Walk into any movie theater, and you’ll see it clear as day. A movie like John Wick comes on, a character slaughters dozens of people in a ruthless rampage, and the audience cheers it on. But the second a puppy is harmed in the opening act? The entire theater loses its mind. People are outraged, furious, and heartbroken over the dog.
Yet, step away from Hollywood and open your phone. Scroll through social media, and you will find people watching real-time videos of dogs being choked, pinned, and psychologically crushed by “balanced” trainers—and those exact same people are in the comment section cheering it on. They mourn the symbol of innocence on a screen, but they happily applaud real-world cruelty as long as it’s dressed up as “discipline” or “rehabilitation.”
How do we explain this massive, glaring paradox? Why do we love to watch violence, yet pretend we hate suffering?
1. The Modern-Day Colosseum
Human behavior is endlessly fascinating when you stop looking at the polite mask society wears and start looking at the shadows underneath.
Thousands of years ago, people filled the Roman Colosseum to watch gladiators tear each other apart. Today, we don’t need a stadium; we have an algorithm. Platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube are massive digital colosseums. They feed an insatiable, hidden appetite for shock, voyeurism, and destruction.
We watch people slowly drink or eat themselves to death on live streams. We watch public meltdowns, fights, and misery. And when it comes to dog training, millions of people tune in to watch animals subjected to pain, intimidation, and fear.
Why? Because quietly, a lot of people enjoy it. They pay good money to see it, watch it, and share it. It feeds the dark, unintegrated parts of the human mind that polite society tells us to hide.
2. The House Cat and the Fantasy of Power
As Jordan Peterson noted when talking about the Jungian shadow, most people are like domesticated house cats. They have lived their entire lives so insulated by comfort, rules, and safety that they are utterly incapable of causing real harm or exerting raw power. They are defanged.
And because they are harmless, they live in a constant, low-grade state of frustration and powerlessness.
When they sit in a dark theater cheering on an unstoppable killer, or when they watch a dog trainer dominate a powerful animal with a prong collar, they aren’t just watching a show. They are living out a fantasy:
- The Fantasy of Omnipotence: Deep down, people who feel trapped in boring, powerless lives want to be the invincible force that answers to no one.
- The Attraction to the Villain: Some secretly wish they could be the villain—because the villain operates without a conscience and bends the world to their will.
- The Proxy Executioner: Because they lack the spine or the nerve to face the real world themselves, they use the brutal trainer or the movie character as their proxy. It lets them taste dominance without ever having to take responsibility.
They cheer for the brutality because it scratches an itch they are too cowardly to own in real life. It’s a safe, sanitized way to let the monster out of the cage from the comfort of a couch.
3. Running From the Mirror
At the end of the day, watching all of this cruelty online is just one giant game of hiding from ourselves.
As the old line goes: “Quietly yearning for what you don’t have, while dreading losing what you do. Desire and fear, baby. Just give the people what they want, right?”
People are paralyzed by the fear of losing the tiny scraps of comfort and control they managed to carve out for themselves, while secretly yearning for the unbridled power and freedom they’ve repressed in their own minds. They run away from looking in the mirror because facing the raw, unfiltered truth of what they are—and what kind of suffering they quietly enjoy watching—requires an ego death most people are too terrified to endure.