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This weekly thread will focus on the phrase “The Cruelty Is The Point”, which may take some explanation.
Frequently on Lemmy (and elsewhere), I see the phrase in comment threads. In my experience, it has been referencing any policy that is contrary to a Liberal or Leftist belief that the thread discusses. I have found the phrase when discussing trans issues, housing, taxes, healthcare, abortion, and many more.
This does not mean it doesn’t exist elsewhere, it is simply where I see it since I spend much of my social media time on Lemmy. If your experience differs, please let us know!
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- Do you believe this? If so, why?
- Is it true / false in some or all scenarios?
- Is it with certain groups or regarding certain things?
- Do you feel that speech like this is conducive to fixing societal issues?
- Is what is considered “kind” always the best course of action?
Honestly, there’s a lot of writing about this sentiment already which explains it in great depth. To understand it, that would be a good place to start.
But, yes, I absolutely believe it’s true in many cases. For example, the criminal justice system, from police brutality to prisons. There are many proven alternative methods to rehabilitate, reduce crime, and make society safer, and a certain political persuasion utterly refuses to consider any of it. Digging into their arguments, the only internally consistent explanation is that they want people to punish. It doesn’t matter if crime could be prevented and everybody made better off. In short, the cruelty of the punishment is the point, even if it means that we have more crime victims as a result.
Do you believe this? If so, why?
Is it true / false in some or all scenarios?
Is it with certain groups or regarding certain things?
These three go together for me, as the phrase is frequently used to highlight the fact that the policies or practices are based on people who are ‘other’ and serve no beneficial purpose to society in general while also negatively impacting people. Things like banning stuff like LGBTQ+ events or activities, banning DEI, creating laws that punish people for seeking out healthcare are all things that only exist to punish someone for being different or making choices for themselves. The vast majority of the time I see the phrase it is about some conservative initiative to rile their base by targeting the minority group of the week with laws and policies that actively harm people.
It is sometimes used incorrectly because any terminology gets used incorrectly.
Do you feel that speech like this is conducive to fixing societal issues?
Yes, because it is a response that stresses the fact that a lot of actions taken that sound like they could be a mistake are actually intentionally harmful to a subset of the population. The war on drugs for example is on record as being promoted to put minorities and hippies in jail for example. Language that opposes harm doesn’t need to be calm, it should be forceful and provoke a response because it both promotes action from those that agree because there is a strong front and it can sway people who might not be aware of the negative impacts of whatever is being criticized.
It does not matter if it doesn’t sway the people who are in favor of the harm because it isn’t framed in a nice way. They are already on board with harm.
Yes, some people go overboard but that doesn’t invalidate the message any more than someone who takes anything too far.
Is what is considered “kind” always the best course of action?
Pointing out something is harmful doesn’t mean the opposite is kind. In most cases not doing anything at all would be the opposite of the harmful actions, and not doing anything is not kind any more than not punching someone in the stomach isn’t being kind.
I don’t really believe this is ever true, except insofar as the cruelty accomplishes some goal. Anti-homeless spikes are, in my opinion, cruel- I would prefer we found some way to address homelessness directly instead of hiding the homeless. But the people who installed them, approved the installation, and came up with the idea aren’t trying to be cruel, they’re trying to keep the homeless from being visible in public spaces.
The cruelty isn’t the point, it’s a means of reaching the point.
During the Nanjing Massacre, two officers got into a contest to see who could kill more people with just their swords. They went on a rampage against captured civilians, executing them by sword in a bid to see who would reach a higher body count. This was reported upon in dispatches with all the glee of a sporting match.
What was the “real point” that this cruelty was the means to reaching?
I can find hundreds or thousands of things like this in reading history. Can you find the “real point” behind all of them? Really?
Probably not, although I think Ace is correct that even in the extreme historical examples there is often a “real point”. I probably should have been more clear, but I meant something like “in all the examples I’ve heard of people using this phrase, it didn’t seem true to me.”
“Real point” sounds very … “no true Scotsman”-ish. It sounds like the kind of diversion you use which can be applied to literally every situation. It sounds, in fact, very similar to the COVID-19 deniers saying “they didn’t die of COVID-19, they died with COVID-19”. It’s intrinsically impossible to prove after the fact and is thus a perfect diversion.
When the “real point” from a body of people seems to always, with almost no exception, include cruelty to some target—doubly so when it’s always the same target!—that whole “real point” thing starts to wear thin. It sounds very much like a diversion of a particularly ugly sort: the kind of diversion that people with no skin in the game make while treating human lives as just a data point in an intellectual exercise.
Is my language strong here? Yes. Because I’m in several of the fucking target demographics of much of the “not the real point” cruelty: female, (half-)Asian, and bi. It’s not some hypothetical mental exercise for me when I see one policy after another whose “real point” seems to always be aimed “by coincidence” at me and mine. At women. At visible minorities (Asians—especially the perceived-Chinese—in my case). At the queer community. And I can’t help but be amazed at how these “real points” always seem to have one of a small set of sub-groups in the cross-hairs. But it’s all by coincidence, of course.
The cruelty isn’t the point. It’s just coincidentally always the outcome. Aimed at the same targets. Of course.
Can you give me some examples of things where “cruelty is the point”?
- Lynching.
- Jim Crow laws.
- Any “tough on crime” bills that seem to always wind up aimed mostly at black and Hispanic people. (Quite by “coincidence” I’m sure!)
- Any anti-terrorism laws that always seem to sweep up “terrorist speech” of minorities (esp. “Muslims”) yet somehow completely misses the terrorist speech of actual white terrorists who then proceed to do mass shootings (of minorities, natch!) or who blow up federal buildings.
- “War on Drugs” laws that seem to always go after the crack users, but hardly ever apply to the coke heads in Wall Street (or in fucking Congress for that matter!); laws that throw black and Hispanic people into jail (often for life after the “tough on crime” bills nail them for “three strikes”) while barely slapping the hand of middle-class suburban white dudes who are doing exactly the same thing: smoking a bit of weed.
Oh, and, naturally, of course:
- every single fucking time an old white dude decides to legislate a woman’s uterus.
“By their fruits shall ye know them,” as the Bible says. You can claim that every one of this (very small sample) list of policies and laws has a “real point” … yet that real point is almost always held to the throat of an out group. Women are too uppity for the modern conservative, so practical biological enslavement is introduced. Not to stop termination of unwanted pregnancies (sex education has been proven time and time and time again to be far more effective at this!, not to mention that the support for the life of the child ends the moment the baby pops out of the mother…), but to keep women where “they belong”: under the thumb of powerful white men. You can claim that all the crime and drug bills are aimed at reducing crime, but the numbers show that these are quite thoroughly debunked as a way of actually reducing crime, and they also show that they’re disproportionately aimed at minorities that, get this, conservative assholes hate, even if the laws’ wording is “neutral”. We’ve seen the “real point” of all these laws and many more, and it points not to “law and order” as the real goal, but rather the control of out-group people through terror. The cruelty is, in fact, the actual point.
It’s all very nice for a white dude to sit there, look at the wording, and treat this as an intellectual exercise. White brodudes hardly ever feel the consequences of these nice intellectual puzzles, after all. Their skin isn’t in the game. “The law’s wording doesn’t reference hatred of minorities or of women, so it must have another point.” But those of us who get that point shoved deep into our body politic while watching it completely bypass white folk and especially white men get the intended message: “fear us and don’t step out of line”.
The cruelty is the point.
I’ll concede on the lynchings and Jim Crow. If the goal is to torture and kill someone then cruelty is obviously the point.
Regarding the rest, and specifically abortion, I think you could still say that it’s not accurate to claim that the cruelty is the point. No (or few) anti-abortion people are anti-abortion specifically to hurt women. They’re trying to stop abortions from happening. Mostly because they think it’s murder, but partially because they think that the risk of pregnancy will stop people from having sex.
If there were a way to stop abortions from happening that (somehow) didn’t place constraints on what women could or couldn’t do with their bodies, and it didn’t conflict with any other beliefs of the anti-abortion people (like sex ed does with Christian morality), they would probably be for it.
The phrase “the cruelty is the point”, to me, implies that the cruelty is the goal. If the people advocating for cruelty would take a non-cruel option that accomplishes the same goal, then the goal wasn’t cruelty.
Again, I say “by their fruits shall ye know them”.
There is always an excuse. There is always a reason. But it’s a staggering coincidence that these excuses and reasons are almost invariably pointed at and/or applied to subgroups who are not in favour: visible minorities, women, LGBTQ+, etc. Where are the policies that accidentally hurt, say, white men? Where are the policies that accidentally inconvenience wealthy people?
No, sorry, I don’t believe in that much coincidence. I know they don’t use the language of hurting visible minorities, women, the queer community, etc. but it completely beggars belief that they don’t a) know what the impact is, and b) want that very impact.
But again, what do I know? I’m just someone with skin in the game. I guess I should defer to the white dude who is my better because he has the clearer view from his purely theoretical stance.
That is an accurate example, but I don’t feel it’s true in every case (or even the majority) where the phrase is used.
For example, many right-wing policies (that I dislike very much) have the phrase in question used in discussions below them. More often than not it’s an ineptness, stupidity, lack of knowledge, or something else cause them to feel that the result would be beneficial. Maybe the intended result is power, or something economic, but it’s NOT them just trying to be mean.
I know you know it, but for anyone reading this… Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I’ve spoken to plenty of limited-understanding people all over the world. Many of them are broadly kind and well-meaning and brutally misguided people. Many express regret at any cruelty they “had to” do, but felt their goal justified it.
Dismissing it as just being shitty to be shitty is stopping people from addressing the underlying issues in the same way that some would dismiss a drug addict as “just an addict” without thinking about addressing underlying issues.
“He wants to be high because he likes being high.” Well, maybe? But probably not, or at very least there’s way more to it.
Hopefully I didn’t overstep.
Oh, every epithet gets misapplied. “Misgendering is literally violence!” “<insert person mildly conservative> is a literal Nazi!” “<insert ever so slightly social policy> is literally communism!” It is not even slightly surprising to hear that people are misusing “the cruelty is the point”.
I know it does, and that’s a massive pet peeve of mine (if you couldn’t tell from other threads). To be clear pre mini-rant, this isn’t aimed at you, it’s just something that bothers me and I wanted to get it out.
I think clarity and unity of terms use is one of the major issues that need to be addressed, especially now. It’s also one of the reasons I often will add the definition of a term being used in our weekly threads, because I don’t like people claiming to be correct because their “personal definition” obscures the truth. We have words. They are effective, powerful, and can be wielded to great effect. Changing what they mean in order to shock with a worse term is a horrible thing to do and is a dumbing-down that serves to undermine the original definition. It makes communication worse.
I despise forced political movement of words and don’t like turning words into the personal equivalent of morality.
Wonder why you used this language to start the conversation:
Generally this is referencing any policy that is contrary to a leftist belief that the thread discusses.
That anecdote also matches my experience. OP wasn’t singling out leftists, it’s just that we’re the only ones I’ve ever seen use this phrase.
I have a shitload of leftist beliefs, but I really hate this phrase and have never seen it used by someone who wasn’t left-leaning. I have corrected my initial statement (which is intended to be completely neutral and non-leading) to specify that this is solely my experience with it.
In my experience arguments that broadly characterize groups of people aren’t make in good faith. No matter how that sentiment is reworded.
In my opinion the cruelty is the point is a coping sort of term. When faced with something uncomfortable or even unconscionable I try to understand the situation.
Why does police violence disproportionately affect minorities, for example? It isn’t new. This shit was around long before Rodney King. The only thing that changed recently was that the killer went to jail.
When I ask myself how I live with a society and a law enforcement system that allows these things to happen I try to understand why. It seems to me that either one of two things could be true. Either it is incompetence, or that the cruelty is the point.
Seems to me that the cruelty is the point. I don’t think every cop is a bastard, for example. See my first point about generalizing. I do think there is a voting bloc that’s never encountered the law enforcement arm of our society and they’ll continue to vote and act in ways that lack empathy.
Because to them, the cruelty is the point. A deterrent to crime. Don’t steal anything if you don’t want to get cornholed or shivved in prison. Don’t have a criminal history, because if you do then it’s okay for someone to kneel on your neck for 10m.
I could very much see how, by not being able to understand certain situations, someone might assume that cruelty was the point, but it dismisses the reasons a person or group might attempt something. Cruelty is rarely the point.
The only way we can stop abuses is by doing away with simplistic “chant”-like phrasing and finding the real issues behind things.
To use your example, policing. It’s a complex one, but I can assure you that in no police training ever tells the trainees to be massive dicks and injure every minority they see. The point can be power. The point can be maintaining the letter of the law, and at their sole discretion. The point can be self-preservation out of fear for themselves. We can’t know all of them, and they change in the moment depending on the situation.
If cruelty was the point, then we could just appoint non-cruel people to be officers and the problem is solved, but that isn’t the case. We have to address the underlying issues which are different for every officer. That’s why it’s complex. We can start with systemic corrections such as de-escalation policies being the default, choosing different response teams for different issues, removal of lethal weapons, and harsher punishments for missteps. Those have been found to be effective. But simply hand-waving away things as “cruelty is the point” doesn’t help fix the situation, it dismisses it. We must come at bad situations with ways to stop them, not simply be angry at them.
Why were 3 of the officers acquitted in the rk beating? They for sure hit the guy. More than once.
Why were they acquitted? I have no idea as I was too young at the time to be following trials, but it doesn’t mean anything about my previous statement was incorrect.
People can be cruel, but the goal is not often cruelty. In this instance, the goal for the officers was most likely to regain a feeling of power in my best estimation - a “how dare you not do what I say” attitude and they used cruelty to get it.
Again, their motivation doesn’t explain why they got off, however. I disagree with that decision wholeheartedly.
I generally disagree with the phrase. In some cases, it is true-- any human behavior is true for someone out there, or maybe even a large group of someones-- but generally I think the truth is far more underwhelming: the people who are being cruel simply do not care. They will cause cruelty if it makes their own lives more convenient in the slightest. That being said, for some topics (generally relating to identity politics), the ratio of people who are simply cruel because they want to make other people miserable is higher imo.
Do you feel that speech like this is conducive to fixing societal issues?
I think accurately identifying the nature of peoples’ beliefs and intentions is conducive to helping fix societal issues. In this case, that means identifying intentional cruelty where it truly is, so we can combat it more aggressively in regards to the perpetrators, and identifying indifference where that truly is, so that we can take a smarter/softer approach of changing incentives to discourage the undesirable behavior. If people aren’t actually being cruel on purpose, it’s more effective to make them not want to do the thing with cruel side effects than it is to convince them to change their cruel actions, or even to convince them that they are being cruel in the first place, since it can be unintentional.
Is what is considered “kind” always the best course of action?
No, but I’m not sure how much that’s because actions that are unkind to a small class of abusive people and kind to a large class of victims are often still considered “unkind”. I do think that considering kindness in the approach is useful, and often leads to superior outcomes (ie. providing housing and food to lower crime rates).
No, I do not personally believe this. I believe that this phrase is one of the shortest-form strawman “arguments” that exist and is usually spoken by itself with zero justification or understanding of the issue referenced.
And beside that, it should be obvious that it is very often not true. Most of the time with issues “the point” is cost-saving, stubbornness, cause & effect disagreements, or difference of opinion on how to carry things out. If there is cruelty involved, it is a side-effect, not the point. Even then, the side being accused may feel the cruelty lay on the opposing side because cruelty is a moral argument, and you can not apply morals universally.
The phrase is like saying “the point of drinking water is to touch your genitals while peeing.” It actively avoids the real point in order to make the entire act seem absurd and is a bad faith argument from the jump.
A good way to find out if “cruelty is the point” is to do a thought experiment. “If they could do / remove the crux of the issue and the perceived oppressed group would still be happy some other way, would this still be an issue?”
For example (and I am not passing a value judgment here, I’m simply doing the thought experiment with a real-world example), if a state passed an anti-transitioning law, but found a single pain-free pill to remove all dysphoria from the affected group, would they allow that pill? If yes, then the cruelty didn’t factor into the decision - the issue and how to deal with it did.
To be absurdist, if you feel they wouldn’t allow the “pill fix”, and cruelty is still the point, then why have they not made the suffering worse? They could say “you can have whatever treatment you want, but only if you allow us to torture you for 6 hours per day!”
If a person eats meat, but is grossed out by factory farming and avoids it, is the point the cruelty or the ease, nutrients, and flavour of a standard omnivorous diet? Rationally, do you really feel that their first thought before biting into a burger is “Fuck this cow, I hope it died screaming.”
No. That would be insane.
Thinking and speaking in this fashion only removes the ability to deal with difficult situations in a meaningful or rational way and simply shows others that you can’t even pretend to fathom other people. It shows that the speaker is not empathetic in the slightest, but sure would like to be perceived as such by their in-group.
Most of the time with issues “the point” is cost-saving, stubbornness, cause & effect disagreements, or difference of opinion on how to carry things out
Part of the reason for the phrase I’d say is that said policies aren’t even effective at what they aim to do. It often costs more and makes their perceived problem worse (or at very least, hurts their own side in some other way), and it’s even worse for the original problem. When this continuously occurs it doesn’t seem like a good-faith action.
Cruelty is the only thing that they can consistently get right. Could it be that they’re just that incompetent? Maybe, but it sure seems like they’re happy with the result.
I agree that things done for an many reasons including ineptness, nonscientific views, fear, reactionary politics, poor training, or even doing things from a detached perspective can seem cruel, but the cruelty is not the point. The cruelty is a byproduct, not the goal. It’s a bad and oversimplified phrase and in nearly every serves to obfuscates issues.
For example, knocking down a big tree can seem cruel if you’re a squirrel and live there. But if you’re a human, maybe you know that that tree was damaged in a storm and is about to fall over and destroy a few homes and potentially kill someone.
A serial killer torturing a victim? Maybe the power is the goal. Maybe the rush is the goal. The cruelty? It’s a means to an end. Understanding goals is how we stop people. Hand-waving away true reasons behind things doesn’t help us understand and therefore stop them.
You can handily cherry-pick examples throughout history of people being outwardly psychotic, and I’d agree with you. However, when used in modern-day political contexts, most of the time it’s used in reference to the things I mentioned. Ineptness, fear, nonscientific views, etc.
Do you believe this? If so, why?
Yes, I do. And I don’t view it as a “left” vs. “right” false bifurcation either. (The Americas need to grow up and realize there’s more than two directions!) There are policies that match however, the phrase and, although usually originating from the so-called “right” in the west are not universal to it and are the product of a very specific subset of that right. (And can be found in other cultures on what would be called the “left” by simplistic-minded western political thought.)
These policies cannot be meaningfully interpreted as attempting something and being cruel as a byproduct since it’s trivial to show they don’t actually accomplish their purported aims. You have to look elsewhere for the goal, and the one consistent thing across all of them is that they hurt an “out” group.
So you don’t believe this “the cruelty is the point” exists?
Tell me, then, what the point of this was if it wasn’t the cruelty? (And be glad I picked a mild example. There are some truly horrific photos of this horrifically cruel institution out there.) Lynching was a cultural backlash of people resentful of having lost mastery—of having lost power over a group they considered (and still do!) subhuman—lashing out to cause that group misery and to inculcate fear in that group.
I could find similar kinds of photographs (including far worse ones) from Nazis (“right”), Maoists (“left”), Islamists (left and right begins to break down here), criminal gangs (even more ridiculous to label with left or right), the Japanese in Nanjing (“right”… I guess?), etc. etc. etc. In all such cases the cruelty is, in fact, the very point of the action or policy
It’s terrorism, to put it into a single word, and in all terrorism the cruelty is, in fact, the very point.
And right now in the USA in particular there’s a single group prone to lashing out at perceived (and actual) loss of standing, power, and influence. A group prone to wearing red baseball caps. (Yes, I’m talking about MAGAts here.) A group that is noted for instituting policies simply to be cruel to an out group that they perceive as somehow “replacing” them. (Yes, I’m alluding to the Great Replacement bullshit that festers in MAGAt circles.)
So yes, indeed, the cruelty is very much the point.
Is it true / false in some or all scenarios?
The statement “it is true in some situations, not true in others” can be made about literally any philosophy, political slogan, or pithy expression.
Is it with certain groups or regarding certain things?
“The cruelty is the point”-style politics are likely older than civilization. You can see “the cruelty is the point” policies and actions in the very first things ever written down. So it is, yes, tied to a certain group: humanity.
As to what it typically applies to, well, that is also a sad fact of human nature: it is an exercise of power. To many people you don’t have power unless you are making other people feel misery. This isn’t universal across humans, but there is a large chunk of humanity that believes this. We call them “sociopaths” or “psychopaths” or other such terms, and they are alarmingly common in human society. Some estimates place them at about 1 in 20 people. And by their nature they crave positions of power and thus strive for them, leading them to be over-represented in the corridors of power. Hence policies that appeal to sociopaths and psychopaths being so common.
Do you feel that speech like this is conducive to fixing societal issues?
Yes.
If you believe that policies are enacted to accomplish goal X and set out to prove that it fails to accomplish goal X, the argument is ineffective if the real goal is goal Y. For any value of goals X and Y. Even if goal Y is “cause suffering”.
To combat something and effect change, you have to know what that something really is, not the polite lies told about what it is.
Is what is considered “kind” always the best course of action?
No. And yes.
To an individual sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind to society at large. For an extreme example, I’m sure that being tossed in the slammer with the key thrown away is unkind to the “kicks” murderer, but it is kind to society at large to stop more people from dying and more people from mourning their losses. For a less extreme example, sending that hedge fund guy who ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of people of their life savings off to jail would be viewed as “unkind” to him. But it would be far less kind to society to let that kind of sociopath run free to do more fraud to more people.
Labeling non-cruel policies as “leftist” and “liberal” defeats any attempt at a Neutral Point of View. You see, those are often centrist policies, and one’s reference point can be inferred.
As to whether cruelty is a goal, I would not suggest people actually exercising a plan we’d all consider to be cruel see it as cruelty: they may realize some cruelty in their plan, but would insist the cruelty is merely an acceptable by-product of their plan and not the goal.
I usually see such phrases when talking politics, and usually then about more conservative viewpoints. As those can be seen as perpetuating a status quo that made rich people richer or enabled very anti-consumer policies, the accidental victimization of non-rich people and consumers in the process of benefiting businesses and the upper class can be seen as cruel, for example.
Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, the ebbing tide will strand the last boats out of port.
I don’t and would never label non-cruel policies as leftist or liberal, but the phrase is commonly used by those groups. I feel that nearly every group thinks their policies aren’t cruel, however.
“Cruelty” is not always unwarranted, nor is it the same things to every person.
Remember that German guy that had himself eaten by another years back? That’d seem cruel to me, but it was a fetish for both of them and they didn’t think it was cruel at all. It’s a moral definition and changes for every person.
- Some people would call me cruel for having a cat.
- More would call me cruel for keeping it indoors permanently.
- But many others would yell at me for allowing outside.
- Some would give me hell for drinking a glass of milk.
And all of them can justify their reasons.
People are quite poor at context and misusing and exaggerating words. I absolutely hate it and feel it’s one of our worst traits which is not an exaggeration.
