Mercy and the Throne
You cannot lower your sword without having raised it before
Mercy often hides a quiet cruelty.
To offer mercy is to first assert the legitimacy of punishment. It whispers of righteous vengeance. It implies “you deserved worse” even as it extends an open hand.
The merciful position themselves above the forgiven. Compassion becomes a throne. And from that throne they speak judgment and package it as benevolence.
The monster doesn’t disappear when the sword is lowered; it simply changes clothes. It becomes the hero of its own restraint.
As long as retribution is the baseline, choosing not to collect it will always look like grace.
And yet.
Hurt people hurt people.
Violence doesn’t end on its own. It propagates through families, nations, through generations who never met. The cycle is self-perpetuating because every act of retribution feels like justice. But this need for retribution paves a path of blood.
The avenger is never the villain in their own story. Heroes are people that do not need justification. Their acts always follow what is right… for them.
Mercy seems like one of the only things that can interrupt this. It breaks this cycle and recognizes that vengeance only ever leads to bloodshed.
So why do I think mercy is cruel? Is it not the most heroic, the most forgiving act there is?
Neutralizing harm is not the same as doing good
Breaking a cycle of violence returns the situation to a kind of zero. It prevents a negative. It does not produce a positive. The person who was wronged and chooses not to retaliate has not added anything to the world — they’ve simply declined to subtract further from it. A world with fewer retaliations is better than a world with more of them. So don’t get me wrong. It IS a good first step to take.
But “better than the alternative” and “good” are not synonyms, and collapsing the two is part of how mercy gets its halo.
This distinction matters because it changes what we’re allowed to expect from mercy. If mercy is fundamentally a neutralizing act — an absence rather than a presence — then a single act of mercy fails to bring about a better world. For mercy to become genuinely generative, for it to do more than return the ledger to zero, it has to stop being the exception. A single merciful person in a vengeful system is an anomaly, admirable but isolated, and the system metabolizes them easily. Mercy only becomes constructive when it isnt the exception. But at that point does it even make sense to call it mercy?
In the past we might have chopped of the hands of a thirteen year old thief that stole bread from the store to feed its siblings. Would we consider it merciful of the bystander to not do this anymore in this day n age?
No, right?
Mercy implies power
Here’s where I think the biggest problem with mercy lives.
It’s also the reason mercy can curdle in a way that its broader cousin, forgiveness, doesn’t have to.
Mercy is a transaction between unequals. The weak beg for it; the powerful have the privilege of granting it. This is baked into the word itself. We do not ask for mercy from our equals, we ask for it from judges, kings, gods, captors. Mercy presupposes a power differential and then exercises that power, even in the act of withholding its full exercise. The gesture of “I won’t hurt you” only means something if you were in a position to hurt them. Mercy, in other words, is power performing its own restraint. Which means power remains the subject of the sentence.
Forgiveness doesn’t require this. Two equals can forgive each other. A person can forgive someone who never had power over them at all, or forgive a situation, a circumstance, even themselves. Forgiveness can be mutual, reciprocal, something that flows in both directions at once. Mercy, almost by definition, cannot. There is no such thing as “we showed each other mercy” in the way there is “we forgave each other.” The grammar itself reveals the hierarchy.
Is there such a thing as just power?
Which brings us to the harder question. Is there such a thing as power to harm someone that is used for good?
Shakespeare’s Portia gives the classic defense in The Merchant of Venice — mercy as the quality that distinguishes earthly power from tyranny, the thing that makes a crown look like God’s rather than a despot’s. But by that mercy is presented as the thing that legitimizes the King. The merciful king is glorified and his throne becomes one with divine authority.
We do not live in the times of Kings anymore.
Dostoevsky offers something different. In Crime and Punishment, it’s not the court’s mercy that reaches Raskolnikov. It’s Sonya’s forgiveness, offered from a position of almost total social powerlessness, that actually does something to him. Her forgiveness doesn’t come from above. If anything, it comes from below, or from beside. And it’s precisely because it doesn’t carry the weight of judgment that it manages to reach him at all.
Which also shows that mercy holds less warmth then forgiveness. Mercy is granted as a performance to elevate the judge as good. It is not even interested in cleansing the wrong doer of the tumor that infested their soul with evil. It merely turns a blind eye to it.
We never hold justified power. It is always taken through opportunity. A big reason I am against hierarchy is because of its amoral implications. We do need order and we do often need to decide weither to forgive, defend and sometimes even punish to deter.
But we should never forget that we are all made equal. There is not a single one who sits above another. When we punish the criminal we do it for a personal gain. For safety. It is never a moral act..
Mercy is not evil in itself. It is a symptom of a broken system. It’s the kindness of a system that first creates the possibility of cruelty and then congratulates itself for restraint.
The highest form of compassion is not merciful power deciding not to harm but a world where harm is not even considered as a valid Option.
(Also fuck Trump ❤️)
A Worker Reads History - by Berthold Brecht Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses, That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it? In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song. Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend The night the seas rushed in, The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves. Young Alexander conquered India. He alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army? Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears? Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who triumphed with him? Each page a victory At whose expense the victory ball? Every ten years a great man, Who paid the piper? So many particulars. So many questions.