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Fallacies: Things You Need to Know to Understand What's Happening

Published: 2026-03-05

I'm going to start writing a series on fallacies.

Not the academic kind you'd find in a textbook on logic — modus tollens, affirming the consequent, that sort of thing. I mean the deeply held, widely shared, almost invisible errors in how we model reality. The ones that shape policy, fuel outrage, start wars, and ruin lives, all while the people involved are absolutely convinced they're doing the right thing.

I see these patterns everywhere. In politics, in media, in conversations, in myself. And once you see them, you can't unsee them. The same handful of broken assumptions, recycled across centuries, wearing different costumes.

I'm not sure how many people will end up reading this. That's fine. I want to put it out there anyway, because the alternative is watching the same mistakes repeat and saying nothing. And I'd rather be the person who tried to articulate it, even to an empty room, than the one who saw it clearly and stayed quiet.

So here's the first one.

Fallacy #1: Good vs Evil

The dominant moral framework of our era is binary: good versus evil. We sort people into heroes and villains, and once the label is applied, no further thought is required. But this framework isn't just lazy — it's the very thing that produces the tragedies it claims to explain.

There is no evil. There are only delusions.

The Binary Trap

Every atrocity in history was committed by people who believed they were on the right side. Not reluctantly. Not cynically. Fervently. The good-versus-evil lens doesn't help us understand this — it actively prevents us from understanding it, because the moment we label someone "evil," we stop asking why.

And the why is always the same: a flawed model of reality.

Where the Binary Comes From

This isn't some universal human instinct. The good-versus-evil framework is a specific cultural inheritance, and it has a source: the Abrahamic religions.

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all share a narrative architecture built on cosmic moral conflict. God against Satan. Light against darkness. The righteous against the wicked. There is a final judgment, a day when good triumphs over evil once and for all. The entire moral universe is a battlefield, and you are either on one side or the other.

This framing is so deeply embedded in Western civilisation — and in the cultures it has influenced — that most people don't even recognise it as a framework. It just feels like reality. Of course there's good and evil. Of course some people are villains. Of course we need to defeat them.

But step outside that tradition, and the picture looks completely different.

Buddhism, for example, has no Satan. No cosmic villain. No final battle between good and evil. Instead, it describes a wheel — samsara — an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, driven not by malice but by ignorance. Suffering doesn't come from evil forces. It comes from not understanding the nature of things. The response isn't to defeat an enemy. It's to wake up.

Karma isn't divine punishment. It's cause and effect. You act from delusion, you produce suffering — for yourself and others. You act from understanding, you produce less of it. There's no triumph. There's no villain to vanquish. There's only the slow, difficult work of seeing things more clearly.

This isn't to say Buddhism has all the answers, or that Eastern religions are inherently superior. They have their own problems. But the contrast is revealing: an entire civilisational tradition managed to build a sophisticated moral philosophy without needing the concept of evil at all. That should tell us something about how optional — and how dangerous — the binary really is.

Hitler Thought He Was the Good Guy

This is the uncomfortable truth that the binary framework cannot accommodate. Hitler didn't wake up and choose evil. He identified a perceived threat — the Jews — and cast them as the villainous force corrupting Germany. His worldview was a textbook good-versus-evil narrative, with himself as the hero.

The Holocaust wasn't the product of some incomprehensible malice. It was the product of a delusion — a catastrophically wrong understanding of how the world works. The Jews were not a threat. The model was wrong. And millions died because of it.

When we simply label Hitler "evil" and move on, we learn nothing. Worse, we inoculate ourselves against recognising the same pattern of thinking in ourselves.

Stalin's Utopian Delusion

Stalin's purges killed millions in the name of building a perfect society. He genuinely believed that enemies of the revolution were embedded everywhere, that ruthless elimination of dissent was the moral path to a workers' paradise.

The model was wrong. The "enemies" were largely imagined. The paradise never came. But the conviction that he was doing good never wavered. He wasn't evil — he was deluded about what the world required.

The Inquisitors Saving Souls

The Spanish Inquisition tortured people to save their eternal souls. If you truly, deeply believe that heresy condemns someone to infinite suffering after death, then torture becomes — in a horrifying, internally consistent way — an act of mercy.

The problem wasn't malice. The problem was a wrong understanding of reality. The model of the universe was broken, and the logical conclusions drawn from that broken model produced suffering.

Mao's Great Leap

Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions through famine. He wasn't trying to starve anyone. He was trying to modernise China, to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. The agricultural and industrial policies were based on fundamentally wrong understandings of economics, agronomy, and human nature.

The tragedy came from delusion, not from malice.

The Pattern

The pattern is always the same:

A flawed model of reality is adopted.
The model identifies a threat or a path forward.
Extreme actions are taken in the sincere belief that they serve the greater good.
Tragedy follows.

At no point in this sequence does anyone need to "choose evil." They only need to be wrong.

Why This Matters Now

We are doing it again. Right now.

Every time we divide the world into good people and bad people, smart people and stupid people, our side and their side — we are constructing exactly the kind of flawed model that leads to tragedy.

The person you think is evil almost certainly thinks you are evil. And they have reasons. The reasons might be wrong — probably are — but they are reasons, not some mystical force of darkness.

If we want to actually prevent atrocity, prevent suffering, prevent the next catastrophe — we have to stop asking "who is evil?" and start asking "who is deluded, and how?"

Including ourselves.

The Real Question

The useful question is never "is this person good or evil?" The useful question is: "What do they believe about reality, and is it accurate?"

Because if their model is wrong, they will cause harm while believing they are doing good. And if our model is wrong, so will we.

The enemy is never a person. The enemy is always a wrong idea.