Insights into Sadism as Social Disease and Psychopathological Disorder

[Milos Uzelac]

From the talk American Sadsim by Chris Hedges:

''The historian Johann Huizinga writing about the twilight of the Middle Ages argued: that as things fall apart sadism is embraced to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe”. No longer bound by a common purpose a ruptured society retreats into hedonism and the cult of the self, it celebrates as corporations on Wall Street and popular reality television shows celebrate the classic traits of psychopaths – superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying and deception and an inability to feel remorse or guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can, before someone else gets it. This is a state of nature, a war of all against all, as Thomas Hobbes saw as a consequence of social disintegration, a world in which life becomes solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.''

Why is a malaise of a dying civilization expressed through sadism rather than a kind of righteous anger? And here we must turn to Fredrick Nietzsche. Nietzsche warned that those who are humiliated and disempowered are poisoned by resentment because they have been stripped of agency, they lack the power to harm those who they believe harm them. In short, there is no cathartic release. Resentment is bred from damaged self-esteem, it festers and corrodes the soul, and here Nietzsche writes about Christianity as a slave religion, must express their resentment obliquely and surreptitiously hence the coded racism, Islamophobia, and the supposed yearning for a return to the traditional family and ‘’Christian values’’. Resentment is produced by feelings of inferiority, failure, and worthlessness and this resentment fuelled by self-loathing expresses itself through sadism. What Nietzsche calls ‘’wrecking the will’’ of those who are weaker or more vulnerable. Nietzsche understood that this ‘’wrecking the will’’ of others imparts a perverted, sadistic pleasure. He writes in the ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ that: ‘to see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more. Without cruelty, there is no festival and in punishment, there is so much that is festive”.

''There is short of nothing mitigating or redirect this resentment. Its pure expression is nihilism and sadism. Trump embodied this dark ethic, revenge is his sole philosophy of life, those gripped by resentment are no longer able to create, they can only destroy, they gleefully ignite their own funeral pyre.''

''The sadism eradicates at least momentarily the sadist feelings of worthlessness, vulnerability, and susceptibility to pain and death, it imparts feelings of omnipotence, it is pleasurable is part of the scourge of sadism in service to the inanimate machine that has become global.

''Sadism runs like an electric current through male sexual desire, pornography is about the fantasy of men who are omnipotent, who have the power to torture and physically abuse girls and women, who in porn beg to be degraded. Sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history, Andrea Dworkin writes, the private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history. Women of course are not immune from acts of sadism. But Dworkin is right to highlight sadism as inherent in male expression of total and unaccountable power and this is why sadism is the chief characteristic of imperialism.''

''Jean Amari defines sadism as a radical negation of the other, the simultaneous denial of both the social principle and the reality principle. In the sadist world torture, destruction and death are triumphant and such a world clearly has no hope of survival, on the contrary, he desires to transcend the world by achieving total sovereignty by negating fellow human beings which he sees as representing a peculiar kind of hell. Amaris’s point is important a sadistic society is about collective self-destruction, it is an apotheosis of a society deformed by overwhelming feelings of loss, alienation, and stasis. The only way left to affirm yourself in a failed society is to destroy.''

''Johann Huizinga in his book Waning of the Middle Ages noted that the dissolution of medieval society provoked what he called the violent tenor of life. Today this violent tenor of life drives people to commit, sadism imparts rush and pleasure often with heavy sexual overtones which lures us to what Sigmund Freud called the death instinct – the instinct to destroy all forms of life, including our own. When enveloped by a death-saturated world, death ironically is embraced as the cure.''

Joseph Conrad in his short story The Outpost of Progress:

''Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities, and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief of the safety of their surroundings, the courage, the composure, the confidence, the emotions and principles, every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd, to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals and of the power of its police and its opinion. ''

''Sadism is carried out in the name of moral good, to protect western civilization ‘’Christian values’’, ‘’democracy’’, ‘’the master race’’, ‘’Liberte, egalite, fraternity’’, ‘’the worker's paradise’’, ‘’the new man’’ or ‘’scientific rationalism’’. Sadism will mend the flaws in the human species, the jargon varies, but the dark sentiment is the same.  Honour, justice, compassion, freedom are ideas that have no converts, Conrad writes, there are only people without knowing, understanding, and feeling, who shout them out, imagining they believe them, without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage, and their own satisfaction.

For man is a cruel animal, he went on, his cruelty must be organized, society is essentially criminal or it wouldn’t exist, it is selfishness that saves everything, absolutely everything, everything that we abhor and everything that we love.''

Wanted to originally post this here for people who are suffering from these sorts of feelings and desires to help them with understanding them better and to trace their sources of them but I by mistake posted it on Journals Thread. Hope this does not violate the guidelines for this sub-form and is helpful to people who are suffering from these feelings and desires, including me, to better understand them and overcome them.