Life & Wisdom Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Cruelty, Coetzee suggests, is rarely a flare-up of raw aggression; it is a decision to anesthetize. The line turns cruelty from a mysterious human darkness into a practical technique: close the heart, mute the other’s pain, proceed. That’s a deeply Coetzee move. His work keeps returning to the machinery of moral distance - the small, private edits we make to reality so our actions can feel clean.

The phrasing is clinical and collective: “we have to.” Not “some monsters choose to,” but a shared human capacity that relies on a shared human trick. It implicates the ordinary person, the dutiful bureaucrat, the neighbor who “doesn’t want to get involved.” Cruelty isn’t framed as sadism; it’s framed as denial dressed up as necessity. The subtext is that compassion is not a soft add-on to ethics; it’s the sensory organ that makes the other real. Shut it down and the world becomes permissive: people become categories, cases, threats, numbers.

Coetzee’s South African context hovers behind the sentence - apartheid as an institutionalized closing of the heart, a regime that required constant rhetorical and emotional maintenance to keep suffering illegible to those benefiting from it. But the quote travels because it maps neatly onto contemporary life: algorithmic outrage, dehumanizing political language, the ease of scrolling past disaster. Coetzee isn’t offering comfort. He’s warning that cruelty is less a temperament than a habit, and that the first violence is often internal: the moment we decide not to feel.