When someone engages in deeply inhumane behavior, we start to think of them as not human. We call them monsters, and we stop wondering what makes it possible for a person—somebody’s child, parent, or lover—to perpetrate an act of cruelty or violence. Instead, they become some otherworldly creature. An anomaly. This is a form of self-protection, but at its heart, it’s denialism. It frees us from seeing that there can be cruelty in us, too. And it keeps us from actually addressing the societal factors that make it possible for people to perpetrate terrible acts of violence.
