The moral operating system shaping our children should terrify us

Every generation eventually decides what truths its children will inherit. But long before they know the details of history, they inherit the moral framework through which history itself will eventually be understood.

This week, I was reminded just how much that matters, and the reminder came from the unlikeliest of places.

A concert in Tampa Bay.

At first glance, it looked like every other arena show. Tens of thousands of fans, phones held aloft, a global superstar making his way through the crowd. Then your eye catches the sign.

“YE IS NOT CRAZY.”

Beneath those words is a Star of David with a line drawn through it.

The image isn’t disturbing because Kanye West is an antisemite; we already knew that. It isn’t disturbing because he praised Hitler; we already knew that too. Nor because he declared he wanted to go to “Death Con 3 on Jewish people”. That is already part of the public record.

The disturbing part is the sign. Someone took the time to make it, someone carried it into the arena, someone held it proudly above their head. Not despite Kanye’s hatred of Jews, because of it.

Perhaps no public figure better illustrates the inversion of reality than Kanye West. Had he targeted almost any other minority with the same hatred, there would have been no redemption tour to celebrate, no sold-out arenas, no global brands quietly moving on, quietly moving back in.

Yet antisemitism has once again become the one prejudice that increasingly requires neither apology nor rehabilitation before millions are prepared to excuse it, contextualise it or even celebrate it.

The obvious question isn’t whether Kanye West is an antisemite; he is. The question is how a society reaches the point where antisemitism can once again be tolerated.

The answer lies far deeper than one celebrity, one concert or one moment in time. It lies in the moral operating system we have spent years passing to the next generation.

Children don’t inherit facts; they inherit frameworks through which they are taught to see the world. The most powerful ideas are rarely the ones we’re taught; they are the ones we stop questioning. That is how every moral operating system succeeds. Not by persuading us to reject facts, but by teaching us which facts matter, which facts can safely be ignored and, eventually, which facts no longer feel true because they don’t fit the framework we’ve inherited.

That operating system determines which facts deserve attention, which facts deserve scepticism, who deserves sympathy, and who deserves suspicion.

The moment a framework becomes more important than the facts, reality itself becomes negotiable.

Reality should shape our framework. Instead, our framework increasingly shapes what we are prepared to accept as reality.

That is the inversion of reality.

Every civilisation passes two things to the next generation. Its history and the framework through which that history will be understood. Get the second wrong, and eventually the first no longer matters.

Every form of racism deserves to be confronted; every minority has experienced hatred, but antisemitism has always occupied a unique place. Not because Jews are uniquely deserving of protection, but because antisemitism has repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary ability to reinvent itself.

Throughout history, it disguised itself as religion, then as race, then as economics. Today, it increasingly disguises itself as justice, anti-colonialism, resistance, and speaking truth to power. It is perhaps the only form of racism that attracts explanation before condemnation and justification before shame.

Why?

Because the moral operating system through which many people now interpret the world has already decided where power resides.

Once power has been assigned, virtue often follows automatically. The world becomes neatly divided into oppressors and oppressed, good and bad, victim and aggressor. The framework comes first; reality is expected to follow, and when reality refuses to cooperate, it is the facts, not the framework, that are increasingly expected to change.

Take 1948 and one particular element of the creation of the State of Israel. Most students today will learn about the Nakba and the displacement, for many reasons, of Palestinians that accompanied it. Far fewer will learn about the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries in the years surrounding Israel’s establishment.

Both events shaped the Middle East we know today. Yet one has become central to our cultural understanding while the other is entirely absent.

The point isn’t that one history should replace the other. It is that the stories we choose to emphasise inevitably shape the framework through which later generations interpret everything that follows.

Education is never neutral; every curriculum makes choices. Every syllabus decides what deserves emphasis, what deserves a footnote and what can be omitted altogether. Those choices don’t simply shape what children know; they shape how children think.

The purpose of education is not to decide which conclusions children should reach. It is to equip them with the intellectual confidence to reach conclusions honestly, even when those conclusions challenge the prevailing orthodoxy.

Education should encourage curiosity over certainty, questions over slogans, and evidence over assumptions. History is complicated; it is contradictory; it rarely offers the comfort of simple heroes and simple villains. The moment we teach children that every conflict can be understood primarily through the binary of oppressor and oppressed, we stop teaching them how to think and begin teaching them what to think.

Schools are where that operating system is first installed. Algorithms reinforce it, social media reflects it back, universities intellectualise it, culture rewards it, and politics exploits it. By early adulthood, what began as one lens through which to understand the world has, for many, become the only lens through which they are capable of understanding it.

7 October did not create that moral operating system; it exposed it. Not because the victims were Jewish, but because the acts themselves should have been beyond moral debate. Women were raped, children murdered, families burnt alive, grandparents kidnapped, and babies taken hostage.

The first question should have been painfully simple. Was this evil? Instead, for too many people and institutions, another question appeared to come first.

Who holds the power? Who are the oppressors? Who are the oppressed?

History, context, and power – they all matter. Every one of those conversations has its place, but none of them should come before the most fundamental question of all. Was it evil?

7 October revealed what happens when an inherited framework collides with facts that refuse to fit neatly inside it. Rather than allowing the facts to challenge the framework, too many people attempted to reinterpret the facts until they fit the framework instead.

That is the inversion of reality.

It wasn’t simply a failure to stand with Israel. It was a failure to defend the universal moral principles upon which every liberal democracy depends.

Over the weekend, I listened to Katharine Birbalsingh describe what she believes is the defining challenge facing Western society. Whether or not you agree with every conclusion she reaches, she articulated something I have been trying to define for many months.

She argues that we are increasingly teaching children to interpret the world through the binary of oppressor and oppressed. This lens enforces a framework which concludes that power before principle, identity before behaviour and grievance before responsibility become one’s defining principles.

Power exists, and oppression exists; every child should understand both. But power should inform moral judgement; it should never replace it.

The moment identity becomes the starting point for ethics, we stop asking, “What happened?” We begin asking, “Who did it?” We stop examining evidence; we start confirming narratives.

That isn’t simply a political shift; it is a civilisational one.

I have three children. Like many parents, I worry every day about the world they are inheriting. Increasingly, though, I worry even more about the moral operating system through which they are being taught to understand it.

The battle for our children’s moral compass is no longer fought simply between right and wrong. It is fought between competing moral operating systems.

Schools, social media and peer groups dominate our children’s attention and time. Parents get the dinner table, the drive to school and the conversation before bed, and that’s if we’re lucky. The odds are stacked against us.

This is precisely why we cannot outsource moral education. Our responsibility isn’t to tell our children what to think; it is to teach them how to think. To ask difficult questions, follow evidence wherever it leads, distinguish explanation from justification, judge actions before identities, and have the confidence to challenge their own tribe when truth demands it.

If we fail to do that, someone else will gladly do it for us, and they may not share our values.

I spend much of my time thinking about culture: how it is built, how it is maintained, how it is adapted. Culture is never created by values written on a wall; it is created by the behaviours leaders reward, excuse and tolerate.

The same is true of societies.

Every generation inherits a moral operating system. Whether consciously or not, we all contribute to the one that follows. Which brings me back to that photograph, not Kanye, but the sign.

One day the young person holding it may become a teacher, or a journalist, or a politician, or a CEO, or, perhaps most importantly, a parent, and the moral operating system they carry will become the one they pass on.

Our responsibility is bigger than winning arguments, bigger than politics, bigger than this generation. Every civilisation is only ever one generation away from forgetting why it believes what it believes.

That is why this matters. Not because our children should think like us, but because they should inherit the confidence to challenge every framework, including our own, when the facts demand it.

If we fail to give them that confidence, they won’t inherit truth. They’ll inherit whatever moral operating system we were too afraid to confront. The one being pushed upon them in this generation has the potential to destroy the Western values which underpin our very society.

That is the inheritance worth fighting for, relentlessly, unashamedly.

Truth and courage before comfort and equivocation.

• Leo Pearlman is the CEO of Fulwell Entertainment