At a basic level, cruelty is the shadow of empathy. To enjoy another’s pain, one must first feel it. Not directly, but enough to register its emotional weight. The sadistic pleasure comes from reversing empathy’s normal direction: instead of sharing another’s pain as pain, one interprets it as power.

That reversal can give a sense of control, superiority, even relief from one’s own vulnerability.

Can an individual theoretically both be empathetic and kind, while possessing the capacity to wilfully inverse the empathy into cruelty and therefore both derive pleasure from being kind and being cruel?

Empathy isn’t a single, static quality; it’s a fluid sensitivity that can be directed or distorted depending on motive, identity, and context. The same perceptive power that allows one to feel another’s joy or pain can also, if turned inward or twisted by desire, become the mechanism of cruelty. To hurt effectively, one must understand what hurts. That requires empathy.

So a person who is deeply empathetic can, in theory, also be capable of refined cruelty. The difference lies in intention. When empathy flows outward, it becomes compassion. When it’s bent back toward the self - used to manipulate, dominate, or test one’s own limits - it becomes cruelty. Both use the same cognitive and emotional machinery; they’re two poles of the same current.

Moral labels like good and bad tend to collapse this complexity into something easier to manage, but consciousness itself isn’t binary. You can recognize the raw capacity for cruelty, greed, envy, tenderness, and compassion as the same underlying energy moving through different expressions. Once that’s seen, the question stops being “what am I?” and becomes “how do I use what I am?”

“Good” and “bad” are surface tools. Shorthand for navigating social life, laws, and immediate consequences. They simplify moral experience so groups can function. But beneath them lies a web of motives, instincts, and paradoxes that can’t be captured by those labels.

Most people know this complexity that live in them, but rarely talk about it or admit to it. Most people do not want to reveal that they are in fact capable of cruelty, also. Instead we hide behind this concept "I am a good person", and attempt to hide our shadow, the part of ourselves we do not want to be associated with.

But sometimes, like it did in Nazi Germany, and now does in Israel, normal "well-adjusted good" people discover within them the capacity to derive pleasure from other peoples suffering. They still do not admit to the complexity, but they do express it.

"Good and bad" therefore are concepts, that collapse something very complex (our consciousness) into something very manageable and easy to relate to. But the tension below these simplistic concepts inevitably reveals that things are not as they seem.

Awareness is the key. Becoming aware of our shadow, allows us to channel it in ways that cause the least amount of harm in the world. But the existence of the shadow cannot be suppressed and denied. Doing so does not eliminate it. It simply hides from the conscious aware self, and goes into subconscious hiding. From there, it can direct our lives unseen and unrecognised.