MEEKER | I have always been fascinated by contradictions in nature. Fire can both warm a home and burn it to the ground. Water gives life, but it can also drown. Yet the greatest contradiction I have found is not in the world, but in people. Human beings are capable of breathtaking acts of kindness, invention, and beauty, but also of cruelty so deep it feels unnatural. This paradox—how compassion and cruelty can exist within the same species—has become the subject I return to again and again when I want to learn more about it.
My curiosity about cruelty began not in a history book, but in everyday life. As a child, classmates would tease one another, not for survival or necessity, but for entertainment. It puzzled me. In nature, harm usually serves a purpose: a predator hunts to eat, a bird fights to defend its nest. But human cruelty often seems detached from survival, driven by choice or even pleasure. That strangeness never left me. I wanted to know: what makes people harm others when they do not have to?
To seek answers, I turn to history. Accounts of wars, genocides, and oppressive regimes are difficult to read, yet they reveal patterns in human behavior. Reading about the holocaust, for example, I was struck not only by the scale of violence, but also by the way ordinary people became participants in cruelty. History shows me that cruelty is not always the work of a few villains; sometimes it emerges from fear, power, or conformity. Each story prompts me to ask what conditions enable cruelty to flourish—and how societies can resist it.
Literature feeds my exploration. Novels such as Lord of the Flies and Night bring human cruelty into focus through personal and emotional perspectives. Unlike textbooks, literature places me inside the minds of individuals experiencing or committing cruelty, allowing me to imagine what I cannot live through myself. This has taught me that cruelty is not just an abstract problem; it is felt, endured, and resisted by real people. Pursuing these questions has shaped how I see the world.
Psychology offers another lens. I read articles and watch lectures on topics like Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment at Yale, where participants were instructed to deliver electric shocks to another person. Although the shocks weren’t real, the participants believed they were causing serious pain—yet most continued simply because an authority figure told them to. The study revealed how ordinary people can carry out harmful actions under pressure from authority. Cruelty isn’t limited to a few. If cruelty is part of the dark side of human potential, then understanding it is essential to preventing it.
Instead of dismissing cruelty as meaningless, I now see it as a riddle that reveals both the fragility and strength of humanity. Understanding cruelty matters to me, not because I expect to solve it, but because in studying it, I learn about responsibility, empathy, and the choices that define us. My curiosity about human cruelty is really a curiosity about humanity itself—and about my own role in making the world a little less cruel.
By REMY BROUSSARD