the.com/ruthlessness
mercy with the safety off, deployed by people who already calculated your apology costs nothing
means The quality of having no pity or compassion, of pursuing aims without being slowed by mercy or remorse.
from Built from "ruth," a now-rare English noun meaning pity or sorrow — itself from "rue," to feel regret (a word still alive when we "rue the day"). Add the suffix "-less" and you get a person emptied of compassion; tack on "-ness" and you name the emptiness itself. Curiously, "ruth" mostly survives only in its negative form: we lost the kindness but kept the word for its absence.
- root word
- from ruth, an old word for pity
- orphaned word
- ruth died, leaving only its negation alive
- power study
- feeling powerful dulls empathy in the brain
- chess truth
- engines crush humans by never feeling regret
- animal myth
- predators kill efficiently, not cruelly, for survival
genghis khan's conquests — conquered 22% of world's land by 1279, destroyed entire civilizations
leopold ii's congo — belgian king killed 10 million congolese through forced labor and exploitation 1885-1908
stalin's great purge — executed 750,000 soviet citizens in 1937-1938 terror campaign