Destructiveness: Definition & Examples​

At the same time, some of them came from fairly typical homes, and it is likely that the precise combination of genes they were born with set them up to have violent, impulsive, and ultimately destructive brains and minds. They were dealt a bad hand genetically, and they and the people around them suffered the consequences.

I don’t bring any of this up to excuse the behavior of murderers or to downplay the responsibility that any of us hold when we act destructively. I believe that almost all of us want to meet our needs and move through the world while minimizing harm to others. But being destructive is, on some level, a part of being human. So let’s get a firm definition of what it is to be destructive and consider where our destructiveness comes from.

Destructiveness is the capacity or tendency to do damage to oneself, other people or beings, or nonliving objects. Since harm happens all the time out in the world, I would argue that almost everything in the world contains some element of destructiveness. For example, even a parent’s love for their child, which we might consider the most beautiful thing in the world, becomes destructive when it means lying to the police about a child’s behavior or enabling a child to continue pursuing their drug addiction.

In a similar way, my own desire to provide good care for my therapy clients has sometimes meant that, in my pursuit of what I think will be most helpful for them, I overlook important information about what they really want or need. I bring up examples like these to normalize as much as possible our destructiveness: You can’t be engaged in any meaningful activity without running the risk of hurting somebody or something.​

The term “cultural destructiveness” is used by academics to describe how damaging people can be when interacting with a person from a different culture or when visiting another culture entirely (Engebretson et al., 2008). Cultural destructiveness is thought to exist on one end of a spectrum of behaviors related to culture; at the other end of the spectrum is something called cultural proficiency.

If these ideas seem vague to you, some examples may help. One component of cultural proficiency is cultural competency, which refers to the ability to appropriately and effectively interact with people from another culture. Cultural competency is a topic that was discussed a lot during my graduate school training, particularly in regard to working with clients from different cultural backgrounds. For example, many people from minoritized backgrounds have an understandable and justifiable distrust of authority figures; they have been harmed too often by people in power to simply trust people in power. For this reason, a more culturally proficient therapist would try to understand, validate, and work with a client’s fear of filing a police report or advocating for their child’s mental health needs with school administrators.​

In terms of cultural destructiveness, perhaps the most striking and painful example that comes to mind is the fact that for many years, both Canada and the United States forced many indigenous children into boarding schools far from their families so that they could become “proper citizens” of these countries. This practice is responsible for much of the loss of indigenous culture in North America over the last two centuries.

Destructive leaders are leaders whose actions prioritize either selfish motives or short-term goals over the long-term well-being of the people or organization they are leading (Illies & Reiter-Palmon, 2008). Although you’re probably not having a hard time coming up with examples of destructive leadership in action, it has been the focus of plenty of research, some of which is thought-provoking.

For example, a list of the primary features of destructive leadership (Padilla et al., 2007) highlights how destructive leaders usually provide some kind of positive benefit to others. They use coercion and dominance rather than persuasion, their efforts are ultimately more costly than beneficial to the people or organization they serve, and—perhaps most importantly—they rely on willing followers and require certain environments to succeed. There are plenty of people living under autocratic regimes who are afraid of facing war and chaos, so they live willingly under a government that takes advantage of them. I think, for example, of Egypt, where I lived for almost a year and where the population has become accustomed to a relatively stable existence under military dictators. In exchange for peace and some semblance of order, many Egyptians seem content to turn a blind eye to how government leaders profit off the country.

Destructive leaders really benefit from instability and possible threats to the people they lead (Padilla et al., 2007). In fact, one can view the recent rise of isolationist, nationalist, conservative world leaders through this lens. People are reacting to increasing economic turmoil and intercountry migration with a desire for strong-willed leaders who can easily wield great amounts of power—even if that wielding of power comes at great costs in other ways.

The connection between anger and aggression—which very often involves being destructive in some way—is a very close one (Berkowitz, 2012). The function of anger is to direct our energy toward fixing a situation we find disturbing or upsetting, such as when our needs are not getting met or our boundaries are being violated. Destroying the thing that is bothering you may sometimes take things too far, but it certainly is a quick and dirty solution for anger-inducing situations (Berkowitz, 2012).
 
My limited experience with being really angry seems to agree with this perspective: The only time I’ve ever been out-of-control angry is when I was three years old, and I threw a wooden toy, handmade for me by a relative, into our fireplace. This was effective in showing my parents how angry I was, but it did not accomplish my goal of getting them to return my brand-new younger sibling to the hospital.​

Jealousy is an emotion that can easily lead to destructiveness, because it pits the motive of preserving one’s positive sense of self against the desire to preserve a relationship (Bryson, 1991). Any time a person prioritizes restoring their own self-esteem as a response to feeling jealous, they may end up causing harm to others. Some of the most common destructive responses include undermining the target of the jealousy or trying to become even better than the object of the jealousy.

Since no human can ever be perfect—hope that’s not coming as a surprise!–perfectionism is a trait that is easily and often destructive. Perfectionism is linked to everything from heightened levels of stress to feelings of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts and behaviors (Flett et al., 2014). Despite this pattern, so many of us continue to have perfectionistic thoughts. Why is this? First, perfectionism is a socially prescribed trait; we get the message so frequently, and from so many different directions, that perfection is something to strive for (Flett et al., 2022). Second, the anxious thinking that drives perfectionism can be effective. It gives us the motivation to keep working at things—but it also fills our heads with worries and negative comparisons along the way. We can work ourselves to the point of neglecting our own basic needs in the name of perfectionism, and that’s a pretty destructive pattern.

• “The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation—a force for construction and destruction.” — Jonathan Haidt
  
• “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?” — Mahatma Gandhi
  
• “War is the science of destruction.” — John Abbott
  
• “When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.” — Victor Hugo
  
• “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” — Thomas Jefferson
  
• “In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.” — Audre Lorde
  

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• Bryson, J. B. (1991). Modes of response to jealousy-evoking situations. In P. Salovey (Ed.), The psychology of jealousy and envy (pp. 178–207). Guilford Press.
• Engebretson, J., Mahoney, J., & Carlson, E. D. (2008). Cultural competence in the era of evidence-based practice. Journal of Professional Nursing, 24(3), 172–178.
• Flett, G. L., Hewitt, P. L., & Heisel, M. J. (2014). The destructiveness of perfectionism revisited: Implications for the assessment of suicide risk and the prevention of suicide. Review of General Psychology, 18(3), 156–172.
• Foster, J. B., & Clark, B. (2009). The paradox of wealth: Capitalism and ecological destruction. Monthly Review, 61(6), 1–18.
• Grossman, W. I. (1991). Pain, aggression, fantasy, and concepts of sadomasochism. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 60(1), 22–51.
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• Illies, J. J., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2008). Responding destructively in leadership situations: The role of personal values and problem construction. Journal of Business Ethics, 82, 251–272.
• Miller, L. (2014). Serial killers: II. Development, dynamics, and forensics. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 19(1), 12–22.
• Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176–194.
• Rusbult, C. E., & Zembrodt, I. M. (1983). Responses to dissatisfaction in romantic involvements: A multidimensional scaling analysis. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19(3), 274–293.
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