Global Dialogues

A phrase coined by the writer Adam Serwer in 2018 encapsulated the one binding rationale of the first Donald Trump administration: “the cruelty is the point”. It was a contemporary epiphany about an age-old mode of politics which vests dominant groups with the power over weaker ones. There can be no supremacy without subordination, and so disparate forms of national obsessions with curbing the rights of, or even purging, religious and racial minorities are about little more than putting people in their place. The cruelty is the point. 

Whether it is the persecution of Muslims in India, the stifling of free speech across the Western world of pro-Palestine opinions, or the drastic, immediately tragic cuts to USAID, these phenomena are to be seen not as policies with specific political goals, but rather a crackdown to maintain and emphasize political and racial hierarchies. What distinguishes these different manifestations of performative marginalization is how the impulse has become popularized and coded within popular discourse, not just political action. 

Part of the way that popularization has taken root is through the algorithm. “Social media” is too inaccurate a term, collapsing many platforms which are not individually similar or all corrosive. But the algorithm—a rapidly adjusting curation of content that is geared towards shares, engagement, and stirring of emotions—lives in almost all online content that has a public square element. The result has been a booster channel for not just divisive politicians, but all manner of engagement entrepreneurs and cruelty merchants, who have made grants and monetized provocation. Elon Musk is perhaps the most vivid example, both a man with a political role in Trump’s administration, and an online presence that is pitched at amplifying, and therefore blessing with the imprimatur of truth, all sorts of content that stirs racial tension.

Cruelty thrives in atomization and silos. And what is most striking about modernity is how we increasingly interface with each other not in physical spaces, but virtual ones, where our ability to make our own judgements and human connections is limited. The ease with which one can then dismiss and demonize others in these spaces becomes gamified, rendering cruelty almost akin to a competitive sport. 

In some Western economies, physical spaces in which people can gather have been effaced or prevented from emerging due to austerity and the diminishment of the public realm. Instead of government funded youth clubs, thriving labor unions, and neighborhood support groups, there are now only online chambers. And as urbanization grew in many parts of the global south, the free public space, or the low rent working man’s club, has become a lucrative site for the property developer. Not even green spaces, from Nairobi to Cairo, are surviving, depriving such cities’ inhabitants from even a sense that there is some claim to the land in which they live, and a right to play, sit, or breathe for free. 

The result is an oppressive sense of exhaustion and scarcity, which, in a loop, then feeds feelings of resentment towards others people are told are responsible for that state of shortage. Immigrants, entitled minorities, refugees, women who won’t give men the relief they need because they refuse to stay home and tend to the children. A resurgent machismo nourished by an increasingly stressed and hectic existence becomes the top of this pyramid of cruelty, everyone below exists in a cascade of protagonists who must submit. The power and license that comes from that is potent. 

It is nothing short of a miracle, then, that in such conditions, compassion, bravery, and insistence of seeing the humanity of others still prospers. And when it does so, it always finds expression in the real world. I always think of the similarities of all the revolutionary spaces I have experienced across the Arab World, and how they are all identical in their overflow of solidarity, kindness, and artistic expression. I found strong echoes of that in student protests for Gaza across campuses in the U.K. and the U.S. last year, as well as anti-racist counter protests to far-right rallies in the U.K. this summer. The onslaught of cruelty and its methods is formidable, but it is a warping of human nature, rather than the natural expression of it. A simple way through its snowstorm is simply, whenever possible, find others, and be with them.

Nesrine Malik is a journalist and critic who explores issues of race, identity, politics, and world affairs.