupid.
It’s that the environment makes stupidity adaptive.
Two truths is not relativism. It’s reality.
Here’s the thing: most human events contain multiple truths at once.
Someone can be harmed and someone else can be afraid.
A policy can protect and also distort.
A person can do damage and still have a backstory that matters.
A movement can contain genuine compassion and still generate perverse incentives.
None of that excuses anything. It just describes the real texture of life: contradiction, overlap, mixed motives, partial information.
But the feed hates texture.
Texture is slow.
Texture is hard to summarise.
Texture doesn’t fit on a banner.
So the system compresses reality into binary moral theatre:
good / evil
victim / villain
clean / contaminated
with us / against us
And once that compression happens, seeing both sides looks like betrayal—not because it’s wrong, but because it weakens the theatre. It breaks the spell. It interrupts the rhythm of ritual outrage.
The new heresy: “I’m not sure.”
This is why I’ve learned—often the hard way—to be careful with opinions.
It isn’t that I have none. It’s that I know how cheaply opinions are manufactured now. How easily they can be installed by repetition, by framing, by selective clips, by the gravitational pull of your “people.”
There’s a difference between:
- having a view because you’ve thought it through
and - having a view because you’ve absorbed it like second-hand smoke
The system loves the second kind. It’s scalable. It’s predictable. It turns humans into relay towers.
So when someone asks, “What do you think about X?” my most honest answer is often:
“I don’t know the full story.”
That sentence used to be a sign of maturity.
Now it can be read as a moral failure.
Because in the current climate, not having an immediate stance is interpreted as a refusal to signal goodness.
Moral goodness as a subscription service
Then there’s the deeper move—where morality stops being practice and becomes posture.
A lot of modern “morality” is less about ethics in the classic sense (how to live, how to treat people, how to build a world) and more about optics compliance: adopting the approved vocabulary, posting the approved stance, condemning the approved enemy.
Not because people are fake, necessarily. But because the system has taught us a shortcut:
If I align with the right tribe, I am good.
That’s a terrifying idea, because it removes the need for self-examination.
If goodness is tribal alignment, then the highest virtue becomes loyalty.
And the greatest sin becomes questions.
This is how you get situations where someone can be deeply kind in person, and brutally punitive online—because online they’re not practicing ethics, they’re practicing membership.
The feed doesn’t turn everyone into a monster. It turns everyone into a brand manager.
Metacognition: the extinct superpower
If there’s a single skill the moment demands, it’s metacognition: the ability to notice your own thinking in real time.
To catch the moment a narrative grabs your throat.
To recognise when anger is being rented.
To ask: “Is this me, or is this a reaction I’ve been trained into?”
Metacognition is the opposite of virality. It creates friction. It slows the machine. It ruins the clean hit.
Which is why it feels so rare now—especially in younger minds growing up inside a full-time persuasion environment.
If you don’t develop metacognition, you don’t have beliefs.
You have installed packages.
And if your beliefs are installed packages, then disagreement doesn’t feel like disagreement. It feels like malware. It feels like threat.
Hence the social reflex: attack the person. Don’t discuss the idea.
A small experiment: the betrayal test
Here’s a way to spot the mechanism in yourself (and in others):
Try to hold two truths at once, publicly, without smoothing them into a slogan.
Watch what happens.
You will often be accused of:
- fence-sitting
- “both sides”-ing
- enabling harm
- lacking courage
- being secretly aligned with the enemy
None of those are arguments. They’re containment strategies. They exist to restore binary theatre.
Because if you can hold two truths, you become harder to govern with outrage.
And that, in the system’s language, is betrayal.
Closing note from the uncertain
I’m not claiming neutrality is always virtuous. Sometimes it’s avoidance. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s comfort disguised as wisdom.
But there’s a difference between avoidance and humility.
Humility says:
“I might be wrong.”
“I may not have enough information.”
“I’m willing to update.”
That willingness—quiet, unglamorous, unshareable—is a kind of moral courage the feed can’t metabolise.
So maybe the task isn’t to “pick the right side.”
Maybe the task is to refuse the machine that demands sides for profit.
To keep your mind spacious enough for two truths.
To be the kind of person who can say, without shame:
“I don’t know yet.”
And mean it.
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