Becoming cruel happens gradually through a slippery slope of minor tolerated harms.

Evidence

Conditions conducive to moral disengagement will not instantly transform considerate individuals into cruel ones. Rather, the personal change occurs through progressive disengagement of self-censure for acts of cruelty. … Initially, individuals perform mildly harmful acts they can tolerate with some twinges of guilt. After their self-reproof has been diminished through repeated enactments, the level of ruthlessness increases until eventually acts Bandura_1e_ch02. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 670

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could argue cruelty escalates progressively, so the first tolerated harm, not the final atrocity, is the moral inflection point worth guarding.
• DEEPTHINKING: The gradualism claim that repeated small tolerated harms ratchet ruthlessness upward is dense enough — once you accept the slope, every small compromise becomes the seed of larger ones, a genuinely paradigm-shifting way to think about complicity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 670
• XREF: connects to: Cruelty escalates through harm-doing that changes actors, not just prior hatred. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 55