Sadism
Despite focusing a lot on masochism, Sigmund Freud also talked about what could only be described as Sadism. Typical of Freud’s interest in bringing in Darwinian views on human development, Sadism for Freud was about self-preservation embedded in the ego-instincts. There is a conflict between surrendering and loving others, and an urgency to abandon love in order to defend oneself, one’s power, and one’s possessions. Starting in childhood, kids look to their parents as role-models and part of the development of the personality comes directly from the unconscious desire to take the place of parents, to control one’s future. This early conflict was a prediction of future ones.
Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
In Dostoevsky and Parricide, Freud said that there are two essential traits in criminal sadism: “Boundless egoism, and a strong destructive urge. Common to both of these…is absence of love, lack of emotional appreciation of (human) objects.” Objects here are imitated personalities that we’ve encountered, introjected, and are often involved when we talk to ourselves. And when some of these influences disappoint us, it makes it easier to dehumanize them, and move into the predator-prey split. Relief comes when we don’t have to blame ourselves, now that we’ve found external targets to blame instead. With Psychopathy, this lack of trust with the environment is global, and under the influence of sadism, the subject now believes that problems can be solved by controlling the environment in a tyrannical way.
J. Reid Meloy studied how this sadism can be incorporated into the personality, and especially into psychopathic ones. Whether from detrimental influences in childhood, or from inherited influences, there’s a lack of trust with the environment and continuous strategizing to find ways to dominate it.
This sadistic aura can even be felt by others, especially when they encounter psychopaths. “This prey-predator dynamic is most apparent in one kind of countertransference response to psychopathic adults. In a large survey study…of mental health and criminal justice professionals, [it was] found that 77.3% who had interviewed an adult psychopath reported a physiological reaction that was likely due to sympathetic activation of their autonomic nervous system. It was typically a dermatological response: ‘my skin was crawling;’ ‘he got my hackles up;’ ‘he made the hair stand up on my neck.’ Other reactions included perceptual, ‘felt outside myself…numb’; gastrointestinal, ‘stomach felt like I swallowed cement;’ muscular, ‘frozen with fear;’ pulmonary, ‘I couldn’t catch my breath’; and cardiovascular, ‘my heart was pounding.’ These are all primitive, atavistic responses that signal danger, the anticipation of being prey to an intraspecies predator.”
This controlling behaviour, as I reviewed in Narcissistic Supply, and Susan Fiske’s theories, is motivated by the desire to eliminate competent enemies, or incompetent people who interfere with goals. Any wishes you have quickly turn into goals, and then any obstacles have to be annihilated. It can easily turn into the emotion schadenfreude, where there is a strong desire for a human obstacle to be brought down. Then there’s a feeling of celebration when the control attempts actually succeed. The pleasure then conditions the sadism further.
Freud talked about this goal oriented conceptual ego, like an expanding bubble of goals, that need to be protected from pin pricks where people feel slighted with their complexes. Depending on how sensitive people are, and their psychological history, some people may react more or less to perceived slights. The sensitivity to feel obstacles so keenly, that makes one go into depression, was described very well by Sylvia Plath in her Tulips poem:
Now imagine sensitive people who react more strongly towards obstacles, and aim their irritation at the external environment. Freud said that masochism and sadism can reside in the same person. If a person gets injured with envy, they may not continue with self-hatred for very long. It can quickly turn towards others. Instead of tulips being too red, they may find that a targeted person is too successful, smug, and self-important, and they want to do something about it. Thankfully many of the early psychoanalysts studied how these adult symptoms could develop all the way back from infancy, so that we don’t have to be surprised anymore.
Narcissistic Supply – Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
Tulips – Sylvia Plath: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49013/tulips-56d22ab68fdd0
Melanie Klein, in Envy and Gratitude, talked about childhood experiences that could be seen to already develop these sadistic impulses. She started with the juxtaposition of good or bad experiences with breastfeeding. There is a good-breast that satisfies, and a bad-breast that doesn’t. When one gets a craving, there’s an entitlement impulse or a demand for satisfaction. “…The infant’s longing for an inexhaustible and ever-present breast stems by no means only from a craving for food and from libidinal desires. For the urge even in the earliest stages to get constant evidence of the mother’s love is fundamentally rooted in anxiety. The struggle between life and death instincts and the ensuing threat of annihilation of the self and of the object by destructive impulses are fundamental factors in the infant’s initial relation to his mother. For his desires imply that the breast, and soon the mother, should do away with these destructive impulses and the pain of persecutory anxiety. Together with happy experiences, unavoidable grievances reinforce the innate conflict between love and hate, in fact, basically between life and death instincts, and result in the feeling that a good and a bad breast exist. As a consequence, early emotional life is characterized by a sense of losing and regaining the good object. In speaking of an innate conflict between love and hate, I am implying that the capacity both for love and for destructive impulses is, to some extent, constitutional, though varying individually in strength and interacting from the beginning with external conditions.”
Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html
Objectification
As experiences of failure to be satisfied are compounded throughout childhood, Klein finds connections between Envy, Jealousy, and Greed. Jealousy being a fear of losing something that one has and Envy in wanting what is someone else’s. All these emotions betray a fear of scarcity and Greed compensates by trying to dominate objects of competition, and even destroying them in order to prevent others from having them. Much like a sadistic Super-ego that can masochistically attack oneself for failure, the sadistic person instead takes action in order to feel better.
“Envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable—the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it. Moreover, envy implies the subject’s relation to one person only and goes back to the earliest exclusive relation with the mother. Jealousy is based on envy, but involves a relation to at least two people; it is mainly concerned with love that the subject feels is his due and has been taken away, or is in danger of being taken away, from him by his rival. In the everyday conception of jealousy, a man or a woman feels deprived of the loved person by somebody else. Greed is an impetuous and insatiable craving, exceeding what the subject needs and what the object is able and willing to give. At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast: that is to say, its aim is destructive introjection; whereas envy not only seeks to rob in this way, but also to put badness, primarily bad excrements and bad parts of the self, into the mother, and first of all into her breast, in order to spoil and destroy her. In the deepest sense this means destroying her creativeness.”
If something is to be denied for oneself, then relief can be had by spoiling what is good for others. “It could be said that the very envious person is insatiable, he can never be satisfied because his envy stems from within and therefore always finds an object to focus on. This shows also the close connection between jealousy, greed and envy…My work has taught me that the first object to be envied is the feeding breast, for the infant feels that it possesses everything he desires and that it has an unlimited flow of milk, and love which the breast keeps for its own gratification. This feeling adds to his sense of grievance and hate, and the result is a disturbed relation to the mother.”
This emptiness that is from within is a deep-seated attitude about the world. The Godly independence that everyone seeks, is projected onto people who have, in reality not an “unlimited flow of milk,” but the illusion remains that they do have infinite happiness, and are a tease that are purposefully torturing the envied onlooker, and need to be punished for their cruelty and unfairness.
What is missing of course, is an acceptance that there is no permanent abundance, partially because of mortality, but also because life is full of so many ups and downs, and even before death, there are many kinds of losses, including gradual health deterioration, and a world that increasingly becomes less accessible.
With Klein’s Projective-Identification, the spoiling things for others has a way of cleansing the badness in oneself and giving it to someone else. If someone hates their poverty, they may try as hard as they can to make others poor with sabotage. Another way that cleansing works, is similar to how “normalization” works in psychology. If the mind attacks itself for one’s bad qualities, it can feel better knowing that many others have those same bad qualities. One wants to see, and even bait people, into those bad qualities in order to feel less inferior, or to essentially be cleansed. That’s how someone can easily inject bad desires into others and avoid self-awareness and painful efforts to improve oneself.
Sabotage – The Beastie Boys: https://youtu.be/z5rRZdiu1UE
If one is stigmatized with bad qualities, it may become a perpetual source of self-hatred, emptiness and greed, because no matter how much one gets through greed, it’s never enough precisely because one feels permanently tainted. One then is stuck with endless desires for destruction of others, or a need for authority figures and cults of personality to absolve one of bad characteristics. There’s a lack of acceptance for one’s flaws, a lack of gratitude for the limited opportunities that do arise, and lack of wonder. The world appears grey, barren and tormenting. Those who maintain wonder, feel loved, and rarely feel lack, look at the world more beneficially and trust the society in which they grew up in.
We can see this dichotomy in our stories of heroes and villains. The villain is a bastard that didn’t get enough love, as opposed to the hero who had a loving childhood and who had many experiences of desires being quenched. The hero has to defeat the villain to prevent all the good objects from being destroyed by the villain’s plans for an apocalyptic spoiling. Heroes protect fulfilling good-objects precisely because they value them without a fear of scarcity. They believe there is enough, because they have so many memories of cravings being satisfied consistently.
Don Pedro the bastard scheming – Keanu Pensive Face: https://youtu.be/kEcnhCJdCFY
Klein says that “if the undisturbed enjoyment in being fed is frequently experienced, the introjection of the good breast comes about with relative security. A full gratification at the breast means that the infant feels he has received from his loved object a unique gift which he wants to keep. This is the basis of gratitude. Gratitude is closely linked with trust in good figures. This includes first of all the ability to accept and assimilate the loved primal object…without greed and envy interfering too much; for greedy internalization disturbs the relation to the object. The individual feels that he is controlling and exhausting, and therefore injuring it, whereas in a good relation to the internal and external object, the wish to preserve and spare it predominates. I have described in another connection the process underlying the belief in the good breast as derived from the infant’s capacity to invest the first external object with [craving]. In this way a good object is established, which loves and protects the self and is loved and protected by the self. This is the basis for trust in one’s own goodness.”
Like in intimate relationships, a good relationship allows for emotional feeding, both sexual and romantic, but there’s a sense of sparing the other person in order to preserve their goodness. In a sexually sadistic mode, one wants to enjoy the partner, but there’s a desire to damage them, or to spoil them for anyone else, so as to maintain control.
Both Freud and Klein’s descriptions show how important breast feeding is for the child, but there’s also a hint of how objectification appears in the mind. The breast seems to become a part-object in the mind like the child wanting an independent breast to carry around for safekeeping and to prevent the owner of the breast from being able to withdraw pleasure, or give it to anyone else. This can be seen in benign scenarios of thumb-sucking.
In extreme cases, objectification can move toward destruction of the good-object. For example, at that extreme end of the spectrum, there is the story of the ironically named Sada Abe, portrayed in the movie In the Realm of the Senses. She desired her partner so much that it escalated to her choking him to death and separating his member from his body so she could carry it around for safekeeping in her kimono. When questioned as to her motives for the murder, she is purported to have said “I loved him so much, I wanted him all to myself…I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him.” In response to the question of dismembering his penis, she said “[They] belonged to someone I loved. Everything of Ishida’s had become mine.”
In the realm of the senses original trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-o8EKjXJPQ
Cancel culture
Nancy McWilliams described how far ownership and objectification can go with psychopathic personalities in this need to fight against scarcity and a fear of loss. “The serial killer Ted Bundy described his need to destroy pretty young women (who, others noted, resembled his mother) as a kind of ‘owning’ them.” This doesn’t only apply to psychopaths, and one can readily see this in the workplace, intimate relationships and also economics and politics. It usually happens to relatively normal people when they are shaken out of their sense of comfort by a crisis, and they are forced to change into a controlling mode. “Anyone whose fondest images of self, reflect unrealistic notions of superiority, and who runs into evidence that he or she is only human, may attempt to restore self-esteem by exerting power.”
This can be readily seen this year with the COVID19 lockdowns that destroyed many livelihoods, the dividing of employment into essential and inessential labour, even if full employment requires the widest variety of vocation possible, the abuse of power against George Floyd, and communist hatred of capitalism, the police force, and the family system. What seemed surprising in 2020, was actually brewing for a long time. The shrinking of the middle class, exportation of jobs to other countries, threats to stop upward mobility to protect the environment, the threat of automation to human employment, high divorce rates, pathological loneliness, isolation, ethnic ghettoizing, addictions, and the fear of growing complexity that can’t be controlled in work and life, has been an ongoing problem for decades.
Go Out – Blur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1ks7PTzng
Lonesome street – Blur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo55vzpL85w
Essential worker – Schindler’s List: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDo6eHyeI8E
People crave independence and stability, and fear dependency, complexity and chaos. When enough people are left out of prosperity, it’s easy for them to gather together in groups and unleash violence in order to restore control and self-esteem to their lives. An underlying theme in the protests of 2020 is that society demands too many complex procedures and responses from us before a reward can finally be given out. More of the general public become easily left out of those rewards, and a sadistic need to vent increases.
Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals described that fear of complexity that worries those who are falling behind. The revolutionary left has difficulties separating themselves from associations to the destructive past of communism, and also to successfully oppose oligarchies in capitalism. It’s very easy to replace an oligarchy and find that you’ve just created another one. As can be seen in the Frontline documentary The Hugo Chavez Show, it’s easy to criticize the powerful, but if you gain power, then you are in the hot seat. The new leaders have to find ways to deflect blame, and begin to look like the old leaders, or even worse.
All types of oligarchies strangle upward mobility, whether it’s endless pushing to amalgamate companies into giant bureaucracies that crush small business competition, or left-wing attempts stop upward mobility with environmental energy policies that always attack growth. In this post-modern, or even post-post-post-whatever, intellectuals are completely bankrupt precisely because things are so complex. Every revolution has a shadow side, and an inability to see their own self-interest, hypocrisy, and destructiveness, because it’s too complex for them to understand. Even when you ask left-wing people about their solutions, one gets the hint that “it’s too complex for them!” Another tell is that they seem preoccupied with their woundedness, and are not really sure their revolution will achieve anything. They just want to vent. The work of “what now?” is too boring and complex. The revolution stays frozen at the level of blame and violence.
Venezuelan immigrant Elizabeth Rogliani’s warning: https://twitter.com/jasonrantz/status/1277478573368983553
The Hugo Chavez Show – Frontline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-n-ZgA5dlk
Saul said that “in the past ‘world,’ whether in its physical or intellectual terms, was much smaller, simpler, and more orderly. It inspired credibility. Today everything is so complex as to be incomprehensible.” Jordan Peterson defines it as the Complexity Problem, and he provides a masochistic example. “I think it’s in some sense the fundamental problem…The reason I think that, is that sometimes people’s lives become so complex that they’d rather be dead. The reason they seek death through suicide is to make the complexity go away, because complexity causes suffering if it’s uncontrolled.” Of course one can flip this into a sadistic mode of wanting to hurt others to agitate a response to solve social problems. The difficulty is that the responses have to be skilled enough to embrace nuance, or else new revolutions will cause unforeseen damage and motivate fresh criticisms in counter-revolutions.
There are too many of us – Blur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQQObIQ63T0
The complexity problem – Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW_zpi2hmI4
What kind of job fits you? – Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu__97bVyOc
The danger of meaningless work – Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQAv0Bn96Gc
People want achievable goals, but consistent obstacles in a complex world build frustration. Once a group is targeted for blame, and dehumanized as an interfering Other, one can then unleash hatred towards “good objects” who withdraw their supplies with their independence, complex rules, and contempt for the rejected. Presciently, the movie The Dark Knight Rises, disclosed the motivation of rioters with Selena Kyle’s exchange with Bruce Wayne. “When it hits you’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”
Bruce and Selena Ball Scene – The Dark Knight Rises: https://youtu.be/nK056dWK7ts
Raw: St. Louis Couple Greet Trespassing Protesters with an AR15 & Handgun at their Mansion: https://youtu.be/OYoyD_Zgj1k
BREAKING: #AntifaTerrorists BRUTALLY Assault Man in #Portland and kick him in the head!: https://youtu.be/ICNufgzVvNw
Woman beaten by rioters with two by fours: https://youtu.be/O6MjhlE9UjI
Even when good objects are targeted for revenge, targets can escape, protect themselves or become scarce as they get more and more assaulted or canceled. Then mobs have to eat their own due to a lack of targets. Like described above, that emptiness is boundless because of the unending mistrust of the complex environment, and the self-hatred at one’s station in life. No placation will ever be good enough if rioters remain emotionally wounded.
“We’re on your side!”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDCjOMDljAU
Woman gives powerful speech to looters on streets of NYC: https://youtu.be/8e1ld1uGpXA
NYPD seeks man who threw fireworks at man: https://youtu.be/SW26DtcjJvM
As the leveling expands, crimes are denounced, both real and perceived, but then in a peculiar reversal, those crimes can also increasingly be taken on by those same denouncers. With dehumanization, the hypocrisy increases because one feels justified to scapegoat, murder and pillage, since the targets are so deserving. Without due process, it’s hard to measure accurately if the punishments fit the crimes. Often people are scapegoated simply because they are easier to access than the powerful. Because solutions to problems are so complex, there’s also a hint at murder as the simple final solution. Like with the above examples of separating the good object, even from a body, rioters are tempted to scapegoat and kill because the simple solution, a zero-sum game, is to make people who are obstacles to wealth disappear, and then take their place. The evil solution is that the wealthy population has to shrink, which eerily echoes the mistakes of the 20th century. If the 21st century version of this is that the population has to shrink, due to over-population and the environment, it’s still the same result: Genocide. Obviously solutions related to population control and the environment must include wealth per capita, so people can earn enough when they are single and childless, but I said the words per capita, and that may already be too complex for many revolutionaries. “Just kill and take, take, take!”
Violence and the Sacred – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html
The Dark Knight Rises – Crane’s court cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-dJPoSlPfU
The Police vs. Bane’s Army: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCEo7SCvYH4
Shooting in CHOP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgs3ehR5s1k
Seattle police begin making arrests in the CHOP zone: https://youtu.be/e9TRoskDmkE
CHOP/CHAZ shutdown by police: https://youtu.be/KdnkB2x99lc
Police officer mowed down in ‘hit-and-run attack responding to riot looters’ in the Bronx, New York: https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/06/02/riots-protests-looting-nypd-hit-and-run-orig-dp.cnn
The Problem with Cancel Culture | Ayishat Akanbi: https://youtu.be/N3ZjTg1OpIE
Comedians CALL OUT PC/CANCEL CULTURE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1O_PwDIafo
As punishment escalates, society becomes so spoiled and destroyed that there’s nothing left to envy, and no motivation to build anything and take risks. Why build anything if it’s going to be destroyed or canceled? The big lesson I took away from the 1st half of 2020 was that members of a revolution have to have more skills than the people they are rebelling against. If revolutionaries cannot run a society at a basic level, let alone improve upon it, then naturally all the leveling, spoiling, poisoning, and destruction leads to a situation where the attempt to defeat the sadistic monster makes you into one.
Complete Sigmund Freud – Vol 21. Dostoevsky and Parricide: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426769/
Envy and Gratitude – Melanie Klein: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099752011/
Psychoanalytic Diagnosis – Nancy McWilliams: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781609184940/
Rules for Radicals – Saul Alinsky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679721130/
Nickname Flower of Evil – The Abe Sada story: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780578551470/
100 most infamous criminals – Jo Durden Smith: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781398809246/
A Psychoanalytic View of the Psychopath J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D. San Diego Psychoanalytic Society and Institute: http://www.yorku.ca/rweisman/courses/sosc6890/pdf/meloypaper-psychopathy.pdf
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/