Cruelty is not an aberration but an inheritance. The lineage is clear enough: technological culture optimises speed and replication, corporate greed codifies value into extraction, political manoeuvre weaponises symbols for control. Each of these erodes the space where integrity might stand. The result is a system in which bullying and marginalisation appear less as moral failure than as by-products of efficiency. To see cruelty as deliberate malice is to miss the structure; to see it as accidental is to miss the continuity.
Yet this continuity folds back on itself. Cruelty becomes both cause and effect, both symptom and machinery. The more it circulates, the more it disappears into normality. A bullying word or exclusionary act is not just personal—it is the echo of a culture whose logic has detached from reflection. Speculatively, one could say cruelty is entropy given form, the redistribution of cost across a field of lives, the abrogation of thought in favour of acceleration. It entangles victims and perpetrators alike, leaving no one untouched, binding them all to a system that sustains itself precisely through unthinking repetition.
Daedelus Kite 