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Why is it so hard to see more than one side? Not just intellectually, but with real empathy.

Why is it that the moment we commit to a cause, a people or a belief, we become unable or unwilling to make room for other perspectives?

Witness the creeping discomfort when someone says something that complicates the version of events we’ve come to believe. It’s far easier to cling to a single truth.

To frame the world as good versus evil, victims versus aggressors, right versus wrong. Simplicity offers a kind of safety. It shields us from the messy work of sitting with contradiction.

But reality doesn’t tend to play along. Human stories are rarely neat. Even the most righteous cause exists in a web of context, memory, pain, fear and power.

When we refuse to see that, hardening our hearts against the possibility that those we’ve been taught to see as “the other side” might also be human, we reduce our vision for truth.

Part of the problem might be strongly held identities. We attach ourselves to certain narratives because they affirm who we are, or who we want to be. They help us feel morally grounded, especially when the world feels unstable.

To question the narrative feels like questioning ourselves. If we’ve suffered — or stand with those who have — it’s even harder. Pain narrows our vision. We become protective, even defensive, of our grief.

But we should consider what this costs us. When we lose the ability to sit with tension — to say, “Yes, this is true, and so is that” — we lose something of our moral imagination.

We stop listening and learning, and start repeating. We become mouthpieces for a cause rather than discerning individuals. In the end, the world becomes more not less dangerous, because no one’s really seeing each other anymore.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t take sides. Sometimes, justice demands it. But I am saying that taking a side doesn’t mean closing your eyes.

It means not hardening your heart. It means not treating someone else’s child as less worthy of life because of the flag they live under.

So I come back to the question. Why is it so hard to see more than one side? Maybe because it asks something of us many are not yet willing to give: humility, courage, patience.

Or a willingness to be unsettled. But I think that’s also where hope might live. In that quiet space where empathy stretches beyond the lines we’ve drawn, and we begin again to recognise each other as human.