We all wake up each morning as the protagonist of our own narrative. We make choices we believe are right, champion causes that matter to us, and navigate a world that often seems to misunderstand our intentions. This isn’t narcissism—it’s the inescapable reality of human consciousness. We experience life from behind our own eyes, with access to the full context of our thoughts, fears, and motivations.
But here’s where things get complicated: so does everyone else.
When you disagree with someone about something important—politics, parenting, religion, how to run a business—you’re not just disagreeing about facts or strategies. You’re contradicting their story about who they are. And in their story, they’re trying to do the right thing.Think about the last time someone opposed something you cared deeply about. Didn’t it feel like more than mere disagreement? It probably felt like they were missing something obvious, or worse, that they didn’t care about the harm their position would cause. From your vantage point, the moral stakes were clear.Now flip the script. That person felt exactly the same way about you.
When Disagreement Becomes Moral Judgment
This is why political and ethical disagreements so quickly become accusations of immorality. If I’m fighting for what’s right, and you’re fighting against me, then you must be fighting against what’s right. The logic feels airtight from inside our own perspective.
Consider two people debating urban development. One advocates for preserving historic neighborhoods, seeing themselves as protecting community character and preventing displacement. The other pushes for dense housing construction, seeing themselves as solving a housing crisis and making cities affordable. Each views their position as deeply moral. Each can easily see the other as either privileged and exclusionary or reckless and destructive.Neither person wakes up thinking, “Today I’ll champion the wrong thing.” Both are heroes in their own stories. Both see the other as an obstacle to justice.
The Gap Between Intent and Interpretation
We judge ourselves by our intentions. We judge others by their actions and consequences. This asymmetry is fundamental to why we so readily assign moral failure to those who disagree with us.You know why you support that policy, vote that way, or hold that belief. You’ve thought it through. You’ve weighed the options. You’re trying to make things better based on what you understand. But you can’t see inside anyone else’s head, so you evaluate them by what they do and what happens as a result—which may look careless or cruel from the outside, even when it comes from the same place of attempted goodness that motivates you.
Breaking the Pattern
Recognizing that everyone is the hero of their own story doesn’t mean all positions are equally valid or that truth doesn’t exist. It means that moral certainty about other people’s character is usually misplaced.
The person who disagrees with you probably isn’t immoral. They probably have different experiences, different information, different assumptions about how the world works, or different priorities about which values matter most. They’re working from a different vantage point in a complicated world where good people regularly reach opposite conclusions.
This doesn’t make dialogue easy. It doesn’t resolve the disagreement. But it does suggest a different question: instead of “How can they be so wrong?” try “What would I have to believe or experience to reach their conclusion?”
Sometimes the answer will reveal genuine moral differences. Often, it will reveal something more mundane: different predictions about consequences, different weightings of competing goods, different assessments of what’s possible.
The Stories We Tell
We are all protagonists stumbling through a world more complex than any of us fully grasp, doing our best with incomplete information and competing loyalties. When we remember this—when we extend to others the same generous reading we give ourselves—disagreement doesn’t have to become demonization.The person across from you isn’t the villain of your story. They’re the hero of theirs. And somehow, we all have to share the same world.