For me it's not shocking that any one person can be this cruel. What's difficult to process is how entire social structures and institutions can be this cruel.

Agreed. People do cruel things all the time.

But how was this perpetrated broadly by multiple societies?

I try to remind myself that the part of humans that makes this possible is in all of us. I don’t think it’s anything special – there needs to be constant vigilance to ensure we don’t allow things like this over and over.

It could be illogical, but it seems true to me if this can occur for generations at such broad scale. It’s a feature of humanity, and to an unknown degree even me as a result.

Societies are commonly cruel without knowing it. Even modern Western society which ostensibly tries to minimise cruelty depends heavily on animal cruelty and horrific work conditions in the third world. Individual people being truly horrible is rarer

We'll look back on homelessness the same way in 100 years

Its easy and it starts with language.