In his recent New Yorker article, “The Root of All Cruelty?“, psychologist and writer Paul Bloom asserts that, contrary to popular belief, atrocities are generally committed not because we strip our victims of their humanity, but rather because we acknowledge said humanity and find it deserving of persecution. If you’re like me, you find the prospect of this more than a little disturbing.

Why? Well first, let’s rewind a bit: There are at least two implicit assumptions buried in the commonly understood idea that dehumanization fuels and facilitates cruelty. The first is the premise that humans are naturally inclined to feel compassion toward other humans (and thus need to be unburdened of that before enacting horror). The second is the unspoken conclusion that the logical solution to this is to induce compassion by forcing violators to see the humanity in their victims. While this is a tall order, the prescript is simple enough to understand, and makes for a clear path forward.

However, what Bloom suggests is that, in fact, it’s the very recognition of another’s humanity that evokes cruelty and informs its manner and nature. He cites examples of soccer fans taunting black players with bananas and Jews in Austria made to scrub the streets. Both are spectacles of public humiliation, and both hinge on the victims’ understood capacity for shame—a uniquely human trait.

Bloom argues that people commit acts of cruelty that respond to and are designed to work on the humanity of our victims, and we do so for a variety of reasons: restoration of order, maintenance of hierarchy, moral imperative, justice & punishment, sadistic pleasure, and more. This complicates things because 1) it doesn’t assume that humans are endowed with natural compassion toward one another, and 2) halting systemic cruelty would require a comprehensive and profound overhaul of power structures, ethical codes, collective understanding of good and evil, etc. If one accepts this as truth, a snarled and tangled maze looms ahead.

At present, we’re witnessing ethnic cleansing in the U.S. (complete with concentration camps), ordered by Trump and carried about by ICE. Now, take a look at journalist Radley Balko’s analogy of sows and piglets. This feels true—and reassuring in its confidence in basic human decency—but is it? Does ICE (and the Trump administration) see immigrants as nonhuman? If so, and following Bloom’s logic, I have to ask why they’d publicly separate parents from their children as a deterrence tactic. We accept that human parents love and form psychological bonds with their offspring in a way that other animals do not. Notable conservatives have also gone on record to state that this separation is a fitting punishment for transgressing our border laws, see: “moral imperative”. They are expected to suffer emotionally and psychically to pay for their sin of trespass, and hesitate before doing so again.

Remember the underlying motivation of #MAGA rationale for wanting to keep immigrants out: fear. Yes, there’s the purported fear of their “criminality”, but moreso there’s fear of their influence. Alt-righters understand and tremble before the potential and alien power of these people’s capacity for intellect, reason, appeal, etc, and the effect it may have on our cultural fabric, mainstream morals and values, as well as the political and economic competition they may bring. The alt-right (old guard that fancies itself vanguard) fear corruption and defeat at the hands of new, ideologically marauding equals. Would base animals inspire so much?

It should be said that I’m still entertaining Bloom’s argument and mulling it over. I do believe that it’s unlikely that dehumanization is mandatory for mass cruelty, but I also think it’s unlikely that perpetrators of violent acts (like the above) appreciate the full humanity of their victims in both breadth and depth. I can’t fathom that. Some level of dehumanization must come into play, even if it’s only at the most basic, utilitarian stage, used by foot soldiers in isolated transactions that form a larger strategy.

The more I think it over, the more there seems to be some kind of middle ground. What if targets are neither viewed as fully human, nor fully animal/object, but instead some halfway, hybrid of lesser human? Subhuman. Othered. This is when we view others to be unlike us enough to provoke fear or disgust, and yet also like us enough to want and know how to punish and hurt them for it. This is the experience of a group of people falling into a kind of mass Uncanny Valley.

What then?