Confessions from a Former Hilltop Warrior
Recently, I found myself in a situation where someone refused to engage in a dialogue simply because I expressed an opinion that didn’t match their own. It was a small moment, almost trivial on the surface, but it felt like a miniature version of something much larger that seems to be happening everywhere these days. And it made me pause — not to judge them, but to look at myself.
Because if I’m honest, I’ve done the same. There were moments when I was so convinced of my own correctness that I treated disagreement like a personal insult rather than an invitation to think. At the time, I felt gloriously righteous — the intellectual equivalent of standing on a mountaintop with the wind dramatically blowing through my hair. In hindsight, of course, I can see that I was not standing on a mountaintop at all. I was standing on a very small hill, waving a very small flag, and mistaking stubbornness for clarity.
And the truth is: I was wrong. Not because dialogue is always possible — it absolutely isn’t; some conversations are emotional minefields, and some people are simply not safe to talk to — but because in the situations I’m thinking of, dialogue was possible. I just didn’t take the opportunity.
And that’s the part that matters. Because when we stop listening to one another, when we retreat into our fortified little islands of certainty, we lose something essential — not just the chance to understand others, but the chance to evolve ourselves. And evolution, as far as I can tell, is rarely comfortable, but always necessary. Even if it sometimes requires admitting that the hill we were defending so passionately was, in fact, just a bump in the landscape.
Listening to one another does not mean abandoning our convictions. It simply means allowing reality to be larger than our own perspective. I still believe, for example, that getting vaccinated against Covid was the best decision I could make at the time, based on the information I had and the responsibility I felt. And yet — although I disagree with the decision itself — I can genuinely understand why some people chose not to get vaccinated. Their fears, their doubts, their sources of information, their personal histories: All of that makes sense once you actually listen. Understanding their reasoning doesn’t change my own position, but it does change the way I see them. It turns disagreement into something human rather than something hostile.
Perhaps the most humbling part is this: Only now, after feeling what it’s like when someone refuses to engage with me because they believe they stand on higher moral ground, do I begin to truly understand how painful and alienating it must have felt for those who chose not to get vaccinated. I don’t have to agree with their decision to recognize the sting of being dismissed, reduced, or morally categorized. If anything, I hope this experience softens me — makes me slower to judge, quicker to listen, and more capable of meeting other human beings where they actually are, rather than where I think they should be.
And somewhere in all of this, I’ve realized something else: Moral righteousness is a very comfortable place to stand. It gives us the illusion of height, of clarity, of moral altitude. It whispers that we are the reasonable ones, the informed ones, the enlightened ones. And the dangerous part is that this feeling is available to everyone, no matter what they believe. It’s a universal human temptation — a psychological all‑you‑can‑eat buffet where the price of admission is simply the conviction that we are right.
But moral righteousness, seductive as it is, doesn’t build a better world. It builds distance. It turns conversations into monologues and people into symbols. It makes us forget that being right is not the same as being wise, and that certainty is often just fear wearing a confident mask. It reassures us that we are standing on higher ground, even when the “higher ground” is nothing more than a slightly elevated patch of ego.
There are so many complicated issues that demand nuance and genuine understanding, and I’ve come to realize that simply dismissing another point of view — even when it contradicts scientific evidence — doesn’t resolve anything. It only deepens division and, in the worst cases, fuels the kind of hostility that can spill over into real‑world harm.
If anything, the world becomes a little less dangerous, a little less brittle, when we remember that listening is not a concession but a form of courage — the courage to let reality be bigger than our pride.
