Cruelty and Happiness

Cruelty goes unnoticed in our society. We see nice boxes with nice products nicely advertised. Sold to us in nice shops by nice people and we are nice people as well. So where is the cruelty within this? You might ask. It goes unnoticed but it is everywhere. It is cleverly hidden. We can ignore it and that makes us feel good. We are in fact glad that the suffering is not ours and we want to keep it that way. And who ever mentions it is an activist. Normal people don’t do that. The deliberate ignorance of cruelty, which is cruel in itself, is the norm. We have to participate in this cruel deliberate ignorance, if we don’t we risk losing our job, our income, our life. Same goes for partner, family, friends. Our church, our club, our community. I have been cruel from a young age, where I would hit my younger sister ‘for fun’. Our parents didn’t stop it, obviously, because we cannot stop what we don’t see, and we don’t see what we ignore. Later on I would apply electricity to little worms, out of ‘scientific curiosity’, here we have a common way of hiding cruelty: science. I would also apply cruelty to pets and to other people, kicking them and hitting them. And lately I noticed in myself cruelty towards people that are poor, where I felt that I want to keep them poor and suffering to make sure that they aren’t able to take away my wealth. So my happiness of enjoying our wealth as participant in this wealthy society of The Netherlands of deliberate ignorance of animal testing, destruction of rain forests, pollution of oceans, atmosphere, ground water, animal extinction (genocide), wars for profit, poverty for profit, too much to name it all here, is the happiness of enjoying our common deliberate ignorance of cruelty, it’s the happiness of being cruel, of standing on the ‘good’ end of the polarity where I can laugh because others suffer.