There is a tendency in modern discourse to force everything into binaries. Right or wrong. Good or evil. Us or them. These binaries create the illusion of clarity, but what they often do is reduce the complexity of life into digestible, weaponized arguments disguised as morality.
The truth is rarely that simple, if ever.
I often find myself straddling different ways of thinking. I assign weight to values, to beliefs, to truths, and let them exist in tension. I live in a world of shades, not one of absolutes. This does not mean I lack conviction. It means I acknowledge that convictions are not universal.
What is true for me can coexist with what is true for someone else, even when those truths do not agree, once we don’t push our truths on each other. Generally speaking, too, where there is truth there is commonality, for there are many paths to the truth and many angles of it.
Take a contentious example. It can be true that killing a fetus is murder. It can also be true that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body. These two ideas do not cancel each other out. They are not mutually exclusive. They can exist simultaneously, and the people involved can bear the weight of those truths without outsourcing judgment to others. Unless someone is the other parent, it is no one else’s business.
That kind of thinking does not come from moral relativism. It comes from moral complexity. From understanding that ethics do not have to be imposed to be valid.
When it comes to outcomes, though, I shift. I think in probabilities. I watch the way people respond not to process, but to results. I see how we are trained to care more about whether our team wins than how the game is played.
This is where many lose sight of integrity.
Probabilistic thinking allows me to ask what is likely, not what is certain. It helps me prepare for multiple outcomes without pretending I can control them. But what it does not do is excuse the method. The method still matters.
What I see more and more is this: People are no longer concerned with the process unless it affects them personally. They are more likely to cheer their team for cheating and winning than for losing with principles. They will rationalize the shortcut. They will defend it as strategy.
But process is character.
You cannot build a just world by violating the path that leads to it.
You cannot manufacture truth through deception and call it communication.
So while I allow for complex truths, and while I navigate outcomes through probability, I hold to this: The way something is done matters as much as what is done.
That is not idealism. That is survival with integrity.
And maybe that is the real lesson here. You do not have to impose your morality on others. But you do have to live by it if you expect to be an example of why it should be lived by.
Not because it guarantees the outcome.
But because it defines the person you are on the way there.
And that defines who you are when you arrive.
The journey defines the destination.
