Book Review: “The Cruelty is the Point.”

This is not one of those books that you read to feel good. It’s not a book that you read to convince someone of something either. It’s a book to just highlight what is so blatantly obvious.

It’s kind of like what I’ve been learning about the Puritans as I’ve been reading more history about them — they were terrible people, intent on making as many people as miserable as they were, imposing a religious tyranny on others. They left England because they couldn’t impose their religious tyranny there and so they left and imposed it elsewhere, ensuring that no one would be happy. By this standard, the cruelty was the point.

And that’s always been the point — tyranny, at it’s core, is always about cruelty. It’s always about misery. Because the people who are imposing the tyranny are at their core just plain miserable. And you know the old adage — misery loves company.

Adam Serwer, in his book, “The Cruelty is the Point” highlights this point very eloquently in a series of 13 compiled essays (and introductions to those essays) that he wrote throughout the last administration on how cruelty was always the point and goal.

I’m not going to do the usual thing and quote specific parts of this book — again, this isn’t a usual type of book. Instead, I want to point out specific sections, or rather topics, so you can see the themes that Serwer covers to get a better sense of what he is talking about.