When Conviction Outruns Knowledge: Why Morals Mean Nothing Without Maps
Dad taught me the most important political lesson of my life back in freshman year.
I had just read an article about the French military’s withdrawal from West Africa, and I was convinced it was a disastrous mistake that would leave power vacuums in Mali. For twenty minutes, I lectured Dad on my newfound expertise in West African geopolitics. He didn’t shut me down. Instead, he asked one question:
“Bruce, what’s the capital of Mali?”
I had no idea.
At first, the point seemed simple: don’t debate a place you can’t even find on a map. But the geography test was only the surface. The deeper danger was the confidence with which I argued despite being detached from the most basic level of knowledge. That same detachment still fuels much of today’s discourse: modern issues are instantly moralized into opinions, and convictions are formed faster than facts are learned. My own bandwagoning wasn’t just embarrassing: it showed how conviction unmoored from knowledge can be reckless.
This danger is not unique to fifteen-year-old Bruce; it’s been around for generations. During the Iraq war, millions of students took to the streets, marching passionately for or against U.S. involvement. Yet surveys from that era revealed that only a third of Americans could locate Iraq on a map, even as 177,000 American soldiers were deployed there. Protest without context is not new, for it has been the soundtrack of modern geopolitics.
“Pull quote”
Of course, passion is understandable. You don’t need a map to grieve for bloodshed. But when grief hardens into slogans and movements that claim political authority, ignorance carries consequences. Geography doesn’t replace morality, but in geopolitical conflicts, geography grounds everything—including morality. Without knowing borders, rivers, and cities, one cannot understand why conflicts happen, ceasefires fail, and why people die. Without that grounding, democratic debates risk being hijacked by emotion, leaving leaders to respond to chants rather than facts.
Consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by far one of the most polarizing campus issues in recent years. Between October 2023 and May 2024, over 500 U.S. universities saw pro-Palestinian protests; many of these protests have been countered by equally vocal pro-Israeli rallies. These rallies see students on both sides hold hand-painted cardboard signs boldly proclaiming trendy slogans like “from the river to the sea” or “Am Yisrael Chai (Hebrew for ‘the people of Israel live’)”. The former chant, in particular, is rooted in geography: the “river” and “sea” refer to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an area encompassing Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Interpretations of the slogan vary: some view it as a call for peace and equality, while others see it as an antisemitic demand for Israel’s destruction. In every case, it remains deeply charged—yet a 2023 Jerusalem Post poll found that less than half of respondents could identify the Jordan River or the Mediterranean Sea in that first chant. Street interviews with protestors revealed similar gaps: some described the phrase as “self-explanatory,” while others admitted they “weren’t sure”. A slogan this charged, repeated without understanding, risks flaming divisions more than informing debate. When the loudest campus slogans make their way into national politics, they can mislead policymakers, who must weigh real trade-offs against symbolic populist calls disconnected from geopolitics or strategy.
Social media has only exacerbated the oversimplifying of context and facts. On TikTok or Instagram, snappy slogans (bonus points for alliteration or rhyming), passionate protest scenes, and heart-wrenching conflict zone footage can reach global audiences and stir hearts in just mere hours. Yet the speed, simplicity, and emotional appeal that make social media clips so powerful also strip away the context that give these slogans their meaning. Clips that gain views are fragments that strip away nuance, leaving passion unmoored from knowledge. We can see how dangerous this becomes in policymaking: in 2024, after Spain’s labor minister declared that “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” Israel’s foreign minister retaliated by banning the Spanish consulate in Jerusalem from serving Palestinians. This slogan, when repeated and interpreted differently at the highest levels, snowballed into punitive diplomatic policy. In democratic systems, especially, such shallow discourse doesn’t just shape street rallies—it can distort legislative processes and foreign policy votes that produce consequences that long outlast the protests themselves.
As the word itself suggests, geopolitics begins with geography: one cannot possibly understand the historic, cultural, religious, or ethical complexities that people die for without understanding the objective lay of the land. Making reels that denounce or defend Israeli control of the West Bank is easy, but those opinions remain baseless without recognizing that West Bank hilltops provide commanding high-ground positions overlooking Tel Aviv—a mere fifteen kilometers away (easily checkable on Google Maps). Likewise, supporting Russian or Ukrainian claims to Crimea is easy, but those claims mean little without acknowledging the significance of the warm-water port of Sevastopol for the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The same is true for chants about the South China Sea, Kashmir, or other flashpoints. Geography, in other words, is not incidental but fundamental to understanding why the conflict endures, and by extension, why lives are lost.
Looking back on the fifteen-year-old Bruce who once held strong opinions on Mali, I can understand why people might feel strongly about these conflicts without being able to pinpoint them. One heart-wrenching picture of suffering and destruction in Ukraine, Sudan, or Gaza can push the human brain from logic to pure passion. But whilst convictions formed on passion are understandable, they fail to acknowledge the very nature of geopolitics as a cold, Machiavellian, and sometimes dirty affair. Idealistic chants may sound beautiful, but blind calls for justice, peace, or equality ring empty when context is missing. In geopolitics, the first layer of that context is basic geography.
I still believe that everyone has the right to maintain their opinion. But sharing opinions without knowledge is not only embarrassing but downright dangerous. My embarrassment over Mali was the best political education I’ve ever had, because it taught me the cold, hard truth: nothing is so urgent, no viewpoint so authentic, that we can afford to abandon facts.