From a neuroscience and psychology perspective, this escalation follows a disturbingly predictable pathway.
When a person repeatedly derives pleasure, power, or emotional reward from another’s suffering, the brain’s dopamine and reward systems begin to associate harm with gratification.
Over time:
Cruelty becomes reinforced behavior.
Control becomes addictive.
Dominance becomes necessary for emotional regulation.
In parallel, the brain’s empathy circuits — particularly those involving the prefrontal cortex and mirror neuron systems — become suppressed or bypassed.
This creates a dangerous neurological imbalance:
High reward activation + low empathy response = escalating violence risk.
Psychologically, this produces:
• emotional desensitization
• moral disengagement
• entitlement to dominate
• loss of inhibition
• increasing need for stimulation
What once satisfied no longer does.
The threshold for arousal rises.
The behavior escalates.
This is how boundary violations become routine.
This is how cruelty becomes normalized.
This is how violence becomes progressive.
And this is why, in extreme cases,
crossing the line sometimes ends in murder.
Not because of sudden loss of control —
but because of gradual neurological and psychological conditioning.
When harm becomes reward and empathy is neurologically silenced, escalation becomes inevitable — and sometimes, fatal.
