by Sherman J. Clark
In a recent essay, Don’t Be Cruel, I argued that looking away from cruelty—mass incarceration was my example—comes at a cost. The blindness and mental blurriness we cultivate to avoid discomfort also stunts us. Avoidance may feel like self-protection, but it leaves us less able to flourish. It is hard to find our way in the world when we are self-blinded. Facing hard truths, including cruelties in which we are indirectly complicit, can be a form of ethical weight training—bringing not just sight and insight but ethical strength.
But facing the truth is easier said than done. Because the truth is that our world is rife with horrors: war, injustice, exploitation, racism, rape. Not to mention the corruption, cruelty, and would-be fascism looming in our national life. To confront all this at once would crush us. We recoil not because we are heartless but because we know that knowing more will hurt. Psychologists describe what happens when we don’t avert our eyes. Studies of “compassion fatigue” show how repeated exposure to others’ pain can leave us depleted, even disoriented. Healthcare workers, legal advocates, teachers—those who must confront suffering daily—describe the exhaustion that follows. The problem is not lack of care but its weight: to feel too much, too often, wears down our capacity to respond. We simply cannot see all of it all the time.
Yet this necessity does not remove the cost. The very act of triage—choosing what to attend to and what to ignore—shapes us. We become people who can bear certain kinds of truth and not others. Sometimes that protective instinct is wise; no one can survive without rest. But sometimes it dulls into habit, and habit into incapacity. We find ourselves avoiding not just unbearable horrors but also discomforts we might well endure—and from which we might grow. We are caught in a bind. On one side: cultivated ignorance that seems to let us glide through life but costs us our growth. On the other: overload, the crushing weight of truths too terrible to bear. How do we remain open to what we must know without being undone by what we see?
The difficulty is not only volume. Certain kinds of knowing carry their own dangers. True knowing requires not just information but empathy. Facing cruelty in a way that conduces to ethical growth means not just memorizing incarceration statistics but recognizing human suffering. And that kind of knowing destabilizes us in subtle ways.
To enter another’s world is to blur the edges of our own. Psychologists call this “self-other overlap”: the merging of boundaries when we take another’s perspective seriously. Sometimes this deepens connection; but it can leave us disoriented. Empathy can also distort. We feel more readily for those who are near, familiar, or attractive. One vivid case moves us more than anonymous thousands. This is not a flaw in our compassion so much as a feature of it—but it means empathy, untethered, can mislead. We may confuse emotional resonance with clarity, or feel righteous for “feeling the pain” without addressing its source.
So the problem is not just quantity but quality. Some ways of knowing, even in small doses, can unsettle us or send us astray. Empathy is indispensable to our humanity, but it is also risky. We need not only courage to face what is hard to know, but discernment about how we face it.
My instinct in facing questions like this is not to search for a fixed set of rules by which we might judge ourselves or one another, nor to imagine some calculus that would maximize benefit or minimize harm. Rather, my approach—call it Aristotelian if it needs a label—is to ask about the traits and capacities and habits of mind that help us live well. In this context, then, we can ask what dispositions of heart and mind allow us to face difficult truths without being either crushed or corrupted by them. This is the lens through which I have been writing, both here and elsewhere: a concern with character and with the capacities that enable us, however imperfectly, to navigate a world thick with suffering while still seeking to flourish.
In that spirit, if we must look, how do we bear what we see? I doubt there is any single answer. We are not likely to find a formula or a settled set of instructions. At best, there are certain capacities that may help us hold difficult truths without being entirely undone by them. I name a few here not as confident conclusions but as possibilities—frail, imperfect, and easily lost.
One such capacity might be a kind of self-forgiveness paired with judgment. When we begin to notice our complicity in cruel systems, the temptation is often either paralyzing shame or quick absolution. Both are evasions. What we perhaps need instead is something like implicated grace: a way of acknowledging our entanglement while still maintaining the will to act. This is close to what Aristotle called phronesis, practical wisdom—the ability to steer between excesses. But it is precarious. Forgive ourselves too easily and we excuse inaction; refuse forgiveness altogether and we collapse into despair. The balance shifts with circumstance, and it is not always clear where it lies. Still, to remain engaged, we may need to cultivate this uneasy equilibrium.
Another possible resource is moral imagination sustained by something like greatness of soul. It is easy, when faced with pervasive cruelty, to retreat into cynicism: “this is just how things are.” That posture may sound tough and clear-headed; but it is often just a form of cowardice. What is harder, and calls for more courage, is holding onto hope without sliding into fantasy—seeing injustice clearly while still believing in the possibility of something better. The ancient virtue of megalopsychia—greatness of soul—suggests expansiveness, a refusal to let our horizons shrink to the size of what is tolerable. Yet here, too, dangers lurk. Hope can shade into naïveté, and expansiveness into a kind of posturing grandiosity. To imagine alternatives without denying reality is a demanding and unstable discipline, one we never quite master.
We might also develop strategies for when and how to bear the weight of what we see—what we might call pacing and patience—not as excuses for inaction but as strategies for sustainable engagement. Facing hard truths need not mean confronting everything at once, nor maintaining constant vigilance. Just as we cannot physically exert ourselves continuously without rest, we cannot psychologically bear witness without respite. This might mean developing what we could call conscious compartmentalization: the ability to deliberately set aside certain knowledge temporarily, with the intention to return. This differs fundamentally from the permanent architectures of avoidance that keep us from seeing mass incarceration. Those are walls; this is more like a door we close knowing we will open it again. Pacing also means patience with ourselves and others as we build capacity gradually. We might explicitly schedule times for facing difficult realities and times for restoration, recognizing that both are necessary for continued engagement. The pragmatic question is not whether to know but how to manage what we know in ways that allow us to keep knowing, keep growing, and keep acting.
We also need to develop toughness and resilience—the capacity to endure productive discomfort without seeking premature resolution. This means learning to live with unease, to carry the weight of complicity without either collapsing under it or throwing it off entirely. It requires a kind of emotional endurance, the ability to stay present with difficult knowledge even when every instinct tells us to flee or fight or freeze.
Yet naming this last capacity immediately raises a troubling question: Who are we asking to be tough? Too often, calls for resilience become another burden placed on those already carrying more than their share. There is a brutal unfairness in telling those who face systemic racism, poverty, or violence to “be resilient,” as if the problem were their inability to bear suffering rather than the systems that create it.
This highlights how a call to face hard truths can produce its own injustice, which itself must be faced. The weight of knowing is not evenly distributed. Psychologists and sociologists describe an “empathy tax.” Those with less institutional power are often required, day in and day out, to know more, understand more, and adjust more than those with greater privilege. Scholars like Patricia Williams and Arlie Hochschild have documented how this unequal expectation is woven into the fabric of workplaces and public life. For many, facing hard truths is not a matter of choice but of survival. And it comes at a cost—fatigue, disorientation, sometimes erosion of self.
This asymmetry should unsettle us. We speak of empathy as universal, but when it becomes compulsory for some and discretionary for others, it ceases to be a shared virtue. Instead, it compounds the very injustices it might otherwise help repair. Those already doing the hardest labor of knowing often need rest and better conditions more than they need exhortations to build character through suffering. The ethical gym metaphor breaks down when some people are doing forced labor while others debate whether to take an optional yoga class.
One way we might face and address this injustice is by better sharing the weight. Community and solidarity of various forms might help us not just distribute the weight of knowledge more fairly but also create the conditions for acknowledgment. We can sometimes work together to resist the impulse to turn away. On the other hand, communities can also blunt or distort; they can bind themselves in shared denial as readily as in shared sight. Solidarity, then, is itself a risk: it can enable us to bear more than we could alone, but it can also tempt us into collective self-deception. So collective efforts to face hard truths should include affirmative recognition and pragmatic support. By affirmative recognition I mean explicitly acknowledging that the unequal burdens are unfair and must be addressed. And by pragmatic support I mean both providing tools and resources to help people manage the stress of what they must face while also working to dismantle the systems that create such stress in the first place.
If we are to keep returning to what is hard to know, we need not only resilience and solidarity but also nourishment. One source of that nourishment is beauty. Encounters with beauty—whether in art, in nature, or in the grace of human action—remind us that the world is not only cruel but also luminous. Such moments do not erase horrors, but they help us bear them. They anchor us against despair and return us to the work of knowing with renewed strength.
If these capacities and tools help at all, they may do so less like rigid rules and more like muscles. Each time we resist the urge to look away, each time we manage to hold complexity without collapsing into simplicity, each time we maintain hope without guarantees, we perhaps strengthen our ability to do so again. But this “ethical weight training” is uncertain work. Muscles can be strained or torn; growth is not guaranteed. Still, if we avoid the exercise entirely, we become weaker. Facing hard truths may never make us invulnerable—but perhaps it can leave us a little more capable, a little more resilient, for the next difficult knowledge that comes.
“But what about doing something?” The question arises, rightfully. Of course we should act. The indispensable first step toward meaningful action is facing what is actually happening. We cannot address problems we refuse to see clearly. The elaborate architectures of avoidance that keep us from seeing mass incarceration also ensure our “solutions” will miss their mark. Action without acknowledgment is mere gesture. But even when solutions elude us—and they often will, given the magnitude of systemic cruelty—we can grow from the act of facing. We can build capacities that transform how we move through the world and help us and others thrive.
We too are hard to know. The same blindness that keeps us from seeing prisons clearly keeps us from seeing ourselves. When we practice confronting complicity in one domain, we develop the ability to recognize it in others. The person who has genuinely faced their connection to mass incarceration won’t just vote differently on criminal justice. They will be more likely to notice other adjacent cruelties, less willing to accept comfortable justifications, more capable of genuine relationship and honest self-reflection.
This is ethical weight training in its fullest sense—not just building strength to bear difficult knowledge, but developing capacities that change how we engage with everything. The courage to hope, the wisdom to judge, the imagination to envision alternatives—these don’t stay contained to single issues. They become part of who we are.
The tension remains: we cannot see everything, nor can we afford blindness. There is no perfect resolution, no formula for how much truth to confront or how often. What matters is not escaping this tension but learning to live productively within it. Growth lies not in finding comfortable middle ground but in developing the strengths, strategies, and forms of community that allow us to keep returning to what is hard to know. Every day we practice seeing clearly, we become people who can see—not just the suffering of others but the possibilities of ourselves. And in that seeing, even when it brings pain, lies the seed of whatever transformation might yet be possible.
Finally, I think there is something deeper here than even growth or capacity-building. The question of whether to know goes to the heart of what it means to be human. We are, distinctively, the creatures who can choose blindness—and who can choose sight. Other animals simply perceive what is before them. We alone can construct elaborate architectures to avoid perception, and we alone can dismantle them.
The ancient Greek inscription “Know thyself” at Delphi suggested that self-knowledge was foundational to a fully human life. To choose not to know—about ourselves, about what we do, about suffering enacted in our name—is to choose a diminished existence. It may be comfortable, but comfort and flourishing are not the same. We are, in a literary sense, the children of Adam and Eve, who chose knowledge over paradise. That choice defined us as creatures who would rather know than be comfortable. Every time we look away from cruelty to preserve our ease, we reverse that fundamental choice. We try to unknow our way back to an innocence that was never really ours.