The meaning and presence of Cruelty

Words may have ‘personal ‘meanings and these meanings may have nothing to do with what the dictionary says about them. We tend to associate certain experiences with certain words. To me cruelty has always been a big word, one which I used to describe all inhuman practices. I sort of conceived the word with an image of fangs dripping with blood and lethal eyes burning with hatred and expressing in them a terrifying satisfaction at the helplessness of the prey. But the actual meaning of the word is far from satisfactory. It primarily talks about what we do to the animals and not what some animals in the human form do to the rest.

The Dictionaries can be so unbelievable pedestrian! So let us look somewhere else.
The first name which comes to the mind in this connection is of Antonin Artaud, he invented the theatre of cruelty. Though his usage of the word and his conception of the word has different connotations, he is more near to my idea of cruelty than any one else.
Artauds conception of reality is interesting. It includes the internal as well as the external in its sphere. Thus dreams and other such phenomena were very real to Artaud. This sort of contrasts with his notion of the theatre and the texts being banal and unreliable. He wanted to be ‘cruel’ on the spectators to drive home the real version over the masked version of life. But he was not really understood in his own times and most of his plays did not appear in public. The man was very sick too with an addiction to opium or its derivatives. Another “cruel” thing he had to undergo was being subjected to electro convulsive therapy to cure his insanity.
Though to him sadism was not one of the components of his conception of cruelty, the basic idea employs violent and terrifying intent in that it aims to shock the audience into the realization of what life actually is. He thought it was necessary to break people out of their inertia and that his method would bring out the hidden wickedness inside man and society to the surface. He never considered theatre to be a true copy of reality. It is a much more dangerous form of reality. It was his idea to lead spectators to what he called a “world that is bloodthirsty and inhuman". This is more like what I had in mind about cruelty.
This is not an article about Artaud and his conceptions of life and theatre, but about the subject of cruelty as I understand it. It has universality in the sense that every dominant society has this element of cruelty in it and is thus essentially oppressive to those that is within it and to those that is being taken over by it. I find a curious echo of the modern reality in Artauds views about cultural colonization. His politics would be very relevant to these times. Writing with the induced transition of Mexico in mind, he states that the inevitable result of such colonization would be self destruction and mental slavery.
This is what cruelty is about; the brutal and inhuman disregard to others lives, rights and freedom and not what the animal rights activists consider it to be.