John Bell, after William Hogarth: The Reward of Cruelty (1750)
Series/Book Title: The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751)

"We will be as grateful then as we were rightfully fearful before, Gods willing."

"The Final Stage of Cruelty, following the casually random, wide-ranging cruelties practiced through Stage Three, occurs posthumously via some form of autopsy. The corpus will be literally cut open as if to find the source of the evil he incarnated. The coroner will find nothing to explain the behavior. No brain tumor or pituitary problem. He will ultimately be judged as apparently normal except for those disturbing behaviors he seemed compelled to inflict. He was not, as many speculated through his life, particularly sick. Anyone with a dick even that size might have been tempted to act out, but he went beyond mere over-compensating behavior. His performance eclipsed acting. He will have died at his own hand. Not necessarily suicidally, but as a direct result of casually inflicting some genuine cruelty. Eventually, even the universe loses her patience and takes out a particularly errant child. This one never matured into an actual adult. He died as he existed, at the emotional age of about eight. May we finally rest in peace without him." NextWorld, The Third Stage of Cruelty: Perfection

I began this final installment of this series within my Nextworld Series with the final paragraph from the next-to-last installment, for I presaged this ending there. I make no promises here, but the history of cruelty seems to demonstrate that it begets its demise and punishment. The eventual reward for cruelty tends to be infamy. Unlike how it might have felt for most of its duration, the protagonist was collecting evidence for use in his eventual comeuppance. Further, every witness, and there are always multitudes of witnesses, might as well have been wearing a body camera. Each errant act will have left an impression, and even the most partisan might ultimately discover a reason to provide state's evidence. The cruel attract lousy allies, the most fair weather of all possible friends. They stoke an underlying competitive nature so that even the most loyal might feel no compunction at turning on their once-presumed benefactor. Few will be able to ignore the eventual come-to-Jesus call.

Our perpetrator will be gone by then, if not dead, every bit as good as. Ruptured ducks will envy him. He will have stoked up enough enmity to independently fuel his prosecution many times over. Books will be published to great fanfare. Everyone will try to get their share of the booty. The story will turn out to be almost precisely as his most vocal enemies had always insisted. What the protagonist had vehemently insisted was, at best, half-truths and malign conspiracies will be recognized as the whole truth, and little but. The former cultists will largely fade into a mildly annoying dust. They'll make their usual fusses, but they will have been relegated to corners so obscure that not even most formerly dedicated conspiracy theorists will bother engaging much. Even they will have moved on to some other complaint, one as yet too insignificant to register as terribly troublesome to society as a whole. There will always be foment. Minority opinions will have properly shriveled to barely represent a minority again, at last.

Recriminations will continue as long as a few of the combatants remain alive. Despite reunions intended to bring former Confederates and Union troops together in the spirit of some presumed brotherly love, animosities continued. Many of the Confederates never lost their convictions that their cause was just. They continued to refer to the conflict as The War Of Northern Aggression. Such Myth dies hard. The Northerners, for their part, played their proper role, sometimes patronizing, if necessarily, the wiser older brother. They grew to tolerate their former enemies’ wet dreams. They seemed little enough bother. Of course, the seeds of some great future cruelties might well be incubating across the upcoming generations, and minor uprisings should properly continue to provide background tension. Still, the arc of history will have already been restored. Sure, gravity should continue to encourage the worst of us. We could hardly remain human without a few genuinely evil intentions attempting to influence our better angels, but that NextWorld, which we rightly found so disturbing, and its attending cruelty, will inhabit history’s abattoir by then. No corpse will be left to bury, just a raft of cautionary stories.

Prosecuting the resulting cases rightly serves to right the record, and many reparations will have to be paid. The insanity that produced the stories will eventually be dispelled. Nobody will ever be able to tell the whole story because everyone became an actor, and nobody was ever qualified to serve as an objective observer. Those who survived the insult to civilized society will not necessarily be better off for their experiences. Many will have been irreparably wounded. Society, though, that too-familiar workhouse, will have retained some of its founding spirit, albeit in a more circumspect form. We might not precisely remember what happened, but we will also never be capable of entirely forgetting the experiences. Some will even seem like they occurred in some good old days.

Justice rides the slowest horse. The conservatives, unencumbered by much but myth, do not have to wade through truth to reach their objectives. This leaves them tenuously holding whatever ground they gain because they stiffed the piper as they passed up through the lines. They arrived so deeply in debt that they could never pay reparations. The winner will come to understand that even their success brought fresh obligations. Having slayed the dragon, they're responsible for disposing of the toxic corpse. Nobody ever really wants that responsibility, but unlike their freeloading conservative forebears, they choose to act like grownups instead of spoiled children. They swallow hard and pick up the burden.

The past was always destined to disappear. Even the stickier elements that existed like the undead, were essentially gone even when in ascension. It was never as if the past held any realistic notion of conquering any future. They were dead ducks before they even considered migrating backward into their future. Their conviction gave us all good reason to wonder if we were the delusional ones. It might have been that we had always been destined to become some cruel dystopian system. Most of us sometimes wrestled with our own demons as we pretended to hold a confident line against them as our only apparent defense. At times, it seemed as though Cruelty's convictions might have been superior to our more empathic ones. How could even well-coordinated embraces ever succeed over such heartless forces? Gratefully, cruelty was always undermining its own fate. We will be as grateful then as we were rightfully fearful before, Gods willing.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz