Cruelty involves ignoring and avoiding thinking about the outcomes and impacts of the action beyond the self. It involves disconnect, reduction, and extinction of life, negating and harming the conditions of existence. (That’s why boredom often leads to cruelty.) The hierarchization of strong and weak, of excessive power channeled into exploitation and oppression.

Cruelty harms both the person who is cruel, who has to reduce his sensitivity and action into (private and momentary) frustration and pleasure, and of course the target of cruelty.

Every judgment and determination holds the potential for cruelty. That is why we often feel that natural and necessary things – like death or illness – are cruel. That is why it is a danger that lurks at the door of every creative action. Any form of cruelty – even necessary one – is a form of abuse and therefore dangerous.

Cruelty lurks like the dark side of finality. Like the bitter taste of the action. The moment in which conscience becomes a mechanism of cruelty, when it turns the responsibility into a reasoning and justification, reducing the other into an image.

Cruelty exists in the gap between the comprehensible (pain) and the incomprehensible (meaning, reason). The birth of sublimation and culture. Keep in mind, culture, as well as consumerism, are mechanisms of cruelty, as they tempt and allow one to enjoy anguish, violence, and pain. It is always an expression of the desire to control and conquer finality. To keeping finality alive. An expression of frustration seeking catharsis.

The level of numbness corresponds with the level of cruelty.