CEIE Director’s Reflection

Cruel Leaders Hope You’ll Forget Decency

by CEIE Executive Director & Seattle University Spehar-Halligan Professor, Dr. Michael Reid Trice

In the past week we witness a growing public conversation about cruelty: cruel leadership, cruel policies, and cruel outcomes. What is cruelty?

I wrote a book on cruelty, and in 2001 moved to Munich, Germany to do so. After World War II, the German government dedicated significant financial resources for libraries to purchase books that catalogued systemic abuses, so that decent people would never again forget the horrors of the Third Reich. I lived and studied in the country for four years.

While there, I stumbled upon a short, forgotten volume titled ‘Polish Cruelty,’ located on a shelf at the back of a small library collection in Hamburg. The volume justified why Germany invaded Poland in 1939. It defended the righteous cause of the Third Reich based on an unprovoked and vicious attack coordinated by the Polish military at the German border. It clarified the ugly, deceitful, and calculated violence of the Poles, whose actions substantiated the German advance for the sake of protecting the German people. It was also all a lie. Every word.

This is how cruelty most often operates in society. A fictional, righteous claim arises from an aggressor concealing himself as a victim. He denounces without evidence a whole series of enemies. An internal logic grows up quickly to defend the victim and his national story. Next, cruel logic permits incrementally more horrendous actions rendered ever more normalized and justified in response. Over time, even long-trusted allies are repackaged as historic adversaries.

Often, religious leaders will denounce cruelty as evil. This is a misaligned diagnosis. For instance, evil in Christian theology is identical with privation, which is a kind of bottomless emptiness, or better, a black hole in the middle of our moral universe. Cruel leaders, on the other hand, have plans for us, seeking to create anxieties smothered in lies. Acknowledging cruelty is essential to the difficult work of unmasking it.

Cruelty is like stealth technology, aiming to get into our collective airspace without setting off a moral tripwire. Cruel leaders infect our public logic by controlling the discourse, thereby turning refugees into aliens, confusing allies for abusers, demoralizing marginal groups as deviant, and settling fabricated scores. Cruel leaders are rooted in deceit; they are charlatans because they seek your moral amnesia by confusing your ability to tell truth from what is fake. In the end, cruel leaders are coming after a value at the soft pith of neighborliness – decency. They hope you’ll forget what decency is.

Where decency fails, the neighbor has reason to fear. In the United States our liberal democracy counts on a shared confidence that religions, government, leadership, in fact all of us as everyday people, value our opportunity to exude and receive decency. Where decency wins, cruelty is weakened.

What any public discussion on understanding cruelty needs to remember is how cruelty is an ugly lie with horrible impact, by which otherwise decent people learn to forget.

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Michael Reid Trice