Don't Give Yourself Permission to Enjoy Cruelty

(Audio version here)

One of the most disturbing features of contemporary political and cultural discourse is the increasingly open delight some people take in the suffering of others perceived as ‘bad people’ and desire to intensify it. This is deeply troubling and damaging both to the characters of those who permit themselves to engage in it and to the state of public discourse and our social norms. It is important that we recognise that, while enforcing proportionate consequences on those who do harm for reasons of deterrence and protection and strongly critiquing terrible ideas for the purposes of showing them to be terrible are essential functions of a healthy liberal democracy, taking pleasure in cruelty serves neither of those purposes and is harmful to it.

The vengeful enjoyment of suffering can be directed at those who have committed unquestionably appalling acts; at people who hold political or ethical views considered socially harmful or morally bankrupt by others; or simply at individuals perceived to belong to an opposing political or demographic tribe. When bad things happen to these people, the impulse is not only to approve of the consequence but to revel in it, and, in many cases, to try to intensify it by hounding or ridiculing them online or calling for further punishment. This is fuelled by mass online outrage.

Before considering what is wrong with this impulse, it is essential to note that these three categories are radically different when it comes to regarding someone as ‘bad’ and assigning moral culpability and justifying negative consequences. These distinctions do not depend on libertarian free will—moral categories and proportional responses remain meaningful even on deterministic or compatibilist accounts of human behaviour.

1. Those who commit material harm

Somebody who commits crimes in which they harm other people - violent offenders, exploiters, abusers - can surely legitimately be regarded as bad actors and satisfaction at negative things happening to them be straightforwardly justified on the grounds of justice, deterrence and protection of others. This is entirely consistent with the essential function of any moral or legal system. It is also unrealistic to expect people to feel no visceral response to an individual who has themselves caused pain and suffering. We have moral intuitions for a reason and they largely serve us well.

They do not invariably serve us well, however. Feeling relief and a sense of justice when an abuser of others is imprisoned or prevented from harming anyone else is a sound moral impulse. Taking pleasure in fantasies of their torturous deaths or in imaginings of their suffering, however, is deeply corrosive of one’s own character and, when indulged in en masse, of social norms. We should experience, at the least, a deep sense of unease and distaste when we see comments celebrating the idea of prisoners being raped, beaten, or tortured. Justice is what can be justified. The enjoyment of sadism and cruelty cannot be.

2. Those who hold radical views and/or views considered objectionable.

Those who express political, ethical or ideological views that must be protected under freedom of belief and speech, but which provoke strong moral outrage in others, are also frequently targeted for vengeful fantasies that veer into the sadistic. These individuals can be on the left or the right and often have a modest public profile or have said something that ‘went viral.’ Angry mobs descend on them, convinced that their views are morally abhorrent and damaging to society, and that they must be shamed into misery and often out of employment.

It is entirely acceptable to make strong criticisms of ideas we believe to be harmful. Condemnation of bad ideas is how they die. We should still try to hold to the principle of charity, find common ground where possible, and avoid dismissing all opponents as evil, but we must be able to say unambiguously that terrible ideas are terrible. Sometimes a person’s beliefs can indeed make them a genuine risk to others, and calls to remove them from certain roles can be justified. The bar for this must be high.

We must be careful, however. Political tribes can quickly work themselves into a feeding frenzy. A culture of public critique on social media can turn overnight into a mob pile-on of somebody who made a radical statement, a tasteless joke, or, if already high-profile, simply made a comment on a sensitive issue. Critical Social Justice activists destroying the livelihoods of those they deemed racist or transphobic believed themselves to be doing good. Those who hunted down people who joked about or expressed pleasure at the murder of Charlie Kirk or attempted murder of Donald Trump presumably felt the same.

Self-righteous online activism is particularly prone to merging into sadistic punishment, especially when framed around a sense of victimhood. People become vulnerable to mob formation, lose the ability to empathise across divides and justify the urge to punish and destroy. Those with sadistic tendencies flock to such movements, revelling in the torment of those they deem bad: magnifying their ‘crimes,’ twisting their words, demanding they be cancelled or ‘made famous,’ insisting on firings or impossible apologies, escalating their vengefulness until the wrongthinker is utterly destroyed.

Coherent arguments can be made that some individuals merit strong criticism or even removal from certain roles. But there is a world of difference between arguing that a consequence is proportionate and seeking out people to make miserable, and then enjoying their misery.

3. Tokens and symbols for collective blame

Entirely blameless people often become targets of callousness or cruelty simply because they symbolise a demographic or political group someone resents. I have recently expressed concern about the growth of social media accounts showing clips of women being intimidated or attacked in public while nobody helps them. The posters display glee at the woman’s fear or humiliation and claim that “feminists” or “women” said they didn’t need men anymore and are now getting what they deserve. If the attacker is from a racial minority, women are ‘accused’ of voting for left-wing policies or supporting identitarian views on immigration and are said to be reaping the consequences. The individual woman’s politics are unknown.

Meanwhile, callousness towards male suffering from misandrist feminist factions continues unabated, exemplified by the concept of “mankeeping,” which treats the male loneliness epidemic and high suicide rates as a burden on their female partners. This is something I have also addressed. Twice. It blames men or ‘patriarchal’ norms for their distress and even takes satisfaction in it. This rarely involves videos of individual men in crisis, but the contempt is socially acceptable in a way that the suffering of women is not. By dismissing men’s emotional pain as self-inflicted, it contributes to the broader culture of factional cruelty increasingly defining our public discourse. White men in particular are framed as entirely responsible for their own misery and dismissed with derision.

Sex, race, sexuality and political alignment all get tangled together in these tokenised hatefests, led mostly by “Very Online” activists. Women or racial or sexual minorities are treated as symbols of far-left identitarianism regardless of their own views; straight white men are conflated with the far-right and seen as symbols of patriarchy and white supremacy regardless of their behaviour. This is the pinnacle of tribal thinking used to justify callousness, contempt and cruelty. Most people still reject it, but they often focus on the cruelty emerging from the opposing political tribe rather than challenging their own. That needs to change.

There are kernels of truth in questions about whether political climates affect men’s willingness to intervene when women are threatened, or in concerns about cultural compatibility around women’s rights, or in whether men support their own mental health adequately. But this behaviour does not and cannot address them effectively. It is callous, malevolent indifference, satisfaction or glee at the suffering of others. It is dehumanisation.

To compare the glee at suffering across all three categories risks being accused of conflating them (and, if one is female, of ‘suicidal empathy’). But they are distinct. People who harm others need to be stopped, penalised and deterred; those who advocate for terrible ideas must be free to do so but strongly criticised and, if they pose a real risk, sometimes removed from certain roles; and people who are merely symbolic representatives of disliked groups should be left alone. These are not the same kinds of cases.

Yet we are prone to blurring them. When tribalists blame members of Group 3—“women,” “men,” “black people,” “white people,” “the LGBT,” “straight white men,” “the left,” “the right”—for political views or cultural trends they dislike, they stop seeing individuals and reclassify them as Group 2: people with radical or objectionable political beliefs. And people in Group 2, who should face only strong criticism and, very occasionally, proportionate social penalties, are in turn pushed into Group 1—those who commit material harm. That is when words are conflated with violence and people begin to justify committing violence against them in the name of self-defence. This is dangerous.

In addition to needing to keep material harm distinct from expressed ideas and expressed ideas distinct from demographic groups, it is also essential to keep the justification of proportionate responses distinct from callousness, sadism and the enjoyment of cruelty. The former is necessary for the protection of society while the latter is damaging to one’s own psyche and society. We must separate out these two things:

A) It is often justified and necessary to impose consequences.

We need systems of justice, and these systems must be allowed to function without sentimentality overwhelming their purpose. Prosecutions and professional consequences can be justifiable and proportionate responses to genuine wrongdoing and material harm. Strong criticism and social disapproval are reasonable and necessary responses to the advocacy of horrible ideas.

B) Becoming a person who enjoys others’ suffering is corrupting.

The desire to revel in pain—to join a mob intended to intimidate and harass, to share memes of someone’s despair or downfall and glory in it, to fantasise about punishment, to scour the internet for employers to contact—is morally damaging to the individual and socially destructive. It nourishes the ugliest human impulses: vengefulness, cruelty, dehumanisation.

People often say that what is lacking when we revel in the suffering of others is ‘humanity,’ or they describe the process as ‘dehumanisation.’ But the enjoyment of cruelty is very much a human capacity. Other animals kill to eat and may do so brutally, but they do not usually prolong suffering intentionally. Cats ‘play with their food,’ but this is not thought to reflect sadism. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, sometimes appear to take pleasure in the suffering of rivals; when one troop defeats another, the victorious males often kill the young quickly and the adult males slowly. These are not behaviours we should be proud to recognise in ourselves, yet psychological cruelty — the deliberate, reflective enjoyment of another’s suffering — seems distinctively human. And we also tend to reserve this for other humans.

History is full of humans engaging in both physical and psychological cruelty and constructing narratives to justify it. When we engage in “dehumanisation,” we are not literally denying someone’s humanity. We are doing something psychologically simpler: we are removing them from the circle of moral concern. This can take several forms. We may see them as outsiders—not of our tribe and not aligned with our values. We may see them as inferior or “subhuman,” undeserving of empathy. Or we may see them as contaminating, as people whose presence threatens our purity and whom we must keep away from or eliminate. All of these mechanisms make it easier to treat others with callous indifference or cruelty. Yet, we have also built societies that mitigate these tendencies and maximise our capacity to empathise across divides, reconcile differences and apply our values consistently to those to whom we are not genetically related or who are not of our immediate tribe. This is another uniquely human capacity.

How does our species manage to be so variable when it comes to humane behaviour and cruelty? A particularly valuable examination of how societies build narratives that stratify groups and legitimise dehumanisation is offered in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. I initially learned of this book when it was first published, having seen the Critical Social Justice activists I have criticised most strongly praising it and expected it to be a hyperbolic identitarian diatribe. It is not. By looking at the narratives which justified Jim Crow laws in the US, Nazi Germany’s racial-purity rhetoric and the caste system in India, Wilkerson identifies the tendency to create narratives that justify tribal hierarchy and enforce it via cruelty, not as a social construct created by any one demographic of people but as a human one. She demonstrates the dangers of making individuals into representatives of a category, dehumanising them and creating moral justifications for cruelty, exclusion, humiliation and violence. Wilkerson addresses the ways in which this both corrupts the moral intuitions of those who engage in it and destroys social relations and liberal democratic values.

Of course, I am not arguing that the political and identity-based hostility and polarisation we are currently experiencing means that we are about to turn into Nazi Germany, see lynch mobs roaming the streets or deem some groups of people untouchable. I am suggesting that, as we navigate this period of social tension and existential anxiety, we remain mindful of the human capacity for empathy, compassion, reason, justice and ethical consistency and also the capacity for dehumanisation, callousness, tribal narrative-building, vengeance and cruelty. Which of our moral intuitions are we channeling and do we really want to do that?

A just and functioning society needs systems of law, accountability, proportionate penalties to deter harmful acts and strong, uncompromising critique of all by all. We cannot allow sentimentalism, relativism or an indiscriminate instinct for kindness and charity to paralyse those functions. But neither should we allow ourselves to slip into the dark, vengeful habit of enjoying the suffering of others while convincing ourselves that what we are doing is seeking a just and functioning society. We should not give ourselves permission to enjoy cruelty.

To become someone who delights in the suffering of others and even seeks to intensify it is to damage one’s own character and psyche. This is the objection on a virtue-ethical level. Do you truly want to become that kind of person? To normalise these kinds of interactions is to empower the worst impulses of human nature and legitimise them. This is the objection on the consequentialist level. Is this really the kind of society you want to help create? What is likely to be the result of that?

History shows us clearly what happens when cruelty becomes entertainment, tribal vengeance presents itself as moral righteousness, and dehumanisation becomes normal everyday interaction. This is a dark part of our nature but we do not have to feed it. We can maximise the best aspects of human nature and mitigate the worst. We can aim to strengthen moral intuitions that value justice with proportion and empathy, and defend robust and uncompromising critique based on consistent principles rather than allowing it to become a justification for cruelty. Even in conflict, we can each ensure that our responses and those of our ‘tribe’ are guided by reason, consistency and humanity rather than the darkest impulses of human nature. If we want to preserve the values that underpin modern liberal democracies, we should do that.

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