One of the basic findings of psychology is that wherever strong emotions are involved, it becomes very difficult for us to observe a conflict with any degree of balance. We instinctively want to take a clear position: one side bears most of the blame, but the other is rarely without fault.
We are drawn to a simple moral picture—a clean victim–perpetrator relationship. We tend to attribute almost unlimited agency to the perpetrator, while denying the victim any meaningful agency at all. At the same time, we assign the capacity for suffering exclusively to the victim, and view the perpetrator as someone largely devoid of human feeling.
The economist Arnold Kling captures this tendency with a striking metaphor: the robot and the small child.
Consider the example of rape. In real life, it encompasses a wide spectrum of situations. At one end are cases where a modestly dressed woman is returning home from work, takes a reasonably safe route, gives no cause whatsoever—and is nevertheless attacked and raped. At the other end are situations where factors such as provocative clothing or ambiguous signals may play some role, and further along still are cases involving various forms of provocation. At the extreme opposite pole lies a scenario in which a woman enters a man’s hotel room, undresses, and then refuses sex.
From a strictly technical standpoint, all of these may fall under the same legal category. Yet intuitively we recognize that they are not the same. To collapse them into a single moral category—as some activist arguments encourage—would be profoundly unjust to the woman who was simply returning home from work.
But once emotions take hold, these distinctions tend to disappear. What remains is a stark binary: victim and perpetrator, total guilt and zero guilt—the robot and the child. In such a climate, even a mild observation—that, for example, confronting armed agents in a tense and dangerous situation is unwise—can provoke an overwhelmingly hostile reaction.
The same dynamic applies in international affairs. Once emotions dominate, states are quickly sorted into aggressors and victims—though different observers will disagree on which is which.
This is not to say that clear-cut cases of aggression and victimhood never exist. The point is more modest: whenever we find ourselves viewing the world in such stark, simplified terms, it is a signal that caution is in order.