Reveling in Revenge: The Addiction to Cruelty and How to Intervene
This is something of a companion piece to “The Hook.”
I’ve been reading a variety of articles about the phenomenon of Trump supporters, studies that show that they are locked into an echo chamber of false information and impervious to reason or evidence. All that is pretty apparent. But there is another aspect of the phenomenon that I find as troubling if not more so — their literal* addiction to cruelty.
As those who know me already know, I devote a bit of time on a regular basis to monitoring Fox News, right wing radio and some Internet threads that give me a window on the thinking of the Republican base. What has been jumping out at me more and more, particularly in threads about the victims of the most violent abuse and oppression — people of color summarily executed by the police, prisoners (even the likely innocent), immigrants and refugees, victims of the drug plague, natural disasters and domestic violence, our fellow citizens suffering from poverty and homelessness — is the shocking indifference and in many cases actual pleasure that the suffering of others seems to evoke.
I‘m not taking about’ explicitly white supremacist or hate group sites. These are attitudes expressed by supposedly run of the mill Republicans and Libertarians who don’t think of themselves as biased and don’t self-identify with overt hate groups. In fact they vehemently deny prejudice and present themselves as rational, reasonable and informed. Their arguments are devoid of overt name-calling (no “libtards” or use of ethnic slurs), often couched in rationales and backed by long recitations of (fake) facts. But the veneer of rationality cannot conceal the undercurrent of sheer joy in pain inflicted on others.
If I had to identify an underlying emotion that seems to motivate this sadism I would have to say it’s revenge. You came into this country illegally (even if you were two years old) so you deserve to have your life upended and your family torn apart. You must have done something to be noticed by the police so you deserve to be shot down in the street or tortured in prison. You made “bad choices” so you deserve to starve or die of medical neglect. Justice is served and we have a right to feel good about that.
I fear the problem goes beyond just its sheer illogic and immorality. I am concerned that we are dealing with a form addiction, where every “high” delivered to the mob creates both the desire for more of that stimulation and the need for even greater stimuli to achieve the same effect. Donald Trump is a genius at recognizing this dynamic and continually testing and pushing its boundaries, tossing the “red meat” of suffering inflicted on the despised “other” to feed and fuel the addiction (and hence their attachment to him, the pusher).
We know from social science experiments that people are highly impressionable and influenced by both authority figures and their own power relative to others. Studies such as the Milgram experiments (people obeying authority figures even at the cost of violating their own norms and morals) and the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment bear this out. We have seen it play out in real life in countless historical atrocities.
I believe the limits of human evil are now being tested again on a mass scale, and that we are witnessing the rise of a segment of society that is at the same time addicted to cruelty and impervious to reason, a very dangerous combination indeed.
Of course this is nothing new in world history much less in a society built on genocide and slavery, but we have gone through cycles, and I believe we are now on a steep, morally downward trajectory. The question is what to do.
If we follow the addiction model, we know that reason will not work and that the addict needs to bottom out. However, in the case of substance abuse, the biggest victim of the addiction is usually the addict. But in this case, at least in the immediate term, the victim is someone else. What intervention is called for?
While I am no more qualified to prescribe a cure than many other puzzling over the same problem, if addiction is indeed involved, I propose that we look for guidance at some of the tools in that treatment toolkit.
One obvious approach is to remove or reduce the availability of the addictive substance. What does that mean in the political sphere? I suggest that it is the equivalent of interdicting the supply of the drug (in this case cruelty), is a most urgent priority. This requires wresting the reins of government from them and their representatives, thus reducing or ending the policies that are producing the suffering they feed on. How loudly they howl in pain from that reversal will be a measure of withdrawal setting in.
Another item in the anti-addiction tool kit is the power of truth, not falling for the addict’s rationalizations or reinforcing their warped world view. This includes attempts to to “understand” or “find common ground” with the addict, which only helps keep alive their delusion that they are ok. They are not ok. We do not need to “understand” them better, any more that we need to understand a drug addict’s logic that says it is pleasurable to pump heroin into one’s veins and therefore it is ok, even necessary, to beat up and rob other people to get money for more heroin…or in this case, that it feels good to revel in the suffering of others and therefore it is ok to kill, torture, imprison and tear apart the families and dreams of others in order to get the desired high. It may be sad that someone has a great big hole in their life or in their soul, but it is still not ok to fill it or numb it by inflicting grievous harm on others. In fact, it will only make the hole grow bigger.
___________
*There seems to be some research to back up this disturbing observation, linking an obsession with revenge to the same brain chemistry that fuels substance addiction. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1073110520979419
