Tag: Masochism

The Secret Masochist.


An arrogant young man gets on a train and sits opposite a little old lady. He begins to regal the carriage with his opinions, takes up everyone’s personal space, endless showing off. He gets off at the next stop but as the doors close the old lady opens a window and shouts out, ‘you left something behind!”. By now he’s running next to the carriage with his arms out, perplexity written across his face. ‘what is it, what did I leave?”

” A very poor impression…” she retorts, just as he runs out of platform.

There is really no such thing as a sadist or a masochist. Search and you can’t find one. Sado-masochism is a polarized continuum, like manic-depression, a kind of sliding between extreme states in order to know who you are, necessitated by narcissistic fragility and emptiness.

Narcissists tend to hide their unconscious masochism behind a front of cruel superiority. Sometimes this masochism has covert expression. Like toadying to Russians, or the ‘look what they done to us’ behind MAGA. Sometimes its done inadvertently by creating the conditions for perpetual investigation; and sometimes it just pops right out like the compulsive laying claim to government shut down. ‘I will take the blame, give me the mantle.”

The Sado-masochistic enactment unfolding on Pennsylvania avenue seems to be getting to the short strokes. Aided by the prophylactic restraint of seventeen strapping investigations…

Donald is finally going to cum.

Former US federal prosecutor Paul Butler recently described Trump as being ‘double teamed’ by the Mueller probe and the SDNY investigations. This image, now indelibly lodged in imagination, brought not a single blush to the cheeks of assembled MSNBC pundits whose blithe acceptance of such a metaphor suggests something a lot stranger than Russian collusion or Fraud is going on in the White House…

the unfolding sado-masochistic component of Narcissism.

Trump has the trade mark ‘big ego’ of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The irony is it’s lack of a healthy ego that’s the problem. The ego is full of gaps. There are sections of it you can drive sheep through. Its like having a claim that’s only marked off by corner posts, one of which has been eaten by a bear.

One solution is to identify with the bear. Your personal space is immediately cubed. Nothing can take you down. Bear is untroubled by life’s contradictions. Berries and Elk are all the same. You can just shamble on regardless.

Unfortunately, you might then need the world’s greatest ever shafting to be restored to more appropriately human proportions, a process that initially unfolds as the sado-masochistic tryst of Me and Not-me, the hell of Other People, the horror of realizing you are not the only one in the room.

You’d hope such developmental needs get resolved with incremental frustration of the toddler concerned. If not, the need for containment will find a more problematic expression. Whilst it may be colorful there is a small problem with this arrangement. Someone always has to get shamed.

Even when you are being praised.

Trump couldn’t help himself on his recent visit to troops in Iraq. The only way he could find to honor their service was, ‘you are no longer the suckers of the world.’ You try to be happy about that but somehow can’t quite summon the strength.

Words matter because they create consciousness. Abracadabra. That which I speak, becomes. If you ask an eight year old on Christmas Eve if they still believe in Santa you are sadistically calling her world into doubt.

If you lack the basic internal cohesion required not to blow a Christmas media event for kids by casting aspersions on the existence of the main event, then the sadism is not just gratuitous, it states your values. Its like wearing a ‘blame it on the badger’ t-shirt to an animal rights meet.

Such behavior would not be tolerated round the household dinner table let alone by the leader of the free world and the reason is that kids and impressionable folk take their example from you, Donny.

In fact the bench mark of Democracy is not just that your job is the highest in the land but that every kid that ever there was secretly aspires to be you, to have power and authority..

and to use it for good..

but how the fuck can they when every example they are given entails someone being screwed over? I pummel the Other into the ground therefor I am. WTF?

What on earth must you be compensating for to want to put kids in cages? What ghosts must haunt you to justify it with the paranoid delusion that they ‘harbor’ disease? Not that some are sick and need your help but that they sneak in armed with it, all sheltered and weaponized.

When an innocent child, fleeing for his life from situations others cannot even acknowledge, let alone survive, is then so failed by the hero he hoped would save him that he dies from sadistic neglect, you send a message. It is not a message of deterrence. Numbers are up. But it is a message of How-to-Be, delivered into the living rooms of every family in the Nation and around the world.

And finally, mounted on top of the heinous betrayal of that poor boy’s faith, a faith he held for hundreds of miles of weary trudging towards the fabled arms of safety, is the cowardly insinuation from Nielsen’s report making this not only his own fault but on account of his malign ‘harbouring’, as though he was some kind of gook whose evil plan backfired.

as though their not giving a shit constituted counterintelligence.

When a person in high office stoops to such gaslighting the moral being created is way beyond giving permission to hold office without embodying it in any way shape or form. It’s not simply the absence of something, a lack of care, or the failure of empathy.

Nor should we limit ourselves to Adam Serwer’s excellent u-tube blog that cruelty is something Trump has elevated to political virtue.

This boy’s death sets the bar of what it means to be human at a new low. Suddenly, all our lives are cheaper; contaminated, not by diseased migrants but by the malignant use of an Office to which the Nation looks for guidance, finding at bottom only the secret puerile need to be sent to the naughty corner so that he can get through another day without medication.


The Emperor’s New Clothes.

What if the Emperor had been cunning enough to perceive some advantage to himself in the wiley tailors’ ruse to gain a whole bunch of gold and silk thread for nothing? What if, for his own purposes, he went along with the idea that failing to see the garments supposedly woven by them meant incompetence of office? And if so, what could that possibly be?

Rachel Maddow’s perceptive response to the Singapore summit was the question, ‘What was it for?’. The agreement between Trump and Kim contained no tangible gains for the US, not even a working definition of the term, ‘denuclearization’, much needed given that vocal promises from the North Koreans since the early 90’s have been somewhat compromised by dropping out of the non-proliferation treaty and making lots of bombs.

It looks as though Kim had it all his way. He gets to be a legitimate businessman and gets the Americans off his back for the forseeable future. Trump critics are keen to point out what an insubstantial deal this has turned out to be and are additionally shocked at the un-negotiated and impromptu gesture of cancelling planned war games for August, announced without consultation with either the South Koreans or even his own military commanders.

Can you imagine being the ranking officer concerned and receiving news about the cancellation of your entire operation from the TV? Delivered as a freebie after the agreement has already been signed.. Why would he do that? Because he liked Kim so much he wanted to give him a party favour bag after the show was over?

Having demanded complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization before any concessions are given to North Korea so loudly it even has its own acronym, CVID, Trump cancels annual wargames that have been  sacrosanct in the American military heart for three generations. For nothing.

What gives?

Rachel goes on to surmise perhaps Donald is giving a gift, not to Kim but to the Chinese and Russians who have long wanted an end to the presence of American military hard ware on their front doorstep and would prefer it if they went home.

The treachery of collusion aside, commentators are quick to attack Trump’s delusional deal making, citing his bankruptcies and failed business ventures as corroboration,

‘Trump is too stupid to know that he has been played. ‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btAgFtaW4Wc

But they forget that the goal of Narcissism is not wealth or success or toadying, but the treading of a thin line between abandonment and engulfment. Early scarcity of resources in a maternal environment that alternately smothers and rejects means that way before money or public approbation, Narcissism wants to shore up vulnerability and create the groundwork for future bouts of bad behaviour by making sure there are patsies onto which his secretly precarious world can be foisted..

Trump’s freebie would seem to chime perfectly with the equally unscripted insistence that Russia be admitted into the G7 and it looks like it’s for the same reason, that he is doing Putin’s bidding. But this is predicated on the assumption that Trump is just a bumbling fool doing his best to prevent incriminating material from sousing the public domain, pee tapes being the least of his worries.

What if there was some method to his madness? Are there more common denominators to these recent events than sucking Vladimir’s dick? The fabled book of warfare, The Book of Five Rings, warns that when you are under attack the most fatal flaw is to underestimate the enemy.

What if our desire to mock and vilify in defense of instinctive fears momentarily masked over some crucial clue, some vital piece of understanding that ties up Trump’s behaviour in a way other than that of simply heeding his masters voice?

Pundits wax lyrical about how Trump has given Kim this international platform to rub shoulders with the leader of the free world with nothing substantial to show for it beyond the promise of thinking about being good. But maybe he has some private agenda, something that may be good for him even if its not good for the country. What could it be?

My father always insisted that children’s pudding bowls remain firmly on the table. You weren’t even allowed to steady the rim while you spooned what you could in silence, made all the easier for being refused the right to speak at table. Meantime the bloated sack of shit would lean back in his chair, also forbidden to children and eat his pudding with bowl balanced on his vast gut, strawberry jelly liberally sprinkled with sugar, another privilege of parenthood.

At the time it was enough to hate him. Later, in the spirit of needing to know the enemy, I had to ask what made him tick without too much frothing at the mouth so that I could become coherent in my own purpose. There is no strategy without knowing what truly motivates the psychopath who is trying to pluck you one feather at a time.

The first mistake is to assume he is stupid even though the evidence seems to be to the contrary. He seemed to delight in playing the fool, almost as if it were camouflage for some more sinister intent. The old man bought a patch of land, drew up plans for a factory with his own tiny hands on proper blueprint paper, built it himself with homemade bricks, installed plumbing, lights and workbenches but it never made anything and sat empty till bank threats forced a sale. He didn’t care. The whole town mocked his business failings but he remained implacable because his true purpose was not wealth or power or even the small joy of successfully marketing a good idea.

Who builds a factory without first deciding what it is for? Somebody with an ulterior purpose greater than money laundering or tax evasion, somebody for whom financial loss is actually capital invested in the meta project of ‘Fuck you’, one that says, ‘I want nothing more than to show you my brilliance, brilliance which defines you as shit and makes it my duty to demean.’

Tyrants have one weakness. They also, secretly, want to be vassals. Sadism and masochism go together. They come on the same plate. After all what is the bragaddocious for if not to mask over feelings of inferiority? In order to keep this from consciousness big compensatory gestures are not enough. An underclass has to be created to carry the projections adequately.

‘If there were no Jews we would have to invent them.’ Goebbles.

When Trump gives a massive un-negotiated concession to Kim in the form of USFK troop withdrawl from the world’s hottest border, he’s as happy for it to look like the impulsive antics of a buffoon to his detractors as he is for it to seem like a peace deal to his supporters. Either way, he gets to make a gesture of ‘noblesse oblige’, a unilateral utterance of sovereignty, the preserve and stamp of kings and emperor’s.

When he announces that Russia should be admitted back into the G7, this is not just an offensive diplomatic gaff, it too is the language of kingship, a sweeping decree whose content is actually secondary to the statement of divine right implicit to it.

This is about more than arrogance, greed or toadying to the Russians. He’s saying, ‘the arbitrary annexation of anyone is okay depending on who you are’, and in the process creates entire swathes of the planet that are now home to second class citizens without rights or recourse to justice.

The idea of pardoning himself does more than confess criminality by implication, which is where most criticism seems to stop. It does more than horrify sensibilities that no-one is above the law. It sets the precedent that, by the same token, no one else has recourse to the law. It does not just give him super powers, it takes away the protection from tyranny enjoyed by everyone else.

For what is a king without a dungeon?

So Kim looks like a winner and Trump is happy for you to think that. But he wins too, though not in a way you might think or want to consider. Rubbing shoulders with a man who executes his people for the high crimes of watching movies and listening to the radio does a great deal more than legitimize the human rights abuses of a vicious regime half a world away. It creates a new low for his own potentiality. It normalizes the violent repression of a new underclass within his own borders, crucial to the maintenance of that thin line between abandonment and engulfment so crucial to the narcissistic personality disorder.

Hanging out with Kim and praising him beyond the requirements of international diplomacy makes public execution by anti aircraft guns a new bench mark of normal, something that is now this side of the horizon. Citizens can be loved and crushed without contradiction.

When the Emperor swans out into the street without a stitch he does so in remembrance of the fact that his is the one office in the land that does not include competence in its job description, so it doesn’t matter whether he sees the clothes made for him by the corrupt tailors or not. Kings and emperors are not ensconced by fitness to rule, but by underlings – one group of which are prepared to deny reality in the process of subjugating another on the basis that they are ‘enemies’.

‘The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” A. Huxley.

So parading naked is worth a bit of a breeze about your privates if it serves to reveal the devotions of your subjects, establish new norms of conduct by a whole class of people who can deny reality, for what better way to crush people than to turn them into slaves without them even realizing it, who condemn the evidence of their own eyes as personal failing and unworthiness?

“They want to believe, and would only hate the argumentative expert who tried to injure the object of their faith.” Grete De Francesco “The Power of the Charlatan.”

.. all of which means that the child who shouts out, ‘the Emperor is naked!’ does not need to be dealt with…. The crowd, already given over to baser instincts and the opportunity to be one with the glorious leader’s command, will take care of him all by themselves.

 

The Politics of Masochism.

Masochism is not a trait of Western Culture that is immediately obvious. Yet if you try to tease it out, like the rag end of plastic I recently found in my veg patch, you might find yourself there all afternoon, digging, sweating, tugging. Mounds of earth everywhere.

Out of all the election fever, the rhetoric of politicians and the hype of the media, one anecdote in particular grabs my attention. Its the moment when Mr Trump asks an audience of Iowans, ‘How stupid are the people of Iowa?’

That in itself was remarkable. Its a novel strategy. Normally politicians try to woo their voter, make them feel good about themselves. Mr Trump does the opposite. He actively humiliates them. But the truly amazing thing was what happened next. His ratings improved in Iowa.

How is it possible?

What’s going on?

”Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were for their salvation?” Gilles Deleuze.

The answer is that there is a strong Masochistic trend in our collective consciousness, which, contrary to popular belief, has little to do with sex.

”Masochism is not a mere perversion, but a reflection of the soul in its tortured, most inarticulate moments.” L Cowan.

Mr Trump has unwittingly hit upon a Big Secret. His slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, hinges upon the same principle as telling the Iowans how dumb they are. It mobilises the passion of having been done to, the lynch pin of Masochism. It says, ”you have been denied, robbed, bought low, subjected to the will of powerful others”. His message hooks in to how the West unconsciously feels about itself, that life has short-changed us somehow, a collective ‘truth’ which we are sorely tempted to reinforce by voting into power those who can then be guarenteed to abuse us.

We do the same in the dysfunctional relationships of our more private lives, staying on for years, putting up with the other’s behaviour, feeling hard done by, never stopping to ask, ‘what am I doing?’

The extent of Sado-Masochistic relating in the West as a dominant form of interaction was largely suppressed by the early schools of psychology who preferred to represent it as a flamboyant perversion so that it need not be recognised as something endemic or, for that matter, rife amongst those respectable gentlemen themselves.

Kraft-Ebing, big boss of the Neuro-Sciences in Vienna who first relegated Masochism to the ‘Perversions’ was the same chap who stonewalled Freud’s original and beautifully expressed, ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’, which clearly stated that neuroses were the result of childhood abuse.

Kraft-Ebing was horrified at the suggestion that children are harmed by their parents. He ostracised Freud until he changed his mind and substituted the drive-conflict theory which made the patient responsible for their own difficulties. He did the same with Sado-Masochism. Its the patient’s fault and its all about sex.

Curiously and for the record, the feted and popular Kraft-Ebing also thought of recreational sex as a perversion that required ‘treatment’, not to mention masturbation for which he had some cures  of Inquisitional proportions, including the application of white hot irons to children’s privates, metal mittens, bed restraints and spiked cages to safely house your unmentionables.

Western Powers-that-Be, dissatisfied with projecting  inferiority onto other nations and subsequently enslaving then to make the point, have also visited denied shadow onto the very young who are powerless to then resist what are in fact the unconsciously enacted fantasies of the Establishment.

And yet this still doesn’t explain the prevalence of Masochism in our society or why its so prolific in our cultural mind set as to swing voters in middle America, nor does it account for the emerging split between Empaths and Narcissists or the prervalence of addictions, alcohol consumption, gorging of all kinds, the endgame of which is invariably humiliation.

”I drink to drown the shame of being a drunk”. anon

Culturally endemic, ‘low self-esteem’ is the energy daily drained from us by the critisisms and judgements that we masochistically level at ourselves. Its the feeling of being a slave to the dollar, the sense that your esteem is measured by the affirmation of people you don’t actually respect, the wish as well as the fear that you’ll be ‘discovered’, found out, shamed.

A story that might help put all this in context comes from the Plains Indians, the story of the Jumping Mouse.

The Jumping Mouse was an adventurous sort. Alone amongst his brothers and sisters, he was determined to explore beyond the shade of the tree where they lived. The others begged him not to go, fearful of the black spots in the sky that wheeled above them.

But Jumping Mouse was brave and one day he set off. He scampered all day until he reached a pond occupied by a large wise looking frog.

‘Have I reached the edge of the world?’ he asked, panting.

The frog laughed kindly, ‘if you jump high enough, you will see a far off mountain. The top of the mountain is as close as you can get to the edge of the world.

Jumping Mouse jumped for all his worth and glimpsed the top of the mountain. He was determined to reach it. At the edge of the plain he asked Buffalo to carry him across.  Buffalo agrees but for the price of one of his eyes. The Jumping Mouse plucks it out and climbs up. At the foot of the mountain he asks Fox to help him get to the summit. Fox agrees but at the price of his other eye.  Jumping Mouse plucks it out and climbs up.

Delirious with excitement and pain, Jumping Mouse makes it to the top. He stands there for a moment, then hears the awful whirring of great wings above him. Mighty talons crush his body as he is whisked away. He prepares himself for a last final scream of agony when his blindness gives way to rushing sight and from his throat comes the call of Great Eagle.

Following your own star is not only full of suffering but demands sacrifices that will seriously impact you. The Gods invariably want something.

”The hallmark of the transpersonal is that it acts upon us.” S.B. Perrera.

The feeling of being subjected to the will of the Self is often an intrinsic part of spiritual awakening, being presented with a path that wasn’t part of your plan.

Contemporary Jungian analyst Lyn Cowan points to this commonality between Inner Revelation and Masochism, they share the experience of being subject to the will of the Other. She asks whether its not likely that if this aspect of our spiritual life is denied by Structures not too keen on folk having their own experience, then its bound to come out somewhere else in your life.

”It is not a matter of indifference if you serve a mania or a God. To serve a mania is detestable but to serve a God is meaningful (because) it is an act of submission to a higher spiritual being. When the god is not acknowledged, mania develops and out of this mania comes sickness.” C. G. Jung

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was of the opinion that the Soviet people needed to have Stalin as their leader because they had not suffered enough. The senseless anguished purging of the people enabling them better to see themselves in one another’s eyes, to realise their common humanity and hold it sacred.

The Oligarchs oblige us. Everyone knows perfectly well that Oligarchs prefer to stay that way and can only do so at your expense. In Orwellian fashion Free Trade Economy becomes the means to make the rich richer, the poor both poorer and less free until some mega-plague comes along and concentrates lines of inheritance for a while.

So while everyone argues for one candidate or another I  would like to step back and ask, ‘what is it in us that gives such tacit approval to a two horse race between the uber-rich whose primary purpose is to shore up their interests whilst we’re so busy being done to as a trade off for staying at home under the tree where the black spots wont get us?