Would It Help To View Cruelty As an Evolved Trait?

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

You will have noticed that there's a lot of talk today about a "force of evil" sweeping around, and/or some talk about a small group of deeply evil people. (And that's not to mention the belief held by many, that the Devil exists and is running the show.)

In this article, please walk with me through a different kind of search for the basis of human evil. I think cruel behavior is part of our evolved human nature. A person can be extremely mean. Thus everyone has a capacity, genetically, to perform "evil."

But it only flourishes in certain circumstances. One is where individuals are "alone" -- they do not amalgamate. The other is where already agreed-upon values get chucked out rather suddenly.

Note: today's understanding of evolution is fabulous. Some folks who take literally the biblical story of Genesis -- that God made all the species at once -- are missing out on a chance to worship God in absolute wonderment as the Creator of life-that-evolves. For an introduction to that, please see Neil Shubin's marvelous 2008 book, "Your Inner Fish." Your worshipping instinct will know no bounds.

Is Cruelty an Evolutionary Trait?

Acts of cruelty have been observed in two species living today: dolphins and humans. As far as I know, dolphins do not jump into a fulltime career of being cruel. They merely act on the moment, when they can do something mean to a fish or even another dolphin.

Having not researched it, I cannot offer a reason why a dolphin would attack a fish and then not eat it. Maybe it's due to an oversupply of its energy for killing actual prey.

Presumably, a sensation of pleasure accompanies the kill when it is for survival. Think how a modern man on a duckshoot gets happily excited when he kills a bird in the air and does not even bother to go collect the "prey." The hunt has pleasure value, which -- I'm guessing -- came from the days when we had to hunt.

In the particular human sport of sexual S/M -- sado-masochism, I reckon there's a carryover from the sexual pleasure that evolved to keep reproduction going. Sex pleasure can become all-encompassing; it's engaged in for its own sake.

In the S/M game, one partner gets pleasure from dominating, and the other enjoys feeling the whip. "Sex" may even disappear from the sado-masochistic act and thus it becomes "cruelty for pleasure's sake."

What about cruelty that's out there in society? I think the entire Covid thing may be a clever, genocidal scheme. If so, it has needed many "cruel-workers" plotting and planning dozens of aspects of getting people to succumb to the genocide, with more to stave off the law.

If you don't want to use something as contemporary as Covid as your example of human cruelty, just go back to the well-known example of cruelty in the Bolshevik "revolution" -- farmers suddenly had their crops stolen as a new group of overlords had decided to collectivize agriculture, and resistors got summarily killed.

Or figure out the cruelty of some force in the US government (yes, not Tim McVeigh) that destroyed a building in 1995 in Oklahoma City, killing off many children who were playing in the employees' Daycare Center there.

You may say that the pleasure of cruelty shown by those building-exploders (or those Russian crop-collectors) wasn't as personal and direct as that of a cruel dominatrix in a sadistic sexual encounter. I agree.

I hypothesize that the shocking cruelty we see today in human society -- and have seen in past centuries -- is not a force sweeping around, and it's not a devil in his little red suit either. But it does include some people doing deeply evil things. Their normal selfishness may have expanded because an opportunity opened up and we failed to catch it in time. It got out of hand.

Now let me argue that cruelty can happen when and if two big anti-cruelty forces are missing.

The Anti-mother Cruelty

Dee McLachlan, editor of GumshoeNews.com, and I found ourselves being spectators at an unusual sport over the last four years: cruelty towards young mothers by female professionals. We weren't looking for it; we had never heard of it. But it popped up when we watched what happens in court cases where a kid has been dragged from its mother.

See my book "Reunion: Judging the Family Court" for an investigation of this. For a Connecticut case, see Keith Harmon Snow's "In the Worst Interest of the Child."

I had first got an inkling about this from videos made by Bill Windsor, a justice activist. A mother, Mona Gudranson, reported to him that at the final moment when a court ordered her grandkids to be taken from their mom (her daughter), a female attorney rejoiced:

"After five very long and difficult years it took its toll on my daughter; they did everything in their power to physically destroy her. Judge William Aims from Courtland, New York’s gavel rang out time and time again, case adjourned, case adjourned, case closed. Attorney Ingrid Olsen threw her hands way above her head as if she scored the winning touchdown in the Superbowl. I was shocked.

"They stole everything precious to my Ingrid. Days, months, years dragged by, my beloved Ingrid lost all hope. It’s been almost seven years since I had to bury my daughter. I am outraged at why it was allowed to take place -- a blatant disregard for families, the very core of our society being destroyed from within. The day my daughter died, I died."

A recent follow-up: a mother in Adelaide was given the usual unfair treatment by "the Crown." Afterwards, as she was getting into her car, the legal team walked passed and pointed to her and laughed. Because I had read Mona Gudranson's case, I was able to imagine that the Adelaide legal team (all female) had been trained to do that laughing, the same way.

Please attend to this. Does it mean that any bureaucrat -- who would normally never hurt a flea -- can be subtly taught to do extremely cruel things? I guess it's possible, since the cruelty experienced by these bereaved moms appears to have been an intended part of the deal. It's not just that the state wants to steal kids -- breaking the mother is also a goal.

Breaking a Prisoner

Please take a moment to look at prison cruelty. It will be important to my "amalgamation" claim, below, which says you can't do much to counteract cruelty if you're alone. It takes support from others.

If you are an individual in a prison cell with two or more nasty guards, or a knife-wielding inmate coming at you, there simply is nothing you can do. We hear that a "reasonable" way to cope is to develop Stockholm syndrome -- a subconscious mechanism that makes you identify with your assailant. You agree with his tactics, and that relieves your anger.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Soviet prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn described many things that were done to him, such as putting insects down his shirt, that could only have been active efforts to break him, rather than measures needed to keep the inmate population under control. (Leaving the lights on all night in prison can be excused as a necessity, perhaps.)

In his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn states that the percent of spies in the inmate population was almost 100%. You can imagine that if one man refused to sign up as a spy, he would be subjectable to any punishment. In fact, he would need "a little something extra," lest others saw his act of defiance -- "and we can't have that."

Just a mention here, of the amazing phenomenon of Americans in Iraq engaging in "sexual humiliation" of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Domestically, rape of male prisoners is common. (See Shaun Atwood's "Hard Time.")

I suppose it is an institutionalized phenomenon. The warden doesn't act to stop it -- possibly he was carefully chosen for the warden job from a pool of morally weak persons, or born torturers, as the case may be. The point of the rape is to really finish off a guy's ego and confidence.

I would not be surprised if the US soldiers who shamed men in Abu Ghraib were involuntarily doing research for the Powers That Be. We know that the US doesn't use torture to extract info from terrorists, as torturees give out phony information in desperation.

One purpose of the Abu Ghraib episode may have been to harden the hearts of any soldiers in Iraq who became aware of what was going on. (Note: one Air Force member, Alyssa Peterson, complained about the torture. She is no longer with us.)

Why Is Cruelty Adaptive?

I was brought up to believe that folks are mainly good, and that social peace is the norm. A few baddies may arise ("they may be from broken homes, you know, or are mentally ill") but we can easily counteract that by policing them, can't we? Sure, it's a worry if a mafia forms, but we can use clever law to put even such gangsters out of business, can't we?

I was wrong. I had lived a sheltered life. The Catholic Church had taught me that all God's chillun' are inherently good. I was also sheltered by the reality of 20th century America -- a society that cared about justice and altruism. When President Kennedy said in his 1961 Inaugural Address, "Ask what you can do for your country," many people said "Yeah, that's a wonderful idea" and started to work on it.

Still, the zoological fact is, we are selfish mammals. Compare our species to others. Members of many species live alone. The spider spins her web, to catch some food, without a care about morality, fairness, or anything else. Her selfishness isn't even looked upon, by us, as selfish -- that word carries a connotation of choosing a selfish path when really you should be more generous or at least considerate of others.

Then there are social species. These can be found in mammals and some birds. The individual must perform various functions that make a good situation for individuals other than himself. An onlooker might think "There's morality in the air," but really it's in the genes. The wolf is a species that is famous for its ability to be group-loyal -- wolves coordinate their ambushing actions to catch prey.

Humans also coordinate an activity, partly by genetic instruction, partly by what's out there. What's out there may be a religion that encourages altruism, or a dictatorship that forces obedience. Or it may be a free-for-all like the Wild West allegedly was.

Genetically, we have a predisposition to be helpful in some circumstances -- parental protection of one's offspring being a blatant case. Helping a person in an emergency is also a genetic trait. You respond to, say, a drowning swimmer, with automatic helpfulness. But other kindnesses are ones that we get indoctrinated into.

I have only recently (thanks to the Ukrainian conundrum) been forced to admit that we are in big trouble today thanks to our ignorance of the dependence of our moral behavior on "what's out there." If there is a lot of bad stuff out there -- no matter whether it was planted or came about accidentally -- we may be in line for a huge dip in morality. Or a huge increase in cruelty.

The bottom line is that we are instinctively selfish, and it shouldn't be politiclly incorrect to say so. We will predictably look out for Number One when the going gets rough. Hence, we need to study what makes the going get rough. And we must see what will lead to less cruelty, not more. Two "correctives" to human cruelty are: amalgamations and values.

Amalgamations As a Societal Answer to Cruelty

Everybody knows that the way adults should deal with a schoolyard bully is to gang up on him, or teach their children to gang up on him. That is because the bully is able to do what he does by intimidating one victim at a time. The victim really is weaker, physically or mentally, and cannot give the bully a good whack on the head.

The bully may even be able to overwhelm a pair of youngsters simultaneously, but he (or she) can't overwhelm a dozen of them. Hence, amalgamating is the way to go. Naturally, we standardly amalgamate against any social practice that we disapprove of. It's easy. You just blend your voice in with the others who are saying "Unacceptable! Unacceptable!"

Today we are having quite a new problem. Bad things that we used to assume were agreed upon as unacceptable are portrayed by the media as having plenty of support. Take the strange fact that in 2020 there were arsonists who wrecked American cities. It was presented in such a way, on the nightly news, as to be a good thing.

Granted, CNN did not say "Hey, this is great, arson is now the way to go." CNN only had to stay mum about what was really happening, or else portray it (as they did) as a social justice thing. It was allegedly a response to the unfair killing, by a cop, of a man named George Floyd.

In short, the typical amalgamation in US society, which would be against arson, or any street violence, is not there. WE HAVE LOST OUR PRECIOUS AMALGAMATION -- for the moment, anyway. Media has a way of telling us that our neighbors are in disagreement with us. Count me in on that -- I feel afraid to broach any subject other than the weather with my friends. (Oops, even the weather is not a safe topic.)

Covid itself has made most people feel bewildered and alone, no matter which side of the fence they be on. New things popped up, such as masking and the closure of small businesses. There was not even a pretense of officials opening up the matter for social debate. "Dr Fauci" emerged from nowhere as the boss-to-be-respected. All very new.

Values As a Corrective to Cruelty

When the crowd forms against a bully, it can be mere amalgamation -- an attempt by the group to block unacceptable behavior. Or it may be a moral answer to the bully's sin, based on an articulated agreement about right and wrong. The wrong done by the bully may be physical; he grabbed the kid's lunch money -- "That's theft" -- or it may be that he broke a norm of civilization "Don't exploit the vulnerable."

In a series that I have been publishing recently at GumshoeNews.com, about Philip Allott's book "Eutopia," I have used the author's interpretation of the role of values. Allott asks us to remember that all our human creations are renewable, revisable, or dumpable. We tend to forget that our ideals and values are human creations -- they come and go.

I'm not saying that for the purpose of downgrading our values. Rather, I'm trying to establish the cause of our sudden helplessness in the face of an intimidating power. The intimidating power is the Globalist elite -- or whatever you call it. They work closely with media to alter our perceptions. Really, you must give them credit for getting us to dump some of our values, such as open debate, medical freedom, and a social rejection of liars.

Yes, it would be smart -- not silly -- for us to shout out are values. That's a major force.

Mind Control?

I now revert to the Mona Gudranson case. Her daughter Ingrid was mocked in the courtroom around 2007. At that time, and even in 2018 when McLachlan was finding similar behavior in Australia, there was not yet a dumping, by the public, of the value of parents-protecting-their-kids. That was a hugely valued norm, a sacred norm.

As to the dumping, the professionals got in first. Take just the attorney who acted like she was at the Superbowl, or the laugh team in Adelaide. They had to have been trained to deviate from the norm, to laugh at a very hurt mother which is patently unnatural. And they weren't play-acting. The lawyers who laughed apparently did so spontaneously.

My research background in mind control says this was probably devised by Tavistock. And if so, maybe the same deliberate training of all of us is happening now. So I ask: how can the Tavistock operators be so inhuman as to do this? Wait, perhaps they're being very human!

Hark back to my mention of dolphins. Dolphins do a cruel thing here and there, but it ends with that act. They have no way to build institutions for it. A human individual, being selfish, may find that one sin or another -- say, theft -- suits his selfish drive. He can then put into effect some amazing plans to steal from a whole population. Soon he'll have to add new sins, such as lying and maybe murder. He'll have to train his minions to sin like mad.

The effect will be cruel, as the population will sink into poverty. He may qualify as evil, though no new entity called "evil" has actually come into being. He is a human who did not have the two factors checkmating his cruelty -- amalgamation by his victims or values shouting him down.

Take Heart, from Allott

The powerful can get their way by force and deception. But we can at least counterattack. I feel that the Canadian truckers did this by standing together. As an amalgamation, their convoy did not succeed, but as a value statement it was a knockout.

Listen to a few optimistic quotes from Philip Allott in his book Eutopia: New Philosophy and New Law for a Troubled World. The numbers are from his paragraph-numbering system:

5.7 The human mind is capable of taking power over public power. The human mind is ultimately invincible in the face of public power. Human beings have an unshakable personal purpose to make a good life for themselves and their families.

5.11 From the very earliest accounts of human societies, we are surprised by the diversity of the social solutions....

5.16 The ideological temptation seeks to ... prevent the formation and propagation of ideas that are inconsistent with [those] designed by and for the holders of public power, especially political and economic power.

5.20 But the story of the human past suggests that those who dominate the public mind have been capable, again and again, of responding to the people's deeply experienced ideal of the good life.

5.44 Social change occurs ... when changing ideas act as evolutionary or revolutionary society-changing forces.