No One Is Cruel

We talk about cruel people as if cruelty were a substance they were made of, the way iron is made of iron. The cruel person, in the popular picture, is just defective. Some part of them is missing or some part of them is wrong, and the cruelty pours out of the defect. This is intuitive, satisfying, and almost certainly false.

No one wakes up and chooses to become cruel. Cruelty is what happens when a particular shape of unprocessed pain meets a particular shape of available power.

If you actually look at any person who is doing cruel things, and you keep looking long enough that the easy explanations stop working, you will find the same structure underneath every time. There is a wound that was never allowed to be a wound [1, 3]. There is a body that learned, very young, that displaying the wound made things worse [2]. There is a developing mind that figured out the wound could be transferred to other people, and that transferring it produced a brief and addictive feeling of relief [3, 5]. The cruelty is the transfer mechanism. It is a strategy, not a personality [5].

The strategy works the way any reinforced behavior works. The wounded person discovers, by accident, that hurting someone else briefly quiets the noise inside. The quiet is real. It is also temporary. The noise comes back, and the strategy has to be repeated, and over years it stops feeling like a strategy and starts feeling like who they are. By the time it looks like cruelty from the outside, the person doing it does not experience it as cruelty either. They experience it as relief. They are not torturing the other person. They are, in their own felt experience, finally getting a break.

Why this is not an excuse

It would be easy to misread this as forgiveness. It is not. The behavior is still the behavior. The damage it does to other people is still real and still has to be stopped. Saying that no one is cruel does not mean that no one should be held accountable. It means that the standard model of accountability, the one based on the idea that there is a fixed bad person inside who chose to be bad and could just choose to stop, is wrong about the mechanism. And being wrong about the mechanism is part of why the standard model rarely actually fixes the cruelty.

The cruelty is a pressure release on a wound. You can punish the release all you like. The pressure does not go down. It just finds a different release [1, 2]. This is why prisons are full of people who came in cruel and left more cruel. It is why family members who are punished for their cruelty often become more cruel, not less [4]. The strategy is not the disease. The wound is.

Why it looks like a person

If cruelty is a pattern and not a property, why does it feel so much like the cruel person is just made of the cruelty. Two reasons.

First, because the strategy is repeated for so long, and so consistently, that it eats most of the available behavior. By the time the person is forty, almost every social situation has been routed through the same release valve, and there is very little of them left that does not flow through it. This makes the cruelty look like the whole person, even though it is really one extremely well practiced response running on a much larger person who is mostly unobserved, even by themselves.

Second, the rest of the person is hidden by the cruelty itself. The strategy works by keeping the wound out of sight. So the part of them that is not cruel, the part that is just hurt, is exactly the part they will never let you see, because letting you see it is what they have spent their whole life avoiding. From the outside, you only see the strategy. You never see what the strategy is protecting. It looks like there is nothing else there. There is. You just are not allowed in.

What changes when you see this

Two things. First, you stop being confused. People who behave cruelly stop being a moral mystery. They become legible. You can predict what they will do, what kinds of situations will trigger them, what kinds of people they will target, and why. The legibility does not make them less dangerous. It makes them less mysterious.

Second, you stop expecting the wrong things from accountability. You stop expecting that arguing with the cruelty, or being hurt by it, or even explaining it back to them, will make it stop. Those moves do not address the wound. The only thing that addresses the wound is something the person has to do themselves, in conditions that almost never naturally arise, often with help that almost no one knows how to give. Most people in this situation never get out of it. Saying so is not pessimism. It is a reason to be careful, on both sides.

The point

Cruelty is not what some people are. It is what some people end up doing because the strategy that produces it once gave them a real, brief, irreplaceable kind of relief, and nothing else they tried ever did. Calling them cruel is accurate to the behavior and wrong about the cause. They are not made of it. They are running it. The distinction matters, because if you treat the running as the made, you will spend your life trying to fix something that is not actually the problem, and the actual problem will keep producing the same output, in the same person and in the next one.

Sources

1. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking. On unprocessed trauma as the engine of repeated harmful behavior.
2. Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No. Wiley. On suppressed emotional pain and its downstream behavioral expression.
3. Miller, A. (1980). For Your Own Good. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. On how unacknowledged childhood injury produces adult cruelty.
4. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem. Viking. The "banality of evil" thesis: cruelty as procedural and impersonal, not as moral substance.
5. Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. W. H. Freeman. Empirical typology of how cruelty actually arises.