Examining cruelty and its origins
04 August 2026 - 1,318 words
The subject of this blogpost is about cruelty. Cruelty is not an emotion or a feeling, it is not a desire or a need, it resides not just internally but perhaps primarily externally. Cruelty, for the purposes of this piece, is an action.
It’s important that I stipulate this because cruelty is very often conflated with a whole cluster of emotions, like anger, resentment, or perhaps hate. My discussion here is not lobbied against anger, which acts as the primary agent of justice, nor is it resentment, which, unlike cruelty, simmers over heat under a lid and breeds slowly over time until it inevitably must erupt―no, for me, cruelty is not a productive social force, nor is it something that brews.
Cruelty, instead, is a choice.
Cruelty is these things given no outlet. It occurs in the absence of justice, not as its arm, it occurs when resentment self-justifies, not in the absence of reason. Cruelty is always cast as inherently righteous.
Cruelty is a potent tool―dole it out in the correct measurements, in the correct implements, it may go unseen under the surface. Cruelty feels good, it feels right, like the pain of massaging sore muscles, the pleasure of suffering under the release of pain. In this way, cruelty feels right.
Anger is probably the most productive emotion; it demands we do. It is probably the most irrefutable emotion; it’s impossible to hide, and impossible to deny. Anger is the engine of reaction and action; it is our nervous system fired up, posed to act.
Resentment is anger denied. It is an anger so strong, festering without justice, activated and denied, pushed and pulled, sparked and suffocated, an anger that has been told to shut up and deal with it over and over again, an anger pushed down and pushed down until it has become so dense that nothing can be seen beyond its horizon, an anger that has forgotten what it was supposed to act against and now seeks out an outlet to explode against. Resentment is a forgotten anger.
Resentment, for this reason, is dangerous: it is anger without direction. But this too, has purpose. A festering anger is a solution denied the confrontation it so demands, a solution coexisting with a problem that it is intended to work against. Resentment is an indicator―your food is burning.
So one path towards cruelty is a resentment that has been misread as a solution rather than an indicator. It no longer motivates us towards justice, instead towards cruelty. We want to hurt them, like they’ve hurt us. A mean statement, a degrading expression, a spiteful look, these things feel good, because this dense ball of anger has grown inside, and we can no longer deny its demands, yet no longer do these demands carry direction, only expression.
It doesn’t really matter if the guillotine, whether in the hands of the state or “the revolution,” yields any justice, only that it yields pain.
It has been said that violence met with violence is an infinitely expanding spiral, but I don’t really think this is true, not at least universally. Anger has a beginning and end, even if the tool it wields is violence. It begins with an act that incites anger, and ends with justice that satisfies that anger. So it isn’t just violence that spirals, there’s something more.
Resentment is cyclical. Anger has direction, resentment has none; this is why even if anger wields violence, this violence is not cruelty, yet resentment knows only how to wield cruelty, even if it doesn’t wield violence. Cruelty has no end, and that is the point. A cruelty with an end is unsatisfying to cruelty. It’s why torture is the most pure form of cruelty, not killing. Once a killing’s done, there’s nowhere else for the resentment to erupt. But the resentment doesn’t go away, because resentment is anger that has become self-sufficient, its direction forgotten. No, resentment cannot end, and nor can cruelty, at least, it will do everything in its power to maintain itself.
I would, of course, be remiss to neglect an internalized cruelty. This is why I say it is important to consider cruelty an action, not an emotion, and not to necessitate its conflation with any emotion.
For me, cruelty towards myself has probably mostly been at the hands of shame. Is shame kind of like resentment? I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Shame, unlike resentment, is a somewhat more primordial emotion. Shame doesn’t require years of build-up. Or does it? Shame, for most of us, occurs after years upon years of a normalization of what is and what isn’t normal, I suppose. Shame, for me at least, occurs when my self bums up against the wall of what it is expected to be.
On a social level, shame is essentially the foundational level of violence to maintain social order, like an emotional or a psychological form of violence. The amount of shame you are supposed to, or expected, to feel is inversely proportional to your proximity to what Audre Lorde called The Mythical Norm, which is probably something like a cishet Anglo-Saxon man.
Thus, shame acts like a motivator to trend towards this societal ideal. Is it a coincidence that shame coincides with how much, generally speaking, our society hates you? Shame is, I think, fundamentally an internalization of this hate.
Whenever I am at my most shameful, one of the thoughts that always pops into my head is that I live in a world that, on a fundamental level, hates what I am. In body, in beliefs, in hopes, in dreams, in mind, in speech, what I am is something that is constructed to be detested, or at least feared or disgusted by. This itself is a cruelty towards myself, but more than that, this justifies my cruelty towards myself.
Shame, like resentment, necessitates cruelty. If resentment is anger turned bitter, anger that has lived so long it has forgotten why it came into existence, then shame is hate that has forgotten who it is. Hate has to try and justify itself, because such an intense emotion towards another requires some kind of cause, whether it, like resentment, becomes self-justifying, or it harkens to external rationale.
Shame doesn’t require this. Shame masquerades as knowledge. Shame convinces you it isn’t necessarily a judgement, but truth. Shame, internalized hate, doesn’t simply justify itself, it imagines itself tautological. If you feel shame, it must be righteous. They hate you. The only thing worse than being what you are is not hating what you are, too. If you’re lucky, your shame tells you that if you just listen to it, it’ll make you into the right kind of person, and you won’t feel it all the time anymore. If not, it’ll be sure to remind you that it’s built into what you are. And most importantly, you deserve to feel it.
Resentment, compared to shame, feels a bit infantile. Resentment, at least, can’t help what it is. It erupts in cruelty because it has nowhere else to go, because you’ve done nothing else with it. Shame, instead, convinces you to be cruel to yourself and makes sure you want it. It guides the knife into your chest and tells you if only you cut out your heart, then you’ll be something worthwhile. Or better yet, it tells you to do it and gives no reason, and you obey because deep in your heart you want to be hurt. It feels so good to give into your hate for yourself.
Cruelty is not an emotion, it is not a feeling. Cruelty is not fleeting, it is not passive. Cruelty is an act, and we, its actors. We are not puppets, cruelty our puppetmaster. We are the arm, cruelty our knife. That’s precisely what makes it feel so good to be so cruel. To hurt is to vindicate.