Those We Call Monsters (Plain Version)

Someone did something terrible.

You already know who comes to mind when you hear that. Maybe it’s one person, a group, or an ideology. You can recall what they did and how it made you feel — anger, disgust, a sense of injustice. You may have wanted them to feel what they caused: fear, guilt, loss. You wanted them to understand.

Calling them monsters feels satisfying. It separates you from them. It creates order out of chaos and makes pain easier to hold. It feels righteous.

You tell yourself you don’t want revenge — just justice. You want balance. But that desire for them to suffer is the same mechanism that drives cruelty in the first place. It’s how cycles of harm continue.

Because when you want someone to feel pain so they’ll understand yours, you’ve already taken the first step toward becoming what you hate.

In someone else’s version of the story, you are now the villain. They see your anger as cruelty, your certainty as arrogance, your punishment as persecution. They will remember your words and call you the monster.

You think of yourself as seeking justice; they think of you as seeking vengeance. Both believe they are right.

That’s how cycles of violence continue. Each side believes its actions are justified — that this time, punishment will finally fix things. But it never does. The wound passes from one generation to the next. The victim becomes the aggressor. The pain becomes identity. And the pattern repeats.

Every time we decide someone deserves to suffer, we create the next person who will believe the same about us. Every time we limit compassion to only those who seem “innocent,” we build the foundation for another round of cruelty.

We tell ourselves that our violence is different — that it’s moral, necessary, righteous. But every movement, every war, every persecution in history has said the same. The people responsible always believed they were defending good. That’s the illusion that keeps the cycle alive.

Eventually, when the dust settles, someone will tell the story again — only now your name will be the one they use to represent cruelty. And they won’t be entirely wrong.

The longer the pattern continues, the more both sides begin to resemble each other. Every side justifies new harm as “justice.” Every act of retribution becomes another story of victimhood. The difference between justice and spectacle disappears.

Punishment performed for an audience doesn’t heal. It only repeats the pain in a new direction.

That doesn’t mean consequences aren’t necessary. Real accountability protects people and prevents further harm. But punishment rooted in anger — the kind meant to satisfy rather than to repair — only deepens division.

There’s no justice that can undo what happened. The only true justice is refusing to create new victims.

That’s what healing requires: seeing even those who harmed you as human again. Not to excuse them, not to invite them back into your life, but to stop feeding the logic that pain can fix pain.

Healing means holding both truths — your anger and your compassion — without letting the anger destroy what’s left of your empathy.

It means refusing to believe that anyone deserves suffering. Not even the people who caused it.

Because the “monster” isn’t a separate kind of being. The monster is what any of us become when we stop seeing others as people. When certainty replaces empathy. When cruelty feels like control.

To stop the cycle, we must end it inside ourselves. We have to stop finding comfort in dehumanization — even when it feels justified.

That choice will feel painful. It will feel unfair. People will tell you it’s weak. They’ll say forgiveness means letting others get away with harm. But real compassion isn’t about forgetting or excusing. It’s the conscious decision not to reproduce the cruelty that broke you.

Maybe those who caused harm don’t deserve mercy. Maybe we don’t either. But that’s not the point. The point is that if nobody is worth saving, nothing is.

So we start again.

We acknowledge what happened.

We face the pain honestly.

We protect those still vulnerable.

We seek truth, not revenge.

We look at those who harmed and say: “I see what you became. I see what you were. I won’t become you.”

Because everyone, even those who harm, bleeds. Remembering that truth is what keeps us human.

If we can see that — if we can hold both pain and humanity at once — then maybe, eventually, the cycle can stop.

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About this series (Plain Version Series):

These versions are for anyone who wants the ideas without the poetry. They strip out the metaphor and figurative language so the message is clear and direct. Whether you find abstract writing hard to follow, prefer straightforward explanation, or are just having a rough day and don’t want the extra noise—this series gives you the same meaning, without the flourish.