One of the ideas I’ve been kind of looking at on the shelf is that Sadism consists in intentionally increasing tension in oneself, and then releasing it.
I think we are all born compassionate, caring, connected creatures. It hurts us when others are mean to us, and it hurts us when we are mean to others. Cruelty has to be taught, and modeled and inflicted.
But if you posit a baseline level of tension that is too high (due to trauma and lack of skill in state management), and that person has no means by which to reduce it, the only relative relief they can get is to RAISE the baseline temporarily, so that the return is, relatively, a release.
(As I think about it, ritual sacrifice could be seen as a sort of ritual sadism.)
As I have argued, Sade is really the best place to go to understand Sade-ism, which very certainly includes masochism. One image I remember from 120 days in Sodom is one of his “heroes” taking a bath in shit, cum, vaginal blood, urine, and perhaps vomit. No other person involved. Just him. He did that to himself.
And the pose he would have struck would have been nonchalant, even aristocratic. He would have laughed about it with his friends.
But the nausea and disgust in him must have been extraordinary.
[And I will note on that score the question Gavin de Becker opens his excellent book “The Gift of Fear” with: what is the worst thing you can imagine one human being doing to another (here, to themselves)? Now make it worse. Somebody somewhere has done it. All possible human crimes have been committed.]
Such a person is obviously strongly dissociated. Dissociation requires stronger stimuli. And in this particular case, what would happen is the BODY, on some level, would react appropriately, even if he was unaware of it. His stress level would go up a lot. Then he would get out, and the stress would go down.
And if you think about it, this is what sex does. Arousal is regulated by the sympathetic nervous system, which we might call the reactive nervous system, and the one affected by outside stimuli. Orgasm, in turn, is regulated by the perisympathetic nervous system, the one that calms the sympathetic system down.
So much of the relief in sex consists in first ratcheting up to a high degree TENSION (sex is work, is it not? And would adding pain–to yourself or to someone else–not sometimes make logical sense?), and then releasing it suddenly.
So you can really derive cruelty/sadism/Sadeism from an inability to achieve calm, beautiful, contemplative states. Trauma creates a continual alarm, and the only relative way to make that emotional sound fade for a time is to raise the level of tension a lot, and then release it.
And of course, say, whipping an innocent person for the sheer “pleasure” of it would amount to a release of the fight response. They become the enemy, and you become their conqueror, which feels wonderful for a time, particularly if you have managed to convince yourself they actually are guilty of something.
Read these lyrics as if for the first time, and know that this happened. This is historical reality:
Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in a market down in New Orleans
Skydog slaver knows he’s doing alright
Hear him whip the women just around midnight
So the core human task is relaxation and state management. The core source of all genuine morality is somatic. Nothing else really matters. All moral codes can be corrupted. All moral reasoning can be corrupted. This is why the postmodernists reject what they call the modernism that enabled, say, the Belgian Congo.
This is right enough, as far as it goes, but reasoning is still better than the rote and thoughtless conformity–itself also an outcome of unresolved trauma–with which they replaced it.
When you reject reason, you reject the possibility of useful human reconciliation of difference. You separate and tribalize people. And if you look at tribal behavior the world over, the only barrier to any one group doing to any other group anything they want is not moral, but dependent solely on relative levels of capacity for violence. Bigger and more aggressive groups always conquer and control and use however they like smaller groups that are less well armed, and less militant.
So I would put it this way: IF we are to use language to mediate difference, then the form it should take, if we want peace and harmony, is reason. Rationality, as best as we can do it. It does not matter that reason can be corrupted. If it is possible to overcook a steak does not mean that it is impossible to do it correctly. If you fuck up, fix it. Don’t stop trying. Don’t reject the aim or the method simply because failure is possible. Learn from your mistakes.
It is my perception that at this moment in history much of the wealthier portion of the human race has rejected reason, and learned to live in fear. This fear makes their interactions with people who differ from them violent, and their calculations based on the raw exercise of power. This is definitionally anti-Liberal in my view.
And I would say this: feeling loved is one of the quickest cures imaginable for all of this. Feeling valued with no additions or subtractions from exactly who you are at this very moment, from someone quite aware of all the fucked up stuff you do you don’t know why. If we’ve been there, we know why, quite well.
Me, I see evil in me. I am not describing anything I have not felt, and not felt RECENTLY. I went on an evil carnival ride through darkness and whirring blades the other night in a dream, which ended with having sex with a woman I know who I am pretty sure dabbled in Satanism, and which left a mark on her she is well aware of. She is not evil, but she has touched it. I feel that. It bothers her, and she has never known what to do with it.
All of this is me trying to map out the human psyche, from the inside. Can you be outside the human psyche you may ask? Well, most psychologists seem to think so. They read a book, you see. Many books. There they are on the shelf.
I’m kidding. I don’t hate psychologists. And I’m trying not to hate anyone. You see these coffee mugs and t-shirts that say “I hate people”, or “I am not a people person”.
What this really means is that they feel fear and uncertainty in social environments that prevent them from connecting with people. And other people, of course, feeling that hesitancy–which is nearly universal by the way in our superficial culture–pull back. So the more needy you are, the less likely you are to connect, in far too many cases.
Our nation is filled with people like Tantalus, who feel like every time they reach out for love, it retreats. Many of them become suicides. Most of them are depressed, with good reason. This is not genetics, and it can only be meliorated–not cured–with drugs.
We need a new way. I continue to seek it, and it is a fucking bitch, let me tell you. But I have been blessed with the gift of not dying easily. Otherwise I would be dead. I am the Wolverine. I am destroyed, killed, blown apart, and then I reassemble and go again. It’s what I do.
My work continues. I feel like I am making progress lately. I think some sort of breakthrough may be possible before the end of the year. That is what my gut is telling me.
What is certain is that I don’t quit. Ever. Not for anything important.