Cruel Behavior, How do we Stop it? First, Stop Denying…

As a young woman, I was very serious and very smart. Humanity mystified me, but I believed that everyone was basically good hearted and if not, at least trying their best to be good. In the way of human beings, I had not one clue. I had no understanding of the culture of drugs, alcohol and sex. I went to work, I went to school, I took care of my children. I briefly drank some and once was even drunk and driving. That only happened one time because it scared me silly.

Now that I am older and my kids are adults, I am much more capable of seeing people around me and understanding behavior. Ridiculously, all of my life I believed that cruelty was an aberration and that all stories had a somewhat positive ending. Why? Because people really do try to do the right thing… how ignorant I feel now.

It has been a compelling journey.

So I had experience with people being nasty and mean. I saw angry people treat others badly, but I had always categorized them as the disenfranchised, people less fortunate than others, who had been mistreated by civil brutality. What I did not have experience with and understanding of was cruelty, anger and hatred for its own sake, expressed out of meanness rather than misfortune. This kind of meanness comes from selfishness and greed and has nothing to do with lashing back at others, but rather was a means to a specific and self-centered end.

Even then, when I experienced it, I believed it to be an anomaly. I had no idea that yes, in fact, half of human beings are capable of being cruel for their own selfish sakes. Many have documented that our minds are capable of great story telling (i.e. rationalization and justification) and I know this to be correct. Stories abound that explain every bit of human behavior.

I want to believe that now that we know these things, for example that our ‘brains can justify anything’, that we would also take a chance at openness and listening so that we could be sure that our justifications were not in the service of harming ‘someone else’. In other words, how do we put a check on cruel behavior? Indeed, how do we?