Doris Doris
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

I have for a long time believed that cruelty is insanity, and is the cause of more of it. It is a bizarre idea and system. It is in all it’s forms undignified, and robs the individual and society of all true dignity. As mentioned, it is self-reproducing and contaminates the perpetrator as it does the victim. It’s disfunction is most obvious in its most obvious form, physical torture: what does the torturer do when he is finished for the day? Go for a walk and see the magnificent sunset?Take his children to the zoo or buy them teddy bears?What about the people who order the torture or arrange a torture program: the politicians, bureaucrats, doctors, psychiatrists? Are they really sane any more than the person who carries it out? Guantanamo was an abomination but it escaped the public’s radar most of the time. Backward prisons systems for profit, even prison slave labour, escapes it. Wars against foreign nations for the benefit of the arms industries and ensuing death, mutilation, displacement, are forms of torture, cruel and quite mad.

And domestic society and its mindless competition in school and workplace, all part of the same schema. When I first saw early woodcut reproductions of torture during the various inquisitions I was struck more by the profound spiritual ugliness of the faces of the torturers than the portrayed agony of the tortured. I’m sure the artist had the right idea. It is ugly, and where does it come from? It comes from the top, from our basic religious ideas. Right now the fundamentalist religious right in the US is a formidable lobby encouraging war as the apocalyptic fulfillment of a self-fulfilling religious prophecy. It is all ugly and mad, and past time we realized it.

    Doris Doris

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