Reflections on "everyday sadism" on the harmless

 We found the following essay in the tcd.ie (Trinity College Dublin) website, posted on September 25, 2020, in an essay entitled, “From Psychopaths to ‘everyday sadists’: why do humans harm the harmless?

The piece opens with these words:

Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife. We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone hurts the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”

Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless-either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain. Another reasons people harm the harmless is because they nonetheless see a threat. Someone who doesn’t imperil your body ro wallet can still threaten your social status. This helps explain otherwise puzzling actions, such as when people harm others who help them financially….

The popular imagination associates sadism (those who feel other people’s pain and enjoy it, at least they do until it is over, when they may feel bad) with torturers and murderers. Yet there is also the less extreme, but more widespread, phenomenon of every day sadism. Everyday sadists get pleasure from hurting others or watching their suffering. They are likely to enjoy gory films, find fights exciting and torture interesting. They are rare, but not rare enough. Around 6% of undergraduate students admit getting pleasure from hurting others. The everyday sadist may be an internet troll or a school bully. In online roleplaying games they are likely to be the ‘griefer’ who spoils the game for others. Everyday sadists are drawn to violent computer games. And the more they play, the more sadistic they become…..Some speculate sadism is an adaptation that helped us slaughter animals when hunting. Others propose it helped people gain power. Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli once suggested that ‘the times, not men, create disorder’. Consistent with this, neuroscience suggest sadism could be a survival tactic triggered by times becoming tough. When certain foods become scarce, our levels of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, fall. This fall makes us more willing to harm others because harming becomes more pleasurable.

Research shows that if someone breaks social norms, our brains treat their faces as less human. This makes it easier for us to punish people who violate norms of behaviour. It is a sweet sentiment to think that if we see someone as human then we won’t hurt them. It is also a dangerous delusion. The psychologist Paul Bloom argues our worst cruelties may rest on not dehumanising people. People may hurt others precisely because they recognise them as human beings who don’t want to suffer pain, humiliation or degradation. For example, the Nazi Party Dehumanised Jewish people by calling them vermin and lice. Yet then Nazis also humiliated tortured and murdered Jews precisely because they saw them as humans who would be degraded and suffer from such treatment.

Do-gooder derogation

Sometimes people will even harm the helpful. Imagine you are playing an economic game in which you and other players have the chance to invest in a group fund. The more money is paid into it, the more it pays out. And the fund will pay out money to all players whether they have invested or not. At the end of the game, you can pay to punish other players for how much they chose to invest. To do so, you give up some of your earnings and money is taken away from the player of your choice. In short, you can be spiteful. Some players chose to punish others who invested little or nothing in the group fund, Yet some will pay to punish players who invested more in the group fund then they did. Such acts seem to make no sense. Generous players give you a greater pay-out—why would you dissuade them? The phenomenon is called “do-gooder derogation”. It can be found around the world in hunter-gatherer societies, successful hunters are criticized for catching a big animal even though their catch means everyone gets more heat. Hillary Clinton may have suffered do-gooder derogation as a result of her rights-based 2016 US Presidential Election Campaign. Do-gooder derogation exists because of our counter-dominant tendencies. A less generous player in the economic game may feel that a more generous player will be seen by others as a preferable collaborator. The more generous person is threatening to become dominant. As the French writer Voltaire put it, the best is the enemy of the good. Yet there is a hidden upside of do-gooder derogation. Once we have pulled down the do-gooder, we are more open to their message. One study found that allowing people to express a dislike of vegetarians led them to become less supporting of eating meat. Shooting, crucifying or failing to elect the messenger may encourage their message to be accepted.

The future of cruelty

In the film, Whiplash, a music teacher uses cruelty to encourage greatness in one of his students. We may recoil at such tactics. Yet the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought we had become to averse to such cruelty. For Nietzsche, cruelty allowed a teacher to burn a critique into another, for the other person’s own good. People could also be cruel to themselves to help become the person they wanted to be. Nietzsche felt suffering cruelty could help develop courage, endurance and creativity. Should we be more willing to make both others and ourselves suffer to develop virtue?

Arguably not. We now know the potentially appalling long-term effects of suffering  cruelty from others, including damage to both physical and mental health. The benefits of being compassionate towards oneself, father than treating oneself cruelly, are also increasingly recognised. And the idea that we must suffer to grow is questionable. Positive life events, such as falling in love, having children and achieving cherished goals can lead to growth.

Teaching through cruelty invites abuses of power and selfish sadism. Yet Buddhism offers an alternative--wrathful compassion. Here we act from love to confront others to protect them from their greed, hatred and fear. Life can be cruel, truth can be cruel, but we can choose not to be.

For many of us, perhaps most, we have been observers, deployers and recipients of acts of power throughout our lives. As young children, we learned the cautions and sanctions that ‘kept us in line’, both literally and metaphorically. We “knew” what was expected from collecting and curating the signals of both safety and tolerance, respect and honour and their opposites from those who raised us. In school, a similar kind of enculturation took place. We all knew who the school bully was and who was the most likely target of the bullying. In our homes, we all knew ‘which parent wore the pants’ as the cliché had it. As we embarked on part-time jobs, we encountered various models of supervision, direction, coaching and mentoring. One physics teacher of my acquaintance, while delivering an exam paper with a grade he considered less than adequate, remarked, in front of the whole class, “When are you going to start to work in this course?” His inverse psychology, absorbed silently will the full import of its social ‘sting’, prompted the student to raise the grade considerably on the next set of exams. Another supervisor, believing that the graduate student had left completing the assignments for the degree too long to be completed before deadline, provoked another surge of activity, to prove him wrong.

Is this kind of inverse psychology an expression of wrathful compassion, in the Buddhist example above? Parental disapproval, of even disappointment, expressed in a sarcastic manner, without inflicting a bruise, nevertheless leaves a psychic imprint with a long half-life.* In the parenting and in the education enterprise, even a frown from a respected mentor can and will have the effect of either motivating a mentee or perhaps turning off all motivation, depending on the psychic and emotional strength of the mentee. Never intended as a ‘cruelty,’ such a frown (physical or verbal, or even in an over-heard conversation of criticism) lingers in the memory of the aspiring student. These frowns, and their opposite, the smiles of approval, silently and imperceptibly imprint messages of approval and disapproval on those youth whose ‘skins’ are especially thin. Students in the ‘arts’ and ‘theatre’ and ‘music’ concentrations seem generally to be among the more ‘thin-skinned’ especially among those whose preferences run to the physical, the athletic and the physically competitive.

In a western religious sense, among Christians, the notion of suffering is an integral component of the life of ‘discipleship’. And those who are expected to inflict cruelty are deemed ‘sons and daughters of Satan’ as a way of constructing metaphoric moats of protection around the righteousness of believers. Diving the universe into believers and heathens is another example of the royal divide and conquer model of ruling. The model engenders comfort and approval for the insiders, and demonstrates a serious objective to convert the non-believers, as the principal role of the believer. Categorizing specific behaviours as “sinful” and “ungodly” and therefore worthy of exclusion from the community, whether formally or informally, socially and politically and psychologically, is considered by some as ‘wrathful compassion’ perhaps, in their justification of their exclusivity. However, one wonders if such a characterization is justified in the minds and the hearts of those on whom the ‘edification’ and patronizing is addressed or imposed?

The existence of cruelty and harm to the harmless has a religious history and a legacy of bloodshed that has been absorbed in the blotters of many battlefields. The textbooks and libraries, too, have become paper blotters of the ink used in recording, documenting, analysing and theorizing about those acts of cruelty, many of them justified as “according to the will of God”. We have been ‘steeped’ like hot tea in the degrees of suffering and death that have been inflicted on harmless, innocent and virtually defenseless people.

This is the story, on the human level, in Ukraine, for the last year plus. And while NATO members, for the most part, have been sending military equipment including trainers to aid Ukrainians in their resistance to the tyranny of this cruelty, the cruelty against the harmless continues.

Inside Russia, itself, just last week, laws condemning all signs of support for the LGBTQ+ community were declared unlawful, in another act of cruelty to the harmless. Terrorist cells in Africa are burning and killing harmless men, women and children, for their own sinister need for power in the name of some ‘religion’ or belief system that not only permits such acts of cruelty, but endorses and rewards them.

It seems time, if not long past time, for the human race to begin to confront the individual, everyday acts of cruelty that are imposed on various objects of harmlessness, the children, the ordinary individual who just goes about his or her daily life without seeking to hurt or harm anyone. While the criminologists and the legal establishment seek to adjudicate individual cases of malfeasance and injury and death, most of these cases the result of everyday sadism on steroids, the rest of us have to find ways to say ‘no’ to those acts of deep psychic and emotional hurt that are inflicted with impunity, because we never want to be seen and considered “weak” by protesting or resisting.

Those in pain, in the middle of personal life crises, especially, will be among those seeking, most likely unconsciously, to inflict pain and hurt on those whose only interest and motivation is to be available as support. And that very purpose, itself, can be a target on the back of those who seek to help.

We have a very long path to trod, as a species, if we are to not merely wrestle with the cruelty that is endemic among us, but also to understand our own complicity in the confusion and the impunity of the barely recognized incidents in which cruelty is inflicted on the harmless.