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Condemnation? Enjoyment? Indifference?
Cruelty is part of our human experience. Most of us encounter it as children, in school yards for example, where bullies torment victims and others watch. And we witness adults being cruel to children and to other adults.
Some people enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on other people and other sentient beings. Others may not exhibit cruel behavior themselves but enjoy watching others be cruel. That’s a basis for violent spectator sports.
And then there are the paradoxical cases of people who enjoy being treated cruelly by other people — being physically or psychologically abused by others, sometimes deriving sexual satisfaction from that abuse.
Finally, there may be some people — psychopaths and sociopaths — who can’t even experience feelings of cruelty themselves but nevertheless treat other people in ways that those people experience as cruel.
Previously I wrote an essay titled “Pride and Humility: The Twin Pillars of a Healthy Personality.” Now I am adding a third pillar: Aversion to Cruelty. For I think it essential to our mental health that we reject both our own cruel tendencies and enjoyment of cruelty vicariously.
In an age when events like the Hitler period and more recent exhibitions of cruelty have demonstrated that a significant minority of our fellow humans enjoy cruelty and a larger percentage are at best indifferent to it, I can only hope that we humans and our descendants can develop an increasing aversion to cruelty. Otherwise our future as a species, to the extent that we have a future, will be bleak.
