Hell Has No Heroes
Author’s Note
I'm a cisgender, white man living in the United States, working in the tech industry. I’m well aware of my privilege, and I know that people like me often sit at the center of systems that do harm, sometimes through action, more often through comfort or silence. I carry that awareness into everything I do, including my effort to think carefully about how I engage with the world.
I am deeply committed to human rights, racial justice, and LGBTQ+ equality. This essay is not not an argument for moral relativism or “both-sidesism”, nor is it an invitation to excuse hate or injustice but a call to resist dehumanization and to hold our convictions with both courage and compassion. It’s an attempt to explore how we might hold on to nuance and navigate complexity in a world that increasingly demands extreme certainty.
Deus ex Algorithm
“This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.
They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out; nor will deep Hell receive them—
even the wicked cannot glory in them.”— Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III, lines 34–42, trans. Allen Mandelbau
If you spend more than five minutes on any modern social media platform, a familiar pattern quickly emerges: extreme viewpoints get the most views, the most engagement, and the biggest rewards. Much like Dante and Milton before them, today’s influencers and talking heads continue the Puritanical traditions of this country and have little interest in moderation or the middle path. What matters most is allegiance, who is or isn’t aligned with their “God.” Those who try to take a more nuanced approach are cast out just the same, exiled to the digital Hell reserved for enemies and traitors alike. Upset the extreme tastes of the algorithm, and you will be punished for all eternity.
If you buy into this kind of dogma, middle ground becomes unacceptable, on both ends of the political spectrum1. Among progressive leftists, especially in blue cities and states, any attempt to reconcile with the right is often seen as capitulation: a betrayal that enables racism, xenophobia, or the erosion of human rights. “Let them suffer for their choices” is a common refrain, even when the people most affected (those living in deeply red states) are often the very individuals progressives claim to advocate for and protect.
The same dynamic plays out on the far right. Among alt-right conservatives and their online echo chambers, any suggestion of compromise or empathy is branded as weakness, or worse, as “wokeness.” Calls for nuance or understanding are dismissed as liberal infiltration, and anyone who challenges the MAGA, anti-DEI orthodoxy, even slightly, is labeled a traitor or a sheep. In this worldview, moderation is not a position of thoughtfulness but a threat to purity, and the only acceptable stance is total loyalty to a rigid and often conspiratorial ideology.
Ultimately, anyone who tries to occupy the space of nuance, acknowledge complexity, or stray from the orthodoxy on either side is cast into “Hell.” Those who hold the middle ground find no celebration or embrace, only condemnation and fiery rage from zealots on both ends of the spectrum.
Neither Gods nor Monsters
Despite the loudest voices pushing for black-and-white positions, alternative moral and ethical systems invite us to embrace nuance and complexity. Aristotle’s virtue ethics, particularly the concept of phronesis, encourages an approach grounded in balance and practical wisdom rather than rigid rules or extremes. Buddhism’s “Middle Way” similarly counsels avoidance of the extremes of indulgence and asceticism, teaching that wisdom and peace arise from embracing complexity and rejecting binary, dogmatic thinking. Even Albert Camus’s absurdism calls us to face life’s uncertainties with clear-eyed resolve, rejecting both zealotry and nihilism, and refusing to fall into patterns of thought and action that lead to fanaticism.
Outside of those more flexible ethical systems, even Kantian deontology (grounded in duty and moral law) insists on the fundamental importance of human dignity. Kant’s imperative to treat people as ends in themselves, not merely as means to an end, challenges us to resist the urge to demonize or dehumanize those we view as enemies. When we reduce individuals to the totality of their ideologies, we strip them of their personhood and abandon the moral responsibility to recognize their inherent worth.
When we engage in this kind of dehumanization and refuse to connect with others as human beings, we risk becoming the very thing that thoughtful rebellion and moral decency warn us against: not a force for compassion or shared understanding, but an oppressive voice bent on silencing those who disagree2.
Choosing Humanity Over the Gods
Given all of the above, I need to say: I get it.
The pull of easy outrage is enticing, intoxicating, and typically the path of least resistance, especially when social ties and acceptance depend on your willingness to echo that outrage. There’s a kind of safety in certainty, in knowing who’s “good” and who’s “evil”, and which words or ideas are permitted. And when you stray from that, even with honest questions or cautious nuance, it can feel like a betrayal, to your community, to the people you care about, maybe even to yourself.
But if we want to live ethically, if we want to live in a world that isn’t just an endless back-and-forth of purity tests and moral posturing, then we have to resist that pull. Not by becoming apathetic, or detached, or “neutral” in the cowardly sense, but by doing the harder work of staying curious. By remaining human in the face of inhuman expectations. By speaking carefully when silence feels safer and listening deeply when our instincts tell us to shout. By building communities where other human beings aren’t our enemies by default, but others who are suffering, struggling, and “in it” with us.
Nuance isn’t an excuse for inaction. It’s the groundwork for action that is thoughtful rather than reactionary. It’s a practice. A discipline. One that will often cost you easy approval. But it’s also one of the few things that might help us recover our capacity for empathy, imagination, and real moral courage.
In a world that rewards outrage and punishes restraint, choosing humanity is an act of quiet rebellion. It’s not about abandoning conviction or compromising with harm, it’s about refusing to become so hardened by the fight that we forget what the fight is for. The work of nuance is slow, often lonely, and rarely celebrated, but it is deeply human. It asks us to see others not as enemies or avatars of ideology, but as people shaped by stories, fears, histories, and hopes. And in choosing that path we keep open the possibility of a world where understanding isn’t weakness, where disagreement isn’t war, and where justice is something built with compassion, not just rage.
A Note on Creation and Collaboration
In the spirit of practicing the very principles I’ve discussed before, I want to acknowledge that part of this essay was developed with the assistance of a large language model (LLM). I used AI as a thought partner by using it to help me generate ideas, refine phrasing, and explore concepts. However, the insights, reflections, and final shaping of this piece remain my own.
Footnotes:
I use the political spectrum as an accessible example, here, but this plays out across many different topics, including things like AI/LLMs and even popular musical artists.
I reference “rebellion” here because of Camus’s work on revolt, rebellion, and resistance. For Camus, rebellion does not mean blind hatred, but clarity and intentionality in our thoughts, words, and actions.
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