“The time comes when every one of us has to abandon the illusory anticipations with which in our youth we regarded our fellow man, and when we realize how much hardship and suffering we have been caused in this life through their ill-will.”
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)*
“Any striking effect caused by our agency gratifies us intensely; and few effects are more striking than the putting sentient beings to pain or destroying their life.”
Alexander Bain, On the Study of Character (1861)**
Liberals tell us that men are naturally kind, and that their intermittent freaks of cruelty are caused by an accidental impairment of their power of sympathy, or by an overmastering passion that temporarily makes them not themselves. This doctrine is false, since men are naturally disposed to cruelty. This false doctrine is however bolstered and abetted in mischief by many modern Christian churches, which falsely tell us that men and women do not find it difficult to live by the Golden Rule.
Hence the child’s illusory anticipations of a world that is bursting with generous good-will; hence the adult’s shattering realization that his fellow man is not only hard of heart, but that his fellow man is, as often as not, a treacherous wolf who delight to cause hardship and pain.
* * * * *
We are all of us drawn to the pleasure of malevolence. We all have this appetite for destruction, torture, even slaughter. So said Alexander Bain, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Aberdeen in the last part of the nineteenth century. This innate destructive hostility is not, as liberals and Marxists say, an accident of imperfect social arrangements. Nor are its eruptions mere lapses in a nature that is essentially kind.
The pleasure of malevolence is essential to who we are.
The moralist John Grote tried to identify the pleasure of malevolence with satisfaction of what he called vindictivolence, or the will to revenge; but Grote’s proposition fails when we consider the pleasure men take in harming strangers they do not personally dislike.*** It again fails when we consider the disproportionate retaliations of what I recently called “the Incredible Hulks of maximal vengeance.”
As Baine put it
“If there were no intrinsic delight in giving pain, retaliation, like punishment, would be remedial and nothing more. But, as there are tyrants in the family, the school, the shop, the state, who are overjoyed when any one commits a fault, so there is a satisfaction in being angry, far beyond the necessities of self-promotion.”†
We have all seen, and no doubt felt, the lip-smacking joy of a man who has been hurt and thereby handed a pretext to pleasure himself with an orgy of disproportionate revenge. This is the lip-smacking joy that the sons of Jacob felt when they learned that Dinah, their tramp of a sister, had been raped by the Prince of Shalem. We must look to heaven for protection from the liberated malevolence of an “injured party,” because we can hope for protection from no other place.
* * * * *
Malevolence may be expressed in many ways: by murder, by battery, by rape, by insult, by slander, by confinement, by holding to some irksome task or degraded estate. It may be expressed in acts that destroy or deface property, in vicious pranks that vex, consternate, embarrass, or alarm.
All such destructive acts are rooted in our inborn will to power, and our inborn will to power is most exquisitely gratified by pleas, and begging, and screams. Bain again:
“Any striking effect caused by our agency gratifies us intensely; and few effects are more striking than the putting sentient beings to pain or destroying their life . . . . The destruction of inanimate things reflects upon the agent’s sense of power in the same way, especially when attended with éclat: a conflagration, a smash, a noise, a tumble, a grand subversion of the existing order of things, is intensely gratifying from earliest childhood.”††
Malevolence especially gratifies a man’s will to power because the freedom and power of his will is magnified by a grand subversion of the existing order of things. It is one thing to assist the existing order of things, quite another to tear it down. Thus the will to power is more evident in breaking a window than in washing a window, in uprooting a bush than in watering a bush, in setting fire to a house than in sweeping it clean.
Recall that the old name for will to power is libido dominandi, and then consider that dominance and submission are most boldly contrasted, and therefore most strikingly magnified, when the dominant will runs directly contrary to the will that is dominated.
(This, incidentally, is the root of the malevolence of Satan.)
* * * * *
When it comes to relations between men, the will to power is more gratified by malevolence than benevolence because, again, the dominant will runs directly contrary to the dominated will. The dominated will wants pleasure; the dominant will imposes pain. The dominated will wants dignity; the dominant will imposes degradation. The dominated will wants life; the dominant will imposes death and annihilation.
Dominance is perfected in defeat, destruction, perversion. As Bain explains:
“The satisfaction of prostrating a rival is a glut of the sense of superior might. The feeling of power essentially implies comparison, and no comparison is so effective or startling as that between victor and vanquished.”†††
* * * * *
This is why we should not be surprised when men are cruel, and why we should be thankful when they are not. This is why we should see ourselves as we are, and not in the fun-house mirrors supplied by liberals and many modern Christians.
*) Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Rivere (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), p. 87.
**) Alexander Bain, On the Study of Character (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), p. 80.
***) John Grote, A Treatise on the Moral Ideals (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co., 1876), p. 261.
†) Alexander Baine, Dissertations on Leading Philosophical Topics (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1903), p. 77.
††) Bain, Study of Character, p. 80.
†††) Bain, Study of Character, p. 77.
The Orthosphere 
One needs only need to read the historical evidence of massacres done by humans. Which look like it is done more out of bloodlust compared to simply eradicating the threat and taking people and loot as plunder which is a small improvement to what the French Knights did prior to the Battle of Nicopolis (25 September 1396) despite promises from King Sigismund to spare their towns when fighting the Turks.
This is complicated. Yes people can be terribly and gratuitously cruel. Quiet Balkan and Lebanese villages can suddenly fill with gravesites. On the other hand, forensic studies of WW2 combat showed most soldiers just closed their eyes and squeezed the trigger. The majority of the killing was done by a minority of men going into berserker mode. Actually effective killers–Eddie Rickenbacker, Smedley Butler, Christopher Lee to name a very few–were quite civilized men.
In my opinion, at most a quarter of people will go actual berserker at the crucial time. Most people just want to be left in peace to raise their families. They don’t go berserker until they have nothing to lose, and it will be no more than a fraction of these generally amiable people. Most will exercise the refugee or indifferent option.
A common liberal trope is that behind every white suburban dad who keeps a shotgun or 9mm in the house is a potential Friekorp member. In truth, there’s a huge normalcy bias and aversion to human killing.
Simultaneously, I think increasingly attenuated democratic government fosters a passive-aggressive cruelty. Normies you meet at dinner parties actually want the government to kill you or put you in camps. I was at a social event in 2016 and a conservative normie I was chatting with literally turned red and had veins bulging in his forehead when I told him I hadn’t voted in 20 years but was going to register and vote for Trump because he was 1) a clown suitable for Clown World and/or 2) a sonuvabich who despised my enemies.
He was a soft, comfy guy and his awareness that I wouldn’t hesitate to punch him in the mouth if he acted on his palpable hostility was clearly driving him nuts.
Which, I guess, gets back to your point: we, the survivors of mankind’s 100,000 year march, have a deep-rooted will to power.
Things get complicated where malevolence combines with violence, especially violence where the other party can hit back. But most ill-will is expressed in more cautious, more devious ways. And the point is that it is often gratuitous, done for no reason other than the pleasure of malevolence.
I have a theory that it is the very attenuation of violence from much of social interaction (a feat accomplished by violent men) that encourages this gratuitous passive-aggression on the right side-distribution. Lots of rude, hurtful behavior because nobody is free to dish out a deserved ass-whooping.
Among less-refined folks of course, the violence remains very much on the surface. And, come to think of it, it doesn’t seem to blunt the violence and cruelty so there goes that theory. Ah, humanity.
I agree. I’ve proposed to my wife that women dare to be so sassy and bitchy because they are relatively sure they will not be punched in the nose. Outside the feminized bureaucracies, men tend to treat each other with respect or open, taunting contempt. Very few are prepared to actually fight, but the memory of male combat still somewhat shapes their behavior. I say somewhat shapes their behavior because work in the feminized bureaucracy eventually transforms men into rats. They are not sassy or bitchy, but rather devious, designing, and dishonest.
Most people have inhibitions against killing (or brutally torturing) other people. But harming others in petty ways (petty as measured from the vantage point of the one inflicting the harm, not necessarily the subject of it) satisfies our will to power without disrupting the view we have of ourselves as generally good people. It takes effort to not do this.
Im some ways the petty domination is worse than a beating. As you say, the non-violent tyrant thinks well of himself.
“Liberals tell us that men are naturally kind, and that their intermittent freaks of cruelty are caused by an accidental impairment of their power of sympathy, or by an overmastering passion that temporarily makes them not themselves. ”
True. Whenever there is some act of extreme cruelty or destruction, of the kind you describe, the usual response is “I can’t understand” – to which, if I am honest, I would have to reply – “Oh but I do “understand”; although I do Not approve what they did.”
Modern people (especially women) routinely deny evil within themselves, and may be outraged and insulted by the merest suggestion that it exists; even though this may be very obvious to other people.
An academic I once knew – someone who did not utter or write two consecutive sentences without calculated, misleading dishonesty (and who would sanction anyone who declined to join-in the official lie) – was incredulous that I doubted her sincere truthfulness in all things, and that I would not implicitly trust her spoken word when it came to matters vital to my personal well-being.
I was, in my turn, utterly stunned that she could have so little self-awareness as to assume that I (and everyone else) would *naturally* regard a successful professional liar as – nonetheless – utterly trust-worthy.
But then again, that is exactly what ‘most people’ do, all the time: I mean, trust and defend and live-in-accordance-with the statements of such professionally-expert known-liars as politicians, bureaucrats and journalists.
It sounds like academics over there are a lot like academics over here. They are essentially ambitious bureaucrats, but with preposterous mental and moral vanity. And I was one of them for quite a while.
I’ve seen this too. Liberal academics are surprisingly proud of all the things they can’t understand.
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