On October 7, 2023, Hamas murdered 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages. Within hours, student groups at universities issued statements praising the attack. As the months passed, despite the atrocities being filmed by Hamas, some, including Rama Duwaji, the first lady of New York City, denied that the atrocities even took place.
Hamas sympathizers are sure they are champions of the oppressed. They march under banners of human rights, social justice, and liberation.
Yet on college campuses, Jewish students are harassed, isolated, and intimidated by those “decent” protesters.
C.S. Lewis wouldn’t have been surprised. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis provided biting commentary on the mode of operation of the ego—the noisy narrator in the mind of each of us that believes everyone else is a mere object in its drama. In the format of letters, Lewis, through the voice of a senior devil, explains the reliable methods for corrupting individuals.
In Letter 6, the senior devil observes, “Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul.”
So what does our ego do to preserve its fantasy that we are good people even when we are malicious? The senior devil reveals that the ego can direct its “malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day, and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know.” The result is that “The malice then becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”
The desire to be seen as virtuous distorts our behavior. As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “Noisily declaring oneself to be ‘For Palestine’ is little more than a proclamation of one’s decency, one’s fitness for membership of the cultural in-group.”
In the “Free Palestine” movement, Screwtape's formula has been perfectly executed. The benevolence—for the Palestinians of Gaza, for the global oppressed, for “humanity” in the abstract—is largely imaginary. The malice toward the Jewish student in the next dormitory room is wholly real.
Reason Is the Last to Know
To understand how people animated by declared love for humanity become agents of hatred toward their neighbors, David Hume’s work is most instructive.
Hume cuts through every do-gooder's self-narrative in his A Treatise of Human Nature. He saw clearly that passion arrives first. Reason follows, selecting evidence, constructing arguments, and dismissing objections, all in the service of passion.
One of Hume’s most famous observations corrects our misunderstanding: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
The do-gooder cannot be corrected by evidence. Reason, as Hume said, serves passion; it does not evaluate passion.
The student who believes he is reasoning his way to justice for the oppressed has the sequence backward. His outrage came first.
Hume observed that passion itself spreads by sympathy. Humans have a propensity “to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.” The passion jumps from person to person, growing more intense with each transmission.
A movement is not a collection of people who have independently reached the same conclusion. Hume explained in his An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals that once the crowd is inflamed, almost no one can resist its amplified message.
Within minutes of arriving at a protest, students who have never thought carefully about the Middle East find themselves certain of the source of the conflict. They feel they have moral clarity, but Hume called it “the common blaze.”
In a footnote to Section V in his Enquiry, Hume explains that good intentions are not enough: “In our real feeling or sentiment, we cannot help paying greater regard to one whose station, joined to virtue, renders him really useful to society, than to one, who exerts the social virtues only in good intentions and benevolent affections.”
Hume further makes his point: “Why is this peach-tree said to be better than that other, but because it produces more or better fruit? ... In morals too, is not the tree known by the fruit?”
The student who has marched at every rally, signed every petition, and posted every correct sentiment, while making the Jewish student in his residence hall afraid to wear her Star of David, has not done anything good. He has produced the opposite of goodness by diminishing the liberty of Jewish students.
By 2025, only 50 percent of Jewish students felt comfortable with others on campus knowing they are Jewish. The movement that claimed to oppose oppression had produced a population of students afraid to identify themselves.
The Man of System
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith described what he called the “man of system”—the reformer so “enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan” that “he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.”
The man of system “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”
Chess pieces have no will of their own. Human beings do. When the reformer's design runs against how actual people actually behave, Smith wrote, “the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”
On college campuses, to the activist, the student who declines to denounce Israel is not a person with legitimate reasons for her views. She is a piece that is not moving in the right direction.
Here is where abstract benevolence becomes a threat to liberty. Smith explains the conceited man of system “goes on to establish it [his plan] completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.” When persuasion fails, force follows.
The genuine reformer, prompted by “humanity and benevolence,” Smith contrasts, “will not attempt to subdue them by force.” He works within the grain of human reality, moderating “rooted prejudices” in others by first seeing his own irrational passions.
The man of system has no such patience; he has no time for his own inner work. His plan is too beautiful to be slowed by recalcitrant people.
When the pieces do not move, the “man of system” presses harder. The liberty of Jewish students to speak freely has not been a collateral casualty of the “free Palestine” movement. It has been a direct target.
Malice Becomes Wholly Real
The do-gooder’s benevolence flows outward, toward the abstract, distant, imagined beneficiary who will never disappoint because he will never actually be encountered. Thus, gays in America can proclaim their solidarity with Hamas while being unaware of how they would be treated in Gaza.
The passionate reformer is precisely the person least able to consult what Smith called the “impartial spectator”—that internalized judge who evaluates our own conduct from a disinterested distance. The impartial spectator might ask: How does what I advocate impact the people I encounter each day? The mindlessly passionate student might answer, The question is, how do I apply decolonization theory to what is happening far away?
Smith’s “impartial spectator” is an internal check on our passions, a tool of self-government that “do-gooders” often abandon.
The activist whose passion flows toward abstractions will always find reasons to override the liberty of the neighbor who does not fit the plan.
Abstract benevolence, without respect for individual rights, produces Hume’s “common blaze” that scorches those who stand in its way.
The question is not whether we love humanity. The question is whether we love and defend the liberty of the person in front of us. The person who will not govern his own passions will inevitably attempt to govern others.