They say kids are cruel, and it’s true. So are adults, though—they’ve simply learned how to compartmentalize their sadistic tendencies.
A child will be indiscriminately cruel while a seemingly “nice” adult will reserve his or her cruelty for those they’ve decided are beneath them. They justify it by convincing themselves that the victims of their sadism are deserving of it.
The nicest person you know, that individual with a reputation for bending over backwards to help someone in need, likely revels in the idea of someone getting their comeuppance. They want to see people who commit crimes brutally raped in prison. They want to see people they disagree with on political issues broke and destitute. They love to see people “getting what they deserve.” They find comfort in the fantasy of such people suffering unspeakable torture and being miserable. Add religion into the equation and you’ve got people absolutely giddy about the idea of unrepentant souls burning for all eternity.
Then you’ve got a whole bunch of people practically orgasming over unvaccinated people dying. It’s porn to them.
A great many people love to see other people get “punished” for infractions against the rules modern society has decided to live by. It’s always been this way. Ancient Romans tortured and killed for entertainment. Public hangings in America were common and a popular recreational activity you could bring the whole family to. They would be again, if permitted to take place.
Cruelty and the need to feel superior and powerful is human nature, unless you’re an aberration like me, who can’t get off on it. I just can’t.
I don’t care who it is, or what they’ve done—I can’t stand the idea of anyone suffering. Anyone. I might wish someone dead, but instantly and without the suffering. Even if they’ve done the most horrible things you can imagine. If I found out later they suffered before dying, then I wouldn’t care, but knowing it’s presently happening bothers me.
Punching someone in the face is one thing. That’s temporary discomfort. I guess getting satisfaction from that means I have some at least some tendency for cruelty within me. Still, say someone tortured and raped someone to death, then had sex with the corpse before eating it. I wouldn’t want to see that person suffer. I’d want to see him humanely and efficiently disposed of with a single bullet to the brain, for the purpose of removing him from the civilized society we aspire/purport to be.
People say things like “I’d like to peel all the skin off his body and hang him upside down by his balls from a hook and shove red hot pokers up his ass.”
And what’s wrong with that? I’m an aberration because I’d sooner chuck a child rapist/murderer into an incinerator and be done with it than toy with them like a cat does with a mouse. It doesn’t make me better than anyone else, though, because it’s actually a defect. It’s a character flaw. It holds me back in life. I’m supposed to be a sadist. Maybe I should desensitize myself and start masturbating to gory crime scene pics so I can be normal.
Patrick Walts 
I don’t think you’re an aberration. Kindness and cruelty are both part of human nature. The cruelest people I know work very hard thinking up justifications for their cruelty, and they use up a lot of mental energy repressing their kindness. At least that’s how I see things.
I do enjoy manipulating people, so I suppose that’s a form of cruelty. Yay! I’m a person! It’s just that watching another living being in excruciating pain makes me cringe because I can imagine how awful it must be. I was disturbed by a coworker pulling a fly’s wings off yesterday. Kind of ridiculous, but why not just kill it?
That is kind of disturbing. I remember finding a large bug at work that had somehow had its abdomen crushed. I decided to kill it. I hated doing it, but it seemed like the bug was really suffering.