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The Pleasure of Cruelty vs
the Joy of Community [copied from spacehey]

Power is not automatically bad. Power is the ability to do something, to affect the world, to protect yourself, to organize with other people, to say no, to build, to refuse, to care, to teach, to interrupt harm, to change the conditions around you.

A child learning language is gaining power. A worker joining a union is gaining power. A disabled person getting access is gaining power. A student learning the history that was hidden from them is gaining power. A community feeding each other after the state abandons them is power.

Domination is different. Domination is power organized through control. It asks who gets to decide, who has to obey, who can be punished, who has to be made smaller, who has to be used, who has to disappear for someone else to feel safe.

That distinction matters because defenders of domination love to blur it. They act like any challenge to their control is an attack on order itself. Parents are told children need fear to have guidance. Workers are told exploitation is just work ethic. Women are told domination is family order. Christians are told that losing domination over public life means religion is under attack. White people are told that losing the imagined center of the country means America itself is being destroyed.

You can see the pattern in ordinary life. The person asking not to be humiliated becomes the one “causing problems.” The worker asking for a living wage becomes greedy. The student asking real questions becomes disrespectful. The trans person using the bathroom becomes a threat. The Black voter becomes suspicious before they have even voted. The person with less power is treated as the danger, while the system controlling them gets to call itself normal.

Power does not have to work that way. A classroom can have structure without humiliation. A family can have boundaries without fear. A country can have laws without turning whole groups of people into threats.

I keep thinking about domination as a problem of literacy. Not just reading words on a page, although that matters too. I mean the broader kind of literacy that helps people understand what is happening to them, what is being done in their name, who benefits from their anger, and whether the feeling they are being offered is actually freedom or just the pleasure of having someone underneath them.

A person can be formally educated and still politically illiterate. A person can quote scripture, law, history, or “common sense” and still not understand when those things are being used to make cruelty feel righteous.

Hyperreality is what happens when the image of something becomes more powerful than the thing itself. The symbol replaces the person. The fantasy replaces the material conditions. The story becomes so loud that people stop responding to reality and start responding to the version of reality they have been trained to fear.

The “dangerous immigrant” replaces actual migrants with jobs, families, grief, rent, children, histories, and reasons for leaving home. The “groomer” replaces actual trans people with a horror story. The “welfare queen” replaces actual poverty with a racist cartoon. The “terrorist” replaces actual Muslim people and entire communities with a permanent enemy image. The “real American” replaces the actual public with a fantasy citizen obedient to the approved myths.

Once people are living inside those images, domination becomes easier to sell. You do not have to prove actual trans people are harming anyone. You only have to keep the image of “the groomer” circulating. You do not have to prove immigrants caused wages to collapse. You only have to keep the image of invasion circulating. You do not have to prove public schools are destroying children. You only have to keep the image of indoctrination circulating.

They are not responding to the neighbor, the student, the worker, the patient, the child, the family, the person in front of them. They are responding to a political hallucination that has been repeated enough times to feel like common sense.

Domination is not only an idea. It is a feeling. It gives the person on top a hit of certainty, superiority, belonging, and permission. It gives them a story where their fear is wisdom, their resentment is patriotism, their disgust is morality, and their cruelty is courage.

Anti-trans rhetoric benefits billionaires because it moves public anger away from the people and institutions actually shaping most people’s lives. If a person cannot afford rent, the problem is not trans people. If a parent cannot find affordable child care, the problem is not trans people. If a worker is underpaid, uninsured, surveilled, exhausted, and one emergency away from collapse, the problem is not trans people. If a rural hospital closes, if a school is underfunded, if a landlord raises rent again, the problem is not trans people. But anti-trans politics gives people a different object to stare at.

It takes material anger, the kind of anger that could be directed at wages, rent, health care, corporate power, union busting, tax policy, climate destruction, medical debt, and the capture of government by wealthy donors, and redirects it toward a tiny, vulnerable group of people with far less institutional power. It teaches people to look sideways and downward instead of upward.

That is useful to billionaires because most billionaire political projects are not popular when stated plainly. “Cut taxes for the rich” is not a mass movement. “Privatize public goods” is not a mass movement. “Break unions and weaken workers” is not a mass movement.

The public has to be given an enemy that feels immediate and morally urgent. Trans people become useful because the panic can be attached to children, bathrooms, sports, schools, medicine, religion, and the family. A tiny minority of people asking for safety and basic public access does not produce enough panic, so the real person has to disappear and be replaced by a monster.

The actual trans person gets replaced by the image of “the groomer,” “the threat in the bathroom,” “the dangerous teacher,” “the mutilated child,” “the collapse of the family,” “the end of civilization.” People are no longer responding to trans people as neighbors, students, coworkers, patients, family members, or ordinary people trying to survive. They are responding to a manufactured figure that has been repeated so often it starts to feel real.

Once that fake image is in place, billionaires and right-wing political organizations can use it as a shield. Behind the shield, they can push tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, union busting, school privatization, fossil fuel expansion, attacks on Medicaid, attacks on public education, attacks on voting rights, and attacks on the administrative state. The public conversation stays locked on bathrooms and pronouns while the money keeps moving upward.

The point is not that every billionaire personally cares about trans people one way or another. The point is that anti-trans panic is politically useful for a billionaire class because it helps build a voting bloc for economic policies that would otherwise be harder to sell. It also helps create legal precedents that benefit people with power. If businesses, schools, doctors, insurers, employers, and states can deny access or care by turning someone’s body into a political controversy, it strengthens the idea that powerful institutions get to decide whose needs are legitimate.

Anti-trans rhetoric gives people the feeling of defending civilization while the actual conditions of their lives are being organized by people they will never meet. It turns domination into a culture war and then hides the class war underneath it.

This is also where whiteness and innocence come in.

Whiteness has always been obsessed with innocence. Not innocence as harmlessness. Innocence as a protected status. Innocence as the right not to know, the right not to be blamed, the right not to feel implicated, the right to benefit from violence while experiencing yourself as clean.

That is one reason race conversations make so many white people furious before anything has even been taken from them. The injury is often not material. It is the loss of innocence. To be told that segregation was not ancient history, that public schools were built through racial struggle, that suburbs were subsidized through exclusion, that policing did not fall from the sky, and that “good families” benefited from bad systems can feel like an accusation of personal evil.

But innocence is doing too much work there. A person does not have to personally invent a system in order to benefit from it. A person does not have to feel hatred in order to participate in harm. Innocence lets people treat accountability as persecution and historical truth as personal attack.

You can see it in fights over schools. A lesson about slavery becomes “making white children feel guilty.” A book about racism becomes “divisive.” A discussion of gender becomes “indoctrination.” A trans child asking to be safe at school becomes a threat to other children’s innocence. Again and again, the innocence being protected is selective.

White children are allowed to be innocent of history. Black children are expected to survive its consequences. Cisgender children are imagined as fragile, pure, and corruptible. Trans children are treated as suspicious, political, adult, deceptive, or contagious. White adults are allowed to “not know better.” Black, queer, trans, disabled, migrant, and poor people are expected to know exactly how their existence will be interpreted by everyone else before they enter the room.

That is not innocence. That is a hierarchy of who gets protected from knowledge and who has to become hyperaware in order to survive. Domination loves the innocence of the powerful. Everyone gets to be innocent except the people harmed by the system.

This is also why anti-trans rhetoric leans so heavily on children. “Protect the children” sounds morally obvious. But the question is always which children are being imagined as children. The cisgender child is imagined as innocent, endangered, and deserving of protection from knowledge. The trans child is imagined as evidence of corruption. The queer teacher is imagined as a threat. The affirming parent is imagined as abusive. The doctor is imagined as mutilating. The school librarian is imagined as predatory.

The actual child who is scared, isolated, dysphoric, bullied, surveilled, or trying to make it through the day disappears behind a fantasy of innocence that was never meant to include them.

This is one of the oldest moves in American politics. White innocence needed Black danger. Settler innocence needed Indigenous savagery. A dominant group presents itself as vulnerable, even while holding more power. Then it points to a less powerful group as the source of danger. Then any attempt by that less powerful group to defend itself becomes proof that the dominant group was right to be afraid. That is how domination keeps its conscience clean.

This is also where the pleasure of cruelty enters the room. I do not think we can understand our politics without being honest about the fact that cruelty can feel good to people, especially when cruelty has been wrapped in permission. There is a real rush in watching someone get humiliated when you have been told they deserve it. There is a real rush in chanting with a crowd, laughing at someone’s fear, seeing a teacher fired, seeing a migrant dragged away, seeing a trans person mocked, seeing a protester beaten, seeing a poor person denied help, seeing a prisoner suffer, seeing a child “put in their place.”

That rush is not the same as joy. It can look like joy from the outside because people laugh, cheer, clap, post, celebrate, and call it victory. But the source is different. Joy expands the self. Cruelty shrinks the self around domination. Joy can survive another person’s freedom. Cruelty needs another person’s degradation to keep feeding it.

Collective life can produce real ecstasy. Sociologist Emile Durkheim called it collective effervescence: the charged feeling that moves through a group when people gather around shared meaning. You can feel it at a concert, a protest, a church service, a union meeting, a dance floor, or a classroom where something finally clicks.

That feeling is not automatically good or bad. A crowd can gather around grief and become more tender. A crowd can gather around justice and become more brave. A crowd can gather around music and become more alive. A crowd can gather around hatred and become more dangerous.

Fascism understands collective effervescence very well. So does Christian nationalism. So does the modern rally, the viral pile-on, the conspiracy forum, and the sermon that makes the congregation feel chosen and besieged at the same time. Some of the most dangerous political experiences feel meaningful to the people inside them. A group can make you feel awake while teaching you not to think. It can make you feel loved while training you to hate. It can make you feel brave while making you easier to control.

That is the wisdom piece. Not a soft kind of wisdom. A survival kind. The wisdom to know when we are feeling the joy of connection and when we are feeling the high of control.

Control can calm the body for a moment. It can make a chaotic world feel simple. It can give people a role, a script, a target, a sense of rank. For people who feel powerless in their own lives, domination offers a cheap substitute for agency: maybe you cannot afford rent, maybe your boss controls your schedule, maybe your town is hollowed out, maybe your future feels smaller than your parents’ future, but here is someone you can look down on, vote against, report, shame, or help punish.

That is not power in any liberatory sense. It is a controlled release valve that protects the actual structure.

Peter Thiel and co. call part of this “mimetic theory,” drawing from the work of René Girard. In plain terms, mimetic theory says people learn what to desire by watching each other, that shared desire can become rivalry, and that groups often create unity by finding a scapegoat.

Anti-trans panic works mimetically. One person performs disgust, then another copies it, then a media ecosystem repeats it, then politicians turn it into law, then the crowd feels like it has discovered the truth when really it has been trained into a shared fixation. The scapegoat gives people a feeling of shared power without giving them actual power. Their wages do not rise. Their health care does not become affordable. Their debt does not disappear. Their boss does not stop exploiting them. But for a moment, they get to feel united, morally certain, and above someone.

American history is full of this. Poor white people were often given whiteness as compensation for exploitation, but even that sentence needs to be handled carefully because it can become too neat if we are not honest about the material history.

Long before the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement, and even before the Civil War, a lot of poor white people in the South were not being meaningfully educated either. Elite white families could hire tutors, send children to private academies, or otherwise buy their way into literacy and status, while poor white families were often left with informal, inconsistent, or nonexistent schooling. The creation of broad public education in the South was not some ancient gift from the planter class. During Reconstruction, newly freed Black people and Black political leaders helped push public education into the center of Southern democracy, and those public school systems benefited poor white children as well as Black children.

Black freedom struggles did not only expand freedom for Black people. They forced open public goods that white elites had never intended to provide broadly.

Poor white people were denied many things by the same elite class that wanted to keep the South poor, uneducated, dependent, and easy to control. But instead of building a shared politics around land, schools, wages, debt, labor, and public investment, white elites repeatedly offered poor white people a racial bargain: you may be exploited, but at least you are not Black. You may be poor, but you are white. You may not own much, but you can still belong to the ruling racial order. You may not control the economy, but you can be told that Black freedom is the real threat to your life.

That bargain redirected class anger into racial policing and made the public school, the voting booth, the workplace, the neighborhood, the welfare office, and the union hall into racial battlegrounds when they could have been sites of shared struggle. Anti-Blackness has been one of the main tools of class war in the United States. It taught many white people to protect the very elites exploiting them because those elites gave them a racial status to defend. It made domination feel like belonging.

Men were given authority over women as compensation for their own subordination under bosses, landlords, churches, and states. Citizens were given status over migrants. Abled people were given status over disabled people. Straight and cisgender people were given status over queer and trans people. The arrangement never gives most people real freedom. It gives them someone to outrank. Then it calls the hierarchy natural.

This is where the founding debates about democracy matter. The United States was not born from a pure, uncomplicated love of democracy. Many of the founders feared democracy, especially direct democracy, because they feared what ordinary people might do with power aka “mob rule.” The constitutional system was built with buffers: the Senate, the Electoral College, lifetime judicial appointments, limited suffrage, property qualifications in many states, and other mechanisms that slowed or filtered popular rule. Some of those structures are still shaping the country now.

That suspicion of democracy has never gone away. Enslaved people were excluded. Indigenous nations were attacked and dispossessed. Women were excluded. Poor people were restricted. Black voters were terrorized, blocked, and disenfranchised. Immigrants were racialized as threats. Today, voter suppression, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the Senate, courts, dark money, and media ecosystems all help preserve minority rule.

Minority rule depends on more than law. It depends on emotion. A minority can govern a majority more easily when enough people have been convinced that democracy itself is dangerous because the wrong people might use it.

Again, illiteracy helps. Historical illiteracy makes anti-democratic structures seem neutral. Civic illiteracy makes people easier to manipulate with words like “republic,” “freedom,” “states’ rights,” and “taxpayer.” Emotional illiteracy makes people easier to recruit into movements that give them belonging through resentment. Media illiteracy makes conspiracy feel like research. Moral illiteracy makes cruelty look like courage.

A public that can read power asks better questions. Who benefits from my anger? Who is being made into the enemy? What material problem is being hidden behind a cultural panic? What am I being asked to enjoy? Why does this version of belonging require an enemy?

Community does not have to work that way. The joy of community feels different from the pleasure of cruelty, even when both can produce intensity. Community joy is not always gentle or calm. Sometimes it is loud, furious, grieving, sweaty, messy, and exhausted. A protest can be joyful and angry. A church can be joyful and serious. A union meeting can be joyful and tense. A classroom can be joyful and chaotic. A family can be joyful while arguing honestly. Joy does not mean the absence of conflict.

Joy means the relationship is not organized around degradation. The joy of community lets people become more real to each other. It makes room for grief, humor, correction, awkwardness, repair, memory, disagreement, and need. It does not require everyone to pretend the same, think the same, worship the same, vote the same, or obey the same authority figure. It does not need an outsider to destroy in order to feel alive.

Cruelty-belonging works differently. It bonds people through contempt. Everyone knows who can be mocked. Everyone knows whose suffering is funny. Everyone knows which people are treated as too sensitive, too dangerous, too dirty, too foreign, too needy, too sinful, too stupid, too much. The group laughs, and the laughter teaches the rules. That kind of laughter is a border.

The problem is not pleasure itself. People need pleasure. People need beauty, humor, touch, music, food, dancing, sex, ritual, rest, celebration, and the strange relief of being known. A joyless politics will not save anyone. It will only reproduce duty without liberation. There is a difference between the pleasure of dancing with people and the pleasure of watching someone be dragged away. There is a difference between the pleasure of collective power and the pleasure of mob punishment. There is a difference between the joy of safety and the thrill of control.

This brings me back to the claim that domination is human nature. I think that claim survives because people confuse the frequency of domination with proof of inevitability. Domination is everywhere, yes. It is old, yes. It is familiar, yes. It has shaped families, nations, religions, schools, economies, and empires. But repetition is not destiny.

If domination were simply human nature, it would not require so much maintenance. It would not need book bans, voter suppression, border militarization, dress codes, purity cultures, anti-trans laws, censorship, prison expansion, union busting, propaganda, surveillance, and endless sermons about obedience. It would not need to frighten people so constantly.

Domination has to be taught and retaught because people keep exceeding it. Children ask questions. Workers organize. Enslaved people resisted. Colonized people fought back. Women refused silence. Queer and trans people made worlds under threat. Disabled people built access out of refusal. Migrants made homes across borders. Students kept reading forbidden books. People created mutual aid when institutions abandoned them. People loved in ways they were told not to love.

That history matters because it proves domination never had total consent.

People keep reaching for other relations. And those relations are not fantasies. They are practical. A community fridge is practical. A union is practical. A wheelchair ramp is practical. A ride to the clinic is practical. A translation network is practical. A classroom where students can ask real questions is practical. A family where children can tell the truth without terror is practical.

Domination likes to present itself as the serious option and everything else as naïve. But domination has produced war, poverty, prisons, loneliness, ecological collapse, domestic violence, authoritarianism, and entire populations trained to fear each other. At some point, we have to stop calling that realism.

A politics against domination does not require believing humans are pure. It requires building systems that do not reward the worst things humans can do. It requires asking what conditions make people more capable of honesty, responsibility, courage, and care.

The old question was whether ordinary people could be trusted with democracy. I think the better question is whether any ruling class can be trusted with domination. History gives a pretty clear answer.

I do not think the alternative is some perfect world where everyone magically becomes kind. The alternative begins much smaller and much harder: learning to read the difference between belonging and submission, between joy and cruelty, between accountability and punishment, between leadership and control, between shared power and chaos, between fear dressed up as wisdom and wisdom strong enough to move through fear without becoming violent.

That kind of literacy will not come from memorizing better slogans. It has to be practiced in the places domination trained us: families, schools, churches, workplaces, movements, friendships, public meetings, online spaces, classrooms, campaigns, and wherever people gather long enough to become responsible to one another.

The goal is not to stop feeling collective intensity. We need collective intensity. We need songs, chants, rituals, jokes, meals, dances, marches, services, meetings, stories, and rooms where the air changes because people realize they are not alone. We just need enough wisdom to ask what the group is asking from us. Is it asking us to become more honest? Is it asking us to protect each other? Is it asking us to share power? Or is it asking us to enjoy someone else’s humiliation and call that freedom?

That difference may be one of the clearest lines between democracy and domination.