In the days following October 7, 2023, I, and millions of other people in Australia and around the world reeled in horror at the Hamas militant group’s campaign of terror against the Israeli people. To me, it felt like watching a dark, evil monster brutally assault a helpless princess. There was no justification other than pure evil. But then I looked to the horizon, and saw a knight in shining gold-plated armour, the Israel Defence Force, stride valiantly down the hill to engage the beast in its rampage. I cheered. The good knight had come to save the princess and bring justice to the monster that was Hamas, so I stood right behind it.
Then the war progressed, as Israel’s counteroffensive took shape. They bombed a refugee camp, and then a residential building, and slowly, the plates of the knight’s armour lost their gleam, obscured by the stains and splotches of war crimes. To my horror, the once noble Israeli knight now appeared just as monstrous as Hamas. Around me, I was deafened by shouting from the supporters of both beasts, jeering at their opponents’ smears of grease while seemingly blind to the same on their own. And all the while, the princess lay on the ground, trampled indiscriminately by both monsters. Where were the heroes? Where was that knight in shining gold-plated armour that I had cheered for so wholeheartedly?
Humans view reality through narratives, accounts of the world grounded on underlying directions or morals. Their simplicity allows us to effortlessly process the constant intake of complex information into useful knowledge. In producing these narratives, we prefer information that conveys a strong delineation between different elements, such as the colours black and white, because we then devote less energy to developing and storing fine-tuned narratives.
The stories we tell ourselves are designed to conform to this preferred structure, and clear contrasts like that between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are often defining features of a good plot because they make it easy for the viewer to understand. Unfortunately, the real world is not scripted this way, but rather involves convoluted sequences of events with no underlying direction or moral. Nonetheless, many try to appropriate reality into such a narrative, into divisions between heroic knights and villainous monsters.
Here is where the problems start. Such a ‘black-and-white’ view of the world has provided the rationale for firebombing a childcare centre. For mercilessly shelling an entire hospital in the name of killing one official. When one side is defined entirely as being evil and demonic, violence becomes justified, even noble. And yet the result is that both sides become virtually identical to external observers, and there is simply more violence and evil. Which of these images shown here depict a lesser evil? This is not limited to warzones; the shrapnel of extremist ideology pierces as far as Australia with harassment and terror against our citizens. The whole world should be concerned with the growth of this mentality.
Of course, it may be contended that this is simply a natural feature of our human condition, and that we should not expect people to act like computers, meticulously processing copious volumes of information to attain a mathematically perfect opinion. After all, simple narratives are how we think. But we don’t need to be computers to not kill people. What I realised after the first year of the Gaza War was that there never are heroic knights or villainous monsters in the real world, only human beings. Some are more knightley, and some are more monstrous than others, but all have their blemishes, and all have their families. If everyone understood this, we would be able to close the door permanently on violence and persecution.
The idea of modifying the worldview of the entire global population is a pipe dream, but we can at least start with ourselves. So I encourage you to do your part. Seek both perspectives on every issue. Limit your assumption of good vs evil in the real world. Constantly change your personal narrative on account of new developments or information. You will soon see that when you drop your black-and-white conception of reality, a vibrant colour image emerges, and colour images are always more interesting.
- Benedict Ramsay
Bibliography
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Wikipedia Contributors (2024). Theory of Narrative Thought. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_narrative_thought#cite_note-ref3-3 [Accessed 17 Mar. 2025].
Edelman (2023). Australia on a path to polarisation: Edelman Trust Barometer 2023. [online] Edelman Australia. Available at: https://www.edelman.com.au/australia-path-polarisation-edelman-trust-barometer-2023 [Accessed 20 Mar. 2025].
Jarrod Martin (2025). Year 10: Topical Conversations - Exploring Discursive Writing. [online] Google Sheets. Available at: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1s6Gfm9toGqFHNLn8XVbZ5UzsbieSI_OoBn2UGCIde54/edit#slide=id.g27bceee817d_2_0 [Accessed 18 Mar. 2025].