Cruelty is taught through graduated steps, not sudden leaps

Evidence

The junta justified its reign of terror by invoking national security. The military police, who did the training in torture for their special interrogation unit, selected ordinary young men from conservative families in rural areas. They first put them through brutal initiation rites in which they were isolated from all outside influence, forced to perform exhausting physical activities for hours on end that left little time for thought, indoctrinated in the ideology of the dictatorship, and subjected to arbitrarily degrading obedience training. This abusive treatment served two purposes. It taught unquestioning obedience even to the most outrageous demands and modeled how to torture without any qualms. In the more formal training that followed, the recruits practiced progressively more brutal ways of inflicting pain. At first they watched the more seasoned torturers do it. Then they participated in torturing prisoners as part of a group but performed the milder forms of torture. With further habituation to cruelty, they carried out beatings callously with only one other peer, using the most excruciating methods. For convenience, the methods of torture were numbered according to severity, with sanitized labels such as “tea party with toast.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 673

Categorization

• DEFINE: Documents the stepwise ‘graduated desensitization’ mechanism: watching, then mild group participation, then solitary extreme brutality.
• XREF: The sanitized euphemism ‘tea party with toast’ and numbered severity grades illustrate linguistic euphemistic labeling that vault claims about authoritarian support draw on. — 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
• ADDENDUM: The initiation rites and ideology indoctrination show cruelty chained to a legitimating ideology — directly relevant to the vault’s claims on authoritarian submission and social conservatism.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 673