I went to a posh white supremacist public school. Its main lesson was in power and how to abuse it. This began with your own abuse and debasement, ‘in order to build you up and create character’.
The new boys had the great honor of being ‘fags’, tending the eighteen year old prefects, warming toilet seats on a winter’s morning, sucking dick as needed, hanging off the hook at the back of his door for an hour..
Of course, you could rat. But then your life would go from being a living hell to something far worse. There was a suspicious death, a few slit wrists, several disappearances….
and so we swore on our mother’s graves that we would never be like that when we were seniors. We would be different. And yet, and yet, the overwhelming feeling upon passing between the great school gates on the first day of my senior year, raising my straw boater as required, was a rush of power and pleasure… Now it was my turn.
I had become one of them.
People tend to think of corruption in material terms. It is the financial shenanigans or the sexual scandal which catch our attention. But there are some very specific ways in which excessive amounts of executive power do a great deal more than make you drunk. Drunkenness passes. More dangerous is the clinical condition bound to overtake even the most rounded personality when it begins to feel appointed by God…
along with the urgent need to project vulnerability and torment on some third party.
To that end both History and Tabloid are littered with mad kings, and not a few mad queens. The salutary tale of Empress Messalina, auntie of Roman emperor Nero, will tell what curious shapes such inflation can take.
Messalina was true to the homicidal traditions of the Julian family, bumping off several nieces and a good few senators along the way, with failed attempts against her sister-in-law Agrippina who eventually did her in before being taken out by Nero. So, nothing too out of the ordinary.
But Messalina had a double life. She might have been Empress by day but she spent her nights in the whore house. According to the Roman scribe Suetonius, she had a sex competition with the top prostitute of the city, which she apparently won with twenty five men in a day. The detail which concerns us is Suetonius’ throw away line that she then went home unsatisfied….
Messalina’s story is not simply one of privileged immorality, though it’s the salacious details which are bound to grab attention. Here is someone who must have been experiencing profound emptiness to go to such extraordinary lengths .. and still fail in her endeavors.
Meantime her husband Claudius is trying to fill his emptiness by gorging on stuffed hummingbirds. Nephew Nero is gorging on young boys he likes to have fucked to death which I suppose he thought was a shade more wicked than great-grandfather Tiberius who only threw the children he’d raped over a cliff.
What’s the point of that? How can you have fun without blood?
Rubbing shoulders with the Gods leads to all kinds of trouble. Not least of these is Paranoid Anxiety. You’d think that the inflation and omnipotence of being a Majesty would be an ample shield against anything as petty as unnamed fears or delusions of persecution and yet Messalina’s privileged life was seeped in subterfuge and plot.
Freud associates paranoia with suppressed aggression, Klein with unconscious envy; but you have to wonder, in addition to the torturous childhoods many a tyrant endures, just what the fallout of being divinely appointed might be…
For Narcissistic Entitlement to work you have to be at odds with those who are not. More to the point, you have to sell out your own common clay in the process, the ordinary self which identifies with others and with the land while still having its own point of view, which is able to keep company and share togetherness whilst still forging a unique path through the jungle.
When you are Divinely Appointed you have to trade in Belonging for the privilege. The problem with this is that you can own the castle and even the ground its built on but if you don’t belong, none of it can be enjoyed.
which is going to feel like someone is out to get you… or that some hidden hand has taken what is rightfully yours….enough to induce homicidal fury..
Meantime the organic unfolding of the Self must be derailed for the feeling of entitlement to be maintained. So, not only your redeeming ordinariness but also your unique potential has to be projected out into the world where it comes at you, if not as destiny, then as fate.
For Messalina and her exalted family, the paranoia inducing projection is eventually so great that a shooting star is taken as an oracle to mean that an assassination of some mighty person is about to take place. Of course, all the mighty persons want to make damn sure the prophecy is not about them so they become agents of prophecy instead, the right hand of the Gods. Everyone winds up dead except Nero, who will soon turn his blade on himself…
having run out of family.
”People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’ C G Jung
Facing your own soul has a prerequisite, ordinariness. For want of this workaday humility, being one amongst many, what Klein calls ‘the depressed position’ there is no sense of a vessel to contain the Self, now compelled into the role of a vengeful fiend visiting humiliation on you instead.
Both Nero and Messalina are compelled to act out their common clay in lieu of its integration. Nero tops his auntie’s whore house sexploits by publicly getting some strapping lads to have their way with him as if he were a common slave. He would give performances dressed as a lowly bard… make sure you applaud just right if you feel brave enough to go and watch… you might wind up becoming the entertainment.
Be careful what you ask for. To ‘have everything’ can constitute a loss of soul, the becoming of a hungry ghost, paranoid and insatiable, poor in apparent wealth, a victim behind the safety of castle walls.
