"Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves"
About this Quote
Tillich’s line lands like a moral boomerang: harm thrown outward doesn’t disappear into the air; it arcs back into the thrower. Coming from a theologian who treated anxiety, estrangement, and “ultimate concern” as the real terrain of modern life, this isn’t merely a pious warning to be nice. It’s a diagnosis of what cruelty does to the self’s architecture.
The intent is to collapse the comfortable distance between perpetrator and victim. We prefer cruelty as a one-way transaction: my power, your pain. Tillich refuses that accounting. The subtext is existential and theological at once: to diminish another person is to further rupture the already-fractured bonds that make a self coherent. Cruelty requires inner maneuvers - denial, rationalization, dehumanization - that numb empathy and shrink the range of what you can feel. You don’t just injure someone; you train yourself to be the kind of person who can.
Context matters. Tillich lived through two world wars, fled Nazi Germany, and watched modernity’s glossy promises coexist with industrial-scale brutality. In that world, cruelty isn’t an aberration committed by cartoon villains; it’s a social technology, enabled by institutions and justified by ideologies. The line reads like a spiritual countermeasure to the era’s favorite lie: that violence can be clean, targeted, costless to the soul.
Rhetorically, the “always also” does the work. It’s absolute, unsettling, and hard to wriggle out of. Tillich isn’t appealing to sentiment; he’s asserting a law of human interior life: damage done to the other becomes damage done to the self, whether or not you feel it yet.
The intent is to collapse the comfortable distance between perpetrator and victim. We prefer cruelty as a one-way transaction: my power, your pain. Tillich refuses that accounting. The subtext is existential and theological at once: to diminish another person is to further rupture the already-fractured bonds that make a self coherent. Cruelty requires inner maneuvers - denial, rationalization, dehumanization - that numb empathy and shrink the range of what you can feel. You don’t just injure someone; you train yourself to be the kind of person who can.
Context matters. Tillich lived through two world wars, fled Nazi Germany, and watched modernity’s glossy promises coexist with industrial-scale brutality. In that world, cruelty isn’t an aberration committed by cartoon villains; it’s a social technology, enabled by institutions and justified by ideologies. The line reads like a spiritual countermeasure to the era’s favorite lie: that violence can be clean, targeted, costless to the soul.
Rhetorically, the “always also” does the work. It’s absolute, unsettling, and hard to wriggle out of. Tillich isn’t appealing to sentiment; he’s asserting a law of human interior life: damage done to the other becomes damage done to the self, whether or not you feel it yet.
Quote Details
| Topic | Kindness |
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