Dear Curious Minds,
Last night I watched "It was Just an Accident" at the closing night of NZIFF, a Palm d'Or winner that left us sitting in the dark until the credits finished rolling. I chose not to dig too much into the plot when we bought the tickets. But whether it was subconscious selection or the universal nature of the story, it was a natural flow from my last week's post, ‘I am So Tired of Both Sides BS’. The film unpacks how we rationalise the unthinkable and how we mistake forgiveness for wisdom when what we're really doing is protecting ourselves from the discomfort of moral clarity. Thank you for being here, I appreciate you.
Today, I woke up thinking about the six journalists killed in Gaza over the weekend. Israel has now killed every single Al Jazeera journalist in Gaza. Anas al-Sharif was filming Israeli bombardments when he was killed and was deliberately targeted by Israeli militants. Still, in a lot of international news coverage, the discourse quickly shifted from "journalists were murdered" to debates about "complexity" and "both sides" and whether we can ever really know what happened.
Driving to work, I found myself asking the same question that's been haunting me since writing about "both sides" BS and the expensive mistake of good faith: Why do our brains work so hard to defend systems that cause unconscionable harm?
The tiring mechanism lies in some deeply uncomfortable psychological research about how we maintain our sense of order in a fundamentally distorted world.
The Just World We Desperately Want to Believe In
Melvin Lerner's research on the "just world hypothesis" revealed something unsettling about human psychology: we have a fundamental need to believe that people get what they deserve. That bad things happen to people for reasons. That the world operates according to some basic moral logic.
It’s our psychological defense mechanism and self-protection. If random terrible things can happen to innocent people, then random terrible things can happen to us. That's too terrifying to contemplate, so our brains construct elaborate explanations for why victims must have somehow deserved their fate.
Watch how this plays out in real time. When journalists are killed in Gaza, the immediate response isn't horror at the targeting of press; it's a scramble to find reasons why they might have been "legitimate targets." Were they really journalists? Were they in the wrong place? Did they have connections to militants?
The same pattern emerged when aid workers were killed. When hospitals were bombed. When children were targeted. There's always a reason, always a justification, always a way to maintain the fiction that this is somehow acceptable.
Because accepting that innocent people are being systematically murdered would require us to acknowledge that our world order tolerates genocide. And that's too uncomfortable for so many people to sit with.
System Justification: Why We Defend Our Own Oppression
John Jost's research on system justification theory goes even deeper. It shows that people don't just defend fair systems, they go the extra length and defend unfair systems too. Even when those systems directly harm them.
The theory explains why working-class people vote for policies that benefit the wealthy. Why women defend sexist institutions. Why people experiencing racism defend racist systems. It's not false consciousness or ignorance; it's psychological adaptation to powerlessness.
When you can't change a system, your brain protects you by convincing you the system is legitimate. That it serves important purposes. That dismantling it would cause chaos. That any alternatives would be worse.
This helps explain the response to Palestinian genocide that we’ve been watching with horror. People who would never explicitly endorse ethnic cleansing find themselves defending it through procedural arguments. "It's complicated." "Both sides are at fault." "What would you do if your country was threatened?"
These aren't reasoned positions, it’s not complicated at all. They're psychological defences against acknowledging that we live in a world order that enables systematic slaughter.
The Neuroscience of Moral Disengagement
Bandura's work on moral disengagement shows how normal people convince themselves that harmful actions are acceptable. The mechanisms are predictable:
Euphemistic labelling: Genocide becomes "self-defence." Targeting journalists becomes a "military operation." Killing children becomes "eliminating threats."
Advantageous comparison: "Look how much worse other conflicts are." "At least we're not doing what they did in [insert historical atrocity]."
Displacement of responsibility: "We're just following international law." "Our allies support this." "We have no choice."
Diffusion of responsibility: "Everyone is complicit." "This has been going on for decades." "Both sides are guilty."
Distortion of consequences: "Casualties are exaggerated." "They're using human shields." "This will bring peace in the long run."
Dehumanisation: Palestinians become "terrorists." Children become "future militants." Journalists become "propaganda tools."
Attribution of blame: "They brought this on themselves." "They chose violence." "They should have left."
Every single one of these mechanisms is operating in mainstream discourse about Palestine right now. Not as deliberate propaganda, but as unconscious psychological protection against the reality of what we're witnessing.
The Film That Made Me Think About Forgiveness
"It was Just an Accident" explores what happens when someone causes irreversible harm and expects forgiveness. The film is suffocatingly brilliant in its examination of how the demand for forgiveness can become another form of violence, forcing victims to absolve perpetrators in order to restore the perpetrator's comfort.
There's a moment in the film where the audience realises that "forgiveness" isn't about healing or justice; it's about returning to the previous order. About pretending that what happened didn't fundamentally change everything. About protecting the system that enabled the harm in the first place.
Watching it, I kept thinking about how often we demand that oppressed people forgive their oppressors. How quickly calls for "healing" and "moving forward" emerge whenever systematic violence is exposed. How forgiveness gets weaponised to silence accountability.
My old church pastors might pray for hours for me when they hear it. But some things shouldn't be forgiven. Maybe some systems don't deserve to be restored. Maybe the demand for forgiveness is itself a form of system justification: a way of avoiding the hard work of fundamental change.
The Personal Cost of Seeing Too Much
I've been thinking about the psychological toll of refusing these comforting illusions. About what it costs to see systems clearly instead of defensively. About why some people can witness genocide and still sleep peacefully at night.
There's research showing that people with higher "system justification tendencies" have better mental health outcomes. They experience less anxiety, less depression, less existential dread. Their brains protect them from the full weight of systematic injustice (if this research is to be replicated enough times, I think it would eliminate most of my neurodivergent friends working in purpose-driven sectors). But this psychological protection comes at an enormous moral cost. It requires a kind of selective blindness that enables unconscionable harm to continue.
I think about this when I watch friends and acquaintances struggle to care about what's happening in Palestine. Are they bad people? Not always. Most of them are people whose brains are protecting them from unbearable knowledge. The knowledge that our governments, our media, our institutions are complicit in systematic slaughter. Well, some of them are arseholes and that’s why I put them in the acquaintance category.
The Complicity of "Complexity"
The most insidious form of system justification I've observed is the retreat into "complexity." Every time evidence emerges of deliberate targeting of civilians, the response is that the situation is "too complex" for simple moral judgments.
But complexity isn't neutrality, it's a form of activism. When you insist that genocide is "complex," you're not being intellectually sophisticated. You're providing political cover for mass murder.
The situation in Palestine isn't complex. Apartheid isn't complex. Ethnic cleansing isn't complex. The deliberate targeting of journalists, aid workers, children, and hospitals isn't complex. My cat’s pattern of showing affection is way more complex than that.
These are clear moral violations that we've trained ourselves to see as "complicated" because acknowledging their simplicity would require us to do something about them.
When Israel kills journalists and the international response is calls for "both sides to show restraint," that's not moral wisdom but rather it's moral cowardice dressed up as even-handedness. When genocide is occurring and our response is demands for "nuance" and "complexity" and "understanding all perspectives," we're not being sophisticated. We're being complicit.
The Neurodivergent Brain and Systemic Clarity
Every other day, I find out how my neurodivergent brain processes systematic injustice differently. ADHD brains often struggle with executive function and social norms, but they can also see patterns that neurotypical brains miss or suppress.
Where neurotypical brains might smooth over contradictions to maintain psychological comfort, neurodivergent brains often get stuck on them. Where neurotypical social processing might default to "everyone seems fine with this, so it must be okay," neurodivergent pattern recognition might flag systematic inconsistencies. Honestly, I sometimes wonder what neurotypicals ever have got to complain about if they can live life on that ‘smoothing over, easy mode’ enabled by default.
This isn't about moral superiority between our brains but an observation about different cognitive processing. Neurodivergent brains that struggle with social scripts might be less susceptible to social conformity pressures. Brains that hyperfocus might notice details that consensus thinking overlooks. Sometimes what looks like social awkwardness is actually moral clarity refusing to bend to social pressure (so, is he/she/they rude or jjust a bit neurospicy?!...)
Breaking the Cycle of Justification
So how do we interrupt these psychological mechanisms? How do we see clearly when our brains are designed to protect us from unbearable truths?
Name the pattern: Recognise system justification and just world thinking when they arise. Notice when you're searching for reasons why victims might deserve their fate.
Centre the affected: Listen to Palestinians, journalists, aid workers, survivors. Their voices matter more than comfortable theories about "complexity."
Question comfort: If an explanation makes you feel better about systematic harm, interrogate it. Moral clarity often feels uncomfortable.
Reject false balance: Genocide isn't "both sides." Apartheid isn't "complex." Targeting civilians isn't "self-defence."
Embrace moral discomfort: Sometimes the appropriate response to atrocity is horror, not analysis. Sometimes the sophisticated position is the simple one.
The Limits of Forgiveness
"It was Just an Accident" suggests that some injuries can't be forgiven because forgiveness would require forgetting. And some things must be remembered to prevent their repetition.
The six journalists killed in Gaza this weekend can't be brought back. Tens of thousands of children already murdered can't be restored to life. The systematic nature of these killings can't be undone.
I don’t think our job is to forgive these atrocities, that’s not for us to decide. But we must ensure they stop. Our job isn't to understand why they're happening either but to make them impossible to continue.
Maybe the most moral thing we can do is refuse the psychological comfort of system justification and just world thinking. Refuse the false complexity that obscures simple truths. Refuse the demand for forgiveness that enables continuation of harm.
Because systems that enable genocide don't deserve our defence. They deserve our opposition. And people who consistently choose harm don't deserve our forgiveness. They deserve our accountability.
The uncomfortable truth is that some things are exactly as simple as they appear. And sometimes the most sophisticated response is the most direct one: this is wrong, and it needs to stop.
I know it’s hard to commit to monthly subscriptions. So it would mean a lot to me if you could support this mahi with a one-off virtual coffee, especially if you enjoyed this entangled feminist rage and grief.
I love this Stella. forgiveness for me has always been a ruse and I have never really been able to put my finger on why I felt like this....you just put your whole hand on it! ..forgiveness was never for me, still isn't. And yes, I am also tired of hearing about how complicated this genocide is....it's not ... you are 150% correct. Genocide isn't "both sides." Apartheid isn't "complex." Targeting civilians isn't "self-defence."