There’s no crestfallenness about it. It is more like a waking up, a new and improved understanding of the world.
Lions are not cruel. It is not the anguish of the victim that they relish, but their own ability to prevent their escape, the joy in their own hunting instinct. The victim has no feelings in their mind, only escape plans. Cruelty relishes pain, only something recognized can be relished.
Regarding disdain, it is daisdainful because it has never been forced or even challenged to exert its strength.
Socrates was not disdainful. Proof of this is that he cared what people thought. Disdain is Diogenes. No exertion was required to prove Xeno foolish.
But Socrates was a cynic, and knew of the cynic tradition of disdain, and imitated it to impress and convince his interlocutors. That was the farce.
A lion, for instance, would be incapable of sistematic, calm, unemotional torture where the enemy is fully bound. But this is the high point of cruelty. Cold disection of the feeling of pain in his enemy.
The group says, the group has been remiss. Since it does not adequately distinguish anger, and the pain of anger, which in some sense does correspond to the tendentious ideological academic view of being gripped by the one who has anger, or, is angry, for (along with the stupid belief that shouting and the like are signs of importance, whereas, on that view, the mere disparaging glance of the authority is the sign of true power: ergo, a simple-minded and naive attempt to make the institution all-powerful, and the human being a mere function of the institution), and the deep being of hate. For anger is always essentially involuntary,. Yet, not hate. Hate is like being oneself. It is like Goethe’s saying: The joys of personality.