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Holy Harm
For four decades, spiritual communities have chosen the preservation of their teachers and traditions over the protection of the people inside them. The belief systems that made that possible are still active.
Society & Culture
Apr 11
This essay is part of an ongoing series on nervous system regulation and the way we live together. Read from the beginning →
In the early months of the pandemic, I watched people I knew, including wellness teachers, coaches, and practitioners who had spent years studying presence and the body, begin forwarding conspiracy content. Not tentatively. With the conviction of the newly certain.
The frameworks varied: covid as a population control plot, shadow governments engineering collapse, hidden forces orchestrating events behind the scenes. What they shared was a complete explanatory structure. Every confusing data point became evidence. Every contradiction proved the theory ran deeper. The world, which had become unpredictable, suddenly had a shape.
What I noticed was not the content. It was the quality of conviction. The certainty had a particular character: urgent, complete, impermeable. Something had resolved.
This wasn’t confined to that moment or that group. It was a concentrated version of something far more ordinary.
The relief of certainty works primarily at the level of the mind, not the body.
Somatic relief settles the body and the mind together, through felt safety, genuine rest, and proximity to someone regulated. Cognitive relief works differently. It settles only the mind, by closing the question. The body may remain in activation. The threat may remain real. The world may be no safer than it was an hour ago. But the search is over, and the end of the search produces its own release: muscle tension that had been holding the question drops, breathing slows, the mental noise that circles an unresolved problem quiets.
The content doesn't have to feel good for this to happen. Q-Anon is a terrifying worldview. Believing that shadowy elites are orchestrating mass harm is not comforting in any ordinary sense. The relief is not in what was found, it is in the search being over.
When the nervous system is overwhelmed, when the volume of information, threat, and unpredictability exceeds its processing capacity, it will accept a dark answer over no answer. Primal and binary over nuanced and unresolved.
The brain under load economizes. It stops holding complexity. It moves toward closure, and closure feels like clarity even when it isn't.
Conspiracy theories are the extreme version. The mechanism runs through almost everything.
First-principles thinking is the capacity to discard inherited frameworks and reason from the most fundamental truths of a situation — to ask what you actually know to be true, independent of what you've been told, what your community believes, or what has always been done. It requires working memory that isn't already saturated, nervous system stability that allows a question to remain genuinely open, and enough room in the system to sit with not-knowing without resolving it prematurely. It is a nervous system state. Most people are not currently operating in conditions that make it available. Most believe they are.
In Near Enemies of Truth, Christopher Wallis develops the concept of near enemies — qualities that so closely resemble a virtue that they are easily mistaken for it, while being its corruption. The near enemy of equanimity is indifference. The near enemy of compassion is pity.
The near enemy of wisdom is the certainty that you already have it.
Spiritual frameworks are particularly prone to this, and I say that as someone who has lived and worked inside them for two decades.
"Everything happens for a reason" offers relief from the intolerable question of why suffering exists, while foreclosing the accountability and genuine inquiry that might actually produce wisdom. "We are all one" offers relief from the pain of separation and becomes the justification for staying silent in the face of harm. Harm, after all, is simply part of the divine unfolding. The belief that end times are near, or that civilizational collapse is imminent and inevitable, offers the same relief.
If the end is predetermined, there is no grief to sit with, no resistance to mount, no role in what is being built or destroyed to examine.
These frameworks persist because they work for exactly as long as the system needs them to. These are not failures of intelligence. These are nervous systems finding structures that make not-knowing survivable.
The most dangerous form of certainty is the kind that wears the face of righteousness.
When certainty hardens into identity, the self-concept reorganizes around being the kind of person who already knows what is true. The system stops processing contradicting evidence. It doesn't evaluate and reject it. It doesn't see it.
The identity requires certainty, and the certainty requires filtering out anything that would destabilize it.
Wallis names this as a near enemy of justice itself: the activist who is no longer oriented toward reducing harm but toward maintaining the coherence of their moral identity. The cause becomes a regulation strategy. The righteousness becomes the floor that the system cannot afford to leave.
The pattern doesn't belong to one political ideology, one historical moment, or one side of any debate.
I watched this happen with something I have a direct stake in.
In January 2026, Iranian security forces massacred unarmed civilians. The documentation was extensive. The accounts were verified. Iranians inside the country and in the diaspora reached out to prominent human rights advocates — people who had built platforms and careers on the language of justice — and asked them to speak.
Most stayed silent.
Weeks later, when the Trump administration made comments about erasing Iranian civilization, those same voices erupted. The language of outrage was immediate, fluent, and loud. Iranian lives, suddenly, mattered.
Hypocrites know what they are doing. What I watched was something more automatic: nervous systems that had organized their moral identity around a specific political framework, and could only register harm that fit inside it. The regime's violence against Iranian civilians didn't activate the justice response because it didn't fit the certainty structure. A statement from a political opponent did.
The activism had become a regulation strategy. The righteous position had become the floor the system could not afford to leave, because leaving it, even for a moment, even to respond to a massacre, would mean tolerating ambiguity in a system that had stopped being able to.
If you felt something contract reading that section — an urge to locate a political motive, to label the author, to find the reason this example doesn't count — stay with it for a moment. Don't resolve it yet. That contraction is the essay's argument happening in your nervous system in real time. The certainty moving in to explain away the discomfort is doing exactly what this piece describes.
Political tribalism operates the same mechanism at scale, with the added advantage of community.
When individual regulation fails, we borrow stability from each other. Shared certainty creates shared nervous system coherence. The tribe's unified position replaces what the individual can no longer generate alone. Leaving the position, even partially, even privately, means losing access to the co-regulation the community provides.
You are not competing with their beliefs. You are competing with their nervous system's primary regulation source. The belief is not just an idea. It is a nervous system resource.
I have a client who is a conservative Christian from the American South. I had spent twenty-four years in California before I met him, long enough for a complete picture of who he would be to form without my noticing. My community had a coherent consensus about Southern Christian conservatives, and I had absorbed it through proximity, repetition, and the absence of anything that contradicted it.
What I found was that we agreed on far more than I had ever imagined possible. The picture I had arrived with dissolved through contact with a specific, real person who kept failing to match it.
I grew up in Iran, hearing things about Jewish people and about Israel that I held as fact. The framework was handed to me whole. It was simply the water I swam in.
A Jewish employer later gave me opportunities that shaped my professional life. A group of Israelis I met while backpacking in Brazil became specific, real, irreducible people in real time. They dismantled what no argument could have reached.
The certainties dissolved through contact, not through being convinced.
For a long time, I wanted to be right. I will say that directly. Rightness felt like integrity, like holding something real in a world full of distortion. Partially it was. But underneath was the familiar sensation of a closed question.
The change that altered how I work, how I relate, and how I think was not complicated: I stopped trying to be right and started trying to be effective. Effectiveness requires staying curious, which requires staying open. Open required giving up the regulation that certainty had been providing and finding another way to remain steady without it. It is a somatic shift: slow, relational, and impossible to force.
The capacity to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity is not a personality trait or a philosophical preference. Technological disruption that outpaces existing frameworks, geopolitical instability with no legible map, ecological crisis that demands holding grief and action simultaneously; in conditions like these, it is one of the most consequential functional skills available. And it is the same capacity across every domain of human life.
In intimacy, it is the capacity to remain present to a person who is still becoming, whose needs change, whose contradictions don't resolve, who will surprise you in ways that require updating the story you've been telling about them. A nervous system that needs certainty to feel safe will settle for a managed version of the relationship rather than the actual one.
In leadership, it is the capacity to make consequential decisions without the comfort of a settled answer, to hold competing frameworks simultaneously, to remain genuinely open to information that complicates the picture, to lead from presence rather than the performance of confidence. The leaders who navigate complexity most effectively are not the ones with the most certain answers. They are the ones whose nervous systems can sustain genuine uncertainty long enough for a real response to form.
In culture, it is the capacity to question foundational assumptions about identity, belonging, and what one era owes the next. Cultures that lose this capacity calcify. The rigidity visible in contemporary politics is not primarily ideological. It is somatic. It is what happens when entire populations are operating past their processing capacity, and certainty is the cheapest regulation available.
In civic and political life, genuine deliberation demands the capacity to be persuaded, to hold a position lightly enough that evidence, argument, and contact with real people can shift it. A population that is systemically dysregulated cannot sustain this.
Genuine deliberation is a high-bandwidth operation, and the bandwidth has been consumed.
Capacity for uncertainty cannot be downloaded, optimized, or hacked. It is built through relationship, through repeated experiences of tolerating not-knowing and surviving it, through the gradual expansion of what the nervous system can hold without collapsing. It is the foundational skill, the one that makes everything else possible.
The question is not why people become certain. Given what most people are operating under, the volume of information, the velocity of change, the scarcity of genuine co-regulation, and the isolation that structures so much of modern life, certainty is a predictable adaptation. The nervous system under load doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The question is what would need to be different for ambiguity to feel survivable.
A system using certainty to regulate cannot release it through reasoning alone. The activation underneath the belief needs somewhere to go — through the body, through genuine relationship, through the kind of contact that allows the system to anchor in a regulated state. The group coherence needs a real replacement. The identity built around the righteous position needs a new structure to lean on.
Asking someone to give up their certainty is asking them to dysregulate on purpose, with nothing to catch them.
You cannot think your way to openness. The system has to be regulated there: through conditions, relationships, and time that most people are not currently offered and rarely seek.
That is where the next essay goes.