The Era of Anxiety - 2
“I want to be right.” At first glance, that sounds like virtue at its highest point. But these days, it often sounds like a phrase used to dress up stubbornness and self righteousness.
Anxiety is vague, its causes are complicated, and solutions feel far away. So people choose a position instead of an answer. They want confirmation that where they stand is the right place. That confirmation turns into clicks, applause, and a kind of moral pardon.
Being right was originally a device people made so they could hurt one another less. But in an age of growing anxiety, it begins to serve a different function more often. Ethics stops acting like a direction and starts acting like a shield. And, ironically, that shield soon becomes a weapon used to push others away and press them down.
People do not cling to being right in order to change the world. They cling to it so they themselves do not collapse in a world that already feels like it is collapsing. As that desire grows stronger, “being right” becomes obsessed not with substance but with form. It becomes less a decision to change something and more a sign that proves what kind of person you are.
Lately, I see that pattern in several trends of our time. They began with legitimate concerns, but at some point hardened into ways of dividing people rather than helping them.
This essay is not arguing that certain values or practices are useless. Quite the opposite. My point is that because those values are valid, more gets damaged when they are used like currency. The issue is not what you believe, but how that belief gets used. The same ethics, the same sensitivity, the same sense of justice can look entirely different depending on whether they function as a direction or as a position.
And that use does not remain confined to language. We perform righteousness not only through what we say, but through what we buy, how we sort our relationships, where we participate, where we refuse to participate, and the choices we repeat in everyday life. What we say, what we purchase, who we spend time with, what we remain silent about, and whom we push away all become part of what being right means today. In that sense, righteousness now feels less like an opinion and more like a mode of conduct that organizes an entire life.
Its distortion tends to follow a familiar path. It first enters through the language and posture of care. Healing, counseling, and psychological language genuinely help many people. The problem is not that they fail to help in practical terms. The problem begins when that help stops being one part of life and becomes the grammar of life itself.
At that point, social problems shrink into personal wounds, and political conflicts are reduced to relational trauma. Responsibility moves from structures to states of mind. We see this easily. When conflict appears, someone says, “You need to set better boundaries.” Someone else seals the other person inside a certain label. The words themselves are not automatically wrong. But they should not become locks that shut conversation down instead of keys that open it.
And the problem does not stop there. That sensibility soon spreads into patterns of action. Instead of trying to understand people, we first create distance and begin rearranging relationships. Of course self protection matters. But the moment every relationship and every conflict starts being handled in exactly the same way, care turns from a way of restoring people into a way of sorting them. Diagnosis ceases to be an explanation and becomes an endpoint. Understanding ends before it even begins.
This language and posture also carry a clear class dimension. The skills of care are beautiful, but they are not open to everyone in the same way. They require a stable schedule, money, insurance, language ability, information, and above all the spare room to look inward. For someone struggling just to survive the day, a journey toward emotional healing is hardly something they can realistically fit into their life. So as the language of care becomes more widespread, a paradox emerges. The people who need it most often have the hardest time accessing it, while those who can access it most easily end up possessing even more of that inner room.
That same movement soon shifts into the realm of lifestyle and refinement. Ethical consumption and ethical diets often begin with serious concerns. Thinking about animals and the environment is not a trivial matter. But problems arise when that ethics begins to transform itself from a condition of life into a marker of lifestyle.
From that point on, practice becomes a badge rather than change. It becomes less about what you do and more about what you refuse to do. What you buy, what you eat, which brands you reject, and which forms of consumption you find shameful gradually become standards by which a person’s morality is judged. What we often miss is this: ethics is not only about will. It is also about resources. It is a form of ethics made easier for those who have time, money, and real choices.
Fresh ingredients, alternative proteins, supplements, and an environment that makes a balanced diet possible are not equally available to everyone. In rural grocery stores, in long overtime hours, in physically demanding labor, and within low wage schedules, the question of what to eat is not a philosophical one. It is a matter of survival. The same is true of environmentally friendly products, ethical brands, boycotts, and alternative consumption.
These may be matters of conviction, but they are also matters of access and cost. The moment ethics is demanded from people who have no real choice, it can quickly turn from an ideal into a class marker. And once ethics becomes a class marker, it does not take long for it to meet snobbery. The word “willpower” is convenient, so convenient that it erases conditions. What remains is no longer the expansion of practice, but a screening process that decides who is qualified to practice at all. It is no longer an ethics of changing together, but a competition over who lives the cleaner life.
This tendency then hardens into rules governing language and attitude. The purpose of respectful language is clear. It is to acknowledge that words and attitudes can hurt people, and to protect the minimum dignity of the vulnerable. The problem is not respect itself, but the way respect turns into a score sheet. The moment its purpose becomes not the baseline of conversation but the goal of conversation, people begin to inspect vocabulary before meaning and posture before context. Mistakes stop being chances for correction and become evidence deserving punishment. Questions stop being the start of learning and become signs of suspicion.
And these rules do not remain confined to tone. Rules of expression become rules of relationship, and rules of relationship become rules of exclusion. In that process, people no longer act in order to avoid being wrong, but in order to avoid being filtered out.
This dogmatism spreads not only through conversation but through creation as well, especially in large cultural industries. Before a work ever meets its audience, it first meets calculation and avoidance. What matters is no longer what to say, but what to avoid. Characters are inspected as symbols rather than treated as people. Narratives are examined as messages rather than allowed to live as stories. “Dignity” becomes a checklist, and empathy becomes the correct answer.
Audiences notice this faster than we expect. The moment something feels less like “this moved me” and more like “this is trying to persuade me,” people grow tired. That fatigue quickly becomes politicized. A film or series is summoned as a symbol of a camp before it is judged as a story, and the industry finds itself standing in the middle of the conflict. But the point is not some simplistic conclusion like “progressive messages fail.” That is not what I mean. The problem with dogmatic discipline is not only what it says, but how it deforms both speech and action.
Instead of speaking and acting to help others understand, people are pushed to submit the correct answer in order to avoid blame and stay in a safe position. What remains, then, is more harmless speech, safer postures, and more predictable behavior. But safe language and safe behavior do not necessarily touch reality. The safer they become, the more reality remains unsafe.
All of this eventually culminates in the language and behavior of the front line. The concerns of gender equality are still necessary. Even in the twenty first century, people still suffer discrimination simply because they are of a different gender. That is reality. The problem begins when the language of gender equality stops analyzing structures and starts by issuing verdicts about who is right and who is wrong.
At that point, a movement stops being a movement and becomes a moral position. People speak, choose, participate, and distance themselves not in order to persuade others and change reality, but in order to prove that they stand on the right side. What remains is not change, but the endless rearrangement of allies and enemies, along with constant self censorship.
People no longer begin by asking what is right. They begin by calculating what they can safely say and how they must safely act in order to stand in a secure position. Self censorship is not silence. It is endless rehearsal. Before a sentence is spoken, it is censored in the mind. The context around it is removed. Anything that might be misunderstood is cut away. At the same time, people calculate which events to attend, which posts to react to, whom to support in public, and where to draw the line.
Questions can be read as attacks, and hesitation can be mistaken for betrayal. So speech becomes shorter and more definitive, while action becomes more predictable. But the fact that these increase does not mean truth increases with them. If anything, the opposite happens. Complex stories disappear.
Sentences that explain structures are usually complicated, and complicated sentences become vulnerable at once. Actions that try to change structures are usually slow, and slow action is easily met with suspicion. One sentence taken out of place can reverse a meaning. One isolated moment can become grounds for judging an entire person. In this environment, people choose survival over accuracy.
In the end, all these different forms are driven by the same desire. “I want to be right.” More precisely, “I do not want to be shaken.” That is why people choose ethics. Ethics originally exists to move the world in a better direction, but in an age of anxiety it often performs the opposite role. A shield built for protection becomes a tool of attack.
So what we have to do is simple. We cannot give up on being right. But we must give up the way being right gets used as a tool. When someone tries to judge my entire existence on the basis of a single sentence or a fragment of who I am, the usual response is to strike back or to push the other person away with even firmer words and actions. But the moment that happens, the issue is no longer ethical.
That is why we need at least a few basic rules. When the urge to define someone rises in us, we should first ask ourselves what exactly we are demanding. Are we asking for change, or are we asking for someone’s exclusion? If it is change, then persuasion is necessary, and persuasion requires time. If exclusion is the goal, then our words and actions are already functioning as a verdict.
There is another rule as well. Before judging someone, we should look again at what they actually said, the conditions they are living under, and the context of what they did. The moment we decide intent without checking context, being right stops being a direction and becomes a weapon. In a time when even a question can be heard as an attack, we need procedures that allow questions to remain questions. We need the habit of listening before concluding, asking before excluding, and examining conditions before issuing judgment.
If values are to remain values, being right has to return to people. Not as the language of verdicts, but as the posture of persuasion. Not as the behavior of self certification, but as a practice of changing together. Not at the speed of stigma, but at the speed of change. And above all, not as proof that I am right, but as evidence that we have become even a little better.
Being right does not grow stronger the more it is proven. It grows stronger the more it expands. When more people are allowed to learn, when people can speak and act again after making mistakes, and when we try to understand others before judging the conditions they live under, being right can actually change reality.
Any other kind of righteousness ends up as a hollow shell with an impressive shape. We already live in a world that is tiring enough.