Anatomy of cruelty
There’s a common misconception, helped along by the movies perhaps, that evil is an aspect of genius. The fact of the matter is it’s the most overtly cruel among us that are the truly dumb ones. Try though we may to promote certain serial killers to polymath status the truth of the matter is we have no real-life counterpart to Hannibal Lecter. Evil people are mostly stupid. They are seldom people of class and taste who end sentences with the words “Mr Bond.”
This idea is best illustrated by Hanlon’s razor, which these days is one of those ubiquitous adages used on internet debates. Hanlon’s razor says, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” As is true with Occam’s razor, stupidity is the simplest — and therefore the likeliest — explanation for bad guys.
Similarly, the human tendency to make false snap judgments about other people isn’t new. It’s rooted in our evolution and deeply tribal. There was a time when people who looked different from us, spoke foreign languages, had unfamiliar traditions and worshipped different gods represented a potentially imminent physical threat. That isn’t ordinarily true any longer.
The capacity to see past our prejudices, therefore, requires intelligence. The kind of intelligence powerful enough to see beyond our low animal instincts. People with higher wattage brains are consequently often more enlightened. This explains why bigots are often very stupid people.
Before I continue I need to make a vital disclaimer. Yes, there are plenty of people who are perfectly wonderful and quite intelligent who are lousy spellers and have very little education. So I am speaking not anecdotally but STATISTICALLY when I say that bad grammar, bad spelling and poor education is overrepresented among Trump supporters. If you doubt this visit their profiles. It’s rare that there are ever any surprises. If they display any kind of brow at all you will get rich betting it’s a low one.
Therefore cruelty is not an advanced characteristic. It betrays stupidity, and people who are attracted to cruelty are usually stupid. They lack the nuanced wit to understand that cruelty is an artefact of our primitive past and is counterproductive to an evolved and enlightened society. This is the common denominator that Trump appeals to, and it’s why he spends the vast majority of his time inciting hatred. Hatred is entertaining to cruel people.
That’s why cruel people are naturally attracted to guns, because guns kill people and, being cruel, they like the power that comes from the threat of a loaded gun pointed at an “enemy.” They love the death penalty. They are attracted to fascistic groups like the KKK and various neo-Nazi groups. They are Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. And most of them are stupid.
Trump understood from the beginning that his road to power was paved with stupid people who were cruel on that account. It is no accident that as far back as February of 2016 Trump gave the game away when he said, “I love the poorly educated.” He was identifying his constituency and, because he’s stupid and cruel himself, he never made a secret about it.
People who follow Trump often see empathy and kindness as a weakness. Stupid people often do. They are able to square this with their religion, which is often evangelical Christianity, by simply never thinking about it and denying any inconsistency despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s much easier for a stupid person to hold onto a cognitive dissonance than a smart one. They simply do what comes best. They don’t think about it.
Thinking is hard. Because it’s hard, a lot of people don’t do it. If you’re not very good at it to begin with then it’s all the easier never to do it at all. That is why so many millions of Americans put Trump into power, and they want to do it again. They will continue to vote against their own interests — no healthcare, tax breaks for the very rich, the demise of Social Security, no money to social programs, no infrastructure —- because they easily believe the lies they are told. They believe those lies because those lies square with the fairy tales they are told the “real” America is all about: flags, military marches to martial music, red hats, gun racks on huge trucks — in short the shiny objects that attract the limited capacities of the very, very stupid.
Many of them suspect all this is true, which is why they don’t want to engage in calm and reasoned debate. It’s why they so often run away from facts and evidence. They are in a constant state of sustained frustration because they can’t articulate what they are sure is “obvious” about the nonsense they believe.
It must be horrifying to be that stupid, to believe a man like Donald Trump, a rapist, a criminal under 71 indictments, a twice-impeached loser who does nothing but whine all the time and yell about how he’s going to “get” the people he hates when he’s restored to power, is some kind of “hero.” To anyone with a brain he’s an embarrassment, and the rare Trump supporter who knows who and what Trump really is knows he or she has their work cut out for them whenever they defend him.
Education is the answer, of course. That’s why so many Trump supporters hate education. They want to destroy books, punish institutions of higher learning for their liberal tendencies and deny people with student loans relief from the crush of their debt. They dimly understand that learning is the road to enlightenment and they are the opposite of enlightened. We must invest in education today in order to turn back the tide of ignorance, ignorance that leads to fascistic intolerance, cruelty and hatred. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.