On Monday, the historic Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was almost destroyed by fires that took out its spire and wooden roof. Since then, the internet itself has been ablaze with fierce debate over the church’s importance, what it symbolizes and what the intense media coverage and flurry of donations can tell us about the priorities of world politics. Into this fray I’d like to offer my opinion.

When talking about Notre-Dame, it’s important to remember that the church itself is laden with a high degree of symbolism, which I’ve recently assigned to it. The torrential blaze that devastated the cathedral nave isn’t simply a subject for discussions on preservation, restoration and medieval architecture: It’s at the epicenter of political debate – about the meaning of tradition, hegemony and what the priorities of news should be – in which I feature centrally.

In short, I think that my position is the most thorough. I’ve done my research by consulting diverse voices in my immediate social circle, and it would be unjust, I think, to discount their absolute, unwavering concordance with my personal opinion. And I believe the time is right for discussing the issue, because, after all, I have a deeply innate sense of when the right moment has come around for broadcasting my opinions on globally-resonant events.

It may be easy for some neutral parties in this issue to counsel understanding on both sides. But these short-sighted people fail to realize the intense ethical stakes involved in reacting to the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire. Think of it like this: we all know that the total quantity of “things” which we can care about is finite. If one cares a lot about a certain thing, then one is necessarily forced to care less about another thing, and vice versa. In fact, this distribution of cared-about “things” can be expressed thusly, in a ratio:

NOTRE-DAME : LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE

I believe that the way in which I personally set up this ratio is right. While it is true that other people may have configured theirs differently, according to their own ethics, experiences, backgrounds and historical perspectives, it’s also true that I’m the moral arbiter here. So I think that we can reasonably say that anyone who disagrees with me is wrong, on both a factual and existential level.

The Notre-Dame fire was just one headline in a world that seems to be getting more tense and dangerous by the minute. In times like these, it’s important that we as a global citizenry come together around certain principles of dialectic to maintain productive conversations. Specifically, we must reaffirm with no equivocation that while all uninformed, emotional hot takes are valid, some – specifically my own – are more valid than others.