Mercy (Not All Mercy Is the Same)
Yesterday I wrote about freeze —
and about mercy as movement after collapse.
Today I want to stay with mercy a little longer.
Because not all mercy is the same.
Let’s start with Upham.
At the windmill, earlier in Saving Private Ryan, Upham argues for mercy.
He wants the prisoner released.
But this mercy isn’t grounded in strength or clarity.
It’s idealism mixed with fear.
A desire to be good without facing reality.
Watching the scene closely, you can feel it —
Upham doesn’t belong yet.
He’s out of place among men who’ve stormed Normandy.
His mercy is untested.
Uninitiated.
And it comes back to him.
The man he spared kills one of his companions
while Upham freezes on the stairwell.
That’s false mercy.
Not evil — but immature.
Mercy that hasn’t yet paid its dues.
Now contrast that with Frodo.
Frodo spares Gollum again and again.
Not because he thinks it will turn out fine.
Not because he believes Gollum will be redeemed.
But because Frodo knows what the Ring does.
He recognizes himself in Gollum.
He understands corruption from the inside.
And by the time he truly spares him, Frodo does so from authority.
In the book, Frodo commands Gollum.
Binds him by oath.
Chooses restraint from power — not fear.
And he accepts the cost.
He knows Gollum may betray him.
May kill him.
May doom the quest.
And he spares him anyway.
Tolkien is ruthless about this:
If Gollum had been killed earlier, the quest would have failed.
Not because Gollum was good —
but because mercy created the conditions for evil to destroy itself.
That’s the brutal paradox.
Mercy does not prevent catastrophe.
It makes redemption possible — at unbearable cost.
Now let me put myself in the story.
I am Bilbo — with a core refusal to become cruel.
I am Upham — who has frozen, felt shame, and lived with it.
I am Frodo — carrying pain rather than offloading it onto others.
I’ve been betrayed by people who are gone.
By people who are still alive.
By people I must now relate to differently — or not at all.
So what is mercy for me?
Not softness.
Not reconciliation.
Not pretending.
Mercy looks like:
• boundaries after betrayal
• clarity instead of sentiment
• refusing to become monstrous
• letting consequences stand
• and not abandoning myself in the process
I’m not done learning this.
I’m in the middle of living it.
My authority doesn’t come from being finished.
It comes from being a little further down the path —
and being willing to name the difference when I see it.
Some days I get it right.
Some days I mistake hardness for clarity,
or avoidance for boundaries.
But the practice is real.
The cost is real.
And the discernment is growing.
Mercy is not about sparing others at the cost of your soul.
It is about how you act
once you can see clearly.
Tomorrow, I want to talk about what comes after this —
about Aragorn, about alignment,
and what it means to act without needing justification.
But today, this is enough:
Not all mercy is the same.