Star Wars Stormtroopers are designed to blur human and monstrous, making violence against them feel justified.

Fictional dehumanization feels safe, but in reality, it undermines empathy and enables real harm.

Recognizing the mental process of dehumanization can help us resist making “monsters” of others.

Consider, for a moment, the Stormtroopers in the movie Star Wars. We like to joke about how they cannot seem to fire their guns accurately or how they are simple-minded. But there is also something very unnerving about them. They are humans, but at the same time, they are also monstrous. They have arms, legs, a head, and a torso, just like the rest of us. But they are completely armored, with no skin showing. They wear a mask that resembles a skull, and they speak as if through a robotic filter. They are, to put it one way, uncanny.

In a famous essay on the uncanny, Freud asserted that there is great fear to be had in things that look human but are not-quite-human, such as wax figures. The wax figure resembles a person, but it is not. It might seem amusing at first, but also unnerving. Similarly, the Stormtrooper walks and talks like a human, but it is also so armored and robotic that it becomes uncanny. And, of course, the Stormtrooper is out for blood.

In the original Star Wars, Stormtroopers are bent on destroying the heroic rebels at all costs. Their role seems to be firing indiscriminately at the good guys. The good guys, in turn, blast away at the Stormtroopers, felling them by the score.........

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