What is the cause of cruelty?

"It's called the spirit of abstraction, a term originally coined by Gabriel Marcelin his essay "The Spirit of Abstraction as a Factor Making for War," and is defined as the practice of conceiving of people as functions rather than as human beings. In early American history a large segment of the population labeled African Americans as "slaves," reducing their identity as human beings into an abstract idea only, freeing slave owners to consider slaves their property. Hitler convinced a majority of Germans to conceive of a segment of their population as "Jews," abstracting their identity as human beings into something he convinced the German people was so inferior he was able to wipe out 6 million of them (not to mention half a million gypsies as well). Americans, in turn, abstracted the Japanese people into "Japs," a derogatory term that reduced them from human beings with hopes, loves, families, and fears into the "enemy" on whom it was therefore eventually permissible to drop two atomic bombs."

Alex Lickerman, MD. Psychology Today.

And is there any way we can stop the spirit of abstraction where everything is made into something like entertainment or economics?

I have seen great organizations demolished because of abstraction. We are currently so good at labelling people and events, making us all part of a pecking order.

Even though we know our planet is under threat of more extinctions as we watch "interests" mobilize distractions from abstractions. It's really in its most diminished form the desire for so much power we can destroy everything. Or the ultimate proof of power is the ability to destroy.

As compassionate individuals it's easy to feel we have no power at all when we read of the customer who beat up a Walmart worker for asking him to put on a mask.

It's the final humility in the mind of someone who has been consistently reduced as a unit of labour, a trend, a consumer, an ego, a fragment of the GDP.

Year after year, the system makes humanity more abstracted, useless, and unemployable. This is no accident. This is the psychology of the pecking order. But it is very difficult to just "suck it up!" forever until we dissolve into a body bag.

Socialism is seen as threat because it acknowledges human dignity and that society is made up of people who have needs. The most urgent of these is the need for dignity.