Could be a variation of different reasons and certainly there is what is called being sadistic. Being sadistic is extreme, where a person actually wants to torture other people and this can be a mental illness, when a person is basically insane.
But average people often like watching violence. Why is boxing is a sport? And they don't stop it? Other sports are not quite as dangerous. But still, why is boxing considered a sport? Is there a degree of desire in some people who simply enjoy seeing other people in pain? Why is it that kids with dolls and little toys sometimes destroy their own toys? And maybe some of you did the same thing, you built a model car and you enjoyed running it off the table and watching it smash , etc. There is some sort of degree of enjoyment being a kind of god in control of other things. And if you can destroy something, is that not the most powerful way that you can control something? Destroy it, it is gone, you are a winner, strong, powerful, etc.
This is kind of something that to a certain extend is more engrained in some people than in others. To a certain extent a tendency towards enjoying violence is more engrained in some people than in others. Buddhism would say that it is because of Kamma that some things are more engrained in some people than others. Certainly a person who is prone to enjoying violence is not somebody who is going to come to these retreats, so their Kamma is not good enough. They are not blessed enough as all of you are, to be able to get this sort of practice. We are living in a realm Buddhism calls Samsara, a realm of birth and death where there are many, many different types of people and other living beings.
Watch a cat with a mouse or a lizard, it's incredible. I don't like watching a cat with a mouse or a lizard, I try to stop it as quickly as I can. It is cruel how a cat will torture a mouse or lizard, playing with it slowing killing it. I find this behavior weird, why do they do that to their prey? Why? Is it from their conditioning of being related to lions or tigers who actually destroy in order to eat to survive, which is a totally different thing, or is it because cats just want to destroy and walk away and leave the creature there. It is weird. But when humans do it and they enjoy violence, they are definitely insane, especially when it gets to the sadist level; there is something wrong in the mind. Bizarre.
Yet the fact remains that some average people like watching violent stuff. When we were growing up statistics where conducted on television cartoons, violent ones such as the road runner. In this cartoon the road runner or the coyote often gets blow up and all of a sudden they are back again. Kids easily see in a cartoon that the violence isn't real because the characters never die, they get blown up but never die. So kids become kind of numb to this type of violence. In the same way adults also become very numb to violence between humans on regular movies and TV shows.
When I was a kid, they had quite a bit of censorship on TV about what kind of movies could be shown and so on. There was never blood in a movie that I ever saw until I was about 17. They never showed blood. All the old cowboys and Indians shows, the old detective stories, people were shooting just like they shoot today, but there was never any blood. The shows were fine it seemed, but of course somebody came along and said that is not realistic. When you shoot somebody through the head, something comes out the other side. And so it has to be realistic they said, so they added it, they were able to change the censorship rules so they could show more realism. These changes occurred gradually so most people didn't care much.
"Schindler's List" was recommended to me for its message and its story. I had not watched a movie for a long time and I was quite shocked by such vivid expressions of violence shown in that movie. So I think a lot of people see violence as entertainment, they see it as an escape and they don't see it as reality. But that is just it, a lot of people are more or less brainwashed by the media, TV shows and movies to enjoy watching violence as a form of entertainment.