Global Dialogues

Our institutions systematically select for and reward the cruelest among us. This is not an accident of human nature or a failure of individual morality, but by design. Contemporary society has built systems that treat empathy as weakness and elevate those who can inflict suffering while remaining detached from its consequences. The hyper-masculine culture identified in the prompt is only one face of a deeper problem. The real issue is not masculine versus feminine leadership, but institutional structures that reward exclusion over inclusion.

Cruelty continues through systemic design, at which point it enters into individual psychology. Schools embody a “power-as-elimination” model: many charter schools advertise success while suspending or expelling struggling students, private schools exclude by way of exorbitant fees, and magnet programs concentrate resources on those who already test well. Executives frame mass layoffs as inevitable—Elon Musk’s firings at Twitter or Hewlett-Packard’s “restructuring” in 2015 were celebrated as efficiency even as executives collected bonuses, repeating a decades-long pattern where destroying livelihoods is recast as leadership. Politicians enforce family separation in the name of principle, from the Trump administration’s 2018 “zero tolerance” border policy to the century-long removal of Native children into Indian boarding schools. In each case, institutions reward those willing to cause harm for abstract metrics. Contemporary society normalizes this logic by treating empathy as operational weakness across every sector.

Remedies too-often misdiagnose the problem. Scholars point to psychology and propose “civilizing” forces—government oversight, market mechanisms, education, reason. Yet these usually refine cruelty rather than reduce it. Centralized authority can protect the vulnerable—or weaponize power against them. Markets transform humans into units of consumption and disposal. Education produces sophistication that polishes cruelty rather than erases it, as seen in colonial “civilizing missions” and scientific racism. In short: our solutions too often reproduce the very logic of elimination they claim to cure.

Ancient wisdom traditions help explain why cruelty persists. Human consciousness defaults to self-preservation, and trauma, scarcity, and competition reinforce egocentrism. What appears as callousness often represents the logical endpoint of self-protection. This is why every major spiritual path centers on radical concern for others. From Cain’s haunting question—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”—to the Buddha’s call to release ego, these traditions recognize that the deepest challenge is transcending the tyranny of the self.

Through this lens, capitalism’s moral failure becomes obvious: it institutionalizes egocentrism. A world where billionaires pursue immortality while millions lack necessities reflects not innovation but the normalization of cruelty as progress. Confronting this reality demands more than moral appeals. It requires structural redesign—systems built not to punish vulnerability but to protect it. The paradox, of course, is that those empowered to change institutions are the very ones who benefit from their cruelty. Yet the first step is clarity: our systems have not accidentally cultivated cruelty; they were built to do so.History shows that cruelty has always been the easiest tool of governance. The real question is whether we can imagine institutions that do not demand it, or whether humanity will accept cruelty as the permanent cost of order.

Christina Pan (C'27) is a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgetown University.