What Is Cruelty? Part 1

Rastinews — Is All Violence, All Suffering, Cruelty?

Cruelty is usually defined by violence's most visible forms: the blow, the wound, the kill. But cruelty is not simply brute force turned on the body. It is a subtler, more insidious violation of a boundary. What separates cruelty from violence is not intensity but nature. Violence can wound the body; cruelty violates the boundary itself, and radically so. That violation appears at the threshold where pleasure and pain blur together. There, cruelty emerges as an excess that spills beyond violence. Cruelty sits at the point where violence meets evil. But a distinction matters here: violence in nature and evil as a human trait are not the same thing. A lion killing a gazelle calf may look savage to us, but the act is not cruel — because animals have no concept of "evil." Evil is a category built by humans, loaded with meaning, intention and value.

In Das sogenannte Böse: Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression (published in English as On Aggression, 2007, 25th edition), Konrad Lorenz argues that aggression in animals serves survival and therefore cannot be called "evil" in any moral sense. Evil, he holds, is a strictly human phenomenon. The difference between animal aggression and human evil lies exactly there: one is biological necessity, the other an excess bound up with meaning, intention, even pleasure. Humans do not merely kill; they kill by attaching meaning to it, and sometimes by drawing a kind of pleasure from it. Robert Sapolsky, in Gewalt und Mitgefühl (Behave, 2017), traces how modern violence has changed shape. As technology advanced, killing came unmoored from bodily closeness and emotional contact. It can now happen without touch, without sight, without feeling. That distance is not only physical; it is moral and emotional too. And the greater the distance, the lighter killing does not become — it becomes imperceptible instead. Yet one moral principle recurs across cultures: Thou shalt not kill. For Sapolsky, that prohibition holds only when killing stays concrete — when the victim registers as a living being. Once the target turns distant, abstract, invisible, the moral threshold weakens. That is why killing a person while looking into their eyes is not simply an act of violence. It reaches beyond ordinary violence, because there the other's presence cannot be denied. And that is precisely what makes it cruelty, not merely evil: a violation aimed at someone whose presence is acknowledged. Which brings us back to the question: who was cruel after the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima? The scientists who built it? The officer who gave the order? The pilot who delivered it to its target? There is no clean answer. Cruelty is present, but the cruel actor has vanished — scattered across the workings of a system rather than lodged in a single intent. Responsibility fragments; the perpetrator blurs. Cruelty stops being an act and becomes an order, a mechanism.

Since Sapolsky has come up, one more point of his deserves mention: the friction between moral intuition and logic. Sapolsky shows that people often respond to situations not with reason but with moral reflex. A family cooking and eating their dead dog, rather than burying it, revolts most people — yet on strictly logical grounds the act poses no necessary problem, and in some parts of the world eating dog meat is culturally accepted.

A similar case turns on symbols rather than substance. An American woman, clearing out a closet, finds a national flag she has not used in years and thinks: since it's no use to me, I'll turn it into a rag. Strict logic says this is nothing but a functional repurposing. But because of what the flag symbolizes, many people find the act unacceptable, even disturbing. The question is: what exactly is "evil" here — the act itself, or the meaning attached to it? These examples show that good and evil arise not from objective fact alone but from cultural, symbolic and emotional frames. The same act can register as evil in one context and neutral in another, depending on who judges it. The very distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is where morality begins. And this is exactly where cruelty appears too — not only in the act itself, but in how that act is given meaning, justified, and experienced.

In Der Lufizer Effekt (The Lucifer Effect, 2007), Philip Zimbardo describes how evil can seduce ordinary people, and how a sharp split between good and evil lets an individual place themselves safely on the "good" side. That dualism locates evil somewhere outside the self and lets the individual step out of responsibility. But evil is not outside — it sits, potentially, in everyone. Stanley Milgram's Das Milgram-Experiment (1982) offers a further insight here. Milgram demonstrated experimentally how ordinary people obey authority, and how that obedience makes it possible to harm others. Most participants did not see themselves as cruel — only as people carrying out an assigned task. What decides the outcome is not intent but position: a person acts less from what they are doing than from the role they have taken on.

After World War II, psychologists and psychoanalysts asked how such savagery had been possible at all, and traced the link between racism, cruelty and a culture of obedience. Milgram's experiments centered on one question: does obedience that produces cruelty belong only to extraordinary periods, or does it lie latent in everyday life too? In the experiment, a "teacher" administers electric shocks to a "student" — in fact a confederate in on the setup — each time the student fails to answer a question. The experiment was repeated in many countries, at many points in time, with similar results everywhere: most participants kept administering shocks, despite the other person's visible suffering, simply because an authority figure told them to continue. A large share of people submit to authority without question. That culture of obedience is learned through socialization. Forcing a child into obedience is often meant to file down whatever is defiant or independent in them — but that same obedience can later turn into an engine of destruction. The deaths of millions in World War II laid bare just how destructive that culture of obedience can become.

The Milgram Experiment underlines one more truth: evil is not what cinema makes it out to be. On screen, villains do evil and heroes do good. The experiment shatters that neat division. Ordinary people, too, can turn cruel simply by obeying authority. This is exactly what Hannah Arendt meant by "the banality of evil" (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 2021, 17th edition). Watching Eichmann's trial, Arendt stressed that he was no monster but an ordinary bureaucrat. Eichmann sent thousands to their deaths, yet he did it "just doing his job." Milgram, in his own way, shows the same thing: dull, average, unremarkable people carry a capacity for cruelty.

In collective cultures where upbringing rests on the idea of "bending the tree while it's young," a hierarchical order tends to take hold. That hierarchy also organizes authority: who ranks above, who ranks below, is spelled out clearly. Everyone ends up positioned to both take orders and give them. Within that structure, the more faithfully a person carries out an order, the more exempt from responsibility they feel.

In sect-like organizations, evil becomes anonymous. Whoever gives an order has, in turn, received one from somewhere above; the highest authority is placed beyond question, sanctified. That makes questioning either the order or the obedience to it nearly impossible. In structures where "we" dominates, "I" fades — and the cruelty that results carries almost no individual responsibility.

The victim of persecution—the other—is also constantly humiliated, devalued and dehumanized, through labels such as "infidel" or "giaour." This dehumanization becomes a tool that legitimizes the persecution itself. Another key mechanism is severing the link between an act and its consequence. A pilot who causes the deaths of thousands by pressing a button describes his action only as "pressing a button." What he did is thus narrated as though it were no longer persecution at all. Such acts, moreover, are often presented as an "honorable duty."

A person who kills another in front of cameras, saying he does so in the name of religion, God or a sacred cause, is another example of the same mechanism. In this context no crime or sense of guilt forms, because the act is redefined and cloaked in a higher meaning. Why, then, do people so often obey the orders given to them without question? Because disobedience creates tension between the one who gives the order and the one who receives it. That tension is the moment harmony breaks down. People mostly struggle to tolerate this tension. Here a key developmental concept comes into play: "frustration tolerance" (Frustrationstoleranz). In infancy, a child experiences the world as a being whose needs are met instantly. Over time, however, the caregiver—the mother figure—begins to delay her responses. This delay lets the child develop an important awareness: the mother is not an extension of me, but a separate being with her own existence. Despite this delay, the mother's return preserves the child's sense of trust. This process is what builds the capacity to tolerate frustration. If the caregiver fails to provide that delay—or, conversely, remains entirely indifferent—the child develops either a "harmony addiction" that constantly seeks accord, or a withdrawal that suppresses its own needs.

As adults, such children internalize obedience to authority, "not being a burden," and avoidance of conflict. For them, opposing authority is not merely a difference of opinion but a source of intense unease and anxiety. Unable to tolerate that unease, they submit to orders. More importantly, even when a person senses that what is being done is wrong, they suppress that intuition, because defying authority threatens their inner order. Identification with the aggressor comes into play here: by identifying with the authority that dominates them, the person feels they have moved from the position of victim to that of perpetrator. In this way they believe they have escaped the feeling of powerlessness.

Philip Cole (The Myth of Evil, trans. Reha Kuldaşlı, 2022), drawing on Valerie Flint's work on the Devil, notes that powerless religious groups often create an "enemy" from within rather than from without. This internal enemy is demonized and presented as absolute evil. The struggle is thus turned into a war fought not against concrete people but against "the devil." The figure of the devil is functional here: it represents an evil that is abstract, undefined and capable of infiltrating everywhere. This absolutizes the enemy, strips it of human qualities, and makes any action against it legitimate. Persecution is thus removed from the category of crime within a religious and ideological framework.

Jeffrey Burton Russell, whose books have also been translated into Turkish (The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, 1999), examines the concept of "evil" in the monotheistic religions through the narratives of Satan, Iblis and Lucifer. In his view, Satan is the personification of evil in these religions. Such a sharp separation of good and evil is not merely a theological matter; this division also shapes the social world and ways of thinking that are influenced by religion. Good, evil and the violence tied to them are thus reinterpreted and often legitimized. Here it is worth addressing the concept of fate as well. Looked at closely, fate functions almost as a structure parallel to God. God knows and writes everything; yet people find it hard to attribute the misfortunes and evils they experience directly to God. To avoid questioning God, to suppress the anger directed at Him, a second domain is created, as it were: fate. Thus God is held responsible for the good, and fate for the evil. Fate is separated from God and constructed as an independent agent; people get angry at it, curse it. This separation allows God to be preserved as "good." A wall is erected between good and evil, and God is positioned only on the "good" side of that wall. In Islam too, good and evil are often divided by sharp boundaries, and evil is not directly attributed to God. Instead, a person sometimes places the responsibility for evil on themselves or on other people. For example, after natural disasters such as earthquakes, the attempt to hold certain groups—"women in miniskirts," for instance—responsible is an expression of this mechanism. Here, by attributing evil to human beings, the person tries to sever the relationship between God and evil. In this way God's goodness is preserved, while evil is loaded either onto fate or onto the human being.

As Philip Zimbardo has emphasized, drawing a sharp line between good and evil makes it easier for individuals to place themselves on the "good" side. Yet as Hannah Arendt pointed out, evil is most often not extraordinary but banal. Susan Neiman (Das Böse denken, 2006) makes a similar point: great catastrophes arise most often not from malice but from thoughtlessness. The question is no longer just "where does evil come from," but how human beings make it possible. One function of obedience is to create distance from emotion, to suspend empathy. Phrases such as "that's not becoming of our family," "men don't cry," "girls don't sit like that" do not merely establish order; they also demand the suppression of feeling. In the words of a mother who says, "one of my sons was martyred, let the other be sacrificed for the homeland too," we see pain replaced by ideology. At this point the question is unavoidable: where does a mother, a father, or a state get the right to sacrifice children? Precisely for this reason, the greatest persecutions are often the ones that appear least personal. Persecution grows stronger the less personal it becomes; it deepens as responsibility is dispersed. A person can feel innocent even while being part of the most destructive acts.

Perhaps the darkest side of persecution lies hidden not in its noise but in its silence. A person becomes dangerous not so much when committing persecution, but when they feel justified while committing it. Persecution does not present itself as evil; it disguises itself as duty, order, responsibility, even virtue. And precisely for this reason, persecution's safest refuge is not conscience but the moment conscience is suspended. People most often carry out the greatest destruction not believing they are doing evil, but believing they are doing what is right.

One more thing should be added here: today hierarchy is often viewed as a negative concept. The ideal of equality that developed after the French Revolution and the American War of Independence created a distance from hierarchy. Yet the issue is not the existence of hierarchy but how relationships within it are formed. As Robert Sapolsky has also noted, people occupy different positions in different contexts. Someone who holds authority in one setting may be a subordinate in another. The problem, then, is not hierarchy itself but how power is used. Properly constructed, hierarchy can also be a structure that regulates human relationships. But hierarchy has another side: it ritualizes inequalities. Inequality then ceases to be merely an existing condition; it is internalized as a natural, inevitable and unquestionable order.

Similarly, another sphere of violence often regarded as "natural" takes shape around private property. In her book Revolution für das Leben (Revolution for Life, 2025, 5th edition), Eva von Redecker notes that property owners fear those who oppose them and, for that reason, build protected spaces for themselves. Looking at these protected spaces, the responses given when the boundaries of property are violated are often extremely harsh and aggressive. The violent response to "home invasion" is not only understandable but also considered normal and legitimate. What stands out here is this: under certain conditions, violence is not merely tolerated; it is also justified and turned into a norm. When violence is legitimized in the name of "preserving order," it is no longer the exception—it becomes the order itself.