Beyond The Plot

Referring to people as monsters dehumanizes them. Making it harder for people to believe that their neighbor, friend, coworker, or family member is capable of committing atrocities.

“Only a monster could do something like that, they aren’t a monster, I talk to them all the time.”

No, they are a monster. They are also human beings. People that smile in your face. Bake cakes. Invite you to BBQs. Attend church. Have families. People that are quiet and to themselves. People that are loud and boisterous. People that you normally would trust.

They are in fact human beings, like all of us. Human beings that have done horrendous, un fathomable things, but human beings non the less.

“Othering” them does more harm to us in the long run.

Calling them monsters makes it easier to see their actions as something alien or exceptional rather than recognizing that ordinary people can be capable of anything.

So, dehumanizing people makes it harder for us to see those same traits amongst our peers or loved ones.

Contextual example of ‘Dehumanizing language’ and its effect:

Referring to an entire group of individual people by their religion, makes it harder for the brain to process that these are humans so there is nuance to their opinions.

Even something as simple as Celebrities, affects our ability to recognize them as just humans, first.

We lump all famous people into this Celebrity category, then we collectively project a certain kind of morality onto them.

Forgetting that these are just people, that a large group of other people happen to know. (Very light on the know part. The whole parasocial relationship thing is a post in and of itself. )

We often see people dehumanizing celebrities and treating them as some elusive other, because they are lumped into this category.

Like how we have entire industries made specifically to stalk and report on celebrities private lives. Or how it’s normalized to expect celebrities to put on a show for their fans, no matter where they are or what they are doing. (Objectively odd behavior.)

Main Point of this Post:

When we call people, who’ve committed horrible crimes, Monsters, it makes them an other too.

Strips away the fact that all of those monsters, we hear about, are just humans that chose to do horrendous things.

Then we hear things like: ”No human being would ever…” but a human being did. This ‘monster’ is someone’s child/ friend/ parent/ coworker.

They, also, made their coworkers laugh, did normal day to day activities, have families and friends, that would never have suspected that kind of behavior. Acknowledging this doesn’t excuse their behavior but it does make it easier for people to question their own loved ones, in the long run.

Continuing to dehumanize them makes it harder for us to process when people around us are exhibiting those same monstrous behaviors.

We are more likely to downplay their actions or make excuses for them because “They just don’t seem like one of those monsters on tv, you must be wrong or maybe they have a really good reason for doing it.”

So, instead of questioning the potential criminal, it’s easier to blame the victim. Figure out what they did to make this person behave so monstrously.

Choosing to ignore their humanity, allows more people to get away with various crimes because ‘we’ don’t believe the victims word over our own perception of the person. (Obviously this is a nuanced topic, there is more to it than just this but it’s a major factor.)

Also, this same discussion can and should be and when we say “he’s not a man” when a man commits a sexual assault. No, he is a man, a man who chose to violate someone. Same for “she is no mother”, when a mother commits crimes against her children. Again, no, she is a mother, a mother who decided to commit crimes against her children.

And we can continue this discussion with a million other examples.

Long winded but I’m trying to make two points here: 1.) We are all human at the end of the day. Anyone is capable of anything and that should be noted. 2.) We are all human at the end of the day, even if we throw other humans in special categories and raise them, or lower them, in the eyes of society… they are all just human.