"And that is what I have to put up with from you?"

 The Associated Press ran an appalling and heartbreaking story this morning about a man—an immigrant from Mexico and a father—who is now suffering from multiple severe brain injuries because ICE agents attacked him, reportedly fracturing his skull in eight places with a steel baton. 

When he woke up from the beating, he told reporters, he at first could not recall that he had a daughter. And still to this day—due to brain hemorrhaging and head trauma—he finds himself unable to remember treasured moments of his life, such as teaching his daughter to dance when she was five years old. 

The story hit home for me on an even deeper level than the obvious horror of it would suggest. My own dad was diagnosed the other week with brain cancer. He is grappling—stoically and optimistically, as always with him, but grappling none the less—with questions about what this disease could do to his own memory and mental health in the months ahead. 

One knows, though, that cancer sometimes just strikes us randomly. One accepts that it is a freak accident of nature. One feels enraged at the unfairness of it—but still, one knows—at a higher level of abstraction—that there is no one to blame. The tumor is not a conscious or reasoning entity to be argued with. It just is. 

The case is altogether different when one is dealing with other human beings, who choose to inflict horrific violence—needlessly, gratuitously, for pleasure—on their fellow people.

There are fathers like mine, dealing with the fear of losing treasured memories, for reasons that—we all know—cannot really be helped. 

Human beings have enough to contend with already, then—one would have thought—from the unavoidable cruelty of nature; the losses and heartbreaks that are "inwoven in our frame." (Burns)

Why—then—do we add to these inevitable evils, by piling on still more human-created ills? Why do we heap "man's inhumanity to man" on top of these in-born, "inwoven" evils of mortality and illness, as Burns once asked? 

"No suffering laid upon us by nature or chance or fate," as Arthur Schopenhauer writes in one of his essays, "is so painful as that inflicted by the will of another." (Hollingdale trans. throughout.)

This is surely because an injury from nature or chance or fate—such as brain cancer—can be accepted as unavoidable. But the same type of traumatic harm to the brain—inflicted voluntarily, willingly, upon another person by the hard edge of a steel baton, wielded by the hand of government agents—has no such excuse. 

"[W]e recognize nature and chance as the primal masters of the world," Schopenhauer went on, "and we can see that what [they] do to us they would have done to anyone else. [...] Suffering caused by the will of another, on the other hand, includes a quite peculiar and bitter addition[.]"

Schopenhauer refers to this "addition" as the sense of "and that is what I have to put up with from you." It's the feeling of: this, too? On top of everything else? On top of everything we have to deal with from human life and mortality on any terms—you're going to inflict unnecessary pain on top of that—pain that never needed to happen?

This is what makes cruelty so particularly and uniquely repulsive. It's not just that it causes suffering; many things in this world do that. It's that it adds to that given quantity of suffering already fixed in the universe—that "sum of human wretchedness" (Byron)—gratuitously. 

"All this [...] With God's consent—on thee!" as Thomas Hardy once protested the intolerable needlessness of human sadism. 

The human brain, with all its store of memories, is such a miraculous and fragile thing to begin with. It is menaced on all sides already by terminal diseases and cancers and tumors and the forces of natural decay. 

And then you have a human being come along—another mortal, a brother, someone with a brain just as fragile and unique in their own skull—and they take a steel baton to that extraordinary, precious mechanism? And for what? For the sadistic thrill of it? To satisfy the atavistic instincts of racial hate and the lust for power? 

The madness of it! The incalculable waste! It's the last thing we need. "Earth is too harsh for Heaven to be / One little hour in jeopardy," as Edna St. Vincent Millay once put it. 

Life is hard enough already—the human frame is vulnerable enough already—without people coming in and bashing each other up for no reason whatsoever.