Please explain human cruelty...

"It is characterized by two features. First, a cruel person gets a strange sort of exhilaration, a false sense of power, by hurting another. Secondly, he doesn't see how cruelty destroys his psychic self. If he saw cruelty as self-ruin, he would stop in horror. All evil, including cruelty, is unconscious. It is done in a hypnotic state of unawareness." ~ Vernon Howard