The Architecture of Cruelty

On living in the moral ruins of our time

We are trying to figure out how to be human in an inhuman time.

I have been thinking about mirrors lately. Not the kind that hang in department store dressing rooms, those brutal fluorescent-lit chambers of self-examination, but the more subtle mirrors we carry in our minds—the ones that reflect back not what we are, but what we have convinced ourselves we must be.

There is a woman in Leesport, Pennsylvania, who volunteers at a detention center on weekends. She brings coloring books to children who have been separated from their parents. She tells me this while standing in line at Whole Foods, her cart filled with organic produce, her voice steady as she explains how she sleeps at night. "I'm doing God's work," she says, and I wonder if she means the coloring books or something else entirely. The children, she adds, don't speak much English, but they understand kindness. She buys them the 64-count Crayola boxes, the ones with the built-in sharpener.

This is how it works now, this careful architecture of cruelty: we build systems that require both perpetrators and saints, and we staff them with people who need to believe they are the latter. The bureaucrat who processes deportation orders goes home to a rescue dog. The politician who votes to cut food stamps volunteers at a soup kitchen. The pastor who preaches against the "invasion" at the border runs a homeless shelter. They have solved the problem of the mirror by fragmenting it into manageable pieces.

But what do they see when they look? I think they see what we all see when we need to: a story that makes sense. A narrative in which they are not the villain but the hero of a different tale, one where difficult choices must be made by serious people who understand what others cannot. They see themselves as the adults in the room, the ones who comprehend the hard truths about human nature, about resources, about the way the world actually works versus the way naive idealists wish it would work. Like me.

The mother who calls the police on her daughter's Black boyfriend tells herself she is protecting her child. The immigration officer who denies asylum to a woman fleeing violence tells himself he is protecting the integrity of the system. The judge who sentences a teenager to adult prison tells herself she is protecting society. They have each constructed a moral framework in which cruelty becomes care, in which harm becomes help, in which the infliction of suffering becomes a form of love.

This is the genius of our contemporary moment: we have learned to weaponize compassion itself. Every act of institutional violence comes wrapped in the language of protection, every policy of exclusion branded as inclusion, every mechanism of harm marketed as healing. We have built a machine that runs on the fuel of good intentions, and it produces suffering with the efficiency of a Ford assembly line.

The evangelical who votes to separate families at the border does so because he believes in the sanctity of family. The liberal who supports policies that gentrify neighborhoods does so because she believes in community development. The conservative who opposes healthcare expansion does so because he believes in personal responsibility. The progressive who advocates for policies that close rural hospitals does so because she believes in efficiency. They have all found ways to make their hearts beat in rhythm with their principles, even when those principles produce results that would seem to contradict their deepest values.

I think about the children in the detention center, the ones with the coloring books, and I wonder what they will remember when they are adults. Will they remember the woman who brought them crayons, or will they remember the system that put them there? Will they remember the kindness or the cage? And I wonder if the woman herself knows which of these memories she is trying to create, or if she has simply found a way to live with the unbearable weight of being complicit in something she cannot bring herself to name.

The truth is that most of us are that woman, in one way or another. We live in systems that require cruelty to function, and we find ways to participate in them while maintaining our sense of ourselves as decent people. We recycle our plastic bottles while buying products made by child laborers. We donate to charity while voting for politicians who gut social programs. We volunteer at food banks while supporting economic policies that create hunger. We have become experts at moral compartmentalization, at living with contradictions that would have driven previous generations to madness or revolution.

But there is something different about this moment, something that feels both familiar and unprecedented. The cruelty has become performative, theatrical, designed not just to produce policy outcomes but to generate emotional responses. The politician who tweets about sending immigrants to Alligator Alcatraz is not just implementing immigration policy; he is directing a piece of political theater in which human suffering becomes a prop. The governor who signs a bill banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not just making health policy; she is staging a morality play in which the bodies of children become the battlefield.

This is cruelty as communication, suffering as semiotics. Every separated family becomes a message about border security. Every denied asylum claim becomes a statement about national sovereignty. Every banned book becomes a declaration about family values. Every closed clinic becomes a testimony to the preservation of life. We have learned to make meaning from misery, to transform human pain into political profit.

And yet, and yet. When I think about the woman with the coloring books, I cannot bring myself to condemn her entirely. She is doing what she can within the constraints of a system that is larger than her individual moral agency. She is trying to find a way to be human in an inhuman situation. She is looking for a way to sleep at night in a world that has made peaceful sleep nearly impossible for anyone with a functioning conscience.

Maybe this is what they see when they look in the mirror: not monsters, but people trying to find their way through a moral landscape that has been strip-mined of easy answers. People who have learned to live with the fact that their choices are constrained by systems they did not create but cannot escape. People who have found ways to be kind within the boundaries of cruelty, generous within the limits of greed, loving within the structures of hate.

The bottomless grief is not just for the victims of these systems—though it is certainly that. It is also for the perpetrators, for the people who have been shaped by these systems into something they never intended to become. It is for the woman with the coloring books, who wanted to help but found herself complicit. It is for the immigration officer, who wanted to serve his country but found himself destroying families. It is for all of us, who wanted to be good but found ourselves participants in something we cannot quite name but cannot seem to escape.

In the end, I think what makes their hearts beat is the same thing that makes all of our hearts beat: the hope that we are doing the right thing, that we are on the right side of history, that when all is said and done, we will be able to look back on our lives and say we tried to make the world a little bit better than we found it. The tragedy is not that they are evil people, but that they are human people, trying to be good in a world that has made goodness nearly impossible to achieve and cruelty nearly impossible to avoid.

This is the architecture of our moment: not a simple story of good versus evil, but a complex structure in which good intentions and terrible outcomes live side by side, in which the same person can be both perpetrator and victim, in which the systems we create to solve problems become the problems we need to solve. We have built a world in which it is possible to be simultaneously compassionate and cruel, loving and hateful, generous and selfish—not because we are hypocrites, but because we are human beings trying to live in a world that demands impossible choices.

The woman with the coloring books will go home tonight and sleep peacefully, because she has found a way to live with the contradictions. The children in the detention center will sleep less peacefully, because they have not yet learned how to make sense of a world that offers them both crayons and cages. And the rest of us will continue to navigate the space between these two kinds of sleep, between the comfort of moral certainty and the discomfort of moral complexity, between the stories we tell ourselves and the stories that others tell about us.

The mirrors keep reflecting, but what they show us is not always what we expect to see. Sometimes they show us saints, sometimes sinners, sometimes simply people trying to find their way through a world that has made finding one's way the most difficult task of all. And perhaps that is the most honest reflection of all: not heroes or villains, but human beings, flawed and striving, cruel and kind, lost and searching, all of us trying to make sense of a world that seems determined to remain senseless.

In the end, the architecture of cruelty is also the architecture of hope: the same systems that can produce suffering can also produce change, the same people who can perpetrate harm can also create healing, the same world that can break our hearts can also mend them. The question is not whether we will continue to be complicit in systems of cruelty—we will—but whether we will also find ways to build systems of compassion, whether we will learn to live with the contradictions while working to resolve them, whether we will find ways to sleep at night while staying awake to the possibility of a different kind of world.

The woman with the coloring books is still in Leesport. The children are still in detention. The mirrors are still reflecting. And somewhere, in the space between cruelty and kindness, between complicity and resistance, between the world as it is and the world as it could be, we are all still trying to figure out how to be human in an inhuman time.

"Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person." -James Baldwin

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean