The Plague of Sadism
Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis in Human Evolution
Book Contents
Introduction
The Natural Order (Thesis)
The Early Natural Order
The Pleasure Function
The Destruction of the Natural Order (Antithesis)
Reductionism and Moralism
Repression and Perversion
Love vs. Split-Love
The Disintegration of Sexual Paraphilias
Parent-Child Codependence and Emotional Child Abuse
The Oedipal Mold and Oedipal Culture
Mysticism and Atheism
Narcissism
Denial of Complexity
The Plague of Sadism
Conspiracy Thinking vs. Critical Thinking
Youth Fascism
The New Natural Order (Synthesis)
The Eight Dynamic Patterns of Living
The Twelve Branches of the Tree of Knowledge
The True Religio
Toward a Science of Life
Primary Power and Permissive Education
Research Bibliography
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Page Contents
The Etiology of Sadism
The Abuse Pattern
Sadism and Moralism
The Etiology of Sadism
Sadism is a blockage of the natural emotional flow through a predominantly moralistic or puritanical education, often accompanied by physical punishment, which leads to a repression of the natural streaming of the hot and melting sexual energy streams and as a result, to demonic emotions, and violence, because the naturally deep sexual discharge becomes shallow or even is inhibited.
As a result, the naturally hot and tender sexual feelings are disintegrated and distorted into a compulsion for sex targeting at strong explosive sexual discharge, as a matter of abreacting an urge, instead of embracing a mate.
The sexual discharge temporarily alleviates the fear armor but tends to entangle the person, who is unconscious of the affliction, long-term in sexual aggression, assault and a bullying, racketing or abasing behavior, that degrades and dehumanizes the mate, relegating him or her to a passive dummy.
Sadism was badly understood before Wilhelm Reich’s in-depth research on the sexual orgasm, which revealed that the natural sexual response is by no means aggressive or compulsive, but controlled by empathy and love for the sexual mate. Wilhelm Reich states in Children of the Future (1955):
Sexual responsibility is automatically present in a healthy, satisfying sexual life. (Id., 208)
Only in sadism, which is a distortion of the natural emotional and sexual setup, this empathy tends to be overridden by an overwhelming longing for egocentric, and power-ridden satisfaction virtually on the back, and to the detriment, of the sexual mate.
It is a fact that only the person who is incapable of gratification, the person whose sexual life is impeded and disturbed and who is contaminated by moral inhibitions, becomes sexually dangerous, while the sexually gratified and healthy person, no matter how many and what relationships he has, poses no risk to social coexistence. (Id., 193)
The Abuse Pattern
This is why long-term sexual sadism leads to a corruption of the personality, as the pattern for abuse then is laid also in a general manner, and the person tends to take advantage of others in the form of a habitual behavior structure, and thus becomes what is called an ‘abuser.’
But for this to happen, the pattern must have been ingrained for long, and the person must never have gained awareness about it. This is rather the extreme case, as often people become conscious of their sadistic needs and begin to become suspicious about the obvious violence of their sexual behavior, and then begin to look for a way out, and may seek out a minister, physician, psychiatrist or psychotherapist for advice and consultation.
Breaking the sadism response is facilitated by being around babies and small children, and generally, when men are actively involved in taking care of children, of trees, of gardens and flowers, or for cooking and cleaning the house.
Hence, the need for involving males in early child care. All these tasks are getting men in touch with their yin side, or anima, thereby helping them to overcome the macho or hero spirit that is negatively conducive to building the abuse pattern as a long-term affliction and personality trait.
For we have to see that sadism is not only an individual problem, but also a societal concern. As early as in 1949, Wilhelm Reich wrote in his book Ether, God and Devil:
The unarmored organism does not know an impulse to rape and murder little girls, or to get pleasure through violence. It is therefore indifferent toward all moral rules that try to repress such impulses. It cannot comprehend that one has intercourse with another only because there is an opportunity for it, for example being in one and the same room with a person of the other sex. The armored character, by contrast, cannot envision an orderly life without strict moralistic rules against rape and lust murder. (Id, 76, translation mine)
If our Western culture was not largely sadistic, we wouldn’t face the sad reality that virtually every day, in one of our glorious nations, a little boy or girl is abducted, raped and killed, or disappears under mysterious circumstances. This sadism can be shown and demonstrated also with many examples from the historian’s or the psychohistorian’s toolbox.
Sadism and Moralism
Sadism is a direct outflow and consequence of centuries if not millennia of moralism as a sort of emotional plague that has distorted our emosexual behavior structure.
Our value system is deeply freedom and touch hostile and this value system was built because our deep emotions are out of touch with our natural emosexual base structure. This value system is against nature because it favors violence and shuns natural sexual tenderness and respectful nonviolent embrace among generations, as a prolongation of necessary and health-fostering touch among all members of society.