I want to tell you about a story from middle school that I shrugged off back then but has haunted me to this day. A story that shaped my understanding of the world. A story that led me to write.

The Wrong Answer

It was back in eighth grade before the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and would-be President Donald Trump. Being an eighth grader and not knowing or giving a sh*t about politics, the election was just an afterthought in my head. There was obviously a lot of buzz between the students, but as we were simply idiots with little perspective on life, nothing was that serious.

In my history class, shortly before the voting season began, we were given a sheet of paper asking us to evaluate the two candidates and pick the one we would vote for. Looking back, I honestly don’t know if this was legal, but most of us just treated it like any other assignment–one we could simply rush through for the completion points and throw into our paper landfill, never to be seen again. That night, I brought it home, worked on it for probably around ten minutes and spent the rest of the day doing whatever I was doing back then.

My mother was a fervent supporter of Donald Trump, for reasons I can’t really remember anymore. She would tell me she liked him every now and then, talking about things that were simply background noise to me. When I wrote up the assignment, I just picked him as the candidate I would vote for since my mom liked him and I liked my mom. Nothing less, nothing more.

It was a surprise to me the next day that when I shared my response with some deskmates in history class, I was laughed at and ridiculed for even writing the evil name “Donald Trump” on my paper. My face flushed as I laughed along with them, blaming my mom for the words I wrote myself on the lined paper. Clearly, the correct answer to this subjective question was “Hillary Clinton” (or simply not Donald Trump), and I was about to be deducted social credit points for giving the wrong answer. Alas, it was too late to redo the assignment. I reluctantly handed the sheet of paper to my old, extremely liberal, posturing, yet relatively pleasant history teacher Ms. Chang.

The following class, Ms. Chang gleefully told us she looked through the responses, saying all the students met her expectations except one, as her eyes darted in my direction. A couple students around me snickered. I couldn’t help but feel ashamed. I felt the warm heat of the blood rushing to my cheeks as I sat in silence. I wanted to go back in time and change my answer. I wanted to tell my mom off for embarrassing me in front of the class. I wanted to tell her that she was crazy for liking someone as terrible as Donald Trump. After all, the fact that everyone else picked Hillary Clinton meant everyone else had to be sane…right?

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Looking at Ms. Chang, you’d have to be a fool to not smell her political beliefs from a mile away. Every student in the class could tell from the overt posturing that slathered over every single topic she taught. I didn’t have a huge problem with it, but I was often intrigued by how passionate she seemed to be about everything. Had I wanted to satiate her political contentment, I could have picked the “right answer” she desired. But, as a naive eighth grader, I just didn’t think it mattered that much. I didn’t think something that seemed so trivial and consequenceless to me could bring about such a profound reaction. Me, a mere child, without the right to vote, committed the ultimate sin of even thinking about voting for a candidate she despised. Over the rest of the school year, she would often take thinly veiled jabs at me during class discussions to remind me of that sin.

Unfortunately, teachers like this were far from uncommon. Time and time again, I would find teachers more keen on pushing whatever personal view of the world they had onto their students rather than actually teaching the material. It would be completely unreasonable to expect teachers to be unbiased or unopinionated, which would be impossible. However, there was a certain kind of teacher where every word they uttered was imbued with political undertones–so much so that no student in their right mind would dare to challenge them. You kind of knew how they thought and how they expected you to think, in classwork, homework, or essays. And as such, I tiptoed carefully in front of these kinds of teachers for the rest of middle and high school, writing not what I truly believed but what I thought the teacher would want to hear. A suffocating conformist mindset antithetical to my soul, brought upon by people who were supposed to teach me how to think.

Turning on Mom

For a good amount of time, my mother became the town clown within my friend group. Everyone would joke about how she liked Trump. Even I participated in the mockery, trying to fit in with everyone else. I always felt a pang of guilt–how could I, as her son, knowing all that she had done for me and how hard she worked, verbally taunt her with my friends behind her back? I don’t blame any of my friends. I mean, how could I? We were idiots who barely knew anything about anything poking fun at someone who we thought was different.

A couple of months go by and the big bad orange man wins the election. In the lunch room, many of my friends tell me how their parents also voted for him, often in disbelief and disdain. They thought their parents were “good people,” too, only to find out they were meddling with the devil himself. After all, could you like Donaldino Trumperino and still be a good person? Most of us didn’t think so. After all, who had more perspective on life? A bunch of sheltered, privileged teenagers gossiping about world issues beyond our comprehension in a cafeteria, or our parents, who worked harder than we’ve ever known in order to give us a better life in the United States?

What did Ms. Chang assume about me when she saw my paper? What did my classmates think of me? That I was stupid? That I was racist? That my mom was racist? That I’m evil? That I’m so irrevocably evil that everything they’ve ever known about me, everything I’ve ever done, paled in comparison to the evil of picking the “wrong” political candidate? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I got it easy for being young and naive, but what about my mom? I also wasn’t sure. It was just fascinating to me, that people, who never met and didn’t know anything about my mom, could judge her so fervently. She could have been the world’s most generous or evil person, but her simple political choice, irrespective of her character, cast her into the bin of idiots and bigots. Not once did these people sit down and think that maybe, blindly listening to what other people tell you to think about something, might not be good. Not once did they think their parents, who raised and cared for them, might have known something they didn’t yet understand. Fortunately, this was not a travesty. Once again, we were kids, and we surely didn’t know any better. But, things only worsened as I graduated middle school and high school, where I would realize that this phenomenon graduated alongside me.

The Bubble

There was a distinct shift sometime in middle school where things began to become political. We were past our nascent years into the first phase of our life where we could just begin to understand the world. People would begin to discuss history in history class, remnants of the past in English class, and whatever controversy or social issue that was popular at the time. At the time, I really wanted nothing to do with it. I was solely interested in Rubik’s cubes, math competitions, and whatever other nerd sh*t I was involved with. But, as the hubbub of political and social talk grew louder, it became impossible to ignore.

As I entered high school, we progressed to the second phase of our life where we thought we knew better than everyone else. It was the time of political pandering, virtue signaling, and getting lectured by teachers and random students. I couldn’t help but feel that something had gone horribly wrong. I found myself mentally disagreeing with whatever groupthink was popular while words of conformity poured out of my mouth. I found myself staying silent knowing that my disagreement would lead to becoming socially ostracized.

I would often go home at night and watch videos or articles that mirrored my line of thinking. I found solace that I wasn’t completely alone as I was in school. Part of me knew that I probably wasn’t alone, understanding there were also people like me who were too scared to say anything at school. But, what was I afraid of, exactly? I was afraid that if people knew how I thought about some things, they wouldn’t be friends with me anymore. I was afraid that my friends might categorize me into that one group of people they vehemently despised, simply because I disagreed with them on some issue. I was quite liked by most people. I got along with many different friend groups that typically didn’t get along with one another. I was terrified to think that my relationships with certain people could be severed with one wrong opinion. That everything we had been through, all the memories we made, could be usurped by something so trivial. I couldn’t help but think that something was wrong with me. Why didn’t I fit in? Why didn’t I think the same things as my peers? It was a harrowing thought. Perhaps I was the one out of line. Perhaps the problem was me.

I was never able to convince myself that I was truly evil. The political pundits and virtue signaling classmates told me time and time again, that anybody who thought like them was good and that anyone who disagreed was corrupt beyond repair. But, I kept seeing evidence of the opposite. In my high school, I got lectured about feminism by guys who treated the girls like trash (perhaps beyond trash). I was “informed” on social issues by liars and hypocrites and cheats. I watched people celebrate and champion the buzzwords and posturing dogma of some of the most nihilistic and narcissistic beings I have ever laid eyes on. And somehow, they were the “good people”? I didn’t buy it.

I never looked down on any of them. To me, they were my friends, they were my peers, and most of all, they were normal people. I grew up with them, and I got along with them the same as I get along with anyone else. I couldn’t convince myself that I was dealing with something extremely out of the ordinary. To me, it would have been counterproductive to assume I was somehow smarter or at a level beyond them. I empathized with how they thought to make sense of how they saw the world. I wanted to understand them. That was the only way for me to move forward. No matter how crazy they thought I was or how crazy I thought they were, we were all human.

Unfortunately, I don’t think they would’ve seen me the same way.

Tribal Warfare

As cliché as it sounds, we really live in a time of division–across ideology, politics, or any other dimension. People seem to naturally operate on an us vs. them mentality–following a sort of tribal instinct baked into the thread of human existence. What was originally literal tribal warfare between cavemen has become abstract warfare between ideologies, with similar psychological mechanisms driving both.

My high school represented one side of the ideological warfare–particularly the liberal front. It was dominated by champions of liberal causes, who made it a part of their identity to be the righteous defenders of progress. It was expected, too, as my school sat in the smack middle of one of the most Democratic counties in Maryland. However, the problem only arose in their nauseating indignation at any dissent, treating anyone who didn’t stand for their ideology or causes as not just wrong, but morally deficient. Each word they spewed was filled with contempt and disgust toward the dissenting tribe, with use of the most sophisticated vocabulary to signal their enlightenment and moral superiority–so much so that you would be a fool to try to argue with them, in which you would become an enemy to be socially stoned in front of your peers.

The ultimate effect of it all was to enforce a tribal dynamic where you were either part of the enlightened in-group or part of the problem. And nobody wanted to be part of the problem. The reasonable path was to fall in line, not only because of the social pressure to do so, but because if your friends really believe in these causes with such conviction, you’d naturally want to believe them, too. This created a feedback loop that was psychologically understandable yet intellectually dangerous. And as such, our school fell into a kind of extremism that bred some of the most intolerant, toxic, stubborn, and narrow-minded individuals I’ve ever met–all while they were convinced that they were the most open-minded generation the world has ever seen.

The Human Element

It’s quite simple to understand why this tribalistic mindset was so attractive to them. Under that lens, the world turned into a two-dimensional battleground between the good and the bad. In their heads, they were on the right side of history, and everyone else was evil scum that needed to be disposed of. They could feel morally superior, thinking they’ve figured the world out within their limited exposure to it. They could pat themselves on the back thinking they’ve done a lot for the world, when in fact they accomplished nothing.

The environment around them only solidified their behavior. Being a good person to them simply meant thinking and saying the right things. They could be a terrible friend or frankly unpleasant to be around, but as long as they believed in the right causes, it didn’t matter. Their character had been reduced to ideology, and their virtue became purely performative rather than lived.

Furthermore, their confidence in their conviction meant they would never have to understand their so-called enemies. Nobody in their right mind would argue with them, knowing whatever they said would be reduced to a slurry of pejoratives, being called whatever -ist they could imagine. So, in their reality, the opposition didn’t exist, but rather as some arbitrary evil over the horizon that they would never truly meet. As such, they could imagine their opposition to be whatever they wanted them to be–whether they be white-robed pitchfork-carrying supremacists or cousin-marrying, banjo-playing bigots. When you can characterize your enemy to be whatever you want them to be, you can justify anything. You don’t have to listen to them, and you surely don’t believe they have anything reasonable to say. You can justify silencing them, verbally harassing them, degrading them, or burning them at the stake. You can make them so evil that you can never be wrong. And that’s what they did.

Why You Shouldn’t be Righteous

I believe the primary motivator of the ideologues’ behavior was the desire to be righteous, i.e. to feel like they were good people. They wanted to feel like caring, compassionate heroes out to make a difference. But in their pursuit of their ideal, they found themselves becoming the very thing they claimed to oppose—intolerant, judgmental, and cruel to anyone who didn’t meet their standards of moral purity. I don’t blame any of them, either. The rush of moral superiority becomes an addiction: the praise from our peers and the sense of being part of something historically significant is intoxicating.

But why is that wrong? I invite you to remember the past, filled with evil, atrocity, and injustice. From war to slavery to genocide to tyranny to murder to adultery, all of human history has been riddled with sin. We like to imagine that we have reached the precipice of virtue, but have we really? We imagine we would’ve been the plantation owners without slaves. We imagine we would’ve been Schindler saving the Jews instead of an SS officer¹. We imagine we would’ve been the abolitionist, not the silent bystander.

The uncomfortable truth is that we all most likely would have been products of our time, shaped by the same cultural forces and moral blind spots that afflicted our ancestors. The average German was not a monster, they were ordinary people who normalized the abnormal, who found ways to justify the unjustifiable, who convinced themselves to be too powerless to resist. They took the chance to be an SS officer instead of risking their lives and their families’ lives to–if even possible–protect their Jewish neighbors.

This is why I find the righteousness of my former classmates so chilling. They display the same moral certainty, the same inability to imagine they could be wrong, the same casual cruelty toward those they deem inferior that has characterized all oppressors throughout history. The reality is that even though we live in the fairest time in human history, every evil temptation still exists. We fall for the same temptations as those before us, just in different ways. We as humans have not inherently become more good, we have simply learned from the past, setting up systems that constrain our worst impulses. We humans on the whole are still flawed and still fraught with capacity to do evil. And to think we have somehow ascended past the plane between good and evil would be foolish.

We’ve seen this kind of destructive righteousness play out today. We’ve seen people celebrate the murder of United Healthcare CEO as a heroic act against corporate oppression. We’ve seen people cheer the destruction of families via deportation for a more secure border. We’ve witnessed pro-Palestinians commit homicide, burn cars, and terrorize bystanders in protest of the war in Gaza. We’ve watched people cheer over government employees losing their jobs because they want a more efficient government.

We’ve witnessed people doxxing and destroying the livelihoods of individuals over social media posts, telling themselves they’re holding people accountable rather than engaging in mob justice. We’ve watched people abandon friendships and fracture families over political differences, convincing themselves of a moral act of courage rather than unjustified cruelty. We’ve seen college students storm lecture halls and physically prevent speakers from talking, convincing themselves that violence against speech is actually protecting vulnerable communities from harm.

And each perpetrator sleeps soundly at night, convinced that their act of righteous indignation is an act of heroism–that they are on the right side of history, without recognizing themselves in the historical villains they claim to oppose.

How to Fix it

How do we fix this kind of behavior? I think the answer is deceptively simple, although hard in practice. We must stop seeing people as opposition and start seeing them as fellow humans shaped by their upbringing and experiences.

This requires a fundamental shift in how we see disagreement. Instead of immediately judging those who think differently, we should seek to understand how and why they arrived at their conclusions–what they care about, what they fear, what they prioritize, and what motivates them. We must discard any semblance of moral superiority that clouds our judgment and makes us feel righteous in the condemnation of others.

The problem is that we’ve become addicted to caricature. We love to generalize our ideological opponents in the worst possible light as a psychological defense mechanism–to protect ourselves from the possibility that we are wrong. When we reduce conservatives to MAGA, AK-47-brandishing, racist, bigoted homophobes looking to put women back in cages, or liberals to blue-haired, triggered feminists who find microaggressions in every critique, we create an easy out, sidestepping the crucial work of understanding their actual arguments. Instead, we should imagine them to be the best they can be: the farmer with a family who provides the world with produce or a city planner who wants to help get homeless people off the streets. You must understand that some of the kindest people you will ever meet will not share your worldview, and you have to be prepared to listen to them, learn from them, and create a better future with them.

Part of this means engaging in real discussion and real debate in an intellectually honest manner. No longer can we avoid arguments by calling people who disagree with us stupid or racist or sexist. We must articulate the core issue and discuss it on fair ground, with no sense of moral superiority, in a productive and respectful manner. We must do so in good faith, with the other person’s best interest in mind. And this means we cannot solely hang out with people we think we agree with–we must find those who disagree, those who will challenge our worldview with genuine intent from a place of shared humanity and a commitment to true progress.

No More Taboo Subjects

We must no longer make certain topics or arguments taboo, as long as the discussions are held in good faith. Many of my teachers committed the crime of forcing a specific worldview onto their students, rather than fostering genuine critical thought. The best example comes from my Asian American studies course² I took at the University of Maryland, where intellectual conformity wasn’t just encouraged, it was implicitly forced. Every discussion seemed to orbit a predetermined narrative, and any deviation was met with scorn, judgment, and ridicule. We were forced to accept the model minority myth as true. We were forced to believe affirmative action was just. We were forced to ignore any cultural strengths within the Asian American community. It’s not that we analyzed the evidence and came to a conclusion. We were given the conclusion and forced to find the evidence…in a class designed to explore the intricacy of the Asian American experience.

This class was not a unique case. Many of my humanities courses were littered with ideological conformity, where it seems like the teachers didn’t trust us to come up with our own conclusions, where reinforcing their dogmatism was more important than any academic discovery. I understand teachers must interject with some personal interpretation, but these teachers stood so confidently in their convictions as to suppress any deviation from their prescribed worldview.

In our own conversations, we inadvertently silence any intellectual curiosity when we stand too strong in our convictions or act morally superior against our peers. In good faith, we should be able to consider any argument, no matter how controversial or absurd it might seem on the surface. We cannot callously mark topics as taboo unless we aim to suppress thought–and intellectual progress along with it.

Maturing

Since going to college, I’ve seen friends become stronger in their conviction and others mellow out in theirs instead. Many of us recognize the toxic environment we grew up in and have met people who changed our perspectives in college. Our once immovable convictions had finally begun to shift.

Broader Political Landscape

I’ve made no mention of what is right and what is wrong, because there really is no right and wrong. This piece was not to sway your political beliefs, and I’ve made no mention of mine. I’ve only recounted my experience growing up in one kind of environment, but the opposite environment exists just the same.

The kind of people I encountered in middle school and high school litter our entire social landscape. We can find them on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, in the classroom, in the workplace. Unfortunately, we live in an age of devout polarization. The divides that existed throughout humanity have been widened like a piece of bubblegum being stretched end-to-end. In essence, we love division. We love being right, and we love engaging only with those we agree with. It takes courage to step outside of our bubble. It takes courage to go against our tribalistic nature.

There’s no doubt the left has dominated the political landscape over the past decade, fraught with all of the flaws we discussed today. In its dominance it sowed the seeds of retribution, giving rise to its right-wing nemesis, who has waged war. It’s time to stop this nonsense.

The cycle is predictable and meaningless: one side gains cultural or political power, overreaches in its superiority, alienates the average Joe, and creates the prime conditions for backlash. The pendulum swings violently from one side to the other, and each side knows nothing but to hit back harder. We’re trapped in a system where moderation is cowardice. The loudest voices have convinced the masses that anything less than total victory is defeat, that the other side is nothing but an existential threat to conquer. We’ve been reduced to cavemen and cavewomen, only acting on our primal impulses as if we’ve learned nothing.

How this Affected Me

Growing up in this environment forced me to examine my beliefs. I found myself navigating a world where friendship and ideology existed in uneasy tension–where people I genuinely cared about might cast me aside without hesitation under shaky premises. The unsettling realization dawned that they would have their reasons, perfectly rational within their moral framework, and I had to make peace with that reality.

I discovered I lived with reasonable people who had drawn unreasonable conclusions, and I learned the delicate art of coexistence. I turned my assignments into literary challenges–finding ways to honor my principles and my teachers’ expectations, in which I found myself getting great grades as well. I developed a form of linguistic diplomacy, learning to frame ideas in a way that could find the overlap between opposing worldviews.

I think by writing this I am making myself seem like a saint, but I really am not. I feel evil temptation just like anybody else. I sometimes wish I could silence someone I truly thought was wrong. I could see myself being the bully if I was part of the majority. I could see myself looking down on people who disagree with me. I don’t want to consider arguments from people I find reprehensible. I struggle to resist righteousness in my convictions. But in my struggles I recognized these impulses as vice and not virtue, and in spite of my suffering, I am truly grateful to have learned this way.

The reason I ever put pen to paper was to write what I could not express in class–a silence that would become my magnum opus³ for some time. I owe my intellectual awakening to something I once despised.

The story with Ms. Chang became the waves that split the iceberg. Just like that, she freed the boy trapped in ice. A boy who finally decided to think.