The Cruelty We Inflict on Ourselves & Nature is not Inevitable

If I had to pick just one word to describe the culture of the United States, it would probably be “cruel.”

From my perspective, cruelty is manifest everywhere, in our institutions both governmental and private, and in our social relations, including families.

The origin of the word “cruel” traces back to the Old French cruel/crudel, to the Latin crudelis for “rude, unfeeling” or “hard-hearted” (which is related to crudus, “rough, raw, bloody”), the Greek kreas, “flesh,” and the Sanskrit kravis- “raw flesh.” The hypothetical Proto-Indo-European root word kreuə- means “raw flesh.” Related words include crude, creosote, ecru and pancreas. The word is both emotional and visceral.

Contemporary definitions of “cruel” include:

• Merriam-Webster: “1. disposed to inflict pain or suffering: devoid of humane feelings; 2. causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain; 3. unrelieved by leniency.”
• Cambridge Dictionary: “(of a person or action) extremely unkind and unpleasant and causing pain to people or animals intentionally.”
• Wiktionary: “1. Intentionally causing or reveling in pain and suffering; merciless, heartless. 2. Harsh; severe.”

For “cruelty” we have:

• The Law Dictionary: “The intentional and malicious infliction of physical suffering upon living creatures, particularly human beings; or, as applied to the latter, the wanton, malicious, and unnecessary infliction of pain upon the body, or the feelings and emotions; abusive treatment; inhumanity; outrage.”
• Wikipedia: “The intentional infliction of suffering or the inaction towards another’s suffering when a clear remedy is readily available.” [my emphasis]

“Rude,” “unfeeling,” “hard-hearted,” “merciless,” “harsh.” That’s the US. Especially the “reveling in pain and suffering” part. My childhood in Catholic schools in reactionary Nebraska was full of grief and pain, intentionally inflicted by the adults in my life, as well as my peers, and the cruelty of this upbringing, though it had its own regional and religious qualities, was hardly atypical. (And now I fear the whole country is becoming Nebraskafied.) For the most part, children in the US are raised in abusive conditions. Capitalism is an abusive condition. So is techno-industrialism, with its estrangement from nature. So is Patriarchy, which poisons our family structures.

I find the bolded portion of the Wikipedia definition—“when a clear remedy is readily available”—to be the most important: the essence of cruelty is that another—not cruel—action is not taken. To be cruel is not merely to inflict suffering; it is to choose to do so when one has the opportunity to do otherwise. Cruelty is never inevitable, though many voices and forces in our society portray it that way. The most frequent justification for cruelty is probably the tiresome, “That’s just how it is.”

How is our society cruel? Here’s a few ways:

Wage slavery

The monetization of all necessities. Food, water, shelter, and medicine is not freely available, though for many thousands of years, in fact for the vast bulk of our history as a species, they were. We labored for these things, yes, but for fewer hours per day than we do now in pursuit of money. We also shared and didn’t hoard. People with antisocial tendencies who could not be healed were exiled. Now those personalities run corporations. Any programs that might relieve, even somewhat, the costs of neccessities like food stamps, social housing or public healthcare are always under assault and seem likely to drop to new lows under the current presidential regime.

State and institutional violence

If a private individual physically assaults another private individual without cause, it’s rightfully condemned and legal ramifications can result. Not so if the perpetrator is an LEO or a CEO. I’ve personally seen cops beat and pepper-spray unarmed, peaceful people, and get away with it. Police beat up and shoot people routinely. Executives make decisions every day that lead to homelessness, sickness and death for an uncounted number of people, just so they can “increase shareholder value.” (For what it’s worth, anger is rising.)

The Military

Then there’s the war-making. Whole books have been written to enumerate the millions of people who have been killed by US military incursions and proxy actions around the world. During the Philippine–American War of 1899-1902, at least 200,000 and maybe as many as 1,000,000 Filipino civilians died. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese, the vast majority civilians, and were recognized as militarily unnecessary at the time. During the Korean War, every structure in North Korea more than one story high was bombed; pilots would return with some of their payloads because they had so much trouble finding any targets left to destroy. In the Vietnam War, ~3,000,000 Southeast Asians were slaughtered. Unexploded cluster bombs in Cambodia and Laos still kill or maim people every year when they are accidentally detonated by people, often farmers. In 2003, during the second Iraq War, under George W. Bush, depleted uranium and white phosphorus were used in the attacks on the city of Fallujah. The birth defects that resulted are horrific. Picture babies born with mutated faces and limbs, and organs on the outside of their bodies. Actually, don’t just picture them. Go look here, and see just how cruel the US is: [ 1 | 2 | 3 | Google image search ] The US sent both depleted uranium and cluster bombs to Ukraine. The genocide in Gaza was only possible with US sponsorship.

Our history

Of course the longest war in US history is the campaign against the indigenous population here, which in some ways has never ended. The sheer brutality committed by settlers and soldier alike is breathtaking. There were massacres of Native Americans where every last person was killed, where pregnant women’s bellies were cut open and the fetuses ripped out, and where infants were skewered. Scalps were taken so bounties could be collected. That scalping is now thought of as something primarily done by “Indians” is a perverse twist. In the present, Native Americans have the highest poverty rate, lowest expected lifespan, highest rate of maternal death in childbirth, and on and on. And we made them mine the uranium for the nuclear bombs, which led to cancer and other sickness.

Slavery, of course, was incredibly cruel. People were kidnapped, families separated, and the survivors beaten, raped and literally worked to death. George Washington’s teeth weren’t wooden—they were actual human teeth taken from an enslaved person. So macabre. That was the “father of our country,” who, like eleven other presidents, was a slave owner. After the Civil War, Jim Crow laws meted out cruelty on African Americans for another century. After the public lynchings of Black people, Whites would cut off pieces of the body, including the genitals, to keep as souvenirs. That’s some sick-ass shit. To this day, justice and equality are still out of reach but if you talk about it you’re decried as “woke.”

One-on-one

Then there’s the cruelty in every day relations, within families and relationships, among friends, at workplaces, and from strangers. As I mentioned earlier, my own pre-adult years were filled with cruelty, and this is not unusual. Peers and adults alike dished out their worst, whether maliciously or subconsciously. Just having to look at a representations of a suffering man nailed to a cross every day is cruel. In my adult life, it took years to learn how to set boundaries and defend myself from it, and I’m still learning. Self-examination has also been crucial for seeing how I myself have inflicted cruelty just by behaving normally, because “normally” too often means without awareness or sensitivity to others.

Think of all the cruelty inflicted by parents and teachers on children, by couples on each other, by bosses to employees. Some of it is physical or sexual abuse, but much more is psychological. One of the fundamental messages this system delivers to individuals—both personally and through media—is that you’re never quite good enough. This is an inherently cruel message.

Of course cruelty is ubiquitous online, especially in the comments section. Which I hesitate to bring up because it might seem trivial. But given how much time people spend online, it’s an increasingly major component of how people perceive life and themselves. Especially for younger people. I’m a Gen X’er, so the web didn’t come along until I was in my 20s. I had already formed a sense of self to a large degree, and none of the mistakes of my youth were publicly posted for people to see. I do worry about the younger generations who, I fear, are facing terrible challenges that people really shouldn’t have to face because of how the online world has changed so much.

Ecocide

This is the most significant one, really, since it threatens to lead to our own extinction if allowed to continue. Our civilization is maintained only by a constant assault on Nature and her more-than-human inhabitants. The system relentlessly destroys wildlife habitat for agriculture, resource extraction and industrial development, expanding the footprint of these activities relentlessly. These offenses are committed mainly for profit, not for the production of necessities. In the US, only 20% of farmland is devoted to food actually eaten directly by humans here. The rest is for fuel (ethanol), export and animal feed. Industrial animal agriculture is itself monstrously cruel. Over-production is the rule; for example, one third of all beef is wasted annually. All the water wasted on alfalfa fields in the desert, on data centers and semiconductors, and other manufacturing you might not think of.

Pick a “natural resource” and it’s being over-consumed. Pick a habitat type and it’s shrinking. Pick a wild species and it’s probably in decline. Victims of cruelty, all.

Lately, my two biggest themes are critiquing the “invasive plant” narrative and questioning “green energy” development. Both are examples of cruelty being inflicted on nature. The war on “invasives,” which is primarily the product of outmoded and bigoted cultural tropes rather than “robust, quantitative” science[1] is centered on killing. I’m often appalled by the glee of some US Americans in hating the accused plants. It’s really ugly. But it’s totally characteristic of this cruel culture.

As for “green energy” development, so far it has only expanded our total ecocidal impact, not decreased it. Solar and wind projects are often sited in areas where other extractive activities had been minor or absent, especially in the western states, so wildlife habitat that had somehow escaped is now under threat. This is tragic—and yes, cruel. Also, the mining and processing of all the materials needed for “green” projects are inflicting additional damage on ecosystems and human health; think copper, lithium, rare earth minerals, etc. It’s business-as-usual—which is cruelty. When I wrote about how horrific copper mining is last year, one commenter was like, “Well it’s better than fossil fuels so we should get all we can and then move on to the next spot.” That’s an expression of cruelty

No, cruelty is not “human nature”

Some ascribe cruelty to “human nature.” I absolutely disagree. Despite all my personal experiences and all the cruelty I’ve observed, I absolutely disagree. I pin the tendency towards cruelty on civilization—that way of organizing life that emerged from the widespread adoption of agriculture and the establishment of cities. This came about only in the last 10,000 years, and given that our species has been around for 300,000, that’s only 3.3% of our existence. Not everyone adopted this way of life right away, and not everyone has. The facts that a) we lived so long without committing ecocide and that b) some in the world still aren’t proves that we are not by nature cruel. Clearly, we are capable, but just as clearly, we don’t have to be.

The danger in attributing cruelty to “human nature” is that this excuses our worst behavior as inevitable and by implication not worth addressing. After all, if we can’t help it, then there’s nothing to do about it, is there? That’s a great way to shirk our responsibility, and I’m not going to let it slide. No, we really don’t have to be cruel.

Some of the secular people who trumpet these claims seem unaware that their dismal view is just an echo of Bronze Age religious dogmas like “original sin.” I left the Catholic Church because it’s a cruel institution that tells everyone they’re bad by nature, and I will heartily reject the same sentiment when it’s spouted by supposedly “rational” people who present themselves as scientifically-minded. Nope. Do some more research. Not everyone who is or who has ever lived is like we are now. We’re a special case, arguably more alienated from Life than anyone else is or ever has been. But that’s on us. Nor our DNA or our taxonomic classification. A “clear remedy” is available.

But… kindness

Those among us who question the “harsh” and “severe” circumstances of life and call attention to the brutality of our history are told to grow up, put up and shut up. We’re called unrealistic, unpatriotic or Utopian. Our messages are not represented in the establishment press and are squashed on social media. We are mocked all around.

I get it. Trauma begets trauma. Misery loves company, so if you’re miserable, try to make everyone else miserable too I guess. If your own circumstances seem inescapable, then deny to anyone else the possibility of liberation.

The opposite of cruelty, I would say, is kindness. One could just as easily make the case that it’s the nature of humanity and indeed the nature of nature to be kind. In his book, Mutual Aid, Peter Kropotkin famously questioned Darwin’s emphasis on competition as the driver of “survival of the fittest,” positing instead—based on his own observations of nature—that it was cooperation.

Considering how deeply embedded cruelty is in the US, it’s virtually an act of rebellion to be kind or to seek cooperation, or even just to suggest either one as a possibility. I honestly don’t know if there’s a way to overcome it. Maybe “the American Project” will just have to utterly fail first, before something new can be built. We shall see.

[1]Hulme, Philip E., Petr Pyšek, Vojtěch Jarošı́k, Jan Pergl, Urs Schaffner and Montserrat Vilà. “Bias and error in understanding plant invasion impacts.” Trends in ecology & evolution 28 4 (2013): 212-8.