“I have no enemies.” This quote from Vinland Saga echoed through my mind recently when I stumbled upon it in a video by Brittany Simon. Brittany used it to reflect on how many so-called progressives, especially progressive men, harbor vitriol and hatred toward those they consider their enemies. It struck a chord with me because, in my own life, I have never truly viewed those who have wronged me as enemies. Instead, I’ve always seen them as individuals in need of care, love, and understanding—often without even realizing it themselves. It’s an ideology I’ve carried for as long as I can remember, but only recently have I found the words to explain why it’s so central to who I am.
From a young age, I was bullied, abused, and treated as less than human. People hurt me in ways that were incomprehensible at the time, and yet, I never felt the hatred that many expected of me. I never viewed them as enemies; I saw them as people who needed help, perhaps even more than I did. And for years, I struggled to understand why I didn’t harbor that same deep, instinctive hatred that others seemed to feel in similar situations. It wasn’t that I didn’t experience pain; it was that I didn’t want to hold on to it. I couldn’t justify turning my anger inward and toward others.
People around me often dismissed my feelings, telling me I cared too much, that I was setting myself up for harm, that I was too soft. It seemed as though my refusal to hate those who had wronged me was seen as a flaw, something to be corrected. The common response was that I should get angry, that I should stand up for myself in the most aggressive way possible. But I couldn’t do it. Instead of shutting myself off, I found myself becoming more and more energized by my belief that there had to be a better way—something that didn’t involve viewing people as enemies.
The quote from Vinland Saga, “I have no enemies,” perfectly encapsulated my entire worldview. It helped me realize that the reason I’ve never hated those who have wronged me is simple: hatred enables the cycle of harm. When you view people as enemies, when you allow yourself to dehumanize others, it becomes easier to excuse their harmful actions. Hate rationalizes and normalizes violence. Hate allows bad behavior to become a system rather than an anomaly. If I hated those who hurt me, I would, in essence, be participating in that very cycle.
I refuse to participate in that. I refuse to be part of a world where hate is the currency of interaction. I don’t care who it’s coming from—left-wingers, right-wingers, centrists, anarchists, or anyone else. So many of these groups operate on a simple formula: create a villain, create an enemy, and then spend all your energy on vilifying them. For a while, I played into that game, too. I saw people, individuals, as the embodiment of everything wrong in the world, and I spent a lot of time angry, upset, and frustrated. But eventually, I began asking myself: “What is this anger actually doing for me?” The answer was nothing. It didn’t benefit me in any way, shape, or form. It only drained me. It only created more conflict in my life.
The clarity hit me like a brick wall. This constant anger, the idea that we need to have enemies, needs to stop. We need something better. We need to approach each other with empathy and understanding, not with the coldness of “us versus them.” And I reached a tipping point in September 2025 when Charlie Kirk, a figure whose rhetoric I’ve long opposed, was killed. Even though I disagreed with almost everything he said and did, I realized I didn’t want him dead. I didn’t want anyone to die because of their political views. The death of someone I considered a villain in the political sphere made me rethink everything.
What hit me the hardest was the realization that I didn’t hate Charlie Kirk as an individual. I hated the actions he took, the messages he spread, and the harm he caused, but that didn’t mean I hated him as a person. I didn’t wish death upon him, nor did I think it was justified. I didn’t want anyone, not even him, to experience harm simply for their beliefs. And that was the shift. That was the moment I realized the importance of radical empathy—empathy that isn’t conditional on who someone is or what they’ve done.
Empathy and compassion should not be transactional. Yet, the world seems to treat them as such. They’re seen as something that must be earned, like some kind of currency, a commodity that people should only receive once they’ve “proven” themselves worthy. This is the kind of mindset that fuels division and hostility. This is the kind of thinking that allows people to justify cruelty, to rationalize harm, and to make excuses for the systemic oppression that continues to harm marginalized communities. When empathy is treated as something that is conditional, we’re telling people that their lives are worth less than others—that they have to prove they’re worthy of compassion.
And that’s not just a harmful idea; it’s dangerous. It’s the same kind of thinking that allowed atrocities like the Holocaust to happen. It’s the dehumanization of individuals, turning them into objects that can be disposed of, that can be punished for perceived wrongs. This is why I reject the notion of enemies altogether. Once we view others as enemies, we stop seeing them as human. We stop seeing them as complex, multifaceted individuals capable of change. We reduce them to labels, to ideologies, to the things we can hate and fear.
But that’s not the world I want to live in. I want to live in a world where compassion is the default, not the exception. I want to live in a world where we see each other as people first, not as ideological opponents. I want to live in a world where we don’t have to create enemies in order to feel validated in our own beliefs. We need to do better, all of us. Every single one of us.
As Brittany Simon often says, we need to deconstruct the ways in which we think about others. We need to reflect deeply on why we feel the need to build up walls between ourselves and others, to create enemies. We need to confront the harmful ideologies that have been embedded into us and actively challenge them. We can’t keep repeating the same toxic cycles. It’s time to raise the bar—to set a new standard for empathy, compassion, and understanding.
This isn’t just a call to be better—it’s a call to be radically better. We need to dismantle the systems that perpetuate hate and division, and that starts with each of us. We need to reject the idea that someone has to “earn” our compassion. We need to realize that empathy is not a finite resource—it is something that should be freely given. And once we can do that, once we can stop creating enemies out of people who are different from us, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll start to see the kind of world that I—and I believe many others—dream of.
The world needs radical empathy. And it’s up to us to build it, piece by piece, person by person, until it becomes the foundation of how we all relate to one another. It’s time to stop playing the game. It’s time to do better.