The Humanness of Cruelty
An excerpt from a novel about history, memory & WWII
This is an excerpt from The Requisitions, a metafictional novel about history, memory, & the Nazi Occupation of Poland written by
.The Requisitions was independently published by Kingdom Anywhere Publishing, a Paris-based imprint created by two Substack writers, photographer & novelist; they also happen to be partners in life.
The Requisitions, Part VI: Meaning
“He who has a Why can bear almost any How.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889
In a Yale University basement in July 1961, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram set out to understand how ordinary people can commit mass murder. Milgram believed that in the right circumstances, most people would inflict pain on their fellow human beings due to peer pressure and obedience to authority.
The test was simple enough. It involved three protagonists: the Teacher, the Learner, and the Authority. The Teacher and the Learner sat on opposite sides of a wall while the Authority, wearing a white lab coat, instructed the Teacher to ask the Learner a series of questions. The Teacher sat in front of a large machine called the Shock Generator, which had a series of switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts. Beneath those numbers were descriptors ranging from “slight shock” to “danger severe shock.” If the Learner incorrectly answered one of the questions, the Authority instructed the Teacher to electrocute the Learner with increasing intensity. The results astonished Milgram: sixty-five percent of all Teachers followed the Authority’s orders until the near-fatal electroshock. Although the Learners were only actors pretending to be electrocuted, Milgram’s conclusion was a watershed moment in the history of the humanness of cruelty: “If a system of death camps were set up in the United States, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”
Seven years later, on the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, a schoolteacher in Iowa named Jane Elliott set out to teach her students about bigotry. On the morning of April 5, 1968, she told all her brown-eyed students that they were better than the blue-eyed ones. Within hours, the brown-eyed children became arrogant, bossy, and bigoted. The next day, Elliott reversed the roles, telling the blue-eyed students that, in fact, they were superior. But while the blue-eyed children did take a certain pleasure in their newfound superiority, their prejudice was less pronounced, for they’d experienced the effects of discrimination just the day before.
What’s most surprising about our ability to be cruel towards others is that it continues to surprise us. In August 1971, at Stanford University, just one month after The Pentagon Papers revealed the USA’s brutal bombing campaign in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, a psychologist named Philip Zimbardo set out to understand how ordinary people’s behavior might change when placed in positions of power. Zimbardo built a makeshift prison in a Stanford University basement and selected two groups of volunteers: Guards and Prisoners. Within days, Zimbardo realized the prison simulation was “a sufficient condition to produce aberrant, anti-social behavior.” Zimbardo himself became megalomaniacal in his role and resisted shutting down the project until an assistant professor named Christina Maslach persuaded him to stop the experiment. One year later, they were married. "Most dramatic and distressing to us,” Zimbardo concluded, “was the observation of the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited in individuals who were not sadistic ‘types.’”
Twenty-five years after my eight-year-old self first climbed up on the bookshelf, I’m finally beginning to understand what my mother meant when she said, “There’s something you need to remember.” It took writing a master’s dissertation entitled The Humanness of Cruelty for me to understand humanity’s innate fascination with purpose and power, which can manifest as both empathy and cruelty. Because while it’s comforting to use words like “right” and “wrong” and “righteous” and “monstrous” to resort to the fallacy of all binary systems, the truth is these words are the real fictions of history. In other words, the belief in “purity,” “sanctity,” and “Good versus Evil” may be the most catastrophic of all human inventions. These bigoted words are defined less by what they are than by what they are not. In this way, the bigot can look outwards instead of within, forever gazing further away from himself. The bigot is what is sick within the chauvinist part of the psyche, for he cannot imagine existing without lording over the other. The bigot cannot conceive of fluidity because, like all fundamentalists, the bigot lacks imagination. His identity relies on a philosophical opposite, which is why his creativity is usually limited to dreams of censorship and destruction.
Inevitably, the bigot becomes obsessed with the very thing he despises. Unable to create, he relies on an enemy to provide clear and present meaning. The bigot is regressive by definition, obsessed with an impossible future defined by a mythical, violent past. In the bigot’s worldview, doctrines, philosophy, and even architecture follow suit, for the bigot’s laws reveal less about what he stands for than what he fears. The bigot is obsessed with self-serving memories and selective histories because, without total control, his project falters. By representing the enemy as a robber, the bigot becomes a victim of a robbery; by defining the enemy as dirty, the bigot becomes clean; and by representing the enemy as Evil, the bigot can justify cruelty in the name of what is Good. But the bigot’s existence is doomed for the same ontological reason as the parasite’s: he can only exist so long as he remains attached to a healthy host.
***
Elsa brushes her teeth and gargles salt water and takes a scorching shower after Carl’s third visit in as many nights.
For a full synopsis of The Requisitions, click here.
“When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café.”
September 1, 1939: the Polish city of Łódź is on the brink of invasion.
The Astoria Café really did exist, but the professor is only a figment of a boy’s imagination.
Many years later, our author unearths a story that reignites his childhood obsession with Viktor Bauman, a disillusioned academic forced into the Łódź Ghetto, Elsa Dietrich, a captive Gestapo secretary, and Lieutenant Carl Becker, a troubled policeman whose fixation with Elsa is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.
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Truly insightful writing. Thank you Samuel. In my career in the Navy I have traveled far and wide and had the opportunity to observe human nature in many diverse scenarios. Our capacity to act in extreme ways is often shocking. Unsurprisingly, the individuals taking extreme action are often damaged as much or more psychologically than those they acted upon in the first place.