From Moral Inquiry to Moral Certainty: On Art, Activism, and Roger Waters

I recently watched an episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored featuring Roger Waters, and what initially drew me in out of curiosity left me deeply unsettled. Not because Waters expressed controversial views - that in itself is nothing new - but because the interview exposed a profound contradiction between the values he claims to uphold and the positions he actually defends. For me, it marked a moment where admiration for a monumental artist collided with serious doubts about the man he has become.

There is no question that Roger Waters helped create some of the most intelligent, psychologically astute, and enduring works in popular music. His lyrics were never naïve or starry-eyed. On the contrary, they were often brutally honest about human nature, power, ideology, and mass psychology. Albums like The Wall and Animals did not offer comforting moral binaries. They warned against them. They explored how trauma curdles into cruelty, how righteous movements can turn authoritarian, and how easily individuals surrender their moral agency to grand narratives.

Those lyrics mattered to me personally. They helped me see reality more clearly and free myself from simplistic idealism. They taught me to distrust easy moral certainty and to recognize how power hides behind language, symbols, and collective emotion. In that sense, Waters’ work was not an instruction manual for political positions, but a training in skepticism - a defense against manipulation.

That is precisely why his current public posture feels so dissonant.

In interviews, including the one with Piers Morgan, Waters presents himself as an easy-going, down-to-earth figure - calm, plain-spoken, almost avuncular. Yet when challenged, this façade quickly gives way to dogmatism. He does not engage opposing arguments in good faith. He dismisses them as ignorance, propaganda, or moral failure. Disagreement is not treated as legitimate; it is treated as evidence that the other person simply “doesn’t understand.”

This is where narcissism becomes visible - not the flamboyant kind, but the quieter, more insidious form rooted in moral self-certainty. Waters does not argue his case; he pronounces it. He positions himself as someone who sees through illusions others are trapped in, while remaining immune himself. There is no epistemic humility, no acknowledgment of complexity, and no willingness to apply his own skepticism inward.

The most troubling aspect, however, is his stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine. Waters has shown open sympathy for Putin’s narrative, framing the invasion as a consequence of NATO expansion and Western provocation, while placing responsibility for the war almost entirely on the West. In doing so, he minimizes - or effectively erases - the agency of the aggressor.

This is not a matter of geopolitical nuance. Russia’s invasion is a war of conquest accompanied by documented war crimes: mass deportations, torture, attacks on civilians, destruction of infrastructure, and attempts to erase Ukrainian identity. To blame these crimes on NATO is not anti-war analysis; it is moral displacement. It shifts responsibility away from the perpetrator and transforms accountability into abstraction.

Even more disturbing is the denial of Ukrainian subjectivity. Ukraine appears in this worldview not as a sovereign nation with agency and rights, but as a pawn in a great-power struggle. Ironically, this mirrors the imperial logic of Putin himself - the very logic Waters claims to oppose.

The same pattern appears in his alignment with other authoritarian regimes hostile to the West, including the Islamic Republic of Iran. Waters speaks the language of universal human rights while excusing or relativizing regimes that systematically violate them. Human rights, in this framework, are no longer universal; they are conditional, applied rigorously to Western actors and selectively elsewhere.

This is where the broader mindset of parts of the “Free Palestine” movement becomes visible. Opposition to the West has replaced consistent moral standards. Israel, as a Western-aligned democracy, is judged by maximal criteria, while its adversaries are stripped of agency and responsibility. Support for Israel - even in centrist or humanitarian terms - increasingly functions as a litmus test that leads to ostracization in cultural and activist spaces. Moral complexity is treated as betrayal.

What makes all of this especially painful is that Waters once understood these dangers better than most. His art warned against ideological rigidity, moral grandiosity, and the seductive power of righteous crowds. Yet today, he seems unable or unwilling to apply those insights to himself. The critique has been externalized. Others are blind; others are corrupted; others are morally compromised.

I do not believe this negates the value of his work. On the contrary, the clarity his lyrics once offered remains intact - perhaps even more so. In a strange and uncomfortable way, it is precisely because I took his art seriously that I now recognize the contradictions in his activism. The work taught me to resist simplifications, including those offered by its creator.

So I find myself holding two truths at once: deep respect for Roger Waters as an artist, and serious concern about Roger Waters as a public moral voice. That tension is not a failure of judgment; it is a sign of intellectual honesty. And perhaps that is the final, unintended lesson his art left me with - that insight must remain self-critical, or it hardens into the very illusion it once exposed.