Performative Cruelty: When a person or an institution publicly acts in a cruel manner to create a social statement.

There’s a large amount of criticism directed towards people who do what many consider performative altruism, or good deeds for social credit. They are held up as fake and filed under the ‘it’s only charity if you don’t tell anyone’ trope. Not many commenters and pundits are criticizing people who do performative cruelty. The opposite is often true and random cruelty is touted as people being honest and authentic, the so-called ‘telling it like it is’. There is no reason to believe that people being publicly cruel is a more realistic picture of humanity than the public sharing of people being kind. The cruelty narrative does create outrage and that creates audience engagement. Since engagement gets more eyes on a specific story and that can bring in profit, the cruelty as honesty narrative gets promoted across media as a social norm.

Why would anyone perform cruelty for social acceptance? I am not often guided, or requested, to perform a public performance of cruelty but one stands out. If you’ve been reading my stories for a bit it’s pretty obvious that I am very fond of pigeons and that fondness has led to some people’s disgruntlement. Enough so that I was told to remove my standard bird feeder because pigeons also shared in the abundance and the city has rules about pigeons. It was suggested to me, when the anonymous neighbor kept filing reports, that I should make a show of squirting the pigeons with the hose so that the neighbor would see me being mean and stop reporting the fact that pigeons existed in the area. That’s performative cruelty. My neighbor would possibly be happy because they would see me being cruel. I assume that it would be doing what they wanted to do for them. I refused.

The reason I bring that up is because lately the increase in performative cruelty has been outrageous. The list of pepper sprayings, beatings, arrests, and the attempts to terrify entire cities for no reason beyond being seen being cruel grows each day. The ones who are performing are trying to impress their bosses or their peers, or both. Because it’s a performance the perpetrators themselves don’t take it seriously. They will say under scrutiny that they were just following orders. They will talk about intentions and peer pressure. They won’t talk about how the rush of power felt. They won’t mention the details when they went overboard and they most certainly won’t admit to any of it being their own idea. But their cruelty is rewarded, especially if it’s barely below the threshold of legality and even sometimes when it exceeds the laws they are supposed to respect.

We, people, are generally a little bit of everything. We have both the light and the dark within us. We can be who we choose to be when it benefits us. But, when we choose to play a role long enough we take the risk that we get so comfortable in that role that it becomes our default. Perform cruelty daily and you get good at it. Practice makes perfect after all. Those who have been recruited and have accepted the role as the performers of public menace and fear will not be assigned new roles of performative kindness when they are no longer useful. They will be discarded as they have been throughout history. They will hide that side of themselves that they let out to run free as best they can so that they do not face the consequences of their actions. Much like the soldiers of losing armies who committed war crimes and atrocities they will try and start anew by removing themselves from the theater where they performed. They tried starting over as someone else, somewhere else, and always anywhere far away from where they were.

Performative cruelty in its early stages can be portrayed as courageous. The risk of consequences is often overstated. The thrill of doing the forbidden, the draw of shocking people, and the seeming success of making someone cry can be attractive especially when there’s a crowd nearby who pat each other on the back and reinforce the negative antics. Abu Ghraib is one of many examples where prompts from superiors and peers led to escalations that defiled not only those subjected to the cruelty but also defiled those who performed it. One of the things that allows cruelty to flourish was seen in the photos taken at that prison, laughter. If a person can be made to find cruelty funny, the cruelty becomes more performative rather than less. Laughter can reframe the adrenaline from fear to excitement. Our body can’t really tell the difference as to why we’re being flooded with adrenaline. It’s a very small difference in perspective between the scream of one person’s excitement during a roller coaster ride and the scream of the person behind them screaming in fear.

Expect the performances to increase their drama as the performers egg each other on to new heights. They will be paying more attention to each other than to those they harm. They will laugh after the fact and continue to brag about their worst behavior and their bosses will be happy to let the paid help face the consequences in their places. The bosses will say later that they never told anyone to do any of those illegal things. They will be stopped. They always have an ending. Retraining them for performative altruism would be a good idea. It’ll take time but practice makes perfect. How do they get stopped? Look to history, but it’s usually meant stopping their bosses.