"The cruelty is the point".

There's an increasingly blunt divide these days between people who think cruelty is a good signal because it's in some way "realistic", and people who think avoidable suffering is bad and should be avoided. This is almost exactly the "woke"/"antiwoke" split.

Thank you for making this point. It's basically confusing correlation with causation, or even reversing causation. Cargo cult thinking. Positive long term change often causes shorter term harm to some people, and this causes shorter term harm to some people, so this must be positive long term change. Poking at a wound, or exercising to overload, precisely because it hurts, because the hurt has become overly associated with progress. Some people make the error innocently. Others use it as an excuse, and make up fancy terms like "technocracy" (Musk's grandfather) or "longtermism" (Musk himself) to dress up the rationalization. Really, it's about essentializing harm itself.

Thank you both pjc50 and notacoward because I heard the phrase "cruelty is the point" and I've always interpreted as the person doing the cruelty enjoys what they do, as if the cruelty by itself is the goal, not a means to an end.

This might map with the idea how the military first needs to break a person to rebuild them in something that's capable of doing what society has taught us to never do (namely, kill others), and more strongly to what I've been increasingly hearing lately in the business world which is "antifragility".

In no way I am equating killing with building resilient systems, but I can see a thread connecting them when someone thinks that cruelty can produce better and improved new behaviors or systems.

You're completely welcome and I'm happy that you saw some value in it. Your military-training analogy is good too. "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" is a powerful concept, but comes with many caveats that are usually overlooked. It is the ability to heal and learn and adapt that is most essential, not the need to challenge, and unfortunately the Nietzschean expression obscures that. The ways in which his ideas were later used should also serve as a stark warning of how dangerous that particular line of thinking can be.