University Diaries » Society for the Prevention of Cruelty

With Michelle Goldberg’s opinion piece in mind, that’s what I’d say we’ve become.

I was going to say that’s what the current Republican Party has reduced us to – a society founded on fending off cruelty from the top – but (recalling Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty), if we agree that cruelty is the worst thing we do, personally and politically, then maybe we should be grateful for a regime that clarifies this primitive human impulse. Easier for us to recognize it and respond morally.

A regime that puts cruelty into relief daily! Think of it. Vaudevillians Vivek & Vance are currently on show, shocking and agitating tens of millions of decent people, but more sadists at the highest levels of government are getting ready to spring.

We all instinctively understand cruelty, because we’re all aware of times when we’ve been cruel, and we feel ashamed about it.

****************

I mean, not all — sociopaths enjoy inflicting pain. There are criminal sociopaths, and there are milder quotidian humiliation-inflicters, ambitious men and women who have watched Trump drain the national decency reserves, making the rest of us a society for the prevention of cruelty. They have made us think about cruelty (see Nietzsche, Freud, and Nabokov); they have activated our fear and disgust in relation to it. They have made us rush en masse to the defense of victims of Republican cruelty like Amy Acton and Khizr and Ghazala Khan; but they have also made us feel helpless, because cruelty is so incredibly strong and charismatic a force. Atavistic. Lord of the Fliesesque.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

Or the just-released documentary about Lindsay Graham in which one of his reputed escorts says Graham told him he wanted to be degraded. Be cruel to me.

And that’s private life, folks — Graham had every right, consenting adultwise, to let it rip. But we are talking about an entire political class for whom lack of consent is titillation. The future box office of Vivek & Vance depends precisely on the degree to which Americans enjoy this electoral exteriorization of humanity’s darkest drive.

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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