Recognise that choosing to dehumanise someone is the first step towards becoming an abuser or villain yourself. You can justify doing monstrous things to someone if they’re not truly human in your eyes. A lot of alt-righters genuinely believe they’re protecting the people they care about from people they’ve learned to dehumanise because other alt-righters told them that those people (Jewish people, Muslim people, BIPOC people, gay people, trans people, etc) were predators and monsters, and gave what they believed to be good reasons and evidence to support that worldview. They have decided, “I am a hero, because I am protecting the innocent from these predators. I will do what needs to be done, even if it means torturing and killing them, and I won’t feel bad about it because they’re not really people.” Same thing when cops dehumanise Black folks to justify killing them. Same thing when rapists dehumanise (often in the sense that they objectify) their victims to justify raping them.
And the same goes for people who aren’t actual nazis and bigots. Choosing to dehumanize the “correct” people instead of marginalised people doesn’t make you any less of a violent, sadistic abuser when you decide someone isn’t human and go after them. You are still a violent, sadistic abuser even if your victim “deserves” it. To an abuser, the victim always “deserves” it.
Like wetwareproblem says above, evil isn’t a natural born trait. It’s a choice, made by humans of all kinds. Am I saying we should never try to resist people who we see as a threat? Absolutely not. But mindlessly sectioning yourself into the role of “Pure and wholesome hero who is completely in the right in all ways” and your adversary as “Irredeemable sub-human scum who deserves suffering” doesn’t actually reduce the number of active abusers and predators in the world. It increases it by adding you to that number.
Humanise your adversaries. Recognise them as people. Because that’s how you figure out their motivations, and understand how they operate. Recognise yourself as capable of atrocity, because that helps you notice when you’re beginning the process of being radicalised, and take steps to pull back before you get in too deep. If you truly want the world to be a safer place for the people you care about, then you need to do the work of policing yourself, too. And you need to be able to find the human in every monster. To find yourself in every monster. Because while it’s deeply upsetting to see a monster with your own face (sometimes looking back at you in the mirror), it also makes the monster a lot easier to understand and deal with.
(A big part of this is getting away from a ‘punishment’ mindset wherever possible. “This person is bad and inhuman, they deserve punishment” is an abusive mindset. “This person is doing bad things – we should stay away from them, and possibly observe them from a distance in order to learn from their mistakes” is a more protective mindset. Sometimes, yeah, you have to keep people away by force, but that’s about necessity – not about taking satisfaction in causing suffering. Know the difference.)
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