Don’t Hand Your Mind to the Loudest Person

Violence doesn’t just break bodies.
It tests minds.

There’s always a moment after something brutal happens where thinking becomes optional. Fear rises faster than understanding. Anger looks for a target. And before you’ve had time to sit with what’s actually occurred, someone else is already offering you certainty.

They’re loud.
They’re confident.
They know exactly who’s to blame.

That’s usually when the real danger begins.....not with the act itself, but with what follows when we stop holding our own minds.

I felt the pull myself.

Over the last few days since Bondi, the reactions came thick and fast. Opinions hardened almost instantly. Rage disguised as clarity. Fear disguised as truth. Entire groups collapsed into single labels, as if complexity itself had become suspicious.

Everyone seems very sure.

And whenever certainty arrives that quickly, it’s worth slowing down.

Because clarity that skips reflection is rarely clarity at all.....it’s just emotion moving at speed.

The human instinct in moments like this is ancient. When something frightening happens, we simplify. We draw lines. We look for a single cause, a single face, a single explanation that lets us exhale.

But the world doesn’t work that way.

Violence doesn’t emerge from one source. It forms where belief, grievance, identity, and circumstance overlap.....shaped by history, pressure, humiliation, and the stories people tell themselves about who they are and what they’re owed.

Reducing that complexity to a religion, a race, or a culture might feel satisfying, but satisfaction is not the same as truth.

Collective blame has always been the shortcut of frightened societies.

Religion is often dragged into these moments because belief runs deep. It touches identity, belonging, meaning. But belief itself is not the danger. Fanaticism is....the moment certainty hardens into righteousness, and righteousness gives permission to dehumanise.

Most people of faith are not violent.
Most people, full stop, are not violent.

They’re trying to raise children, earn a living, and make sense of a complicated world.....just like you.

There’s another truth that rarely survives the noise, and it’s uncomfortable for people on all sides the people most often killed by Muslim extremism are Muslims themselves. Entire communities caught between radicals on one side and suspicion on the other. Families who want nothing to do with violence, yet live in its shadow.

That fact doesn’t excuse anything.....but it does change who we imagine the enemy to be. Extremism doesn’t protect faith. It consumes it.

When violence occurs, it is almost always driven by a narrow few who fuse grievance with ideology and find belonging in certainty rather than conscience.

To mistake them for the whole is not insight. It’s intellectual laziness dressed up as strength.

What makes moments like this more volatile now is that we don’t encounter them in silence.

We meet them inside media systems designed to reward outrage. Platforms that amplify emotion over accuracy. Narratives that spread not because they’re true, but because they’re contagious.

Fear travels faster than facts.
Anger travels further than nuance.

And somewhere in that acceleration, responsibility slips away. Thinking gets outsourced. The loudest voice doesn’t win because it’s right.....it wins because it’s relentless.

Living true means resisting that pull.

It means holding positions that are harder, heavier, and less emotionally convenient.

It means recognising that two things can be true at once:

• Violence can be unequivocally wrong without defining an entire people.
• Communities deserve protection without innocent bystanders becoming collateral.
• History and geopolitics matter without excusing brutality in the present.

If your position can’t hold more than one truth at a time, it’s not a position....it’s a slogan.

And slogans don’t build anything worth standing on.

The deeper risk after events like this isn’t just further violence.

It’s what happens quietly, internally, when fear reshapes perception. When suspicion replaces curiosity. When certainty replaces humility. When we stop asking questions and start repeating answers we didn’t arrive at ourselves.

That’s how division normalises. Not overnight.....but thought by thought.

So before you share the next Facebook article, post, or opinion, it’s worth sitting with a few questions.....not to weaken your stance, but to strengthen your integrity:

What emotion is driving my certainty right now....fear, anger, or the need to belong?
Am I blaming a whole group because it feels cleaner than sitting with uncertainty?
What fact would genuinely challenge my view.....and have I gone looking for it?

These questions don’t make you passive. They make you accountable.

Violence thrives in simplicity.
Extremism feeds on certainty.
And fear is always looking for someone else to carry it.

So don’t hand your mind to the loudest person in the room.

Hold it yourself.
Think slowly.
Aim your anger at actions.....not identities.

That’s how a man stays grounded when the world is trying to pull him apart.
And that’s how a society stays human when it would be easier not to.