sadism – Andy White Blog

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.

Because I’m Not.

A mother is walking down the street with her child. She’s in high gear and the child of three-ish is having to run to keep up. She looks at him with annoyance and says, ‘why are you running?”

The boy, out of breath, replies, ”because I’m not.”

The poor lad cannot face the denial of his reality in her question, the dismissal of his inner world to which the only honest answer is a forbidden truth-telling version of, ‘because you’re in a big bad mood and stomping off…

without looking to see if I’m left behind….

And so the only thing he can do is to deny his own reality. At least there will be common ground if only on the basis of shared contempt for the child’s point of view. This will cost the child his footing. On the pavement and in life.

This boy is not, ‘failing to internalize values’ (Kernberg)

He’s internalizing them only too well.

I … am not quite real, but I can run and walk at the same time. Look out everyone it’s the fantastic running/walking boy!

Where adequate treatment fails, double think and grandiose Self structures ensue. We can’t be whole for as long as we identify with an expectation to run and walk at the same time.

Otto Kernberg coined the phrase, ‘Grandiose Self Structure’, to describe Narcissism. But his insistence on it having a ‘pathological formation’, tends to strip it of meaning before we’ve even had a look around.

The problem with calling anything abnormal is that we tend to lose respect for it and forget to ask helpful questions.

and so he has to account for sadism by saying that,

”the infliction of suffering is the child’s attempt to defend against his own helplessness, through the exercise of omnipotent control over another.” O. Kernberg

No, that’s what kings do.

Not children. Y’all confuse’.

Important names for things can get in the way of experiencing them. Its like mastering the Kama Sutra without ever looking your partner in the eye,

The thing about early deprivation is that it urgently needs to split off and project desperation. The child concludes that it is un-held because it is lacking or deficient. Moreover, the baseline of how people treat each other, reality itself, is violated. The intrusive dark splinter of not quite being real has to be visited on another.

and even more pointily when collectively encoded in religious lore…

DO AS I SAY ON PAIN OF DEATH..

in one moment and…

DO AS YOU PLEASE SO LONG AS YOU PRAISE ME.

on the other.

His poor flock are suddenly awash in persecutory anxiety and paranoia. Their double/bind is unbearable and can only regain their composure by joining Yahweh in his unreality …

”I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” St Paul.

and so it begins.

Kohut is unequivocal, Narcissism,

”results from massive shortcomings in mothering.” Kohut.

and even Kernberg will give a bit and refers to incipient..

”intolerable reality in the interpersonal realm.” Kernberg

which I suppose is a sanitized way of talking about the unbearable misery of being a child who is related to in an ideal way or not at all, which is what you get when Mother has had her spiritual essence sucked out of her by animus-ity which refuses to sacralize her mothering .

And so the crucial detail is that the Grandiose Self Structure is largely uninhabited by any one permanent resident, though there are tenants who might be acquainted

but not necessarily

in the way you might like.

or that might like you

and so we pollute because we don’t, and lie and cheat because we never and start wars because we’re not.

People don’t dumb themselves down with the nonsense of being accepted on the basis of rejection unless they have been systematically devalued already, and not in adversity, but by a child’s soul not being sufficiently welcome…

”until he too, loses all sight of it.” Alice Miller.

So paranoid anxiety might well be an appropriate response to having insufficient toe holds in the world. But what do you do with a kid who’s too smart to read the instructions at the front of his exam paper? The spouse who turns the Aga oven off in Winter and back on in May? The dismissive colleague…who isn’t.

If you are just benign he’ll take advantage and if you are too confrontative there will be no safety. So, you do as you would with any kid whose acting out because they’re not getting enough of the good stuff, you pick your battles..

and try to love them at least as much as you hate them in the meantime.