Over the past few weeks, I have watched two completely different stories unfold. Here in Greece, the death of George Mazonakis has dominated conversations and television programmes. Internationally, Ed Sheeran has suddenly found himself at the centre of an enormous controversy following the removal of Macklemore from his tour.
Different people. Different circumstances. Different issues. Yet I keep noticing the same human behaviour. Within hours, sometimes minutes, we decide who is right and who is wrong. We choose a side. And then something even more interesting happens.
We begin to identify with our side.
Suddenly, questioning anything that supports our position feels almost like betrayal. Nuance disappears. Curiosity disappears. People we have never met become idiots, monsters, cowards, frauds or worse. All from behind a screen.
Why are we so quick to judge?
Human beings have always formed groups. Belonging helped us survive. We still do it today, except our tribes may now be political, spiritual, medical, cultural or ideological.
We saw it vividly during COVID. Vaccinated. Unvaccinated. Science. Alternative medicine. Left. Right. Pro this. Anti that. Once we put ourselves into one group, it becomes surprisingly easy to stop seeing the people in the other group as individuals. They become the enemy.
And media and social media know how to feed this. They didn’t create our need to belong or our appetite for a villain, but they have become remarkably good at exploiting both. An algorithm doesn’t require the full story. It requires our attention. Anger gets attention. Outrage gets attention. Certainty gets attention.
“I don’t know enough about this yet” rarely goes viral. Perhaps that is precisely the sentence we need to say more often.
What do we actually know?
The case surrounding George Mazonakis is still being investigated. Serious allegations have been made against the two doctors involved, and the judicial process will establish what can actually be established from the evidence. That matters. Because an accusation, however serious, doesn’t suddenly give the rest of us access to everything that happened in that room.
Nor does one case automatically tell us everything about alternative or complementary approaches to health. Putting every unconventional practice, every practitioner and every therapeutic approach into one enormous box labelled “mumbo jumbo” may feel satisfying. It doesn’t make the conclusion more accurate.
I have also heard privately from people who say they had very different experiences with the practitioners now being discussed publicly. Some describe being helped by them. Yet speaking publicly in their defence suddenly carries a social cost. And that fascinates me.
I cannot verify those individual experiences, and they cannot tell us what happened in this particular case. But the fear of saying, “My experience was different” tells us something important about the climate we create when public discussion becomes a trial by crowd.
Then there is Ed Sheeran.
Millions of people have watched another story unfold and formed conclusions about what he believes, why he acted as he did and what kind of human being he must therefore be. Yet even the publicly available facts became more complicated as the story developed.
Sheeran said Macklemore’s removal from his tour was ultimately a decision made by promoters and venues after objections to Macklemore’s statements about Palestine. Other artists withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore. Sheeran was attacked for his response and his desire to keep his concerts politically neutral.
Then he spoke publicly about Gaza, describing the situation there as catastrophic and unjustifiable, while also acknowledging mistakes in how he handled what happened.
People can agree or disagree with his choices. But how many of us actually know what conversations took place behind closed doors? How many know the contractual obligations, pressures, conversations and consequences involved? And how many simply read a headline, watched a 30 second video and decided who Ed Sheeran is?
We have done this before.
COVID showed us how quickly disagreement can become identity.
People weren’t simply discussing vaccines, mandates, risks or medical evidence. They became the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. And suddenly, everyone seemed to become a medical expert!
Friends judged friends. Families argued. People on both sides sometimes spoke about the other as though intelligence, morality and human worth could be determined by a medical decision.
The subject changes. The mechanism remains remarkably similar. Today it is George Mazonakis or Ed Sheeran. Next month it will be somebody else. There will always be another scandal, another controversy and another invitation to choose a side.
Perhaps the more interesting question is why we accept the invitation.
Why does belittling another person sometimes make us feel better? Why do we need the stranger on Instagram to be stupid so that we can feel intelligent? Why do we need someone else to be morally inferior before we can feel morally certain? Why does belonging to the “right” group matter so much? And what happens to our capacity for compassion when our identity depends upon someone else being wrong?
There is a difference between thinking critically and judging another human being. We need critical thinking... and the freedom to express it. When disagreement comes with the risk of ridicule, attack or exclusion, people learn to keep their opinions to themselves.
We need courts to examine evidence. We need journalists to investigate. We need scientists to challenge claims. We need people to question authority. We need accountability when people cause harm. But we can do all of that without hatred.
We can say, “I disagree.” We can say, “The evidence suggests something different.” We can say, “If these allegations are proven, there should be consequences.” We can also say three words that seem increasingly difficult:
I don’t know.
I don’t know exactly what happened. I don’t know what another person was thinking. I don’t know what pressures they were under. I don’t know everything they have experienced. I don’t know enough to reduce an entire human being to one headline.
There is tremendous freedom in those three words.
Because when I no longer need to identify a villain, I can become curious again. I can listen. I can question my own assumptions. I can disagree with someone’s choices without hating the person who made them. And perhaps most importantly, I can decide what kind of person I want to be while everyone else is shouting.
I would rather create more love and acceptance in my life than spend it searching for people to despise. And perhaps it is fitting that I am writing this today, 21 September, the International Day of Peace.
We tend to think of peace in terms of countries, wars and conflict. But peace also begins much closer to home. In how we speak to each other. In how we respond to people we disagree with. In our willingness to listen before we condemn. In choosing curiosity over certainty, and compassion over hate.
There will be another controversy next month. There always is.
The question is: when everyone around us is choosing sides, how much compassion, curiosity and openness can we bring to the conversation?