Global Dialogues

This essay was selected as one of three winners of the 2025 Georgetown Global Dialogues Student Essay Contest. 

Cruelty doesn’t require tanks or tyrants. It flourishes in quieter ways: a law recast as “efficiency” that punishes poverty, a school policy that disciplines Black and Brown students most harshly, a headline that erases the humanity of refugees in the name of “objectivity.” These are not exceptions but habits. Cruelty becomes ordinary, stitched into governance, classrooms, neighborhoods, even the idle flick of a scrolling thumb. (And even I am not exempt.) The danger is not only in the spectacle of brute force but in the ordinary rituals that disguise it.

The language of strength makes this palatable. A century after Social Darwinism was discredited, its logic resurfaces in the meritocratic mantra: the strong deserve to win, the weak deserve to fall behind. Hyper-masculinity is packaged as “decisiveness.” Domination rebrands itself as “leadership.” Aggression struts as authority. In reality, governance that humiliates corrodes the very trust it relies on. Real strength lies not in crushing, but in protecting.

To recognize cruelty, we must identify and name its subtler forms. The asylum seeker stalled for years in a labyrinth of paperwork. The student suspended for defiance while their wealthier peer is praised for “assertiveness.” The social feed that thrives on outrage and rewards humiliation with clicks. Accepting these as normal is not neutrality; it is complicity. And complicity, multiplied millions of times over, is what gives cruelty its staying power.

Skeptics argue compassion cannot scale, that politics cannot run on empathy. And structurally, it can’t. But cruelty is a fragile thing: it corrodes institutions, hollows communities, and demands escalating violence to sustain itself. Compassion endures. It generates resilience rather than suspicion, stability rather than fear.

There is another way—although slightly corny: love made structural, not sentimental. Compassion rendered as policy, not charity: healthcare that heals without bankrupting, housing that guarantees stability, schools funded equitably across zip codes. Add to this labor protections that honor dignity, climate action that treats survival as non-negotiable, immigration systems that welcome before they surveil. Care is not weakness. It is strength—measured not by spectacle but by sustenance, not by how loudly it asserts itself but by how deeply it holds.

History proves this is possible. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, imperfect but real, created space for accountability after apartheid. Post-Katrina mutual aid networks rebuilt neighborhoods the state abandoned. Queer communities forged in the fire of HIV stigma transformed grief into infrastructures of care that still sustain people today. And in the present, climate justice coalitions are knitting together indigenous leadership, scientific expertise, and grassroots organizing to imagine survival rooted in solidarity rather than extraction. Again and again, compassion institutionalized has reshaped societies.

To call out cruelty, then, is not only to condemn it. It is to live otherwise, legislate otherwise, to plant care where cruelty has rooted itself. At a time when brute force is livestreamed, monetized, and paraded as authority, compassion is not naïve—it is insurgent.

Jacob Gardner (C'29) is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgetown University.