engaged cruelty & disengaged cruelty

[kradeelav]

little bit of thoughts on a trend.... not intensely dark or particularly squicky, but more of a somber topic.

i've been rotating a theory lately of something i'm calling "engaged cruelty" vs "disengaged cruelty". a lot of this is in the context of pondering about how the online world has changed from the early 2000's to now; particularly in cis(?) male dominated spaces (eg the chans, hacker news, jock-y subreddits, but also some real-world spaces).

starting with engaged cruelty - "cruelty" might be a tad too loaded for what specifically i mean by this. there's a lot of articles hand-wringing about male behaviors right now for obvious reasons and personally i feel like a lot of them have ... very little interaction with the actual dudes of note lol. (not to mention social standing with them lol kek).

engaged cruelty to me is standard (feral) male bonding teasing/agitating/poking behavior. perhaps on the more intense end of the spectrum where you might have to tell them to fuck off or knock it off.

in a weird sense though, i feel like this kind of emotional roughhousing /bullying still inherently sees you as "human". they're mean, yes, but they're looking for a reaction in a warped sense of (usually) male bonding. if you're charismatic enough at turning the tables on them or dead-faced stonewalling, there's a non-zero amount of times you can be good buddies after with complete sincerity. i'll freely admit there's a part of me that likes this push/pull rough-housing tension. the old web could be a uniquely cruel place but there was also ... i don't know man. you had to be there. you had to have a hell of a thick skin but i miss the two-way roughousing dearly.

i'm not saying it's good and that it hasn't done damage. but it exists as a flavor.

( on a side tangent: one channer recently quipped that there'll always be the feral male behavior and that a mistake is blanket-labeling it as toxic and inherently bad. and honestly, i hate to say it, but i agree? personally, i feel like this is part and parcel of human/animal nature; it would be nice in some degrees if we were able to remove this kind of bullying or at lest the extreme varieties, yes, but if we haven't done it across history yet, i don't think we have the nuance or tools to handle it now. the next best thing feels like corralling said feral aggressive qualities into sports/sports rivalries, boy scouts, ROTC, mentorship opportunities. play with the occasional nips. rather than forming an ugly mob hunting for victims.)

"disengaged cruelty' however ... personally feels like that barest human respect is gone.

the active participant doesn't see others as human. when i see somebody like this ... the vibes are off, man. this whole essay got started with me staring aghast at a hacker news comment basically implying that elderly people should commit suicide since i paraphrase it, "at some point ya gotta realize the party's over and you got to remove yourself from the party." jesus, man. hacker news could always be a little wincing but that's... there's a disregard for humanity in that kind of comment that wigs me out in a way that the other kind of cruelty doesn't.

i feel like this overlaps quite sickeningly with "institutional cruelty" - it can happen on a 1:1 level sure (certian kinds of horrific family abuse), but it can scale up to well, the holocaust is a good example. genocides too. the doxxing kind of art harassers feel like a version of disengaged cruelty where the point is to erase the other party. not just looking for a reaction out of boredom like an orangutan poking another one with a stick.

the... thing is i see a vastly larger amount of "disengaged cruelty" on the web now than the other kind.

personally? that worries me greatly.

Comments

[karel]

huh... this really seems to hit the nail on the head for something I've been struggling to verbalize for some time - ghosting vs getting into an argument, bullying vs shunning... I think it speaks to my having grown up with sort of...cultivated crankiness and yes, this "engaged cruelty" that I kind of hold as a point of pride the "rivalries" that I've turned around into working relationships, and I think in many ways, that's not something that's really seen as something good so often with this disengaged mode...

I think what you're pointing at, the human/animal nature, there's really something there... all creatures have this sort of nettling they do at each other. playfighting. biting each other until there's a yelp. it serves a social function of reinforcing and teaching boundaries via pushing on them... in absence of that, you just have to give people a wide berth, and when you bite, you don't know when to stop. part of its shifting, I wonder if is a function of there just being so many people in each others' orbits that we're afraid of dying of a million soft bites? idk, I suppose a bit of a ramble. but this has given me some things to roll around in the braincase.

[paperghost]

>on a side tangent: one channer recently quipped that there'll always be the feral male behavior and that a mistake is blanket-labeling it as toxic and inherently bad. and honestly, i hate to say it, but i agree? personally, i feel like this is part and parcel of human/animal nature; it would be nice in some degrees if we were able to remove this kind of bullying or at lest the extreme varieties, yes, but if we haven't done it across history yet, i don't think we have the nuance or tools to handle it now. the next best thing feels like corralling said feral aggressive qualities into sports/sports rivalries, boy scouts, ROTC, mentorship opportunities. play with the occasional nips. rather than forming an ugly mob hunting for victims.

This... is something I had to think about for a moment, and I do agree. Even if it's "bad" and often inappropriate, I think most people have these aggro mean streak/offensive tendencies, self included. I unironically believe trying to get rid of or ignore it leads to people trying to reframe this behavior in a "righteous" way.

[kradeelav]

yeah it's so nuanced... on one hand of it, there's no doubt an excess of thoughtless agression does a lot of unneeded harm. and yet on the other... we're all social animals, you know? repression does nobody any good (arguably mass repression leads many times to these social regresses that we're seeing now) - so might as well channel it in ways that are less destructive both on a short and long term scale..

[flowersforgraves]

agreed. as a man of trans experience I can also say that I think something a lot of those thinkpieces are missing is that women do it too. it's not the same, and when it gets attention it's often discussed in misogynistic terms ("catfights" etc.), but it's definitely something I saw happen to female friends and, to an extent, before I was out, happened to me. both "types" of engaged cruelty are often targeted, in my experience, to people who don't quite fit in -- me as an undiagnosed autistic not knowing he wasn't a girl, my cis male friend who was quiet and shy and thoroughly unathletic -- but it's very different from the disconnect and erasure from online harassment.