Fear & Dehumanization

Every day, in subtle ways, fear nudges us toward cruelty. Fiction, history, and real life all tell the same story. Revisiting Steinbeck’s East of Eden, I came across commentary on Cathy Ames. She’s described as the embodiment of hatred and fear, traits the critic claimed drive human cruelty. I lingered on that thought longer than I care to admit.

Fear, I can definitely agree with. There’s fear of humiliation, loss of status, change, or loss of control, all with deep evolutionary roots. Predictability meant stability, and stability meant survival. It’s why so many people cling to familiar routines even when they’re unhappy. The unknown feels threatening almost by default. Hatred, though, rarely appears on its own. It often grows out of fear or a perceived threat. And even then, fear doesn’t automatically lead to cruelty.

The real turning point is dehumanization. When fear or resentment strips away empathy and we reduce others to threats or caricatures, cruelty becomes not only possible but justified. Once tribalism, ideology, or a sense of moral disgust creates enough psychological distance, violence begins to feel permissible. Frame a situation as zero-sum, a scarcity mindset, and moral restraint collapses. At both individual and societal levels, fear combined with dehumanization creates a predictable path to cruelty.

The Act of Killing, the documentary about the Indonesian genocide, makes this painfully visible. A manufactured fear of communists allowed a government to justify half a million deaths. Marginalized young men, searching for identity and status, joined paramilitary groups and coped through self-deception, drugs, and state approval. One journalist, who openly admitted to spreading false information, tells a perpetrator he never knew they were murdering people. The perpetrator replies, “If you didn’t know, I’d be shocked.” Self-deception becomes a tool for survival. They filmed reenactments of murders as if they were heroic, and when they were forced to watch those scenes back, cracks appeared in the stories they told themselves. It’s a chilling portrait of what happens when an entire group is stripped of its humanity.

I’ve seen smaller versions of this dynamic in everyday life. As a Cuban, I’ve heard decent, moral people casually applaud the death of Marxists in conversation. On the other end of the political spectrum, I’ve seen supposedly compassionate people justify the murder and disappearance of thousands of Cubans after the 1959 revolution. “That’s war,” they say, as if atrocities become acceptable when they serve a perceived greater good. These examples are anecdotal, of course, but they reveal a pattern. Moral reasoning becomes fragile when fear and uncertainty dominate, and when empathy collapses for some created “other.”

Our current political climate isn’t immune. A bit of pressure or perceived threat can suddenly make people applaud political killings and assassination attempts. We cheer when something bad happens to the “others” we’ve invented, rationalize it as justified, and consume media that reinforces our worldview. How much of that is media influence? How much is self-deception? Are we truly opposed to cruelty, or just selective about whose suffering matters?

There are limits to what we can ask of one another. Being open to a new perspective or questioning a guiding principle—something that shapes identity—can feel like too much to bear. It is easier to categorize the person in front of us as something lesser: irrational, stupid, liberal, conservative. Easier to avoid the conversation altogether. And once empathy collapses, cruelty becomes a predictable outcome.