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What do people gain from cruelty? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My general assumption for the lowest I can expect a person to behave is basically always looking for their own absolute gain, and any attitude towards other people comes secondary to that. So while a person living by this standard wouldn't donate to charity without some other motive, they would have basically the same answer to something like the trolley problem as anyone else.

Am I wrong thinking of this as a "minimum reasonable behavior", or is there something people actually gain from the suffering of other people?

This question was born out of seeing how people are being treated by the US government at the moment, but I'm asking about more than just that. People like abusive partners/family, hostile cops, or just bullies in general.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

This was partly explored in Erich Fromm's work "Escape from Freedom" and "The Anatomy of Human Destruction", but basically, if I understood correctly, sadistic personalities use it as a means of defence against loneliness and isolation. By exerting power over another, they temporarily lose the painful feeling of being alone. Abusive people tend to be miserable when their victims leave them and they have nobody to control.

Nobody gains anything from cruelty, it's a symptom that something's terribly wrong with the person in the first place. Even animals don't display acts of cruelty in the wild, they do so only when confined to cages and subjected to other inhumane treatment.