Is the acceptance of Zionism and adjacent supremacies really an issue of lack of education? Is it that the ignorant are “too privileged” to care, too far removed, too babied and buried behind bureaucracy to understand the reality on the ground?

Then how do we explain the ignorant ones who are on Gaza’s grounds? Who are watching, and killing with precision. Who have not just seen the gruesome footage, but were taking field notes. The ones who have read the testimonies, because they fabricated it. The ones that witnessed Gaza fall to rubble, who are boiling in its bloodbath – and still love what they see.

Seeing it all, despite.

Consciousness doesn’t come with a conscience

Self-awareness is the Enlightenment’s most seductive inheritance: the belief that greater self-knowledge produces better people. That reasoning, turned inward, is redemptive. That self-discovery – through education, reflecting, and the accumulation of insight – bends naturally toward virtue. But the examined life is not always a more virtuous one.

While education requires study, the studious act is not inherently progressive or a prevention program for moral rot. It can go any way.

Social psychology has found this time and time again. Developing new knowledge doesn’t necessarily neutralize bias – it equips it with better reasoning. In fact, it’s not that educated people are less likely to rationalize harm; they are often more skilled at doing so. The more informed the self, the more sophisticated the justification.

A morally corrupt person can absorb new ideas the same way a progressive person does – selectively, in ways that sharpen what they already believe. Education refines your position. Self-awareness polishes your presentation. Neither guarantees a higher moral trajectory – neither guarantees its absence either.

Here’s what’s become the pill that’s too hard to swallow: self-awareness is just a compass. It tells you where you are, but it is not what moves you. It calibrates to the self, not to any true north. It points whatever direction you’re already headed.

This is why growing in self-awareness is not about purification, about absolving one self. To come to know yourself well is not the same as being good – the examined life can still be a deliberately cruel one. Self-awareness is not an innocent, tax-free realization.

This is why the sentiment that evil people are simply “not self-aware” or “educated enough” doesn’t hold. They are usually the ones gathering the most awareness because they’ve learned how to sharpen the perceptive edge of the human eye. Evil holds no power without a surveilling gaze.

Evil is committed with full conviction, especially when it has been premeditated and deliberated to the first degree.

Evil has done the homework.

Evil doers aren’t thoughtless drones – and their evil isn’t the absence of self-reflection. Whether someone is self-aware doesn’t make them enlightened, and whether they aren’t doesn’t make them a wrongdoer who is simply unawakened.

If harm is just a failure of insight than we have misunderstood ideology. But we have gathered enough evidence that harm is often the product of deep intention, not always the byproduct of negligence.

Cruelty is a curriculum

Lack of humanity is not a lack of education, it is a kind of education.

Cruelty is a competing education. They don’t just write textbooks to tell one story.

Even the language of indoctrination assumes individuals do not have the choice in developing their own world views. But agency is exercised, not assigned.

One can study all of the delicate details about the human psyche and still be committed to a life long study of a moral sickness.

Evilness is a practice of its own, and a very detailed, and descriptive one. Evilness is never vague about it’s dirty laundry. Which is why deceit doesn’t necessarily exist in a world that has kept such a proud, unfiltered record of its antics. Cruelty is no longer human’s best kept secret. Cruelty isn’t hidden in shame, its documented and well loved.

Education is a bare-bone framework that organizes knowledge. It’s a container. And when that framework is simply recast into a different dogma, it just becomes another way a person “stays informed”.

The language we learn can become a weapon:

About whether we articulate evil as an investment, not ignorance. Whether we see evil as ideology, instead of idleness. Or whether we see evil as a belief, not a blindness to bias.

You cannot educate someone out of a position they did not arrive at through playful ignorance. This is not a failure of information – it is a success of ideology. Of an education of a different kind, not a higher kind.

The most sophisticated bigotry, the most enduring “-isms” and “-ologies,” were legitimized through highly meticulous contemplation. The type of academic fluency you would think would incite a spiritual awakening.

Definitions for cruelty can always be redefined – which is why pulling out a dictionary definition to prove a bigot wrong misunderstands something fundamental: they have already read the fine print. They have studied the theories, parsed the frameworks, and arrived here, anyway.

A morally bankrupt person knows what they’re doing. Which is why the issue of collective moral decay demands a harder analysis than “they just don’t get it”, when the cruel have seen it all, despite.