When things go wrong we assume people have not done what they know is right. Sometimes this is true.

But sometimes things go wrong because people want to do exactly what they know is right, when the reality they are acting into does not afford such exactitude.

Out of a desire for moral clarity, for clean definition of right and wrong, for unambiguous, algorithmic rules of conduct — upstanding citizens can become fanatics and reduce reality so far that it becomes brittle. It becomes necessary for such people to aggressively shut out all sources of ambiguity. It is necessary to close their ears to the full testimony of their senses, to the ramifications of reason, and to the objections and appeals of their neighbor — and in effect, they make the mind a place of its own, a heaven-fortress of faith which protects the faithful from everything that conflicts with it: the realities that transcend the facts of the faith.