The Warm Demander
Cruelty, compassion, collusion - what does real help look like?
For a long time I narrated my life as if I was a helpless victim who needed alcohol like a vitamin. That story told me that I could lie and cheat and steal and do whatever I wanted to feel better immediately, since I was in so much pain and every emergency measure was authorized.
Dropping that story was terrifying - doing so meant abandoning the only scraps of control and relief that I understood. Dropping that story was painful. Until I dropped it, I saw everyone who asked me to see myself differently as people who wanted to hurt me. My pain was my moral authority, and contradicting my righteous self-centeredness meant that I saw you as cruel.
I’m grateful that that story is no longer with me, at least not in the way that it was. What remains is an ever-urgent question: what does real help look like? Does real help look like validating someone and supporting them no matter what? Does it look like telling the truth as it is and damn your feelings if you don’t like it?
Did it count as ‘cruelty’ to contradict my old story of self-victimhood? Or was that contradiction the most honest form of compassion?
This has been a big tension for me that I’ve wrestled with ever since. On one hand, I prize empathy and the expansion of who counts as “we”. I want to create a future where we have fewer and fewer ways to humiliate one another. On the other hand, I also suspect that “pity”, offered carelessly, can keep people stuck in their suffering.
The best synthesis I can offer is this: the most humane compassion is compassion for becoming, not compassion for stasis. Compassion refuses humiliation and abandonment and also refuses collusion with diminishing stories.
Let me call in some philosophers to help explain what I mean.
Compassion and Suspicion, Re-Described
I’m a big fan of Richard Rorty, the American philosopher known for his pragmatic approach to truth as “what works in practice”. Rorty’s humanism asks us to widen solidarity - that felt sense of “who counts as ‘us’” - so that cruelty becomes harder and kindness becomes easier.
Crucially, solidarity is not sentimentality. Solidarity is re-description. According to Rorty, the universe has no preferred set of words to describe itself, meaning we are always free to change how we describe ourselves. Re-description is where we choose the words and practices that reduce humiliation and increase the freedom we have to live together in peace.
My old script was “I am helpless, only drinking and acting out can save me from my despair”. Re-describing that script as something untrue and self-diminishing was not cruelty, even though there was pain involved for me. It was painful to suddenly see myself as responsible, painful to see that I was never actually forced to act the way that I had, painful to see that I had destroyed myself for nothing.
If cruelty is what shrinks a person’s world and makes self-respect harder, then enabling me would have been the crueler thing to do. Real compassion can sound like contradiction when the story we protect is the thing doing the harm.
This, for me, is where Nietzsche comes in. Nietzsche is famous for such bomb-throwing aphorisms as “what does not kill me makes me stronger” and “God is dead”. He saw the world as having lost its traditional certainties and wanted to challenge his readers to deal with this crisis. As such, Nietzsche is allergic to the kind of pity that freezes a person in their wounds.
For me, Nietzsche is the friend who calls you upward - the friend who sees your power before you do and refuses to pretend that you are nothing but your pain. It isn’t chest-thumping toughness for its own sake, it’s a wager on your capacity to become someone who is ten times more happy and ten times more free.
It might sound strange for me to be allied with two thinkers who use the word ‘cruelty’ in very different ways. For Rorty, being cruel is the worst thing you can be. For Nietzsche, being cruel is the best thing you can be, when “being cruel” means “being boldly willing to cause the pain of smashing one’s own idols”. Rorty gives me the target, “reduce humiliation”, and Nietzsche gives me a crucial method, “do not collude in smallness”.
Put together this way, they form a posture I think of as the “warm demander”.
The Warm Demander
The warm demander is a synthesis of high warmth and high demand.
To see what this looks like, consider the other combinations of warmth and demand.
Indifference: low warmth, low demand. Abandonment. “Go ahead and suffer, I don’t care”.
Harshness: low warmth, high demand. Humiliation disguised as truth-telling. “If you don’t have your life figured out by tomorrow then you’re just a parasite.”.
Collusive pity: high warmth, low demand. Shallow, diminishing kindness. “Your debit card got declined at the liquor store again? You poor baby, of course I’ll lend you fifty bucks.”
A “warm demander” pairs high warmth with high demand. It sounds like “I care about you too much to help you hold on to a story that shrinks you”. That posture is the one that saved me, and is the one that I try to offer now.
What makes the warm demander stance work is leading with empathy. The pain is real, even if the story about the pain is up for debate.
This is what made 12-step groups like AA such a literal lifesaver for me - AA offered me a new story to tell about my life and my pain, but before it did that it let me sit in a room full of people who understood exactly how I felt.
This stance works for all kinds of human situations, addiction-related or otherwise. Here’s a rule of thumb:
If it shrinks a person’s world and makes self‑respect harder, it’s cruelty — even if it sounds kind.
If it widens their world and makes dignity more likely, it’s compassion — even if it stings.
The kindest thing anyone ever did for me was affirm my pain while contradicting my story about it. Today, when I love people in pain, I try to offer the same: compassion without collusion, a refusal to humiliate, a refusal to abandon, and a refusal to lie about what will truly set us free.