The Smile of Certainty
Self-Righteousness and the Shadow of Religion
Earlier today I wrote a brief article entitled “The Smiling Mother and the Dancing Soldier” – which was a reflection on how self-righteousness has become a mechanism for justifying literally any behaviour. But what role does religion play in all of this?
The mother in Gaza speaks to the camera with an open, almost radiant smile. She has just learnt that her four sons died while trying to kill Israelis, and she declares, without hesitation, that she wishes she had ten more children to offer the same fate. In the other clip, an Israeli soldier dances among broken concrete, rifle slung across his back, grinning as he celebrates the deaths of Palestinians. I pointed out that the languages, uniforms, and hashtags differ, but the expression is identical: the radiance of someone who believes history has already issued a verdict in their favour and that the enemy’s suffering is therefore a kind of honourable punctuation mark.
The smiles we see are not anomalies. They are the predictable outcome of a moral operating system that has been quietly installed in many places at once. Its first programme is moral exceptionalism: our grief is unlike any other; therefore, our rules are different. Next comes a vocabulary calibrated to numb: children become “collateral”, massacre becomes “mowing the lawn”, and suicide bombers are rebranded “gifts”. A third routine keeps the ledger of pain permanently open yet allows only one side to add entries. Finally, sermons, social-media memes, school textbooks, and political speeches loop the message until it feels like common sense: we are the aggrieved, they are the threat, and any action taken in our defence is by definition just.
Under that logic, violence is no longer violence; it is hygiene, surgery, or celebration. In Gaza, Hamas summer camps teach boys to salute with one hand and cradle a toy rifle with the other. Mothers receive public honours for “offering their sons to the nation,” and stipends arrive alongside the promise of paradise. What looks like madness is, inside that framework, entirely rational: death has been renamed victory, and grief has been monetised. In Israel, the army publishes ethical codes and trains soldiers in “purity of arms”, yet artillery units treat entire neighbourhoods as hostile terrain. When civilians die, spokespeople speak of “regrettable errors”, then pivot to the rockets that justify the next barrage. The dancing soldier is not a lone sadist; he is the surplus of a narrative that says any Palestinian casualty is either a terrorist or unfortunate background noise.
The template travels well beyond the Levant. In Myanmar, Buddhist monks bless soldiers who torch Rohingya villages. In Nigeria, Boko Haram fighters recite Quranic verses before abducting schoolgirls. In Sri Lanka, nationalist monks cheer the bombing of Tamil hospitals. The content changes; the structure remains: sacred cause, demonized foe, ecstatic permission.
At the heart of this engine is self-righteousness—not just smugness, but a full-blown conviction that because my cause is just, anything I do for it must also be just. George Orwell warned that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable; today, the warning reads like a user manual. When the woman in Gaza calls her sons “martyrs”, she is not describing death; she is renaming it so that grief is replaced by pride. When the soldier speaks of “cleansing the area”, he is not confessing destruction; he is advertising hygiene.
But to what extent is religion to blame for this pervasive mindset? Religion often serves as a key enabler of self-righteousness, supplying the fuel for its most destructive manifestations. Many faiths offer frameworks where actions are framed as divinely ordained, providing a transcendent authority that makes self-righteousness feel not just rational but eternal. In the Gaza example, the mother's pride in her sons' "martyrdom" echoes Islamic concepts of shahada, which promise paradise and reframe death as a holy victory. Similarly, in Israel, some interpretations of Jewish texts—such as biblical mandates for defending the land—can morph into a sense of divine entitlement, where military actions fulfil a covenant. This isn't inherent to the religions themselves; texts like the Quran or Torah also emphasise compassion and justice. But selective interpretations twist them into permission slips for violence, amplifying "moral tribalism" as described in social psychology research, such as Jonathan Haidt's work in The Righteous Mind. Religion binds groups with shared rituals and beliefs, making outsiders seem not just wrong but unholy, and creating the euphoric certainty that history—or divinity—is on your side.
Historical precedents underscore this enabling role: the Crusades saw Christian knights massacre in the name of reclaiming holy sites, while the Inquisition used self-righteous certainty to justify torture. In modern times, Boko Haram weaponises Quranic verses for abductions, and Myanmar's Buddhist monks invoke karma to bless ethnic cleansing. According to analyses from sources like the Global Terrorism Database, religious extremism accounts for 50-60% of terror incidents in recent decades, supercharging self-righteousness with divine authority and turning personal grief into collective righteousness, as seen in the stipends and honours for "martyrs" in Gaza or the ethical codes in Israel that enable "purity of arms" to justify disproportionate force.
Yet religion isn't the root cause—it's a vehicle, and self-righteousness is a human software glitch that persists with or without faith. Blame extends far beyond religion, as secular variants thrive equally. Stalin's purges in the Soviet Union justified millions of deaths under the "scientific" banner of communism, reframing victims as "enemies of the people" with the same one-sided ledger of pain. Mao's Cultural Revolution in China turned mass starvation into a "necessary struggle". Nationalism, as in Sri Lanka's Sinhalese Buddhist case, blends religion with ethnic pride, but it's the nationalism that's the engine—religion is often just the paint job. Even in Israel-Gaza, secular elements like realpolitik and security needs drive the narratives; the dancing soldier might be secular, his grin stemming from cultural survival stories rather than scripture.
Modern secular examples abound: eco-terrorists bomb pipelines in the name of planetary salvation, while online cancel culture unleashes self-righteous mobs to "deplatform" heretics. Data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program shows that while religious conflicts make up a significant portion (around 40-60% based on global patterns), secular ideologies like ethno-nationalism fuel others, such as the tribal Rwandan genocide of 1994, which produced the same ecstatic permission for slaughter without primary religious underpinnings. Religion gets blamed disproportionately because it's visible and organised—monks blessing soldiers or imams preaching jihad make blatant headlines—but strip away the holy texts, and self-righteousness endures in ideologies promising moral purity, from US interventions "making the world safe for democracy" to authoritarian regimes "defending the revolution".
The interplay is key: religion amplifies existing fault lines but isn't the spark. Underlying issues like resource scarcity, historical grievances, or power imbalances ignite conflicts, and religion fans the flames by exploiting human cognition. Evolutionary psychology suggests we're wired for in-group favouritism—protect the tribe, demonise outsiders—and religion, like any ideology, exploits this bias. At its core, self-righteousness is a cognitive flaw, programmable across contexts.
Breaking this loop requires disabling the operating system itself, with reforms that address religion's role while tackling broader human tendencies. Schools could require students to study parallel cases where their own side committed atrocities—not to induce guilt, but to introduce cognitive dissonance: "If we are capable of this, perhaps our enemy is not uniquely monstrous." News outlets could follow every euphemism with uncensored testimony: when a politician speaks of “collateral damage”, the next segment could carry the audio of a mother screaming outside the mortuary. International bodies like the UN could enforce symmetrical standards for every army, militia, or state, where self-righteousness withers under uniform scrutiny.
Religion itself holds positive potential for counteraction: figures like Martin Luther King Jr, drawing on Christian nonviolence, or the Dalai Lama, emphasising Buddhist compassion, show how faiths can promote humility. Interfaith dialogues, such as those at the Parliament of the World's Religions, could highlight shared anti-violence principles and debunk cherry-picked interpretations. Moral education could teach the distinction between righteousness—adherence to shared principles—and self-righteousness, which grants exemption from them. Secular safeguards, like global axioms treating all euphemisms equally, would complement this.
The simplest litmus test remains unambiguous: if my cause allows me to celebrate the death of a child, my cause has become the enemy. Religions could adopt this explicitly—no holy war justifies a child's grave as "victory". Until this line is non-negotiable for every side, religious or secular, the grins will keep coming, and the graves will keep filling. The smiling mother and the dancing soldier are not cultural outliers; they are early-warning sensors. When any society begins to applaud the death of children, it has already entered the tunnel where atrocity becomes civic virtue. The only safe exit is a stubborn, universal insistence that no child’s death may ever be a cause for joy—regardless of the gods we invoke or the ideologies we hide behind.
ENDNOTE
Breaking this cycle is less about inventing new moral codes than about dismantling the machinery that lets old ones run on autopilot. The key is to attack the pillars that keep moral exceptionalism alive—secrecy, language, asymmetrical accountability, and social insulation—and to replace them with habits that force every group to see its own reflection in the enemy it caricatures.
First, end secrecy. The most powerful disinfectant is still eyewitness evidence. Support independent journalists, human-rights monitors, and open-source investigators who can document abuses in real time and publish raw footage before it can be sanitized. When atrocities are streamed live, euphemisms die quickly. Crowd-fund satellite imagery, body-cam archives, and encrypted tip-lines so that no army, militia, or police unit can operate off-camera for long.
Second, strip the language of its anesthesia. Create public glossaries that translate official jargon into plain words: “collateral damage” becomes “dead children,” “mowing the lawn” becomes “systematic shelling,” “martyr operation” becomes “suicide bombing.” Push schools, newsrooms, and social platforms to adopt these glossaries as style guides. Once the vocabulary loses its numbing effect, the act itself becomes harder to celebrate.
Third, enforce symmetrical accountability. Support universal jurisdiction so that war crimes can be prosecuted in any court, regardless of where they were committed. Tie development loans, trade deals, and arms sales to transparent human-rights benchmarks. When every side risks the same legal jeopardy, moral exceptionalism stops looking like a shield and starts looking like a liability.
Fourth, break social insulation. Fund exchange programs that bring mid-level officers, teachers, and community leaders into direct contact with the people they are trained to see as threats. Documentary projects, joint trauma clinics, and cross-border trade apprenticeships force participants to confront the humanity they have been instructed to ignore. Empathy grows fastest in shared kitchens and classrooms, slowest in separate echo chambers.
Finally, reward moral humility. Establish national and civic awards—backed by real money and prestige—for individuals and units that prevent harm rather than inflict it. Promote the whistle-blower, the soldier who refuses an unlawful order, the officer who de-escalates a checkpoint confrontation. Make restraint a path to recognition, not ridicule.
These measures do not require everyone to agree on a single worldview; they only require that every worldview be subjected to the same mirrors, the same rules, and the same costs. When no side can hide, euphemize, or exempt itself, self-righteousness loses its oxygen and dehumanization begins to suffocate.