nanon:existingcharactersdiehorribly:Cruelty is the gift humanity has given itself.I have never reall

nanon:existingcharactersdiehorribly:Cruelty is the gift humanity has given itself.I have never really understood her line “Extreme acts of cruelty require a high level of empathy.” Empathy by definition means an ability to be in the other person’s shoes without losing your sense of objectivity. For a “psychiatrist” to say something so contradictory rankled the psychologist in me. Cruel people have no empathy because if they did, they would not go ahead with the act in the first place. Being empathic means you understand the other’s persons pain, almost like your own. If you feel pain in the same way, If you truly did understand that the other being was a person, someone you related to, you would not go ahead with it. If she means that only by understanding another person can you really hurt them, that is different from empathy. That is a logical understanding of social relationships than many sociopaths have. This is why villains always go after the hero’s loved one. perfectly logical. It doesn’t mean they have empathy. rather it proves they don’t. If they did, they would never go after the loved one in the first place. because they Care about the other person. I think–not having specialized knowledge of psychology–that perhaps a useful word in that sentence is “extreme.” The cruelty you are describing is the sort of thing Hannibal and for that matter Will and by now Bedelia would consider fairly banal. Is it cruel? Yes. But is it the sort of thing Will and Bedelia, in season three, are likely to ever discuss with any seriousness or attention? Not really. They are all through the looking glass here. Neither Hannibal nor Bedelia (she of the crushing of the wounded bird) is a psychopath or sociopath in the psychological sense. Will certainly isn’t. The line exists in the context of a conversation whose basic terms are a comparison between Will and Bedelia: Will wants to help the bird; Bedelia, to crush it. With that in mind there are a couple of ways of looking at it. The idea of crushing the baby bird is lifted from something Jodi Foster said in an interview, about how she can’t stand to be around that kind of weakness so she would rather crush the bird. It seems likely to me that the reason such weakness becomes so abhorrent to an observer (speaking more generally than just about Jodi Foster; I ain’t her therapist) is because the weakness is too identifiable. Someone who cannot tolerate such weakness in themselves may find it intolerable to be near. [Insert digression about abjection here.] So in that sense empathy, identification with the other, becomes the actual motivator for cruelty: the other’s weakness must be stamped out because it is equivalent to stamping out the weakness in oneself. It’s the inverse of how Will, when he saves other people, is always also saving himself–just as Bedelia and Will are presented as opposites across the axis of the bird. Another way is to connect this to “Save yourself; kill them all.” Bedelia, after all, presented the scenario as a form of advice: she was telling Will he might be better off just crushing the bird and moving on, rather than trying to save it, whatever “the bird” might be at any given moment. Here, extreme cruelty becomes necessary as a defense against (or of?) empathy. I’m not sure if it’s quite fair on my part to suggest this is similar to extreme cruelty’s requiring empathy; but maybe we could say that if deep empathy requires defense in the form of cruelty, then in a differently causative way, empathy is still a prerequisite for the cruelty she’s talking about. Cruelty emerges because of empathy–not because empathy is a precursor to cruelty but because cruelty becomes a necessary consequence of empathy. It depends which one you think is the primary term in the sentence, if that makes sense.Either way, though, in the particular way the show has built Hannibal’s and Will’s characters (which is what we’re really talking about here in this scene), I think it’s been made pretty clear that they are both able to be violent in their unique ways in part because of their ability to see and understand others. They do that in very different ways and with different intentions, but for both there is an element of perspicacity and of inspiration. (Hannibal talks to Will about urges as inspirations in the s1 finale.) Hannibal once said that emotions were a gift from our animal ancestors, but cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself. For him, in some ways, cruelty is inseparable from empathy; both are the most human of experiences. You can see that to some degree in his handling of James Gray, and of his various murder proteges. If Hannibal listened to pop, “Cruel to be Kind” would be his favorite song. Will, on the other hand, experiences cruelty–both against himself and against others, whether or not he originates it–through empathy. It is the medium of cruelty. They aren’t connected in the same way for him as they are for Hannibal, but they go together because they are the channels through which he spills out into the world, and vice versa. In some ways for him these are actually the least human of experiences, because they dissociate him so badly from himself and from his environments–from the normal range of human experience. The final and most symbolic way to look at it is to think of Hannibal as the avatar of cruelty and Will the avatar of empathy. (This is an oversimplification of both their characters, but bear with me for a second.) If you think of it that way, then the sentence becomes a HUGE statement about the show’s story as a whole: it implies that Hannibal needs Will to be fully himself, and that in some different but equally important way, Will finds expression through Hannibal. I think both things are true. -- source link
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