There is nothing worse in a human being than cruelty, and yet it has never been so justified as it is now.
Knowingly inflicting harm on a weaker being to cause him any kind of pain or harm is a common practice, a propensity of man, at least since Cain killed Abel.
People, institutions, states and religions use it to prosper and justify it in the name of the common good, and the general interest, and this dilutes the border between good and evil.
Machiavelli believed that it is better to govern from cruelty than from indulgence and today there is no leader who does not pay attention to him.
Cruelty is evident in dictatorships. The vacuum that surrounds the tyrant favors him. It is a void that has opened fear. The fear of the subjects to lose their heads, but also of the courtiers to fall into disgrace if they resist. In this vacuum reigns inequality. The more the leader is idolized, the more inequality there is, the greater the gap and the more cruelty thrives.
Cruelty is also evident in free and democratic societies. It is not only manifested in isolated cases, but is a current that gains strength day by day. Populisms, for example, are genuinely cruel. They attack minorities and sanctify an exclusionary ideology. His message, loaded with hatred and greed, penetrates every home, divides families and society.
Social networks increase the cruelty that lies in political ideas, in the interpretation of laws and the performance of any collective activity, because they create a vacuum around the aggressor similar to what an autocrat can have.
Each troll and each imbecile moves in the networks with impunity and the distance of the master over the slave. Its impact on the social body is devastating. They keep ordinary people out of the basic knowledge they need to understand the world. They radicalize her.
Every day there are more citizens at the extremes, happy in their ignorance and overflowing with cruelty.
There is nothing a political leader or a media entrepreneur fears more than to despise them, to ask their bases to retreat after having ordered them to occupy the streets. It takes a special courage to put the genie back into the lamp. Who dares?
Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, retires at the age of 92 regretting that he created the Trump monster. Covering up and amplifying their lies has been cruel, but also beneficial. Murdoch has made a lot of money from the audience shares generated by Trumpism, and his last-minute lament demonstrates the ties that unite cruelty with hypocrisy and progress.
The despot becomes depressed when he realizes that his life will not have the historical significance he thought and tends to die by killing. Putin, for example, may do so.
The conqueror, however, has almost nothing beyond his military and repressive force. He can subjugate a people, but not transform their behavior. It is Unamuno’s “you will win, but you will not convince”.
Today it is still much easier to win than to convince. The loss of trust in politicians and the media seems unstoppable. Who can trust the ruling class in Europe, China, the United States, India or any country in the world? What happens in a State of law when there is more cruelty in the punishment than in the crime committed? How many bosses still think they have to be mean to their employees to get things done?
As long as inequality remains, that is to say, the ever-widening distance between the narrators and the narrated, cruelty will continue to be reproduced both by the apex and the base of the social pyramid. The French suburbs prove it to us every few months.
The arrogance of power is not cured by promises of equality, but by examples of modesty. Nor is it cured by appealing to the common good. Under this excuse hides the arbitrariness and vanity of the powerful.
The just leader will never be arbitrary. The magnanimous, yes. The drama for all of us is that this righteous leader can also be cruel.
Just as the good citizen need not be a good person, the righteous leader need not be pious.
It is the laws and the material needs that keep us together as a society, not the morality of the State or of each of us. At the same time, however, it is undoubted that society moves forward based on the sum of anonymous and individual morals and heroism.
I think, for example, of Iranian women, of the courage to resist and denounce, to try to change what seems immutable, but also to live in resignation and die without stridency, satisfied to have been normal in a world which is not
People who resist cruelty convince even if they don’t succeed. They are braver than the mighty and their defeat is only temporary. His is the definitive version of the story. They make us better and yet we have such a hard time seeing them.
