Sadism Depravity and Cruelty are Unnatural

Each of the 'Seven Deadly Sins' is something that we can all admit to experiencing in one way or another, at one time or another in our lives. Most of them aren't even particularly 'sinful' in themselves if kept in check. It is excessiveness, even to an addictive level, that places them in the 'deadly' department.
I've eaten too much, drank too much, felt jealous of people, wanted more than my fair share, let anger take over me and yelled to the point of making myself look ridiculous, and so on and so on. If I haven't done some of those lately, I certainly did when I was younger. Most of us, between the ages of three to twenty, run the whole gamut, and live to tell about it.
It seems to me we should star reexamining things. The Seven Deadly Sins are pipsqueaks. Surely, we all need to find ways to keep them in check, but they aren't 'deadly' to the point of driving our species to the point of extinction.
But cruelty, sadism and depravity are another category. Most of us aren't even guilty of them. And yet the most powerful people in the world typically display them, using them to gain and hold onto the power they use to place all of us in danger.
They are the true Three Deadly Sins. They will be what dooms us if we don't find a way to move past them. Eliminate cruelty, sadism and depravity, and the rest of it falls into place. We can teach our children, and ourselves, ways to deal with Jealousy, Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Laziness, Vanity and Greed. Without those three pillars of evil allowing them to fester, we can work them out of our system collectively, even though it might take a thousand years. But without Cruelty, Sadism and Depravity, we will HAVE that thousand years. With them, we won't.
Certainly, many will disagree with my premise that cruelty, sadism and depravity are unnatural. After all, they have been with us throughout history. Humanity has always been tribal and warlike, and the strong have always preyed upon the weak. Fair enough; points conceded. But if these features of humanity were truly natural, it seems to me they would be more prevalent. And, call me naive, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. I think about all the people I know, easily numbering in the high hundreds; actually quite a bit more, since I teach hundreds of new students each year at my university.
And none of them have ever struck me as being sadistic or depraved. I don't believe they are/were, although of course it is possible they have/had me and everyone else fooled. As for cruelty, I get that we all display it at times, but I think very very few of us are actually cruel by nature. It's more that we have displayed it in our worst moments. Generally our own feelings are hurt so badly that we want to make somebody else suffer as we do. That's cruelty for most people, in my humble opinion. People who are cruel by nature are the exception, not the rule. Those who enjoy the suffering of others, not because they themselves are hurting, but rather because they are sick individuals for whom making others suffer is an ongoing pursuit, are rare. Just off the top of my head and unscientifically, I estimate that less than one percent of the population are people whose very nature is cruel, sadistic and depraved.
If I'm right, and the figure is indeed that small, can we really call that 'natural'?
I have modified my understanding of cruelty, sadism and depravity to a certain extent in the wake of the Epstein scandal. I have long known that many rich and powerful people are up to some truly monstrous doings, but the extent and pervasiveness has thrown me.
Previously, I mainly associated cruelty, sadism and depravity with psychotic loners. Every culture will have different names pop up, but for Americans typically names like Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy and a few others that live in infamy come to mind. These depraved sadists murdered without conscience, and committed unbelievably sadistic acts of torture upon their victims. They shattered the lives of the victims' families. The evil they committed is incomprehensible, and if there actually is a hell, they deserve to be there right now.
But the Epstein files reveal that some of the world's richest, most powerful, most influential etc. men (almost entirely men) engage in the same acts as the serial killers who give us nightmares. Not only that, the Epstein files show that an entire system is employed, internationally and running through a political, financial and media apparatus, to keep those men from ever facing justice for their deeds.
Even now, when so many names are known to us, when many of their crimes have been revealed, they remain free men. Bundy, Dahmer, etc. no doubt lived in fear that some day their luck would run out, the law would catch up with them, and the rest of their lives, whether short or long, would be miserable.
The men of the Epstein files don't think like that. They aren't fearful. They are not terrified of slipping up somehow and leaving a clue that pins their crimes on them. They expect to get away with what they have done. They even expect to keep getting away with what they are still no doubt doing. They are protected by the system. And this system is the very system we all operate in, because these men are financiers, politicians, moguls, royals, and so on.
Thus, cruelty, sadism and depravity are in a very real sense core elements of the society we collectively inhabit. Yet, as I wrote earlier, I believe that only a tiny portion of human beings are actually sadistic, depraved and chronically/habitually cruel. There might be fewer such people in our world than there are people with albinism, for all we know. And yet our society accommodates this small minority. It works for them, enabling them to be as cruel, sadistic and depraved as they want to while the judicial and law enforcement arms of society have a no-touch policy regarding them.
This point is crucial: we live, love, work and operate in a society that is deeply flawed, because it protects a tiny minority of people who are cruel, sadistic and depraved instead of protecting countless innocent people FROM them. We need to explore this further, uncomfortable as it is.
Before doing so, there is one more category I should note. In addition to the lone wolf serial killer types and the Epstein cabal, there is another group that bears noting. Many of the cruelest, most sadistic and depraved acts ever committed in human history were done by soldiers. The mindlessness of war brings out the worst in people, and has done so down through the ages.
There is a scene in 'Saving Private Ryan' that is illustrative. After being picked apart like fish in a barrel by Nazi machine gunners, the Allied forces finally win a stronghold and firebomb a machine gun nest. As the Nazis emerge, screaming with uniforms aflame, the sergeant orders his unit not to shoot them. 'Let them burn!', he coolly commands. I have to admit that had I been in that situation, I would have been more than happy to obey that order. I would have felt sadistic glee knowing how much pain the men who had just mowed down my comrades, plugging them full of holes, were now forced to endure.
But if anything, that strengthens my argument. Cruelty, Sadism and Depravity are NOT natural, and neither is warfare! The soldiers on Omaha Beach wouldn't have enjoyed watching Nazis burn alive if they themselves hadn't been tossed into the middle of a nightmare of agony. Soldiers commit atrocities in war, but those same young men would have been outside tossing a ball around if they hadn't been sent to a battlefield.
And ALL wars are started by men in power (and exceedingly rarely, some women in power). These are people who fully well know that their wars will lead young men down a path of sadism and depravity, and that many many innocents will suffer unspeakable horrors as a result. But they do it anyway.
The leaders, the Masters of War, the War Pigs. They are the ones to whom cruelty, sadism and depravity come easily and unforced.
All soldiers who commit an atrocity must be held responsible for their actions, of course. But it is the chess masters, the men who put them in these impossible and nightmarish scenarios that bring out the worst in them, who are most to blame.
And they are a tiny minority. They are UNnatural. The problem is that they use those unnatural attributes - cruelty, sadism and depravity - to attain and hold onto positions of power. This is where our efforts need to coalesce. The power structure is what has allowed a trait possibly as rare as albinism to cause so much horror and pain.
I believe people are basically good. Admittedly, this might be an insular viewpoint, as it is mostly based on my personal encounters with the thousands of people who have come into and gone out of my life. I mentioned them earlier, but my young uni students are a good example of this. I'm not saying they are angels, but at the same time I can't recall seeing clear signs that a single one of them was a sadist, or was inherently cruel and depraved. Had I been born and raised in other circumstances, I would likely see otherwise. If I had been a black American in the Civil Rights era (or any other era for that matter), I might reject the premise that most people are good.
Nevertheless, myopic though it may be, I hold to my viewpoint that BASICALLY people are good, and under the right conditions of upbringing and environment, I believe that even more of us would be.
Furthermore, I hold that 'The Seven Deadly Sins' aren't really even all that bad. They are human characteristics that we all have displayed at one time or another, often during our formative years, which need to be disciplined and tamed through personal growth.
So, why did religious leaders call greed, anger, jealousy, vanity, laziness, gluttony and lust 'deadly' sins while not mentioning sadism, cruelty and depravity? Just an oversight? No, my guess is that religious leaders - the priest class, in other words - were all too willing to give a pass to these far greater sins, BECAUSE THEY WERE COMMITTING THEM! Likewise, the royalty that the priests were often in cahoots with were committing them with abandon. 'The Seven Deadly Sins' were just a way to keep the common people fearing that their own bodies were unnatural and deficient while the rich and powerful got to play on a whole different level of evil.
Therefore, if - as I maintain - sadism, cruelty and depravity are unnatural - how and why did they come to be the 'privileged' domain of the priest and landowning, and later the financial and industrial, classes? Diluted down to a single word, the answer is 'intercession'. To understand the source of these TRULY deadly 3 sins, we must understand how, as agriculture replaced nomadic living, God - in the most significant real estate decision in human history - picked up and moved to the sky.
Agriculture requires above all else, rain and sunshine, in balance, with an excess of neither. And this is how the opportunistic priest class came to power. By persuading their cohabitants, the land tillers, that they possessed a special gift of knowing what the Sky God (who provided both rain and sun) wanted, they established a lofty position for themselves.
In early agricultural societies, the priests WERE the kings. The pharaohs of Egypt, for example, ruled the people because they were said to be descendants of gods, with one foot on the ground and one wing in the sky. Over time, the priest class and the landowning class assumed specialized but interdependent roles. However, the key ability they purported to possess, the ability to translate the Sky God's desires to the masses, remained. Priests gave support to kings, proclaiming that angering a king was the same as angering the Sky God who had selected him to rule. And thus was humankind subjugated.
Thus too, did THE most insane and evil concept ever cooked up - that of an eternal hell where a cruel, sadistic and depraved god could torture those he was angry with for eternity - appear as an added inducement for the land tillers to follow the dictates of the intercessors, whether priestly or royal.
By arrogating an authority to themselves that was beyond questioning, and instilling in the masses a primal fear of a sadistic, cruel and depraved god, the priest class and landowning class created a psychosphere in humankind that hadn't previously existed. It became a rite of passage for these new elites to indulge themselves in the most despicable acts with abandon. To, in other words, pervert themselves to a subhuman level where sadism, cruelty and depravity became stock in trade.
The worst and most freakishly unnatural traits of mankind found a home for themselves in the most protected and powerful echelons of society. From this position of impunity, they spread like a cancer.
(Here I should return to my usage of the word 'unnatural'. One might argue that cancer IS natural, in that it occurs in nature. But at the same time, one can't very well argue that it is a natural human state that we should all just get used to. Death, we can agree, is natural and a part of life, but cancer is not. It often brings about death (which is natural), but that doesn't make it natural in the same way that death is.
Same with sadism, cruelty, and depravity. We can compare them to the 7 deadly sins - human failings we ALL are susceptible to - but they are of a different category. They are UNNATURAL in a way the 7 deadly sins are not.)
Thus, they should be recognized as the cancer on society they are, and fought against in the same way the medical field wages battle against cancer.