> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://otherwise.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A Society That Worships Certainty Will Eventually Sacrifice People to Protected Error - URL: https://otherwise.ghost.io/a-society-that-worships-certainty/ - Published: 2026-06-14T10:09:56.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-17T13:39:32.000Z - Author: Khaled Salih - Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1792244264359, #Import 2026-10-17 14:38 14 June 2026 Socrates, Auschwitz, Anfal, October 7, and the question that led me to *When Parochial Error Goes Global* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d6/2c/d62cdd13-a476-41c5-8f2c-29270c99d95d/content/images/2026/10/f975c3e5-e8f1-404a-aca1-da6a293ba6b3_1029x1528-jpeg.jpg) **Note:** A society does not become dangerous only when it knows too little. It becomes dangerous when it believes it knows with such certainty that criticism becomes corruption, doubt becomes betrayal, and persons can be sacrificed to a protected theory. This is the question behind my new essay — and behind my forthcoming book, *When Parochial Error Goes Global*. The article moves from Socrates to Auschwitz, from Anfal to October 7, but the deeper concern is not historical comparison for its own sake. It is the mechanism by which bad explanations become immune to criticism, enter institutions, borrow moral language, and eventually make human beings disappear behind categories. The moral line is simple but difficult: Protect persons absolutely. Keep ideas exposed to criticism. When we reverse that order, we protect the cage in the name of protecting the prisoner. A rational civilization lets theories die before people do. --- **A society that worships certainty will eventually sacrifice people to protected error.** --- That sentence has been following me. It followed me back to David Deutsch’s chapter “A Dream of Socrates” in The Beginning of Infinity. It followed me back to Karl Popper. It followed me back to Jacob Bronowski standing at Auschwitz, warning that catastrophe does not begin when people know too little, but when they believe they know with the certainty of gods. It followed me back to Kurdistan, to Anfal, to the question that first disturbed me decades ago: how could a secular Baathist dictatorship use Qur’anic language to name and justify a genocidal campaign against the Kurds? And it followed me back to October 7. I have been thinking about these questions again because of an exchange I recently had with Daniel Agalar, the host of Stand Tall Israel. I had sent him my reflection on Haras Rafiq’s [interview](https://khaledsalih.substack.com/p/when-islamism-escapes-islamists) and on a deeper problem facing open societies: not only how extremist ideologies radicalize people, but how bad explanations travel beyond their original carriers, borrow new languages, enter respectable institutions, and become protected from criticism. Daniel’s reply was generous. He saw the distinction I was trying to defend: the difference between protecting people and protecting ideas. That distinction is now at the center of my work. It is also the moral line on which the future of the Open Society depends. The question is not whether Muslims, Jews, Christians, Kurds, Palestinians, Israelis, Europeans, or Westerners are good or bad as groups. That is the old tribal mistake. The question is different: how do ideas become protected from criticism? How do doctrines enter institutions? How does a bad explanation move from the page to the street, from the sermon to the law, from the slogan to the knife, from the theory to the railway, from the category to the camp? And how does a civilized society notice the danger before the theory demands bodies? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d6/2c/d62cdd13-a476-41c5-8f2c-29270c99d95d/content/images/2026/10/8e23490d-fc04-4344-bbee-e1df72650b13_1536x1024-jpeg.jpg) **Socrates and the right to criticize gods** Deutsch’s “A Dream of Socrates” is playful, almost theatrical. Socrates dreams of speaking with gods, but the lesson is not that gods rescue knowledge. The lesson is the opposite: no authority, not even divine authority, can remove the need for criticism. Even if a god speaks, the human being must still interpret. Did I hear correctly? Did I understand correctly? Is the source trustworthy? Is the message literal, symbolic, ironic, manipulative, or misunderstood? How would one distinguish revelation from dream, hallucination, poetry, fraud, tradition, or later interpolation? Revelation does not abolish the problem of knowledge. It intensifies it. That is the Socratic nerve of Deutsch’s chapter. The wise person is not the one who possesses certainty. The wise person is the one who refuses to confuse knowledge with certainty. Knowledge grows not by finding an authority above criticism, but by exposing explanations to criticism and replacing worse explanations with better ones. This may sound abstract, but it is not. Epistemology is not a luxury. It is the hidden architecture of civilization. A society that misunderstands knowledge will eventually misunderstand morality. If truth is treated as possession by authority, then the critic becomes dangerous. If certainty is treated as virtue, then doubt becomes corruption. If obedience is treated as the highest moral act, then conscience can be trained to serve error. That is how protected error becomes lethal. The Open Society is not valuable because it possesses final truth. It is valuable because it builds institutions and habits through which error can be found. It allows laws to be revised, leaders to be criticized, sacred memories to be historicized, theories to be abandoned, authorities to be mocked, and inherited assumptions to be reopened. > A rational civilization lets theories die before people do. > > When that fails, people die for theories. **Germany: civilization’s instruments captured by protected error** This is the terrible lesson of Germany. The puzzle is not that Germany lacked intelligence, science, philosophy, music, administration, universities, or technical capacity. The puzzle is more alarming: a society can possess many Enlightenment instruments while losing the Enlightenment discipline that makes those instruments humane. Germany had Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, Humboldt, universities, laboratories, bureaucracy, engineering, philology, law, and disciplined administration. But culture is not enough. Intelligence is not enough. Technical brilliance is not enough. A society may have books, orchestras, chemistry, railways, courts, and universities while the deeper correction-system is being captured. The German catastrophe was not caused by too little intelligence. It was caused by intelligence being reassigned. Doctors did not stop thinking. Some used thought to classify life as worthy or unworthy. Lawyers did not stop reasoning. Some used law to strip persons of rights. Engineers did not stop designing. Some designed systems of confinement, transport, killing, and disposal. Bureaucrats did not stop administering. They administered exclusion, deportation, and murder. That is the horror: the instruments of modernity continued functioning after their correction-task had been disabled. Auschwitz was not the absence of civilization. It was the capture of civilizational instruments by a protected error. Antisemitism was an old European falsehood. But old falsehood alone does not explain Auschwitz. The decisive step was the transformation of prejudice into protected explanation. The Jew was made to explain defeat, humiliation, decadence, capitalism, Bolshevism, modernity, disease, corruption, and national weakness. This was not a good explanation. It was an anti-explanation: a theory so elastic that every fact could be forced to confirm it. If Jews were poor, they were parasites. If Jews succeeded, they were conspirators. If Germany suffered, Jews had betrayed it. If modern culture disturbed the old order, Jews had corrupted it. The theory could not be embarrassed by reality because reality had already been made subordinate to the theory. That is epistemological closure. A dynamic society lets bad explanations die under criticism. Nazi Germany did the opposite. It protected the bad explanation and exposed human beings to destruction. Law became racial classification. Science became racial mythology. Medicine became selection. Bureaucracy became registration and deportation. Railways became transport to death. Industry became the optimization of killing. The camp became the final office of the protected theory. The deepest crime occurred before the gas chamber. It occurred when the person disappeared behind the category. The Jewish child was no longer seen as a child. The Jewish mother was no longer seen as a mother. The Jewish neighbor was no longer seen as a neighbor. The Jewish scholar was no longer seen as a mind. The living person was replaced by an administrative fiction. Once that fiction became sacred to the state, cruelty could present itself as procedure. Once the person is replaced by the category, logistics can become atrocity. ***Anfal*: the question that would not leave me** My own path into these questions did not begin in a seminar room. I am of Kurdish origin, from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. My father’s mother was Jewish. Kurdistan once had a vibrant Jewish community. My grandmother’s brothers, sisters, and other relatives left for Israel before I was born. I grew up in a non-religious Kurdish family, but we lived inside the afterlife of difficult questions. We were always puzzled by Islam, by power, by memory, by the strange ways religious language could enter politics, fear, law, family, and identity. Then came *Anfal*. In 1988, Saddam Hussein’s regime used chemical weapons and mass violence against the Kurds. The campaign was named *al-Anfal*, after the Qur’anic chapter meaning “spoils of war.” I was already in Sweden. But the question burned into me: How could a “socialist,” “Baathist,” “secular” dictator use Qur’anic language to justify genocide against the Kurds? That question never left. A purely materialist explanation was not enough. Yes, Saddam’s regime was a dictatorship. Yes, the Baathist state was brutal. Yes, war, Arab nationalism, militarization, elite paranoia, and regional power all mattered. But something else also mattered: language. Memory. Sacralized vocabulary. The availability of a religious-political frame that could be activated by a supposedly secular state. *Anfal* showed me that ideas are not ornaments. They are not harmless decorations above power. They can enter institutions and change what those institutions think they are doing. A regime does not need to be pious in order to use sacralized language. A dictator does not need to be a theologian in order to exploit theological memory. A state can borrow an old category and make it perform a new task. That is one of the roots of my book *When Parochial Error Goes Global*. The book is not an attempt to define Muslims by essence. It is not a hatred of persons. It is not a call for suspicion or collective blame. Its governing distinction is absolute: the person is not the doctrine. A Muslim is a human being, a Universal Explainer, capable of criticism, love, doubt, courage, creativity, and moral agency. The target of criticism is not the person. It is the protected system of ideas insofar as it disables correction. The question of the book is problem-directed: How does a religious-political memeplex protect its root claims from correction? How does it make doubt dangerous, exit costly, satire punishable, historical inquiry taboo, and criticism morally suspect? How does it travel from one setting to another, across languages, states, institutions, migrations, and digital networks? And how can an Open Society protect itself and persons without granting immunity to doctrines that endanger them? That is the question *Anfal* opened for me. October 7 made it impossible to postpone. **October 7: when the category preceded the face** On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led forces committed a pogromistic massacre and hostage-taking operation against Israelis. The victims were not abstractions. They were children, parents, grandparents, festival-goers, neighbors, families, workers, soldiers, civilians, lovers, students, and hostages. But almost immediately, in parts of Western intellectual, activist, and religious culture, the victims began to disappear behind categories. > The murdered person became “context.” > > The kidnapped civilian became “resistance.” > > The raped or sexually humiliated body became “contested narrative.” > > The filmed atrocity became “understandable rage.” > > The Jewish victim became “settler.” > > The Israeli child became “colonial.” > > The pogrom became “decolonization.” That is what happens when a map precedes the person. October 7 was not only a massacre. It was an epistemological stress test for the Open Society. The violence was visible, recorded, celebrated by some, denied by others, minimized by many, and rapidly translated into the language of anti-colonial romance, grievance theory, moral equivalence, and institutional cowardice. The Deutschian question is not merely: W**hy did Hamas do this?** The deeper question is: **What bad explanation became protected enough that explicit atrocity could be filmed, celebrated, minimized, or morally reclassified — even inside societies that officially claim to protect human rights, women, minorities, civilians, and the vulnerable?** For Hamas, the protected error was jihadist certainty fused with anti-Jewish eliminationism and sacred resistance. For some Western Muslims, October 7 was plugged into the machinery of *ummah* grievance, humiliation memory, anti-Zionist identity, “sacred” land, martyrdom grammar, and social-media amplification. This does not mean Muslims as such. Many Muslims were horrified. A few condemned the attack. Many want no part in Hamas’s ideology in their own society. The person must never be reduced to the memeplex. But some were recruitable because the symbolic machinery was already there. For parts of the radical Left, the mechanism worked differently. It did not require Islamic belief. It required a sorting grid: West / Israel / whiteness / capitalism / colonialism / power = oppressor. Palestine / resistance / Global South / racialized victimhood = oppressed. Therefore violence by the oppressed is reactive, while violence by the oppressor is structural. This grid contains real historical materials. Palestinians have suffered. States do abuse power. Occupation, blockade, civilian suffering, and humiliation are real moral and political problems. But a framework becomes anti-rational when real suffering is converted into immunity from criticism. > No suffering licenses the murder of children. > > No grievance turns hostage-taking into moral knowledge. > > No occupation transforms rape, abduction, and slaughter into liberation. > > Context may explain conditions. It does not dissolve agency. That is the distinction that much of the West failed to defend after October 7. **The industrialization of excuse** Auschwitz was the industrialization of killing. October 7 was not that. It was not an industrial death system. It was a pogromistic massacre, hostage operation, and symbolic act of jihadist terror. But the response to October 7 revealed something else: an industrialization of excuse. Not in factories, but through institutions. Universities, activist networks, NGOs, media frames, social media, DEI vocabularies, religious networks, protest slogans, selective silences, and moral sorting systems all helped convert atrocity into ambiguity. The unsafe question was: **Did an anti-rational movement commit deliberate atrocity, and did parts of our moral culture make excuses for it?** The socially safe answer in some circles was: **Context. Occupation. Decolonization. Rage. Resistance. Israel’s fault. Complicated. Do not strengthen Islamophobia. Do not center Israeli suffering. Do not say barbarism. Do not say evil. Do not say Jews.** That is how moral clarity gets renamed as vulgarity. The word “resistance” became a solvent. It dissolved agency, victimhood, and moral particularity. > Resistance to oppression can be legitimate. > > Resistance to state abuse can be necessary. > > Resistance to tyranny can be heroic. But when the word “resistance” is allowed to cover deliberate murder, abduction, torture, rape, humiliation, and hostage-taking, it ceases to name moral courage. It becomes ideological camouflage. A good word is made to do bad work. That is how bad explanations survive in open societies. They borrow the moral vocabulary of the Open Society — rights, dignity, liberation, anti-racism, trauma, inclusion, context — and use it to block criticism. The result is a category error: the Open Society begins by protecting vulnerable persons and ends by protecting dangerous doctrines from criticism. **The alliance of *Jihadist* certainty and Western self-hatred** The strangest feature of the post-October 7 moment was the alliance between Hamas-style Islamism and parts of the radical Left. They do not share the same final moral world. Hamas is not feminist, secular, liberal, gay-friendly, pluralist, or progressive. It is not an ally of the values many of its Western defenders claim to hold. But the convergence was possible because they shared an enemy-category. The Islamist frame says: **Jews, Zionists, and Israel are obstacles to sacred liberation.** The radical anti-colonial frame says: **Israel is the settler-colonial outpost of Western power.** These frames are not identical, but they can interoperate. Hamas supplies myth, sacrifice, blood, kinetic violence, and sacred certainty. The Western radical supplies language: decolonization, resistance, anti-racism, liberation, settler colonialism, trauma, context. > That is ideological interoperability. Not agreement on everything. Just enough shared anti-Israel coding to allow moral laundering. The deeper problem is that Western self-criticism — one of the greatest achievements of the Open Society — can mutate into *oikophobia*, a one-sided moral debt accounting in which the West is judged infinitely while anti-rational movements are granted immunity because they oppose it. > Self-criticism is essential. > > Self-hatred is not. > > The first corrects error. > > The second disables judgment. > > A civilization that cannot criticize itself becomes dangerous. But a civilization that can criticize *only* itself becomes defenseless against those who exploit its conscience. > The person must remain protected Here I must state the moral boundary as clearly as possible. > Criticism of Hamas must not become hatred of Palestinians. > > Criticism of Islamism must not become hatred of Muslims. > > Criticism of antisemitism must not become denial of Palestinian suffering. > > Criticism of Israel must not become permission to dehumanize Jews. > > Criticism of the radical Left must not become indifference to injustice. > > Criticism of anti-Muslim hatred must not become immunity for Islamist ideology. The Open Society has to perform a difficult task: protect persons while keeping ideas criticizable. That is the point Daniel noticed in my work, and it is the point I hope to discuss with him if we speak on Stand Tall Israel. > The West must defend Jews from antisemitism. > > It must defend Muslims from collective blame. > > It must defend Palestinians from dehumanization. > > It must defend Israelis from pogrom denial. It must defend speech, inquiry, and conscience. But it must also defend criticism itself from ideological capture. The moral test is not whether one can condemn enemies. Every tribe can do that. The test is whether one can criticize one’s own preferred side when that side commits or excuses evil. > Can one condemn Hamas without qualification? > > Can one criticize Israeli policy without denying Jewish victimhood? > > Can one defend Palestinians without laundering *Jihadism*? > > Can one recognize Gaza’s suffering without making October 7 disappear? > > Can one oppose antisemitism without excusing anti-Muslim hatred? > > Can one oppose anti-Muslim hatred without protecting Islamist doctrine from criticism? > > Can one say that deliberate atrocity against civilians is evil even when committed by the side one identifies with? That is the Backspace Key. That is the Open Society under pressure. **Why this conversation matters** My communication with Daniel brought me back to Socrates because the interview, if it happens, should not be only about Islamism, antisemitism, Israel, or Kurdistan as separate topics. It should be about the deeper question beneath them: > How do bad explanations become protected? Germany shows one answer: racial mythology captured a modern state and turned civilization’s instruments toward death. *Anfal* shows another: a secular dictatorship could borrow Qur’anic vocabulary and make sacred memory perform a genocidal task against Kurds. October 7 shows another: a *Jihadist* movement could commit atrocity, then watch as parts of the West translated that atrocity into the language of resistance, context, and liberation. > The common thread is not identical ideology. > > Nazism, Baathism, Islamism, and radical anti-colonialism are not the same. > > The common thread is protected error. A protected error is not merely a false belief. It is a false belief surrounded by mechanisms that prevent criticism from reaching it. It disqualifies critics. It reclassifies victims. It absorbs counterevidence. It borrows moral language. It captures institutions. It tells people which suffering counts and which suffering must be explained away. Eventually, if not corrected, it looks for bodies. > That is why Socrates still matters. > > Not because Socrates had final answers. > > Because he refused final immunity. > No ruler is above criticism. > > No party is above criticism. > > No state is above criticism. > > No prophet, priest, book, tradition, nation, liberation movement, university, expert, victim-group, or sacred origin is above criticism. And no human being should be reduced to the false theory they currently believe. This is the moral center of my work. Persons must be protected absolutely. Ideas must remain exposed. If we reverse that order, we will protect the cage in the name of protecting the prisoner. A society that worships certainty will eventually sacrifice people to protected error. A society that protects criticism may still make terrible mistakes. But it preserves the only peaceful means by which mistakes can be found before they become sacred. The Open Society exists so that theories may die before people do. That is why I wrote *When Parochial Error Goes Global*. And that is why I believe this conversation matters. **References** Amnesty International. “Targeting Civilians: Murder, Hostage-Taking and Other Violations by Palestinian Armed Groups in Israel and Gaza.” Amnesty International USA, 2024\. https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/targeting-civilians-murder-hostage-taking-and-other-violations-by-palestinian-armed-groups-in-israel-and-gaza/ Britannica. “October 7 Attack.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/October-7-attack Bronowski, Jacob. *The Ascent of Man*. Episode 11, “Knowledge or Certainty.” BBC, 1973. Community Security Trust. Antisemitic Incidents Report 2023\. 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