Perversion Part 5: Sadomasochism

Written by Richard Bukowski

Sadomasochism in the ancient world

Much more prevalent as a perversion than in my prior installments of this series is the phenomenon of Sadomasochism. As I posted before, Sadomasochism is not only in intimate relationships but also in the workplace and in sports. Because Sadomasochism is a part of nature for humans, we have plenty of historical examples to provide. A great example is from the Stoic philosopher Seneca in his Letter VII where he writes pedantically about some of the subjects I’ve been reviewing, especially the problem of imitating suggestions from others and negative influences from crowds. Just like with Plato, he targets entertainment, but in his Roman world of Gladiatorial games, entertainment was much more visceral than today.

“Nothing is as ruinous to the character as sitting away one’s time at a show – for it is then, through the medium of entertainment, that vices creep into one with more than usual ease…I happened to go to one of these shows at the time of the lunch-hour interlude, expecting there to be some light and witty entertainment then, some respite for the purpose of affording people’s eyes a rest from human blood. Far from it. All the earlier contests were charity in comparison. The nonsense is dispensed with now: what we have now is murder pure and simple. The combatants have nothing to protect them; their whole bodies are exposed to the blows; every thrust they launch gets home. A great many spectators prefer this to the ordinary matches and even to the special, popular demand ones. And quite naturally. There are no helmets and no shields repelling the weapons. What is the point of armour? Or of skill? All that sort of thing just makes the death slower in coming. In the morning men are thrown to the lions and the bears: but it is the spectators they are thrown to in the lunch hour. The spectators insist that each on killing his man shall be thrown against another to be killed in his turn; and the eventual victor is reserved by them for some other form of butchery; the only exit for the contestants is death. Fire and steel keep the slaughter going. And all this happens while the arena is virtually empty.”

As audiences get bored by comparison with prior entertainments, what’s in front of them may be disappointing. “‘Kill him! Flog him! Burn him! Why does he run at the other man’s weapon in such a cowardly way? Why [doesn’t he put his heart into it?] Why isn’t he a bit more enthusiastic about dying? Whip him forward to get his wounds! Make them each offer the other a bare breast and trade blow for blow on them.’ And when there is an interval in the show: ‘Let’s have some throats cut in the meantime, so that there’s something happening!’”

Resonating with a lot of people who are skeptical of crowds, pop culture, and politics, Seneca admits that “you must inevitably either hate or imitate the world. But the right thing is to shun both courses: you should neither become like the bad because they are many, nor be an enemy of the many because they are unlike you. Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one: men learn as they teach.”

Flow and Sadism

The Flow Diagram can also be useful as an Emotional Dysregulation Diagram

As this blog continues on, I notice that so many subjects keep returning and infuse each other with complex causes and effects. With Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow diagram, we can see how hard it is to maintain emotional equilibrium, or emotional regulation throughout life. One could say that all of our endeavours are to maintain self-development, love, enjoyment, and peace. Because these things are interdependent with other people and social structures, and in fact, we get many ideas from others through suggestion and imitation, the usual conflicts can appear when social exchanges work cross-purposes.

One of Mihaly’s conditions for getting into Flow is related to social controls. “To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.” An example of this could be a hobby, like Photography. When you take photos for your own pleasure, you can study the craft and move forward without feeling too dejected when some photos don’t turn out to be good, but when you make it into a photography business, one has to be careful not to lose that self-satisfaction in order to follow trends, get likes and appreciation. The sense of play and experimentation has to exist so failure is a lesson instead of an identity. We look for setups and payoffs, and the less social control interfering, the better. It’s a tricky balance that requires concentration, as you will see below. Even these posts I’m doing, when hoping for a social reward, I find these rewards are not as stable as when I get some kind of helpful knowledge in which it doesn’t matter if others like it or not. If I tangibly got something of value, I’m more focused on that, and if others respond it doesn’t matter one way or another. Treat your hobbies in this way. It’s good to connect with others on what you like, but disappointment in their non-alignment with your views shouldn’t faze you if you benefitted ultimately.

Ten ways to unleash your creativity – Zenography: https://youtu.be/hYsNKVMTjLo

How to escape your creative ruts – Sean Tucker: https://youtu.be/yqu1Jpoos7g

German Shepherd plays with a duck: https://youtu.be/xK02Q4fhJ4A

Alongside Mihaly are the leaders in studying intrinsic motivation, Deci and Ryan, which help to remind us that we have to create our own goals within the social goals created. By selectively choosing which skills we need to develop for work or relationships, and to be able to measure oneself so that one is at least meeting expectations, there are opportunities to exceed them with our own creativity, which can create a feeling of contribution within the social context. All the studies on concentration show that letting your mind wander into places and activities you would rather be in, interferes with your Flow. This also includes changing work tasks in midstream. There’s a clinging or resistance that mars the experience of Flow. To counter-balance that, one has to remind oneself of the WHY of their aim and the benefits that will accrue with the task. Of course, this requires a certain amount of concentration to practice. Keeping imagery in the mind on benefits when the mind is easily distracted, needs a lot of practice, for example meditation is a good mental exercise to develop autonomous concentration.

Part of the irony is that we make products to be addictive and then their addictive consequences undermine our ability to produce because of how distracted we are. One of the ways to balance that is to add meditation to daily life with open eyes. To protect our concentration is a way to bridge the gap between activities when we are likely to have an emotional high fall into a low, when Flow activities end. Giving oneself successive enjoyable breaths (whether shallow or long, depending on what the body is requesting), relaxing all muscle and cranial tension in the body, can level off bouts of depression. This is especially important when there are long periods without enjoyment. Bringing up imagery of why-reasons, and asking “wouldn’t this be nice if this was achieved?”, creates intrinsic motivation independent of social commands. Like in my review on Letting Go, not being afraid to create imagery on drawbacks and dangers, to gain counter-intuitive pleasure from avoiding unnecessary obstacles, helps to reduce depression further. Again, all these things take practice over years to become an extension of your initiatives. It’s not a walk in the park when you’re just beginning, but with repeated practice, “what fires together, wires together” in the brain and becomes second nature. Habit. Over time, subtlety and delicacy in moving the spotlight of the attention span can be done with less force, or Sadism. Scanning the meditation practice to see where there are unnecessary thoughts, tensions and forcing, teaches you gradually to finesse your meditation practice. Forcing can have a stressful voice of “Behave!” As meditation develops, sadism and violence become more jarring. The mind becomes more sensitized and less tempted by sadism.

Positive Psychology Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrNBLR4djB7FpPCg1eJPNY2xFTTdpwhg7 

The Jhanas Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrNBLR4djB7GEUw8KzzlpSuTg2lsjp1h_

Why we do what we do – Edward Deci: Paperback: https://amzn.to/3rN9Qqe

Thanissaro Bhikkhu – Steps in Concentration: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2021/210206_Steps_in_Concentration.mp3

The danger of letting the mind go into automatic pilot, without lots of contemplative practices nudging those habits over years, can lead to traps of Sadism and Masochism in social situations, which are reactions to resentment, emotional dysregulation, alienation, narcissistic wounding, and low self-esteem. Mihaly warns in a very plain and obvious way that “one of the consequences of slavery, oppression, exploitation, and the destruction of cultural values is the elimination of enjoyment. When the now extinct natives of the Caribbean islands were put to work in the plantations of the conquering Spaniards, their lives become so painful and meaningless that they lost interest in survival, and eventually ceased reproducing…Alienation is a condition in which people are constrained by the social system to act in ways that go against their goals.” Of course, alienation was a big argument against Capitalism by Marxists, but as Mihaly pointed out, it’s a much more difficult problem to solve than changing economic systems. “A worker who in order to feed himself and his family must perform the same meaningless task hundreds of times on an assembly line is likely to be alienated. In socialist countries one of the most irritating sources of alienation is the necessity to spend much of one’s free time waiting in line for food, for clothing, for entertainment, or for endless bureaucratic clearances.” Like in the practices above, we have to find skills to control our frustration no matter what economic system we live in.

As time has passed since Mihaly’s main works were published, a new threat to Flow is not necessarily being crushed by rote work, but being utterly replaced by automation and robotics. A belated “I told you so!” from Luddites. Modern politics now swirls around human obsolescence.

Gattaca – The best movie you never saw: https://youtu.be/JrEHFk9g1gM

On the Right, we have solutions involving more balanced trade agreements where the West doesn’t accept dumping, purposeful government currency devaluations, and tariffs without concomitant responses. Illegal immigration is to be controlled so that underemployed citizens can get back on the horse. Ironically, these protectionist policies are similar to union policies where hiring is controlled to maintain higher wages, a money concentration for the citizen vs. money dilution with unlimited illegal immigration. This allows for people with different personality types to apply for jobs that match what they like. Unless people are willing to move to other countries, learn other languages, experience reverse racism and culture shock, people don’t want to lose these supposedly “unwanted” jobs. Rudy Giuliani says “it’s easy to say ‘Oh go learn how to use a computer…What are you a dummy, you can’t use this, and you can’t do that?’ Not everybody is skilled in all different things. When you’ve been brought up with this certain kind of skill, and it’s something we can still do, why are we giving it to China?”

On the Left we have progressives like Democrat Andrew Yang who understand that we are not necessarily taxing only people, and since machines are doing a lot of the work, we have to look at taxing them, because as of yet, they don’t have feelings of alienation. When asked how his $1,000/month minimum income would work he said “It’s difficult to do if you have companies like Amazon, trillion dollar tech companies paying literally 0% in taxes while closing 30% of our stores. Now we need to put the American people in the position of benefit from all of these innovations, and if we had a value added tax at even half the European level it would generate over $800 billion in new revenue which combined with the money in our hands it would be a trickle-up economy. We would spend the money and it would circulate in our regional economies and neighborhoods creating millions of jobs, making our families stronger and healthier. We’d save money on things like incarceration, homelessness services, emergency room healthcare.” Whatever your political inclinations, when a middle class is struggling or failing, politicians and people desperately resort to protest and violence to try to redress the balance.

Do you love me?: https://youtu.be/fn3KWM1kuAw

Andrew Yang – Minimum Income: https://youtu.be/j-pJzQJJiUs

Rudy Giuliani – China surpassing U.S. by 2049: https://youtu.be/9F09m0cPgjM

Rahm Emanuel – Learn to Code: https://youtu.be/wEb_U6C9k20

Trump defense team plays Democrats ‘inciting’ language: https://youtu.be/J31rXRjryFA

Loser – Beck: https://youtu.be/YgSPaXgAdzE

The danger on the Right is controlling illegal immigration without indirectly encouraging racism with mentally ill narcissists who embrace NAZI and White Supremacist ideologies. The danger on the Left is using the leverage of the populace needing most or all of their income from the government. If laws are passed to socially engineer the public with social credit scores, for example, people will be alienated just the same because there are no checks and balances in the power structure of the government. Is free money really without a catch?

How this connects with the topic of Sadism in particular is how it connects with our wishes, goals, and endeavors. Also those who are sadistic and narcissistic will inevitably be motivated by their envy of your Flow states. Sabotage for Cluster Bs is a quick way to get relief by “giving people a hard time” an often used euphemism. Can you always create a work environment without bullying and Sadism?

The best definition I’ve seen of Sadism comes from a biography, The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade, where Sadism is defined as “the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world produced by the will of the observer.” Here I would add that the pleasure comes from self-measurement on how well one is doing. Another thing I would add is the force we apply when we are frustrated and struggle to make something work. The consequences on machines and inanimate objects is much less than when we apply that force to people. This is the most difficult area in regards to power-differentials. People who complain about the abuse of power very quickly abuse power when they face their first frustration after finally gaining some power. To learn more about this, read my review on Narcissistic Supply.

Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond: https://youtu.be/P1Mavs4UqYE

One also has to look at boredom, which is often added to descriptions of psychopaths and narcissists. They are bored because the comparative mind is only interested in what is better, and not in what is available. When comparing one thing to another, one can move up the Flow diagram with constant demands for better qualities and more quantities to release satisfaction. It can trap a person into boredom and eventually a sadistic response towards an empty environment that yields nothing exciting. This is why there’s an importance in Heidegger’s studies on Presocratic Greek Philosophy. Comparing something to nothing, or death, can revive appreciation for what was taken for granted.

Parmenides: https://youtu.be/dWdVTN5LQKs

Sadomasochism and Sexuality

Naturally one of our goals is sexuality, and there is a Sadism in trying to make sex “work properly,” or to make dating a “conquest,” and the typical rejection, frustration, and disappointment that can be involved. The need to control social praise runs the gamut from requiring appreciation at work as well as in the bedroom. Once power is prioritized over the sexual act, it becomes very easy to view sex mainly from the angle of power. In The Sadomasochism Checklist: A Tool for the Assessment of Sadomasochistic Behavior, Weierstall and Giebel created an inventory of S&M behaviors that could help to define Sadomasochism. The problem in modern psychology is to separate perversion from what is consensual, and stigma for those who enjoy S&M. Like with homosexuality, there is a healthy view in seeing how people get on with their regular lives and with S&M most researchers have trouble finding S&M practitioners unable to live regular lives outwardly. Yet I can sense some political correctness in regards to what people actually feel. How they separate out pathology from an orientation is based on personal distress. People can take on pleasure practices that create a certain amount of pain, and their libidos can naturally move orientations to different objects based on boredom or disgust. Ambivalence over pleasure is everywhere, including non-sexual addictions. At a minimum, pleasure can only last so long, and ever growing tolerances can spoil people, which forces the libido to look for new objects.

For the researchers, they describe this ambivalence as an individual who feels “…personal distress about their interest, not merely distress resulting from society’s disapproval.” On the other side of this is imitation based on social suggestions and promises of happiness. Social pressure to like something can interfere with the actual experience so that ambivalence related to the promise of happiness competes with real world experience that may be more or less enjoyable, and sometimes much less. Really analyzing how much lasting pleasure actually exists with an activity allows submissives to escape, and trade-up for better relationships. Crucially, for the person in the Masochistic position, a person who feels they can’t get better pleasures, don’t deserve better, or who vicariously imagine themselves in the dominant role, this study found a more negative balance in the ambivalence compared to a dominant. As you can expect, submissives in the study yielded the least pleasure compared to the dominants, those who switch between dominant and submissive roles, and the control group. Using consent as a marker for the definition also has to be set aside to delineate the difference between people who enjoy coercion and are only pretending vs. actual coercion which would keep that person from the definition, because at that point, how could it be consensual? Authenticity is not easy. The natural desire that everyone has at some level to be part of an in-group can easily muddy results of any studies.

For those who are ego-syntonic with S&M practices, the researchers grouped the following activities as part of the definition of sadomasochistic practices that participants enjoy authentically:

  • Clawing
  • Light beatings
  • Rough intercourse
  • Spanking
  • Waxing
  • Clamping
  • Whipping
  • Genital torture
  • Plugging
  • Commanding
  • Role playing
  • Blindfolding
  • Verbal humiliation
  • Tying up
  • Confinement
  • Force against will
  • Displaying partner
  • Swallowing
  • Urinating
  • Feces
  • Facesitting
  • Strangling
  • Breath control

There are many theories on how people can come to enjoy these practices, and naturally Psychoanalysis and the later iterations have their own theories of sexual development. The typical classical psychoanalytical view is that S&M is a perversion because it’s sexuality devoid of tenderness. No matter how much the masochist likes being in the submissive position, it’s not really believed that they like it that much, especially if participants get more pleasure in the dominant position, and especially if few rewards are given for taking the abuse. There’s only so much vicariousness that a person can stand before they get frustrated and bored. The sadistic impulse is to be able to control and master the environment, and that won’t happen in a submissive position, except in fantasy. Part of the illusion of Masochism is that a person doesn’t really know they are masochistic. They are chasing after an important contribution and they are hoping to receive a reward from.

Franco de Masi did a good review on psychoanalytic perspectives on sadomasochism in, The Sadomasochistic Perversion. To him “…every perversion involves a process of degradation of the love object, whereby the person is transformed into a thing.” The submissive is a victim and also a victim of their own Super-ego that has lost trust in the Ego. “Unlike a bereaved person, the melancholic feels not only that his world has become meaningless but also that his ego has been emptied out. In confirmation of his own unworthiness, he attributes to himself not merely guilt but all the negative qualities of the world, too. Freud points out that, in melancholia, it is not just the relationship with the lost love object that is altered, as in mourning, but in addition the relationship with the subject’s own ego. Whereas in mourning the loss concerns the object, in melancholia it is the ego itself that is affected.” The Ego believes in the warped Super-ego and accepts self-punishment, and even takes pleasure in being told what to do. This matches well with the feeling of impostor syndrome when people try to exert more of their will onto the environment when they are not used to it. They expect punishment based on all the failed attempts at gaining freedom and independence in the past.

As psychoanalysis developed after Freud I could see a pattern that was similar to the prior installments of this perversion series. It’s the need for replacements again. It’s like like a survival instinct where if there’s a lack of self-esteem and pleasure, the Ego needs stimulus to feel alive, and it will look elsewhere for pleasure. “According to Kohut, the child’s primitive voyeuristic and exhibitionistic relationship, combining with an appropriate maternal response, undergoes a gradual transformation: an archaic narcissistic configuration gives way to a sense of self-esteem, cohesion and continuity of the self. Kohut hypothesizes that some adult patients with narcissistic personalities must in infancy, have had to face the isolation and depression caused by an absent or unempathic self-object (the parents) and to sustain themselves with masturbatory activities. The sexualized wishes express a need to incorporate the missing object and to reassure the self that it is alive and whole.”

Part of the reason why Psychoanalysts look at sexuality as so important is it’s reparative function. “Analysts of the Kohut school derive their interpretation of perversion from the fact that erotic experience gives rise to a state of grandiosity of the self that is necessary for the structuring and cohesion of the child’s sense of identity. In their view, sexuality and sexual pleasure do not merely defend against anxiety but also have a restructuring and reparative function.”

A lot of our self-esteem is also shackled by social measurements starting with parents, and if we can attain enough mirroring of appreciation, not to excess of course, we search less for replacements. “Winnicott contends that only an appropriate, sensual way of being held by the mother can give the child the perception of an entity contained within the surface of the body… Child development is no longer determined by drive forces but takes place by a complex process of interaction between subject and environment; the biological substrate is transformed into a relational matrix. The lack of an average expectable environment represents a betrayal by the world, causing the child to regress to a narcissistic state in which sensory and illusionary modalities of support and survival predominate….Kohut associates the intensity of the pleasure with the structural deficiency and lack of integration of the self. The behavioural manifestations of perversion are, in his view, secondary phenomena: After a breakup of the primary psychological unit (assertively demanded empathy-merger with the self-object), the drive appears as a disintegration product; the drive is then enlisted in the attempt to bring about the lost merger (and thus the repair of the self) by pathological means, i.e. as enacted in the fantasies and actions of the pervert…Khan, a member of the British Independent Group owing allegiance to Winnicott’s thought, develops a similar approach to the one just described. He contends that in the perversions there is an area of failure of development and integration of the self due to distortions in the primary mother-dyad relationship; these distortions may be represented either by an excess or by a deficiency of stimulation. Where a depressed mother is unable appropriately to stimulate the child’s libidinal potential, the child is compelled to use the surface of the body or its orifices as a substitute, so that erotization comes to hold sway in the growth process.”

The way it seems is that early parenting involves a certain amount of narcissism to make the child like him or herself based on social cues from the parents, but this can easily be destroyed if the love is not based on how the child really is, but based on them being treated as a trophy. The child abandons his or her true self to chase after an idealized self. For example, if a child shows a proclivity for a certain skill, but is only rewarded for skills that make the mother, or father proud, then the child can be conditioned early on to chase after what is inauthentic. They are also being primed to chase after other idealized people and situations.

“Perversion may be favoured by the attitude of a mother who idolizes a child that is himself incapable of using objects transitionally. The child very soon begins to understand that the mother perceives him as an idealized part-object and not as a whole person; he learns to practise this dissociation in the experience of self by colluding with the mother for the preservation of the idol object, which she feels that she herself has created. When the mother finally attempts to distance herself from this exciting and secret complicity, the child is invaded by catastrophic anxieties and threats of annihilation; having failed to construct any real object, he is compelled to reinforce the idolized self still further…Because the reparative drive is directed towards the self as an idolized internal object, perversion constitutes a relational experience in a class by itself: the person is never really ‘another’, but instead a transitional object that can be manipulated so as to recreate the omnipotent bond with the mother…Perversion is by its nature a profoundly solitary technique. Even if two persons are interacting intensely in a -‘drive-related’ manner, it is essentially the invention of a single person: rather than an object relationship, there is a kind of illusory control over the object with the complicity of the other. Control is indispensable: any resistance by the other will break the spell.”

Even if an authentic object-relation is not developed entirely, the need to control betrays a desire to find a replacement if nothing else is available. “McDougall regards the so-called perverse sexualities (fetishism, sadomasochistic practices, voyeurism and exhibitionism) simply as extreme and complex attempts to maintain some kind of human relationship; in her opinion, perversion exists only when the individual is completely indifferent to the other’s needs and wishes. However, this author rejects the term ‘perversion’ and suggests that it should be replaced by ‘neosexuality’, along the lines of the ‘neorealities’ created by borderline patients in the illusory, if not actually delusional, attempt to find solutions to unresolvable conflicts.”

This inability to really connect with others in a deep way can lead to an insensitivity to the suffering of others. Often associated with Sadism, partially because of the Marquis de Sade’s escapades of sexuality mixed with abuse, especially in his fantasies and novels, is Cruelty. Why does it exist?

Cruelty

Kathleen Taylor made an erudite book, Cruelty, which helps to connect sadism with it. Cruelty is hard to understand because it involves actions that are often unnecessary and involve a playful sadism that is unnerving. Connecting with the above lack of connection with others, Kathleen prefers to use “Otherization” as an amalgamation of demonization, social death, dehumanization, and objectification. That disconnection can lead us to make excuses for ourselves and be merciless with others. Enemies become pests, and something has to be done about them.

What I like about Kathleen’s descriptions are the self-centered qualities of sadists that help us to understand the complex phenomenon of projection. We can find excuses for ourselves, but believe none of the excuses from others. “Instead of viewing human cruelty as a behaviour in which even good souls like us may occasionally indulge, we regard it as a built-in flaw of evil people’s nature, as inescapable as the need to breathe. In doing so we distance it from ourselves, making it something that only other people do…The essence trap is psychologically satisfying. It keeps us out of the dirt and the danger, preserving our pleasant self-image as justified people who act from reasonable motives. The downside, of course, is that the dirt and the danger are conceptualized as a malevolent, unchangeable agent: a devil whose only purpose is to destroy. This shuts down any attempt at understanding, presenting cruelty as something other than human, an essentially evil force on which our explanations can get no purchase.”

As much as I agree with this, there is an element of wishful thinking. There are people who literally have limitations in their brains on control over their impulses. Repeated behaviour shouldn’t be tolerated. It is an advantage to look at behaviour over a fixed identity, because quite a lot of people can change, but there are people with fixed traits supported by repeated behaviours, so an ability to forgive can be rationally implemented so that repeated behaviours are rejected permanently. Unlimited forgiveness will be raped by psychopaths and narcissists.

Otherization can also make us culpable. When we act cruel to people who “deserve it” we have to understand that we are being cruel in these situations. It’s very easy for others to accuse us of dehumanization and find out in the end that they are right. “For those who use hate propaganda for political purposes…otherization actually makes propaganda more effective. Implying that an enemy fully intends to do you wrong places that enemy firmly within the moral universe, allowing you to justify your behaviour as self-defence or righteous punishment (i.e., not cruelty). Meanwhile, implying that an enemy is by nature destructive, like cancer, encourages appropriately extreme responses. Cancerous cells may be part of the human being they afflict, but that affiliation does not deter wholehearted attempts to eradicate them.” Non-human pest-like qualities make it easy to sadistically be cruel. Naturally you can predict that the need for revenge can then escalate the same feelings. People don’t really like competition, and they don’t lose well.

Not losing well leads to a need to find strength in numbers through politics and gangsterism. Again, how sexuality connects with sadism and cruelty is the need to maintain power so as to be attractive for mates. It makes sense that in a planet that actually has scarcity, especially in ancient times, the need to Other-ize and annihilate would be advantageous for evolution, and pleasure could coincide as an inherited reward that signals fitness. That pleasure can be playful and sadistic at the same time and involve a form of savoring, like we see above in gladiatorial games. Even vicarious sadism in movies is very pleasurable. Have you watched a good Quentin Tarantino movie? Vicarious sadism is a staple in entertainment, just like in ancient Rome. It’s a guilt free form of release. All people are in a hierarchy whether they like it or not, and fantasies of revenge fuel those types of entertainment.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 1 (spoilers): https://youtu.be/9gxGFGEiCAs

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 2 (spoilers): https://youtu.be/2f7P7tZXJZI

Ultimately, no matter how many reasons there are for sadism in this review, there are a lot of contributing factors we have to be open to so we can learn more. “Single-motive actions are easier to interpret, but many actions have multiple contributing motives, just as one motive can influence more than one action.” This is true for all studies of psychology, and our attempts to control violence, prevent future holocausts, concentration camps, and other modes of cruelty, it means we have to pay attention to changes, especially in technology, since technology can be involved in more advanced forms of cruelty.

What makes people react with revulsion to cruelty is its intentionality. It seems inhuman to do what people can do. “Cruelty is unjustified voluntary behaviour which causes foreseeable suffering to an undeserving victim or victims.” For sensitive types, this is not justified sadism when you are caught in wrongdoing, but when it’s blameless. It has that Wrong Man Hitchcock feel where you are innocently accused, scapegoated, and singled out unfairly. It’s like a lazy label put on you. When people have put that target on you, it can be very surreal. Cruelty can know no bounds.

North by Northwest – Alfred Hitchcock: https://youtu.be/K0c2HJ4AO6o

“…There are extreme cases, like the man reported to have buried a cat to neck level and then used a lawnmower to decapitate it.” It’s hard to understand what people do, but the hurry to judgment is what Kathleen aims at. “This is ‘hot’ thought: moral evaluations are swift, automatic and highly resistant to argument. Once given the tag ‘abomination’, even the most inoffensive targets can find it impossible to gain their judges’ favour. Moral stains linger, even when their justifications are explicitly dismissed, and morality involves emotions which can be extremely strong. Tabloid newspapers rely on this emotionality, using language and images which stimulate strong feelings in their readers. Negative emotions are particularly effective. Outrage, fear, disgust, and shock, hook buyers.” There is also “compassion fatigue” where we realize that we need energy to be compassionate and helpful. If you are burnt out, it’s easier to be cruel. A lot of studies on courts reference that example of how judges tend to be more lenient in the morning when they have more energy, and by the end of the day the judge goes for harsh sadistic judgments out of exhaustion. “Moral judgments, paradoxically, have been used to justify extraordinary cruelty.” This kind of exhaustion can happen when there are too many images in the media of destruction and failure. People get tired of being outraged. It’s exhausting. “Confronted with an atrocity, we may well react with horror – although the intensity of our feelings will depend on whether we are stressed, distracted, on guard against ‘weakness’, or atrocity-saturated.”

Hotel Rwanda – How can people not intervene?: https://youtu.be/psW7sLoNutA

Depending on how atrocities affect us, we worry more or less based on our energy level. Compassionate people get shocked at how they can be cruel when they are hungry or tired. “What to us is defence against a deadly threat to our identity – defined symbolically, not physically – to a distanced observer, or victim, is cruelty.” In less threatening situations, like in a workplace, there’s a lot of sadism in hurrying and rushing to meet deadlines. Deadlines are necessary as a marker, but as employees often experience, some obstacles require more time no matter how sadistic you are to force a solution. “Unfortunately for victims, all sorts of motives, from fear to greed to the simple compulsion of having begun to act, can temporarily conquer a person’s inhibitions.”

The biggest sadistic support is the attitude of science. If something is thought of as being scientific, even if it’s actually just a theory, it can decouple empathy and reason from any cruel actions. “Disease metaphors are powerful drivers of otherization. They offer clear, simple and highly emotive explanations of a person’s, group’s, or nation’s maladies, co-opting evolved threat responses to increase the motivation to act. They fit smoothly among accepted beliefs about disease, including the ancient fear of strangers as disease-carriers…Greed, fear, revenge and its cousin resentment, competition over resources: these and other motives can both fuel belief-driven cruelty and be fueled by its ideological justifications.” The feeling of “act now or else” pushes people out of desperation, or paranoia, to stamp out the threat.

All these pointers aim at cruelty as a form of deterrent. Being playful, artistic, and sadistic with punishment towards enemies sends the message that death is not swift, and if it’s not death, ostracism will be ruinous to one’s wealth, energy, and comfort. Cabals, gangs, political parties, always require some cruelty to provide enough time for power grabs, and it’s a great way to control the population through fear and to maintain power. Scapegoating and symbolic crucifixion are waiting for those who want to fight corruption. Whether it’s communism on the left or corporate monopolies on the right, a world without checks and balances leads to cruelty when people have no representation.

The Christian, and even Girardian response to sadism, is to understand that the brain is very short-term and looks for temporary stimulation that leads to emptiness and boredom. People have to visualize the boredom of success and realize before they act that nothing will give them complete permanent happiness. One has to ask oneself as a practice, “is this what I actually want long-term? Are there details that I’m not considering because I don’t have enough experience to inform my goal?” One has to look at social goals as a goal to attain appreciation at differing levels. Individual goals can be self-chosen setups and payoffs, but when we create collective goals, there’s a yearning for appreciation. A lack of it can lead to resentment. One of the most edifying things is to see how people tear up when they finally get long waited appreciation. This isn’t fake appreciation, it’s the genuine kind that pulls the trigger.

Violence and the Sacred – René Girard: https://psychreviews.org/violence-and-the-sacred-rene-girard/

Part of why people feel stressed about keeping up with the Joneses is the fear of being rejected for being too poor and contemptible to be allowed to be “polite company.” Pariahs have to look at where their needs are met through other people. The lack of independence leaves them in the situation that Freud calls Prestige. Those who you need something from instill fear in you, and there is a desire to treat them with prestige precisely because of this need. If in reality you don’t need them, then of course the spell is broken, but until then, you’re on the hook.

Group Psychology – Freud and Beyond: https://youtu.be/Glw3sOeQEng

As the majority of the public feel there is some progress, they can feel good for the time being. The trifecta of economic collapse, disenfranchisement, and contempt, as if you are a disease or a pestilence, leads eventually to resentment, a need for revenge, and a need to satisfy sadism. The sadism is crying out for control and mastery, and when those opportunities aren’t there, replacements become the new goal, and in some cases, those goals are one form of perversion or another.

Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Paperback: https://amzn.to/3qlXZPJ Kindle: https://amzn.to/3jNdVYV

Letters from a Stoic – Seneca: Paperback: https://amzn.to/3pmwrbI Kindle: https://amzn.to/3jM8U2I

Weierstall, Roland & Giebel, Gilda. (2017). The Sadomasochism Checklist: A Tool for the Assessment of Sadomasochistic Behavior. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 46. 10.1007/s10508-016-0789-0.

The Life and Ideas of The Marquis de Sade: Kindle: https://amzn.to/3tZTeh6

The Sadomasochistic Perversion – Franco De Masi: Kindle: https://amzn.to/3al8nll

Cruelty – Kathleen Taylor: Hardcover: https://amzn.to/3puoj9f

Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/