Quora had an option to post to your blog [my blog] but it just created a page there at Quora.
So, here's a direct link, and a bit of an excerpt, to Diane Meriwether's answer to: The Big Philosophical Questions: Why do certain people derive pleasure from doing cruel things to their fellow human beings?
Diane Meriwether, Kinder than necessary
Evil is suffering passed to someone else.
When I was two, my mother broke my arm because I couldn't stop crying.
Part One -- suffering in
In the early 1960s childhood beatings were called accidents. My mother had dreamed of having children, but she struggled with rage. Looking back now, I know she was horrified and ashamed by what she had done.
To my mother, evil was something that made her feel bad, after my broken arm that something was me. It eased her discomfort to believe that she was only responding to my true nature. She was a victim, if you will, of her child's darkness. She was able to convince each or her four children, including me, of this "truth" and disastrous consequences curse my family to this day.
And yet, I am quite lucky.
Part Two -- suffering out
When I was about four, my father found me in the backyard killing insects. He told me later that he saw some joy in my body language, some delight in my eyes that frightened him and he tried to imagine what his father would have done. He sat down near me and saying nothing, he started looking at one of the bugs I'd smashed. Soon I came over to see what he was doing.
"Look," he said, "Where do you think he was going?"
I squatted beside him and looked.
"His mommy is very busy with the other little bugs at home," he said. He told me a story about a little bug who was always getting in trouble, but this morning his mommy trusted him to go to the store for her. She gave him a quarter and told him to bring home a loaf of bread.
"Is she waiting for him?" I wanted to know.
"I imagine she is," he said.
I started to cry. I sat in his lap and sobbed and hiccupped and cried again. I covered his shirt in tears. ...
Read the full "article": Kinder than necessary
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