The day I became ruthless (fiction)

There are a handful of events that can drastically change a person’s life from being a loving, kind-hearted being to a cold and ruthless being. When I meet ruthless people, I always wonder what their backstory could have been, because I don’t think they were born that ruthless, cold, and mischievous, like every villain. they must have had a series of events or a specific one that pushed them over the edge and turned them into what they are.

When I say ruthless here, I mean it in the sense of those persons who are very selfish, strict with their affection, inconsiderate of empathy, and who are barely social. What does it take for a person to stop being loving and caring and become so out of touch with the norms of society? You could even take it further to those who are ready to watch others suffer for their own interests, What makes a person reach such a state?

This change can happen either suddenly or from the culmination of multiple factors, you can never tell what it takes to push someone over the edge, and it varies from one person to another. There is no general rule here that I can give you to avoid becoming ruthless, assuming that's even something we want to avoid, we still live in a society with very ruthless persons, and we do just fine, so it isn’t necessarily a bad state to be in. I didn’t say these people are evil or wrong for what they do, far from that, the only remark I made was that they have lost touch with their social nature in many ways.

Betrayal

I think the predominant feeling in such a moment is astonishment, to feel the sharp blade of betrayal penetrate into your back while looking straight into the eyes of your closest and most trustworthy friend with only one question ringing in your mind, “why?”. This is a unique feeling which really can’t be described, it's difficult to imagine losing all of your trust in a matter of seconds when you realize the person for whom you could have given your life and in whom you placed all of your trust is the one turning his weapon against you.

This event changes a man forever and there is never really no recovery from it, turns you into a cold being who can’t trust anybody, with hatred and caution filling your eyes every time you meet another person. It will take a mountain of work for you to learn to trust again.

When you meet such a person, you don’t have all this backstory, you don’t know what they’ve been through, why or how they feel, All you can see is a ruthless person who has a hard time trusting you or maybe some strict people who are preventing you from doing certain things. Life is full of surprises, some good and others very displeasing, One thing we always have to take away from all those experiences are lessons, What lesson could you take out of betrayal if not to be cautious about the people you trust?

Overwhelming Hypocrisy

One very common situation which happens in our society today is hypocrisy and how people don’t hold themselves to the same standards they expect from others.

Some people expect you to show concern for them while they display only disregard for you, others will blame you for the exact same things they do, yet again some will request for help from you but never show up when you are in need.

This is so common and overwhelming to the point where it slowly changes a person and makes them ruthless, imagine coming to the aid of everybody, doing the best you can to help very ungrateful persons who might feel like they deserve your help because you are doing well in life but when it comes time for them to help you aswell they’ll use the excuse that they aren’t doing well enough to help you. The hypocrisy is so blatant and frustrating, In a society where everyone is doing okay and requesting for help from others isn’t common practice, there won’t be much of a problem but in a society where very few are doing well and requesting for help is common practice, you can imagine that the few who are doing well will be overwhelmed by the requests, which will eventually turn them into ruthless beings who don’t show any empathy to others.

The reason why this is hypocrisy (if it wasn’t obvious already) is because the person in need expects others to help them but doesn’t think they have to help others because they don’t have enough, so they demand from others something they can’t do themselves. So you can imagine that when a person has been abused like this, a good number of times they will become very reluctant to help others, not necessarily because they don’t want to but more so because they are fed up with the hypocrisy.

Despair

When you fall into the realms of despair, it is more than likely you will become a ruthless person. This despair can manifest itself in many forms, whether it is poverty, an accident, overwhelming problems, etc Such an event can make a person very difficult to socialize with. They’ve been through a traumatic event and the scars are still very much present on their body, so they are reminded not just of the trauma but also of the absence of everybody to help them when they were at their lowest. Unfortunately, they end up putting the blame on others and hold a deep grudge against everybody.

Despair transforms us, it turns us into something less human. There is no telling the effect it has on everybody, for some, it might just make them fearful and shy, while for others it literally can turn them into villains who seek to destroy the whole world. When you come into contact with such a person and since you have no clue about what they’ve been through, It's easy for you to judge them and label them as being evil without knowing what the world first did to them and how reality changed them into that.

What you can do?

There is definitely no way for you to know what a person has been through unless they tell you about it; you can’t possibly guess, and also, its not like everyone needs an excuse to be bad. Some people are programmed genetically to be like that, while others simply embrace that because it satisfies their self-interests. I just thought it might be important to acknowledge as well those who had to become like that due to circumstances, ruthless despite them. In ignorance, there is just so much you can accomplish, so the best course of action can only be for you to inform yourself on the backstory of such a person and to reach a point where you can empathize with them for their character. It might be difficult to pinpoint the specific events that led to a person becoming cold and ruthless, but the signs of trauma are always very obvious, you only have to look for them.

Conclusion

There is no telling what a person has been through—all the traumatic events they’ve had to face, and ultimately this is what has shaped their present character. I don’t think they are to be blamed for these circumstances, and if a person is cold and ruthless today, then we have to empathize with them because we’ve not been through what they have, so we can never fully understand their pain. There is no telling what we would look like if we went through the same events, maybe we would be worse.

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