QUESTION6.com
The world we live in
4 - Sadomasochism
We don’t talk about masochism because it is not something to be proud of. It is part of human nature and we cannot decide to ignore it. Your dictionary will tell you about the achievements of famous people without mentioning the role that masochism played in their lives. What could have motivated the explorers who try to reach the north pole several times until they died frozen in the snow? The glory of being the first one to get somewhere is not enough. Masochism is latent, waiting for any opportunity to manifest itself. You find it associated with sadism in any race, color, or religion. Sadomasochism has remodeled our society.
You will even find it in animals. When food gets scarce, some animals will sacrifice themselves for the survival of their species. The slime molds even sacrifice their individuality and merge their bodies to survive. QR code.
Could we find something similar in human nature? We always face the danger of being left alone. We need the feeling of being surrounded by others. The worst danger we face is to never be loved. We want to communicate with a loved one in a meaningful way. We want to replace words with feelings. We want to get out of our isolation like we get out of a cage. There is a way out of Plato’s cave and we spend most of our life, unconsciously looking for it. Our sadomasochism can appear in many ways in our life.
Here are some examples.
-Do you remember running low on gas? You could have stopped at the next gas station but decided to take a chance and kept going. You introduced, in your life, a chance to suffer, like the butterfly trying to get as close as possible to the flame of the candle, without getting burned. What was your motivation? Don’t you have many opportunities to suffer in life without creating some more?
-Have you ever risked your life on the freeway to save a few seconds when you have nothing urgent to do? The temptation is difficult to
resist. You see what should be done. The slow ones should remain in the slow lanes. They should not be in front of you. What motivates is feelings and sadomasochism is a powerful one.
There is a price to pay for progress. No pain No gain. Did you assume that introducing pain in your life will pave the way for some progress.
Did you take that chance on the freeway because you are bored with a life that does not lead anywhere?
-Go to a casino and look at the faces of the gamblers. They don’t care about their probabilities of winning. They know their handicap. They want feelings and the feeling dominating the casinos is sadomasochism. When they lose, they are a failure and should be ashamed. When they win, they are king and everybody must pay them. Sadomasochism overrides any mathematical probability. We use the casino to lie to ourselves. We pretend that the probabilities do not apply to us. We can rely on our luck and our luck is better than anybody else’s luck around the table. We don’t care about logic. We are starving for feelings and would sacrifice any thinking to satisfy our needs.
-Do we need the north pole to park a car? Some cities have signs: “No parking north of here” If it is raining and you don’t know where the north pole is, you can always turn around the block waiting for a sunny day! Why not say: “Parking on this side only”? Somewhere, along the way, a need to complicate everything has prevailed.
-Look around you and you will see instructions that nobody reads for using new gadgets . What we need is a drawing, but nobody is trying to make our life easier.
-We still have people using complicated measuring systems instead of the metric system. They are attached to their system like we get attached to our many little problems that are easy to solve. Why do we keep them? Sadomasochism!
-Would you think of using the judicial system to impose your opinion on others? Would you use the excuse that you are doing it for their own good? When we are sure of being right, we want everybody to follow our example. It satisfies a need buried deep inside. We could decide to live our life and let others live their own life. Nobody can live the life of someone else. Unfortunately, tolerance does not satisfy some of our needs hidden behind good intentions. We know that imposing our will on others is to steal their freedom. This is a crime, but sadomasochism is overwhelming. It is so powerful that it is commonly accepted to steal other people’s freedom. Unfortunately, we can’t take someone to court and accuse him of using the law to commit a crime!
-How would you explain The Inquisition? Could it be a burst of sadomasochism more powerful than “Love thee neighbor”?
-What we call ‘geopolitics’ is nothing more than sadomasochism at the government’s level. What is left after removing sadomasochism
from most of the conflicts in human history could be a lack of maturity that we cover with glory and ego gratification.
In a more civilized society, when there is a conflict, the politicians responsible for the fighting would be charged with mismanagement and
war crimes. They would be sent to The Hague. The judge would decide who can go back home and who will go back to the battlefield to
remove the mines.
-We have examples of thousands of people following a religion leader and going to a foreign country to commit mass suicide. It would be interesting to investigate if sadomasochism did not play a role - unconsciously - when millions of people followed blindly a leader all the way to their demise. World leaders could use masochism to strengthen the support of their followers.
-When people do not have enough stress in their life, they create some. Let’s go back a few centuries. People were waiting for somebody’s mistake to use it as an excuse to torture him. They boiled people in hot water, wrenched their tongues, and burned their eyes with hot iron. What could have motivated them, other than sadism? It was not revenge or a method to educate the public. The most popular entertainment was to use religions as an excuse for burning people at the stake. We imprisoned those who did not follow the way of thinking of the majority. We pretended that our morality was best for the public good. This was only an excuse to steal other people’s freedom and satisfy their need for sadism. For many centuries, we used all the resources of human thinking to make the victims suffer as much as possible for as long as possible. How can we pretend that sadomasochism is not in our genes?
-Some countries are more prone to sadomasochism than others. Every detail of every day’s life can become an opportunity to make rules.
Those who are not following the rules are chastised.
-We tried to mass produce killings like we mass produce our cars. It was a mistake. An atomic bomb cannot replace watching lions eating
people alive. There are no feelings in atomic bombs. Sadomasochism needs feelings. Sooner or later, we will have to admit that our atomic
bombs are not the right tool for the job.
-Searching for God is another example. It reveals our limitations. It is a search inward. When we fail, we turn outward, to institutions,
authorities and doctrines to tell us what to believe. Do we prefer submission to uncertainty?
-Some countries use guns to satisfy a need for violence. In other countries the government may create rules that are not necessary and people use those rules as an opportunity to make everything even more complicated. The TV News will tell you how different countries are using religions, ideologies, and traditions to satisfy the human need for sadomasochism.
-A country may want to develop new armament to dominate the neighbors. Keeping it secret would be useless. To let the neighbors know of
their vulnerability is an incentive for the whole world to develop the new technology. In the long run, the result is to increase the general level of danger. This is how we went from the sword to the atomic bomb. We can see a general motivation in human beings to cultivate a need for danger. This is not limited to one country, one climate or one race. If it is in our genes, it will be difficult to eradicate. We cannot blame our tools. A hammer would hit a skull like it would hit a nail. Tools do not differentiate between good and bad. It is our responsibility to make morals control our thinking. Our new tool AI is very powerful. There is a race between thinking and morality. Sadomasochism can influence the outcome.
It is true that we made some progress. We don’t burn people at the stake anymore. We don’t torture as much as we used to. We still have the Female Genital Mutilation and tortures in the jails. We still have a long way to go, but our need for sadomasochism may not be as acute as it used to be a few centuries ago.
Let’s imagine “The News“ written by psychologists.
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“Today, our President satisfied his need for sadism by executing an inmate.”
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“In our conflict with our neighbor, it was decided that sadism was at the base of our motivation. Any attempt to solve such a problem using a war would take about 4 years before both sides have satisfied their need for sadomasochism. A better solution was to send the two presidents to The Hague. They are charged with war crimes. Everybody else in uniform was sent back home.
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A decision was made concerning the accents we still have in many of our languages. Starting next year, the keyboards of the new computers and cell phones will not have accents. It was decided that if you can manage without accents in capital letters, you should also be able to manage without them in lower cases. Languages are part of our national patrimony. We should keep them free from unnecessary burdens. Schoolchildren and keyboard manufacturers welcome the new law.
Let’s try some empathy:
Don’t jump to the conclusion that Homo sapiens are carriers of evil. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom placed pain and pleasure together in the same part of our brain called the nucleus accumbens. It is the same part of the brain that releases dopamine when experiencing pleasure. That makes us look at history from a different angle. Nature is using pain to make us conscious of our mistakes.
Our ancestors did not conquer fire without getting some blisters. They did not survive without being hungry and fighting predators. No pain No gain. Today, children are still learning to use their body by getting bruises. Forget gravity and you get an instant reminder. Pain is part of our learning process.
Sadomasochism introduces a different way to look at our lives. We live in a world driven by money, wars, oppression, crime, geopolitics, fanaticism… We should use them the way flowers use dirt. They are a compost to be recycled. The bad can be used to promote the good. It can even be a necessity.
Even the most beautiful flower needs manure.
We could even be proud to have some sadomasochism. At least, some of it. If we are not afraid of distancing ourselves from scientific rigor, we could say: “Let’s assume that the souls could decide to make a detour through planet Earth to speed up their development. They know that they will be associated with a human body and endure some pain. They accepted the challenge and we should be proud of them.”
That could explain how planet Earth attracted so many sadomasochists.
