HUMAN DIGNITY ABOVE ALL

However you organize your thoughts, make this number one

I feel clear on this. Human dignity is the principle we should elevate over all others. Above the idea of private property, above concern for the economy, above our religious doctrines, above our political affiliations and ideologies. Human dignity above all.

Nearly every horror human beings have inflicted upon one another—from the mundane cruelties of middle school to the vast, institutional evils of genocide—has its roots in the denial of dignity. It is the first thing to go, the first domino to fall. Our most important task is to keep it.

The Problem of Seeing Other People

One of the most distressing truths of human experience is that other people do not automatically appear to us as real as we are. We live inside the murky, solipsistic fishbowl of our own consciousness, experiencing ourselves as the center of all narrative. Other people, when we’re not careful, become NPCs—flat, non-playable characters who exist primarily to get in our way in grocery store aisles or clog up traffic. Alas, this is the cognitive default setting.

The real moral and spiritual challenge of life, then, is to fight against this setting—to insist, through repeated effort, that other people are just as real as we are. That they have their own stories, their own humiliations and desires and griefs. That the old woman struggling with her bags on the subway might have been, fifty years ago, a poet who once met Sylvia Plath and whose first love died in a war. That the cashier at Costco, the one who seems bored and vacant and slow, might be exhausted from caring for a sick mother, or from working an overnight shift at a second job.

To recognize this reality is to recognize dignity. It requires a certain amount of attention, which is another way of saying love. And real love is the decision to grant dignity to another human being, over and over, even when it is utterly inconvenient.

Disregard is the Opposite of Dignity

The opposite of dignity is not humiliation or suffering or even death, but rather a state of being in which one’s selfhood is disregarded entirely. This is why solitary confinement is considered a form of psychological torture. It is why slavery was not just about forced labor but about the complete legal nullification of personhood. It is why children who grow up never being looked at with love or interest often struggle to understand that they exist in any meaningful way.

This is also why we recoil at casual, everyday indignities. Consider the way we bristle at being talked over in meetings, the way we feel a flash of anger when someone in a position of authority is unnecessarily rude to us, the way it feels when someone capable refuses to make eye contact. It is the sense, deep and unspoken, that we are being made to disappear.

The writer Marilynne Robinson once observed that the assumption that other people’s lives are as full and complicated as our own is “the rarest kind of moral insight.” It is also, I think, the foundation of all dignity. It is what stops us from cruelty, what makes us hesitate before dismissing someone as useless or beneath our attention.

Emancipate Yourself

Here’s the part that gets tricky. If dignity is something fragile, something that can be taken away, does that mean it is merely bestowed upon us by other people? Is it just a social construct, an illusion we hold up for one another’s benefit? This is the great existential question, the one that lurks behind all of our ideas about respect and worth and humanity.

And yet, if you’ve ever witnessed an act of great dignity—someone standing tall in the face of unfairness, or forgiving an injury with unexpected grace—you know that dignity is not just something others give us. It is something we can claim. It is an assertion: I exist. I matter. I refuse to be erased.