When Cruelty is the Point

The Atlantic published an essay by Adam Serwer October 3, 2018, which is most disturbing yet salient.  "The Cruelty Is the Point: President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear."

This essay lists incidents that I find very difficult to read. In the 30's black men chained to poles—whipped to death while white men grin proudly as though this was an accomplishment. "Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another."

A Mississippi crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford for reporting the attempted rape by Kavanaugh when she was a teenager. "Lock her up!" they shouted. The trial or at least a part of it was taped for mainstream viewing.

Ford, a psychology professor, reported the laughter of Kavanaugh and his friend Mark judge as "Indelible in the hippocampus ... that part of the brain that processes emotion and memory".

Adolescent male cruelty "is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt." White men in lynching photos bonding through cruelty. These examples say—the white man has evolved to be part of the global family of cruelty and torture.  

You may be thinking that white women and black men are as capable of cruelty as white men. But what I find so chilling in the history of World War I and II is the branding of men's psyche in the camaraderie of violence and cruelty.  That something in the healthy brain has been erased so that men can serve the ruling elite through bonding by traumatizing rituals to "toughen him up" rendering him unable to interrogate his feelings without falling back into the trauma.

When we question this behaviour men may get defensive or applaud it by further abuse. Should women learn how to do this? I have seen women who are willing to display cruelty and violence for the sake of maintaining power over a group.

I have even felt that hardening in my own heart when it appeared it was required "to do the job." To lose that intelligence of empathy and sensitivity which informs my place in the group. 

What makes me most fearful for the future is how easily we can become monsters through unidentified trauma and fear. This is like a setting in the mind which makes me do something I thought I was incapable of doing.

This is why election day is not the only opportunity I have to protest against injustice, cruelty and stupidity. I am a member of the human family and have an obligation to take care of us by caring what happens to them. This is my political task between elections.