Every age believes, quietly or openly, that it is governed by monsters. The forms change, but the perception endures. Sometimes the monsters wear uniforms. Sometimes they wear suits. Sometimes they speak the language of ideology, sometimes the language of efficiency, and sometimes the language of compassion itself. What defines them is not their appearance, but their relationship to other human beings. To the monster, the person in front of them is not a person, but a function. A statistic. A means.
The central question of moral life, therefore, is not how to defeat monsters. That is a political question, and often beyond the control of any individual. The deeper and more immediate question is how to remain human while living under conditions shaped by inhuman systems.
This problem is older than modernity. It was confronted by prisoners in camps, by dissidents under surveillance, by workers inside vast bureaucracies, and by ordinary citizens navigating systems that quietly demanded their moral surrender in exchange for comfort and security.
The first and most important step in remaining human is refusing to internalise the logic of the monster.
The monster operates by abstraction. It reduces the individual to a category. It speaks of populations, targets, compliance rates, and acceptable losses. It replaces the face with the number. This process was described with chilling clarity by Hannah Arendt, who observed that the greatest evils of the twentieth century were not committed by sadists, but by ordinary functionaries who ceased to see others as fully real. They did not think of themselves as monsters. They thought of themselves as administrators.
To remain human, one must resist this abstraction at the level of perception itself. One must continue to see individuals, not categories. One must notice the person behind the role, the face behind the function. This sounds trivial, but it is not. It is an act of quiet rebellion against systems that depend upon moral blindness.
The second step is refusing to lie, especially in small ways.
Large lies require infrastructure. They require media institutions, political power, and enforcement mechanisms. But they also require millions of small acts of cooperation. They require individuals to repeat things they know are false, or to remain silent when silence implies agreement.
The great dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood this with painful precision. In The Gulag Archipelago, he argued that the power of oppressive systems depended less on violence than on participation. His prescription was simple and terrifying: "Live not by lies." He did not promise that this would destroy the system. He promised only that it would preserve the soul of the individual.
This distinction matters. The goal is not always victory. The goal is integrity.
The monster seeks not only obedience, but complicity. It seeks to recruit the individual into its moral framework, to make the individual see the world as it sees it. When a person repeats what they know to be false in order to avoid discomfort, they begin to reshape their own perception. Over time, the lie becomes easier to accept. Reality becomes negotiable.
To refuse the lie is to anchor oneself to something beyond the system.
The third step is to preserve the capacity for empathy.
Monstrous systems operate by normalising indifference. They present suffering as distant, abstract, or necessary. They encourage the individual to accept that certain outcomes, however unfortunate, are simply the cost of progress, stability, or order.
Empathy disrupts this logic. It reintroduces moral friction.
The totalitarian societies depicted by George Orwell were terrifying not only because of surveillance and punishment, but because they sought to destroy the emotional bonds between individuals. They sought to create a world in which loyalty flowed only upward, toward the system, and never outward, toward other human beings.
Empathy resists this isolation. It affirms that the suffering of another is real, even when the system declares it irrelevant.
The fourth step is accepting the cost of remaining human.
There is always a cost. It may be social exclusion. It may be professional stagnation. It may be misunderstanding. In extreme cases, it may be persecution.
The Czech dissident Václav Havel described this condition as "living in truth." He argued that systems built on falsehood are inherently fragile, but that their fragility does not guarantee immediate collapse. Those who live in truth must therefore accept uncertainty. They must act without the assurance of success.
This is difficult, because human beings naturally seek safety and belonging. The monster exploits this instinct. It offers protection in exchange for conformity. It offers inclusion in exchange for silence.
To remain human is to accept that safety purchased at the cost of one's moral perception is a form of internal exile.
Finally, one must preserve the ordinary human capacities that monstrous systems cannot fully comprehend: love, friendship, humour, curiosity, and gratitude.
Monsters understand control. They understand fear. They understand incentives and punishments. But they do not understand why two people would help each other for no strategic reason, or why someone would tell the truth when lying would be easier.
These ordinary human acts exist outside the logic of domination. They affirm a different model of existence, one based not on control, but on recognition.
This is why monstrous systems often appear powerful but feel strangely hollow. They can regulate behaviour, but they cannot fully extinguish humanity itself. They can compel outward conformity, but inward freedom remains difficult to access and impossible to measure.
To remain human in a world run by monsters is not to defeat them directly. It is to refuse to become one of them.
It is to continue seeing clearly when blindness is rewarded.
It is to continue speaking honestly when dishonesty is safer.
It is to continue caring when indifference is easier.
These acts may appear small. They may appear futile. But they preserve something essential.
Every monstrous system in history has eventually collapsed. Not always quickly. Not always peacefully. But inevitably. They collapse because they are built on falsehood, and falsehood requires constant maintenance. Reality, by contrast, sustains itself.
The individual who remains human participates in that reality.
And when the system finally cracks, as all such systems eventually do, it is the humans — not the monsters — who remain standing.