Emotional, psychological, social, intellectual, legal, and MORAL blindness to cruelty (~1,800 words - 8 - 11 min. read)

When I was a child, we used to travel up to Queensland to visit relatives - mostly during end of the year holidays. Sometimes, some relatives came down to visit us - which was quite a hike both ways, as we couldn’t afford to fly much in the 60s, and instead drove for 3 or 4 days each way.

There were considerable culture shocks both ways. 

On the occasion of one visit to us in Melbourne, I recall one cousin complaining that the bread was “too doughy” . . . by which he meant fresh - in all his life, he had never had truly fresh bread, and the unfamiliarity of fresh bread was unsettling to him.

Going the other way, my sister and I thought it was quaint to collect the mail from our (adoptive) paternal grandmother’s letterbox, as there were always a few green frogs in it, and it was as much a joy to count and report the varying number of frogs as to collect the mail. 

The other grandparents - who were English and Scottish - were sterner, and less joyful. 

The tropical storms were also less joyful (although I liked the rain - except that, on Nan’s tin roof you couldn’t hear yourself think, as the saying went), but the mossies were probably worst of all. 

One of the most disturbing things for me, however, was the day we went crabbing. I got used to standing on the thwarts of the tinnie as the crabs escaped and clattered around in the bilge, but it was boring and the mangroves smelled. (They still do, but now, as an adult with a few more years [and decades] under my belt, I appreciate what that smell means in terms of a rich biodiversity - and that mangrove mud makes an excellent screen against the sandfly and mossie parts of that rich biodiversity, and indeed possibly also against alien abduction attempts - and also any attempts at any sort of dating life until quite a few showers have been had.)

I would much rather have been home reading, or wandering somewhere where there were trees (but not too many snakes - I wasn’t in those days a fan of snakes or spiders, but they were a smaller [size* and frequency] problem back home in Melbourne). 

(* Generally - one day my father swept what he called a “Christmas spider” out of the house and it was only slightly smaller than the width of the broom he used to gently deposit it in a garden bed outside.)

Even worse was to come after the crabbing, when my uncle began boiling them alive.

Both my father and uncle, as with many people of that era, wanted to show that they were well informed (smart, in the lingo of the times), as do many people these days, but they put their faith more readily in official pronouncements than we do now, in the post-Watergate world, and those official pronouncements included claims that crabs being boiled alive didn’t “really” feel pain.

It was an utter bloody absurdity - an obscenity against all reason, and I question to this day how ANYONE could possibly be anywhere near such an appalling event and even THINK to suggest that. It is a practice that is cruel to the point of being barbaric, so I find that farcical justification not only an obscenity against all reason, but an obscenity against all decency - to the point that I have to wonder if those who proposed it or used it were sadists, sociopaths or psychopaths.

Such offensive and farcical excuses abound in other areas of life as well - such as the male emergency services workers a few years ago who separated a mother from her child and then performed what amounted to a strip search under threat of being handcuffed out of an alleged “abundance of caution” over about a cupful of spilled chemical. 

Are they sadists, sociopaths or psychopaths? 

They certainly were NOT decent, responsible, or caring in any way, shape or form. 

I’ve now come across a similar blindness to cruelty - a blindness  of emotion, psychology, society, intellect, law, and morality from the 70s and 80s that has left me utterly staggered.

In the 1970s, the South African military - the military of a regime that was so emotionally, psychologically, socially, intellectually, legally, and morally blind that it implemented apartheid - implemented a regime of conversion “practices” that was so abusive and extreme that, when aversion practices including electric shock and “chemical castration” didn’t force gay men to become heterosexual, those men were - without consent - given partial gender reassignment surgery.

I am appalled at the level of depredation and wilful blindness of individuals and society that could even countenance accepting that.

Are they all sadists, sociopaths or psychopaths? 

It brings to mind the notorious non-consensual and abusive gender reassignment of David Reimer by John Money. 

All of these cases resulted in gender dysphoria - David Reimer being wrongly forced to live as if he was female and the gay men in South Africa being wrongly forced to live as if they were female show a staggering level of individual and social emotional, psychological, social, intellectual, legal, and moral blindness that is utterly obscene. 

They caused the sort of gender dysphoria that transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people remedy through transition.

Let me consider that further: 

• emotional blindness: 
• the individuals in South Africa’s military who were applying their abuses failed to recognise the distress they were causing; 
• South Africa’s white society was too emotionally incompetent - whether blinded by their personal insecurities or by unthinking allegiance to immoral teachings against normal human sexuality - to recognise the emotional shattering it was causing; 
• John Money failed to recognise the distress he was causing, which is often attributed to intellectual stubbornness, but that in turn depends on an emotional incompetence in that he was unwilling to be embarrassed by admitting error;
• psychological blindness: 
• the individuals in South Africa’s military who were applying or overseeing these abuses clearly were psychologically inept in both a professional and personal sense - but why?
  They clearly had no interest in true scientific method: was that because they were personally insecure about the issue, or because they had a value judgement that such normal variations in sexuality were somehow wrong or harmful?
  They lacked sufficient ethical integrity to be honest, and that made them professionally incompetent: their holding to their position took their failure into personal psychological blindness;
  
• South Africa’s white society was clearly as a whole psychologically incompetent because of their use of apartheid. I don’t consider there is any need to expound upon that failure, but I will note that not all white South Africans agreed to that, and thus that society had some elements that were free of the cancer of race hate; 
• John Money’s failure on this aspect is probably similar to that of South Africa’s military;
• social blindness: 
• society formed the soup that South Africa’s apartheid regime and military grew in, and to some extent the soup that John Money was trying to change or challenge.
  That soup is formed by the accumulative decisions of many people - typically, people going along with parents, peers and respected influencers, which is commonly (in my experience) because they want approval, or because that is the easiest way to live.
  But convenience and comfort are no excuse for wrongdoing - a problem being made painfully clear now by our failures in relation to the climate crisis, but also made clear by the widespread enabling of the “turning a blind eye” and “that’s-the-way-it-has-always-been”-itis of child abuse in religious groups and other organisations;
  
• intellectual blindness: 
• society trusts experts to advise it on specialist topics. When they do their work properly, that works well - subject to possible failures of society to accept the truth - for instance, there have been decades (actually, nearly two centuries) of warnings on the climate crisis - in fact, the warnings started way before it was a crisis.
  Similarly, there were decades of warnings about child abuse in some religious institutions.
  What is wrong with society that it wilfully ignores valid warnings or advice? Inability to face the discomfort of a change or sacrifice for the greater good? Is that as a result of personal psychological failings?
  I definitely attribute intellectual failures of experts to personal psychological failings;
  
• legal blindness: 
• “The law” - more accurately, the legal and/or judicial systems - has strengths and weaknesses. The context of the political-social soup such systems exist in has an influence, but so too does the fact of whether the legal system is more progressive or regressive than the society it exists in.
  In the case of abolitionism in the UK in the late 1700s/early 1800s, “the law” was probably more progressive than the political-social soup it existed and operated in.
  When the United  Nations was founded and the Genocide  Convention was adopted, they both probably matched (sadly, society has regressed since then).
  In the USA at present, “the law” is about two centuries behind society.
  In 1970s and 80s South Africa, “the law” matched the political-social soup it existed and operated in, and both were about a century and a half behind the rest of the world;
  
• moral blindness: 
• this is the point that I most wish to emphasise: all persons who boil crabs alive, or indulge in the equivalent forms of abuse of other creatures shown by John Money, South Africa’s military, and others, are guilty of an obscenity against life itself.
  And as love is the essential for life to thrive in a nonphysical or spiritual sense, they are guilty of an obscenity against all that is spiritual, including all valid conceptions of Deity.
  

There are details of what was done in South Africa at: 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Medical_experimentation_in_Africa&oldid=1073987413#Forced_sexual_reassignment_in_South_Africa:_1970s%E2%80%931980s;
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Aversion_Project&oldid=1087628719;
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aubrey_Levin&oldid=1067488618#South_African_Defence_Force; 
• https://www.salon.com/2014/09/04/10_of_the_most_evil_medical_experiments_in_history_partner/; and 
• https://web.archive.org/web/20121201172631/http://www.mrc.ac.za/healthsystems/aversion.pdf. 

The last reference includes the following dedication:

We dedicate this project to all the people who shared their experiences with us — whether victims, family, friends or lovers—and those who survived in spite of having their basic human rights violated.

In particular, we think of the man known as Neil in this report, who died tragically the week before the report went into print.

We also think of all those who suffered abuses at the hands of health workers in the armed forces, but whose voices are not represented here.

So I repeat my question: 

What is WRONG with people who allow or take part in such obscene cruelties? Why are they emotionally, psychologically, socially, intellectually, legally, and morally blind to their cruelty?

This question applies to a lot of other areas of life as well . ..

PS - the current transphobic hate of some involved in the current election in Australia is clearly based on complete and utter ignorance - it is thus both blind and based on blindness, and thus lacks all credibility. The experts and much of society are against that bigotry, and the bigotry will quite possibly harm those people in tomorrow’s election. Hopefully it will one day also backfire on the conservative media who have shown their professional incompetence on this matter.