I posted the following on this website.
This is a topic I have given a lot of thought to. As I see it, the core problem that faces all human beings is the problem of pain. Why should we live at all, as Camus, asked, particularly if there is no larger world around this one? Atheism makes this a very hard question to answer.
Now, the existence or non-existence of God is an empirical question which I won’t examine here. (I do on my website cursorily).
But all of us have to figure out some means of transmuting pain into something higher, or we WILL kill ourselves.
Look at this video, from one of the rougher parts of the training of American Air Force Special Operations troops http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X07-xQ_YajI&feature=relatedIs this not a type of torture? But it has a purpose, that of making them stronger. Their motto is “voluntary suffering is weakness leaving the body”.
But what if you are unable, within the constraints of your perceptual abilities–as expressed in the latent or explicit philosophies we all use to guide our lives–to find any good reason to live?
Do you then not enter into a direct, unmediated relationship with pain, almost as a protective reaction? If you are seeking shelter from the maladies of bitterness, self pity, resentment and unrelenting hostility to the world, can you do better than to make of submission a creed, a religion, and is it not the hope of all the faithful to be martyred for their faith?
My preoccupation is with Goodness, but I see no way to pursue the idea properly without seeing life on this planet as it really is. Plainly, these sorts of things help some people. As I imagine it, it makes them feel more alive, more tingly, and releases some latent energy in them.
The question, though, is: is this the only way, and if not, is it the best way? Many of us look at these practices and see mental illness. I look at them and see defective solutions, but to real problems, and solutions which are better than the alternative in most cases, which for many would likely include suicide.
Foucault spent a career talking about power, and yet he liked to be whipped.
I could go on, but I have things to do. There are parts of these things that are mildly erotic for me, for moments, but mostly they are gross, and the awaken empathy in me for the women who are so desperately sad and lonely–don’t call this love–that they endure these things just to stay with the man who abuses them. “I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all”.
I have called BDSM “ersatz sacred”. True sacrality is something which converts pain into meaning. It is the reason we suffer voluntarily. People obviously suffer voluntarily in BDSM, but they don’t BUILD anything from it. There is no more complex structure there afterwards than before. There is perhaps release, but not expansion, at least over the longer term.