No One Owns the Truth: On Certainty, Fragility, and the Lost Art of Understanding

Everywhere I look, people are building fortresses out of their beliefs.

Whole movements, communities, and professions have started talking about truth as if they invented it. Activists, politicians, corporations, charities — each claiming to be the moral centre of the universe. Each convinced that to question them is to betray humanity itself.

But the truth doesn’t belong to anyone.
It never did.

Morality isn’t a universal law — it’s something we’ve built, refined, and reinterpreted across time. It’s born from experience and culture, and reshaped by perspective. And yet, in today’s public life, we talk as though morality is a fixed, measurable thing — something that can be owned, branded, and used to score points in the marketplace of outrage.

I’ve spent years working with people who’ve seen both sides of this.

Public servants who feel paralysed by the fear of saying the wrong thing.
Community leaders exhausted from navigating ideological minefields.
Advocates whose good intentions harden into superiority.
And others — immigrants, disabled people, neurodivergent professionals — who are tired of being turned into categories to prove someone else’s virtue.

We’ve built a culture where identity has become performance.
Where “I care” has become “I’m right.”
And where disagreement is treated as violence.

The more we build these moral empires, the more fragile we become.

Every sector does it — especially the ones that claim to care the most. The non-profit world has become particularly vulnerable to this illusion.
People mistake conviction for competence and outrage for understanding.

I’ve seen pro-immigration organisations call anyone who questions immigration policy racist or anti-immigrant.
But not everyone who says, “I think immigration should be managed,” is hateful.
Sometimes they’re talking about the rate of change in their local area, about losing the familiarity of heritage, or about feeling like language and culture are disappearing faster than they can process.

I’ve heard people say, “I’m not racist, but all lives matter.”
And in isolation, that statement isn’t bigotry — it’s clumsy yearning for universality.
The problem isn’t the sentiment. The problem is our refusal to stay in the conversation long enough to understand where it comes from.

When you label people before you listen to them, you don’t make them better — you make them resentful.
And that resentment, left unattended, becomes the very extremism we claim to fight.

We’ve built an ecosystem of moral fragility — one that can’t tolerate contradiction.

Every cause becomes a category, every category a purity test.
People find community by shrinking their world into smaller, safer boxes.
Neurodivergent spaces, LGBTQ+ spaces, immigrant spaces, activist spaces — each doing important work, but increasingly operating as echo chambers, cut off from the world they’re trying to influence.

We talk about diversity, but what we’re really practising is voluntary segregation.
We gather with people who think, vote, and feel like us — and then convince ourselves that this is progress.

The most painful part is that many of the people trapped in this cycle are the ones who care most deeply.

They want justice. They want inclusion. They want to help.
But compassion without curiosity turns into control.
It stops being love for people and becomes love for your own moral image.

In psychological terms, this is what happens when the ego fuses with identity — when we start to believe that “goodness” itself lives in our category, our cause, our language.

It’s moral arrogance, yes — but it’s also fear.
Because once your worth depends on being right, every disagreement feels like a threat to survival.

What I’ve learned, through coaching and conversation, is that calm is the only way back.
Not the kind of calm that avoids conflict, but the kind that can sit in it without falling apart.

Calm is a nervous system skill. It’s emotional regulation in motion — the ability to hold strong emotion without turning it into violence or shame.
It’s the thing that lets police officers talk about moral injury without defensiveness, or charity leaders admit that ideology has swallowed their empathy.
It’s the strength that turns conversations into spaces of transformation instead of trauma.

No one has universal access to truth.
That’s not cynicism — it’s humility.

The truth is built between people, not declared by them.
It emerges in the messy middle — through disagreement, listening, and the uncomfortable space where emotion and intellect meet.

When we stop chasing moral perfection and start practising understanding, something changes.
Conversations stop being weapons and start being mirrors.
We begin to see not just who we are, but what we’ve become — and what we could still be if we remembered how to talk to one another.

If we want a different society, we have to be honest about the one we’ve built.
And right now, we’ve built one that confuses outrage for insight and labels for empathy.
A world that rewards noise over nuance and purity over progress.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

The way forward isn’t moral collapse — it’s moral maturity.
It’s learning to live with tension, to think deeply, and to care without turning caring into control.

Because when conversations deepen, understanding deepens.
And when understanding deepens, calm and change follow.