A word from Officer K: The Delusions of Cruelty

Image by Niek Verlaan from Pixabay

"What were they thinking?" my friend asked.

"They weren't," I replied.

We were speaking of the Trumpists who have been recently visited by what could be called the FAFO Leopards. The red-hat brigade who voted for the red-hat guy, and got rewarded with layoffs and soaring prices and measles.

What were they thinking? Easy: They weren't thinking. They were emoting.

And none of that, I asserted, meant they were likely to see the error of their ways once they got bit. They weren't going to convert and become rainbow-flag waving progressives because their orange idol screwed them over. They were just going to look for another idol of a different color, but the same stripe. Maybe not as prominent a one, maybe not as charismatic, but an idol of cruelty nonetheless.

So much of what thinking goes on here, such as there is any, can be summed up in another phrase floating around these days: "They thought he was going to hurt someone else."

The first part of that sentence is far more important than the second -- that these people value, in some form, cruelty as an ideal. They're okay with it as long as it's not them that gets it in the ass.

This by itself is not new. What's new is how it has become an openly cherished value, thanks to the elevation to power of those who can forgive cruelty.

It's a common enough exercise to break people into two camps. Not once and for all time, but as a way to understand a given situation. In this case, the dividing issue is cruelty: there's one group of people who see it as -- well, maybe not a good thing, but sometimes a necessary thing. (And when no one but other cruelty-approvers are in the room, then perhaps it becomes an actually good thing, and even a fun thing.) And then we have another group, those who understand all too well that cruelty is not a solution but a problem all its own, or a symptom of problems.

Those who exist on the spectrum of "cruelty is a grim necessity" to "I want some of that" exhibit many of the other traits of authoritarian personalities. They may not be hateful or violent to friends and relatives. (I can personally attest that one of the most authoritarian people I knew in my life was deeply kind to his immediate family.) But outside of that circle of intimates their world is codified as us-vs.-them. Cruelty is how you protect yourself and the ones you (claim to) care about, you see. Rarely, if ever, is the question asked: but is that the best way to do it? Or even the only way to do it?

To that end, there was once a time when valuing cruelty was a relatively personal matter. It showed up mostly in the way you conducted your own life, and was not reflected in the way you voted -- in big part because the vast majority of the people we could empower were not avatars of cruelty. Now it is easier than ever to elevate the truly cruel and hateful to the top of the food chain, because any sense of shame about it has been erased.

When Trump took over, it sent a message to everyone who held cruelty as a value of some kind: You are right. You do not have to be ashamed of yourselves anymore! You do not have to listen to those bleeding-hearts who tell you that violence (mental, physical, social, spiritual) is to be abhorred. It is to be embraced, because we will absolve your use of it.

The real shame of his second ascent to power is not that it was a majority of Americans who demanded it. It was that not enough of us said no. More of us, I want to believe, think of cruelty as a problem and not a virtue (and perhaps not as a grim necessity either). But not enough of us were sufficiently repulsed by the idea of empowering a proven sadist to prevent him from coming back for a second, even more devastating round. More of us were motivated to sit it out, because somehow the idea of a competent black woman with a track record for intelligent compassion was not enough of an appealing alternative.

We may say we don't value cruelty, but we sure don't act like it. We only condemn cruelty when we think we risk nothing by doing so. And how different is that from those who demand cruelty but only for others? I say this not to make a nihilistic moral equivocation ("we are all equally bad"), but rather as an attempt to awaken the consciences of those who still have one. You gain nothing by embracing the cruelty of the powers that be except your status with them as another expendable mook. And you gain nothing by making your condemnations of cruelty conditional, except to negate the power of such condemnation where it matters.

If there is one other thing that seems to lie at the bottom of all this, it is the confusion -- sometimes intentional, sometimes not -- of cruelty with strength. Strength is not inherently cruel. Strength is at least as much about enduring cruelties, about guaranteeing the safety of others from cruelty. It is certainly almost never about violence, but about its opposite. And, most overlooked, strength consists of doing the thankless and exhausting and never-ending work of making the present habitable and the future welcoming and the past coherent.

Those who are convinced strength embodies best, or only, as violence and cruelty, are in the grip of the delusion that embracing such things grants them immunity. That it makes them immune to the cruelty wielded by others they ally themselves with, or that it makes them immune to their own use of cruelty. Both are wrong.

Cruelty becomes its own animal. It feeds on whoever feeds it. And once aroused, it refuses to be placated. It only eats.