Video: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/k43el0LlFgPmkgzSFqy
0:00:00 The prevalence of sadism in society
0:01:41 Cruelty and sadism in various aspects of life
0:03:28 The role of pain and pleasure in our behavior
0:05:32 Programming and exploitation of pleasure signals
0:08:07 The impact of societal changes on our emotions and behavior
0:09:49 Conforming to Tribal Expectations for Protection
0:14:21 Humiliation Breeds Cruelty and Exploitation
0:16:34 Overcoming Natural Instincts and Training into Cruelty
0:20:02 From reactive abuse to gaining value from abuse.
0:23:17 Sadism as a shield against vulnerability and inadequacy.
0:29:40 The Cycle of Abuse and Humiliation Begins
0:31:08 Blaming and Humiliating the Broken for Being Broken
0:33:35 Escalation of Attacks and the French Revolution Story
In part two of this podcast episode, we delve into the prevalence of sadistic tendencies in society. We examine an experiment from 2013, which showed that a significant percentage of people volunteered to harm insects with cute names, highlighting the existence of cruelty within the population. Our exploration extends to various aspects of popular culture, including horror movies, sadistic literature, and the pursuit of BDSM lifestyles and pornography, indicating a broader presence of sadism. Furthermore, we discover evidence of cruelty and sadism in class warfare, racial hostilities, aggressive political discourse, cancel culture, and the dehumanization of welfare programs, suggesting that our society has cultivated a certain level of cruelty and dehumanization.
I emphasize that while cruelty and sadism are not identical, they are closely related, with individuals easily becoming desensitized and finding pleasure in causing harm to others. However, a lack of comprehensive data on the prevalence of sadism leaves much to speculation, although existing evidence suggests a potentially widespread occurrence.
We explore how pain and pleasure, as natural survival mechanisms, can be manipulated and exploited in the modern world. This manipulation leads to issues such as overconsumption and health problems like diabetes, as evidenced by the high prevalence of diabetes in the United States. Additionally, we recognize the crucial role emotions play in our lives, providing us with valuable information about our environment and influencing our decision-making process.
We discuss the concept of the false self, which emerges from the conformity required in tribal systems for protection and survival. The development of a false self often involves adopting false beliefs and suppressing individual thoughts, stemming from a fear of humiliation. This false self can lead individuals to exhibit indifference and cruelty, particularly if they have experienced abuse and developed defense mechanisms to cope.
When deprived of status or humiliated, our natural instinct is to regain that status, often at the expense of others who are weaker. This cycle of humiliation and retaliation perpetuates cruelty and can be observed across different dynamics, such as in sibling relationships and societal conflicts. We acknowledge that breaking free from this cycle requires self-discipline, empathy, and a conscious effort to resist the urge to humiliate others.
Furthermore, we explore the addiction to justification for cruel behaviors, often driven by the desire to reaffirm one's sense of status and self-worth. This addiction can become detached from the initial roots of cruelty, leading individuals to seek constant justification rather than addressing the underlying feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy.
Ultimately, our discussion revolves around the concept of justice and how sadistic impulses are often justified under the guise of justice. Totalitarian regimes and cycles of violence are fueled by this justification, targeting specific groups based on perceived guilt. We highlight the importance of empathy and breaking the cycle of violence by acknowledging the harm done while maintaining a clean conscience.
We invite feedback on this thought-provoking topic and express appreciation for any support through donations. Thank you for listening, and we eagerly await your thoughts and opinions.
sadistic tendencies, prevalence, society, experiments, popular culture, societal dynamics, cruelty, sadism, pain and pleasure, false selves, cycle of humiliation and retaliation, addiction to justification, empathy, cycle of violence, feedback, support, donations
[0:00]Truth about sadism part two, how common are sadists? I'll put the link to this in the show notes.
There was an experiment done in 2013 where people were given the choice to kill bugs that had cute names and all of that, like Muffet and Tootsie and so on.
And about 27% of them volunteered to kill these live gill bugs.
And another 27% volunteered to assist the experimenter with killing the bugs.
Obviously, it's a proxy. It's not perfect. But, of course, if you think about all of the people who love horror movies.
[0:38]All of the people, think of the popularity of Stephen King novels and vampire novels and other things with sadistic elements, if you think about the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey or even aspects of Ayn Rand's novels and so on, I mean, we're looking at a population with pretty significant levels of cruelty embedded in it.
I assume also that the pursuit of BDSM nightclubs, lifestyles, and pornography and so on is not insignificant.
So it's not a tiny, tiny percentage of people at all.
It's not a tiny percentage of people at all. there is even a certain amount of just cruelty and sadism you think sort of class warfare, racial hostilities and so on i think of the people who are saying oh the riches need to pay their fair share there's a matter of aggression and desire to punish others and and all of that kind of stuff the deplatforming the the cancel culture all of these has elements of of sadism the dark personality is common to the troll people anyone who's spent time online and i know it's a sort of self-filtering thing.
[1:41]But if you spent time online, achieved any prominence or talked about any controversial things, then, of course, it's pretty clear how many cruel people there are out there.
And the dehumanizing of things like the welfare state and all of that where you survive on the fruits of the labors of others, well.
[2:00]You're going to have a certain amount of coldness and cruelty in that, in that anyone who, you know, wants to lower taxes or cut welfare, you're going to be incredibly aggressive towards.
So, unfortunately, our sort of negative sum game of coercive financial redistribution that characterizes the modern state of societies, at least in the West, or particularly in the West, has produced a kind of cruelty and dehumanization that has occurred.
Heard if you think of all of the people who would rather be right and and break up with their father or the mother of their children rather than work to fix the relationships there's a certain amount of certainly indifference towards the effects of that on their children there's a real indifference to that and that's kind of cold and cruel so all of the people who cheer a cheer along war even when you now can see the vivid and horrendous details of various wars you know you can see the videos on social media, people are still cheering this kind of stuff along.
It's really wild. There's a lot of cruelty, and in many ways, I mean, think of the cruelty.
And cruelty, of course, and sadism are not identical, but they're not opposites either.
It's very easy to program people into being dehumanized, and to go from dehumanizing to enjoying hurting others is It's not a big step at all.
[3:23]So, some indications, and it's really hard to find good numbers.
[3:28]I looked a lot to try and find some good numbers on this.
It's something that seems woefully understudied, which almost certainly means that the situation is worse than we think.
So, 27% seem to enjoy some kind of cruelty, and a further 27% happy to tag along or assist other people with certain levels of cruelty. cruelty.
And again, none of this is perfect and it's all kind of hazy, but I think we can look at these kinds of things as a whole and get a sense.
Just look in your own life and look at the media that's around you and look at, I mean, saw movies and things like that. It's a lot.
So why might we experience pleasure or relief at causing another pain?
Or why might we have that impulse?
[4:12]Well, of course, the purpose of pain and pleasure is for our survival, growth, and reproduction. production. Pain warns us of something that needs attention in order to prevent harm or permanent damage, right?
If you stare at the sun, you get too much light. It's uncomfortable because, you know, if your eyes get too much light, then it damages them, right?
So you'd want to squint and close your eyes and get pain and all that.
Yeah, I know that endings yell if we put our hands on a hot stove because if they don't, we get a worse burn.
I guess we have to wait for the smell of our cooking flesh or something horrible like that.
So we want those kinds of pain signals early.
And of course, as you know, the pain signals go from your hand to your spine and then back to your hand to pull it away before your brain even registers the pain. So it's really that first.
[4:55]And of course, on the other side of the coin, we have the pleasure signals that something is beneficial to us or worth pursuing.
The discomfort of hunger is then matched with the pleasure of eating.
The discomfort of loneliness or horniness and so on is satisfied with sexuality or physical touch and so on.
And socializing allows us to relax because we know we're surrounded by people who care for us and will watch our backs and guard us at night and so on, right?
So there's a lot of pleasure involved in life as a whole and very positive and helpful towards our functioning.
[5:32]Now, these signals aren't perfect, right? They can be programmed by negative experiences.
When we're young, they can be exploited by others, but they're not a terrible way to do it, right? I mean, things can go wrong in the modern world, of course.
I mean, we like brightly colored sweet things like candy bars, like candies usually brightly colored, things like Skittles and so on.
It's brightly colored and it is sweet, right?
And of course, we go after brightly colored sweet things because our ancestors needed to eat fruit in order to stay healthy.
So that sort of biological hack that has us go in hot pursuit of fruit Fruit is now being used to program us to over-consume sugars in candy and so on.
I mean, and the numbers, just sort of by the by, the numbers are really quite staggering when this stuff goes awry.
So pre-diabetes is a condition where blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough to be considered official type 2 diabetes.
[6:27]Almost 100 million adults in the U.S. have pre-diabetes. That's about 38% of the adult population.
[6:34]Among those 18 years or older in the U.S., a percentage of people with diabetes is 14.7 percent.
14.7 percent is diagnosed, right, as humans higher.
So almost half of the U.S. population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic.
It's wild, and that's one of the reasons why healthcare costs up, that plus massive growth in endless administrators.
But yeah, that's one of the reasons why the healthcare costs are just so insanely high. It's just wild.
It's just wild. out. So yeah, these things can go cannon-eddy, right?
So we have direct sensations, pleasure and pain. We have emotions, right? Positive, negative, pleasant, or uncomfortable.
[7:17]Happy, tormented, overjoyed, depressed, and so on, right? And the emotions are also essential for us.
We need them for our survival. We need them for social interactions, adaptation, growth, overall well-being, reproduction, and so on.
Our emotions and our instincts provide us with sort of valuable info about our environment, help us make decisions, motivate us to take action, all kinds of good stuff to do with that.
And one of the primary functions of our emotions is to act as a warning system, which is going to alert us to potential dangers and help us avoid harm.
So fear triggers our fight-or-flight response, preparing us to either confront a threat or escape a threat.
[7:58]And our senses can be fooled, so to speak, right?
And our emotions can point us in the wrong directions, especially if we're badly programmed or traumatized.
[8:07]Our emotional responses can be maladaptive right and now it's funny because of course throughout most of our evolution things didn't change like our society didn't change our environment didn't change our belief systems as a whole didn't change our hunting patterns didn't change our geography didn't change much i mean i guess we could be nomadic but that was just we didn't go from nomadic to farmer right generally that was there was this kind of groundhog day repetition throughout out most of our history.
Now, the fact that we can change our environment, change our circumstances, change our countries, change our friends, see or not see our family, change our culture, change our language, if you want, it's pretty wild.
And, you know, some of the real deep opportunities and shocks of modernity have to do with this issue of having so many choices.
[8:55]That we have no choice but to adopt principles, if we kind of want to be sane and happy, because the social cues keep changing, society keeps changing, culture keeps changing, social norms keep changing.
So, it's really philosophy or bust in the modern world.
I could sort of understand how people would reject philosophy in the past when social programming didn't change and it was kind of all you needed and all of that stuff kind of worked out fine, but now there's so much change in the world that if you don't have principles, you're just going to be like a leaf in the wind.
You're just going to be tossed all over the place, right?
[9:30]So, if you look at something like the false self, well, the false self is the conformity that...
A tribal system requires us to absorb and manifest in return for guarding and survival.
[9:49]So if you want your tribe, your parents, your tribal elders, or if you want the people in your tribe to protect you, then often case you have to conform to tribal expectations.
You have to go through blood rituals. You have to worship a particular god or gods. you have to do particular chants or songs or whatever, right?
So you have to, and you have to just believe various worldviews, and you have to do that in order to get the protection of the tribe.
In other words, in general, the bad ideas sell protection in return for the reproduction of those bad ideas, which is why bad ideas tend to be so long-lasting, right? Because that's kind of the way things work.
So the false self is like, I'm just going to pretend to believe things things that aren't particularly true in return for protection.
And the false self is not the part of you that lies in order to survive.
[10:44]The false self is the part of you that ends up believing those lies and thinking that they're good because it's just less painful, right?
If you're going to have your independent thought humiliated and ground down into a sewage of an amoras and a muck and a mire of lies and subjugation, well, that's kind of humiliating.
So a lot of people don't really want to experience that humiliation.
So they then stock home syndrome with these false and inflicted and brutalized ideas and accept them as true and virtuous and good.
And so the false self is not having big brother or believing big brother, it's loving big brother, right?
[11:20]So let's think of a child who grows up in a highly critical and punitive environment where any display of vulnerability or failure is met with harsh ridicule or even an often physical violence or punishment.
To survive this abuse, this danger, the child learns to suppress his own feelings of hurt and instead adopts an attitude of indifference or even cruelty.
As they grow older, this defense mechanism solidifies into a key aspect of their personality.
[11:47]I mean, cruelty comes out of vulnerability in many instances and in many cases.
If you are abused, then you are rendered into a weakened state, right? If you are hurt or yelled at or humiliated, then you're put down into a weakened state.
Now, all creatures will attempt to gain a position of strength from a weakened state.
All creatures will attempt to gain a position of strength from a weakened state.
A state. We can see this happening pretty much everywhere in the animal kingdom.
So if you are humiliated as a child, then you go from a positive emotional state to a negative emotional state.
Sort of think of status and humiliation, right?
So you might go from plus five status to minus five humiliation.
Well, your body wants to take you from the weakened state to a strengthened state. The most common example, of course, is you're hungry.
So you're in a a weakened state, so you want to move to a strengthened state by eating.
You're thirsty, you're in a dehydrated or weakened state, you want to move to a hydrated or a stronger state through drinking.
And so if you are pushed to a negative emotional state, your body, your mind will attempt to re-establish equilibrium.
[13:04]Now, if you are humiliated from a plus five in status to a minus five in humiliation, then you wish to regain status.
How do you regain status? Well, you generally can't fight back against those who've humiliated you. Why?
Because they're tribal elders, they're parents, they're priests, they're teachers, whoever, right?
So you can't fight back directly against those who've humiliated you.
So how do you restore your status?
Well, you take status from someone else, right?
I mean, think of a kid who's really, really hungry angry, and someone takes his food.
Well, his first impulse will be to go and take food from someone else.
And of course, he can't take food from the person who took it from him, because the person who took it from him is strong enough to take it, and so on.
So he'll generally find a weaker kid and take the food.
So of course, food being kind of like status, we can see how this plays out, right?
[13:57]That you humiliate a child, the child is then in a negative emotional state, and therefore the child needs to take status from another child in order to return to a positive state of status themselves.
So it's really quite tragic.
And so the humiliation is uncomfortable, and the solution to the humiliation is to humiliate someone else.
[14:21]The solution to the humiliation is to humiliate someone else.
And that's why the vulnerability breeds the cruelty right if you're really really hungry somebody takes your food then you have to take another kid's food a weaker kid's food a smaller kid's food but in order to do that you have to be cruel you have to dehumanize you have to.
[14:43]Say that status and hierarchy really really matters now of course one of the great and massive changes in human consciousness as a result of christianity was the idea that low status should not breed cruelty but low status should breed sympathy and love right love your enemy and those who are last become first in heaven and the meek shall inherit the earth and humility as a value so the idea that you should become kinder through humiliation goes very much against the biological imperative that humiliation should breed cruelty and exploitation right so the idea turn the other cheek.
If your enemy wants your cloak, give him your shirt as well.
If he asks you to walk a mile with him, or if he forces you to walk a mile with him, walk two miles with him.
[15:32]The idea that you should give, in a sense, you should give more food to someone who takes your food was radical.
I mean, it's staggeringly radical and had some real benefits, of course, in terms of universalizing morals right because do what they will shall be the whole of the law do what you can get away with why are you quoting laws to men with swords that is most of human history most of the human experience and so on and so yeah it's it's it's pretty wild to say that the response to humiliation should be kindness and not cruelty but we are programmed in a sense to reach equilibrium if we are acted against in a cruel manner or we are humiliated through cruelty.
Our instinct is to turn and be cruel to others and humiliate others.
[16:24]So, if you feel bad, hurt others is really the essence of what we're talking about here.
[16:34]And I'm not immune to this. I strongly suspect you're not immune to this.
This is a natural phenomenon.
Now, of course, we can overcome our natural phenomenon, right?
I mean, just because fatty, sugary, salty food tastes good doesn't mean that we're doomed to eat it with no intervention of free will, of course, right?
So, we can intervene with our instincts, and we should, right?
That's really what philosophy is about, is having standards other than biological hedonism.
[17:05]So, the more that, and you train yourself into this. Remember I said sort of bit by bit we train ourselves into this, which I know is not a proof, right?
I'm just, let me sort of make a bit of a case here, that you train yourself into these kinds of things.
I mean, if you take up smoking, right, the first time you smoke a cigarette probably probably isn't very nice.
And then you smoke it again, you smoke it, you're training yourself into a dependence on nicotine in the same way that you train yourself into a dependence on alcohol, or in my case, of course, caffeine a little bit, maybe more than a little.
So we train ourselves into these kinds of things.
And it's the same thing with cruelty, right?
So if somebody acts in a hostile and destructive manner towards us, then our instinct is to turn and be cruel towards someone else.
You know, like that old cartoon of the boss yells at the dad, the dad yells at the wife, the wife yells at the kid, the kid yells at the cat, right? That just all flows down.
[18:04]The staircase of hierarchy so to speak so if we are able to restrain our impulse and say i'm going to sit with the bad feeling and i'm not going to attempt to regain status by reproducing that which hurt me it's kind of like a universal thing it's kind of like a basic empathy thing which is well i don't like being humiliated so i'm not going to humiliate others right that's sort of a basic empathy 101 thing, right?
Mom yelled at me, so I feel bad, so I'm not going to go and kick my little brother, because I don't like it when mom yells at me, and it wasn't my fault, and she's wrong, and it's certainly not my little brother's fault that mom yelled at me, so I'm not going to reproduce in others what I don't like in myself.
But you indulge yourself in that.
[18:53]Relief from from humiliation through cruelty is a drug and you train yourself to dependence on that drug.
And every time you do it, it becomes easier to do it the next time.
This is the slippery slope, right?
Every time you restore your sense of status by being cruel to someone else, you become that much more dependent on it and you become that much less able to handle the negative emotions because you can will away the emotion of humiliation by being cruel towards someone else.
So every time you take those steps, every time you do those things, right, It starts off as a series of steps, and then it ends up as just a loose slide, like a slippery slide that you can't even fight and probably don't even end up wanting to.
Whatever muscle you train is the one that gets stronger, and whatever muscle you don't train gets weaker.
So if you train the muscle called, I will deal with humiliation by being cruel to others, then you are strengthening the muscle called sadism.
Because also now you have lost the moral right to be angry at those who've humiliated you because you have participated in the humiliation of the innocent, right?
So the typical scenario, of course, the older sibling is treated cruelly by the parents.
[20:02]And is angry, hurt, and upset, and then abuses a younger sibling, and then loses the right to be angry at the parents, because now they are doing what the parents did.
Of course, with much more of an excuse, right?
Because they're still a kid.
But you then get tangled up in the abusers, and now you are gaining value from abuse, which is relief from humiliation.
And so, yeah, it's pretty rough. enough so sadism is when you don't have any longer the really the capacity to deal with humiliation other than by lashing out and humiliating others and restoring a strength a sense of of strength yourself and so as an adult you're going to end up with this this cruelty, so what happens is your sadism is no longer reactive or your cruelty is no longer reactive Now it's become proactive.
It's a very different situation.
So, for instance, if you start smoking, then you smoke because someone hands you a cigarette.
You smoke maybe because you're stressed. You smoke because you're trying to lose weight and you don't want to eat.
So it's reactive to some sort of environmental stimuli. You don't particularly want the cigarettes unless they're right in front of you.
The same thing, of course, happens with alcoholism in someone, right? So you start off...
[21:28]And your addiction, it's not quite an addiction yet, it's a reaction to stimuli.
If the stimuli isn't present, then you don't really have the urge.
But then what happens is, of course, as you train yourself to become dependent on the substance, or the alcohol, or I guess social approval, or nicotine, or whatever, then what happens is your addiction goes from reactive to proactive.
[21:52]So every smoker, I mean almost every smoker, what do they start off?
Somebody hands them some cigarettes. they start off as social smokers, they start off as reactive smokers, only when I'm stressed or whatever it is, right?
Only if, you know, on a Saturday night with a coffee after dinner or whatever.
So you start off reactive and then it becomes proactive.
And then you go out and you buy your first pack of cigarettes and then you keep buying cigarettes.
And right, so now you are not reacting to stimuli, you are pursuing the activity.
It's the same thing, of course, with sadism. it starts off as reactive somebody's humiliated me so now i'll go humiliate someone else and that becomes so associated with stress reduction and pleasure or at least relief of pain that you then actually have to go out and be cruel without the stimulus present right so initially you have to be humiliated and then you go and humiliate others and then you end up going out to humiliate others in order to get that high or at least relieve that that guilt right so with addiction you you You train yourself to need a stimuli, and you start off with it being reactive, and then it ends up being proactive, right?
You start off as a social drinker, somebody hands you a drink, and then you end up buying 24 beers in a weekend, right?
So you become proactive.
It's the same thing, I believe, with sadism.
[23:17]And also, because you have been cruel to others, you now have self-inflicted shame and guilt.
So, when you're young, if you're cruelly treated by a parent, then the shame and guilt, the humiliation, is inflicted from the outside.
But after you've spent a certain amount of time, say, being cruel to your younger sister or younger brother, then that shame and guilt is internalized.
It's a result of your own actions. and therefore you now have to manage all of this shame and guilt without external sources the in the the external source may not even be present anymore but the internal shame and guilt is now your own conscience so your own conscience is constantly humiliating you in the same way that a nicotine withdrawal is constantly making you uncomfortable so you have to go out and get cigarettes and now your internalized shame and guilt is becoming so uncomfortable that you constantly have to go out and find people to humiliate and I think that's where the sadism stuff comes from.
So you then are fighting for control, not over the humiliation inflicted by your parent, but you're fighting for control over the humiliation inflicted by your own conscience and your own being adopted into this sort of black circle of humiliating others in order to feel better or feel good.
[24:35]So these sadistic tendencies that are like a shield against deeply buried feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy.
But this adaptation, which again, initially is a defense, is no longer connected to its childhood origins.
And you can listen to podcast 2350, What is the False Self? for a little bit more on this.
Now, of course, the real addiction, right, the real addiction is not to the activity.
The real addiction is to the justification, right? The real addiction is not to the activity. The real The ill-addiction is to the justification.
[25:09]And this is why, you know, if you talk to a smoker and you say, yeah, smoking is bad, blah, blah, blah, yeah, I guess smoking is bad or whatever.
Now, of course, you look at Ayn Rand and she loved cigarettes, she loved smoking.
And of course, it is a stimulant and it's hard to imagine that she would have been able to perform the feats of writing that she did without the uppers and the cigarettes that she was endlessly consuming.
So she was, you know, like the light of the cigarette, the fire in the cigarette is like the fire in the man's mind.
She really did have a fetish for smoking, so she thought it was a positive and a good thing, I think even after she lost a lung to it, and then I think it ended up killing her.
But the real addiction is to the justification.
This is why marijuana smokers, it's very, very tough to get through to them about how dangerous what it is that they're doing, like how much schizophrenia and psychosis can erupt from these drugs and how powerful they are and how destructive and dysfunctional they are and how they lock you into a loser world of Cheeto eating underachievers.
And I guess because they've got all it's natural relax it's horrible it's right the real addiction is to the justification so for sadism to continue the person has to say that the sadism is not sadism that the sadism is justified that the sadism is a playful in terms of BDSM that it's you know just self-expression it's just exploring human sexuality it's you know whatever it is right So there has to be a justification.
[26:37]So how is it that people end up justifying this sadism?
I mean, we can look at totalitarian regimes that regularly are creating class enemies, race enemies, divide of culture enemies.
And so what people in general do to justify their cruelty is they say that it's a form of either A, self-defense, or B, punishment for past wrongs, right?
So if some guy kills your dog and he ends up locked up in jail, you're not being sadistic, you're punishing him for his past wrongs.
[27:18]Or if some guy is threatening your kid and then you end up threatening him back, you're just defending your kid. You're not just being some crazy threatening person.
And so for parents, cruelty towards their children is often reframed, usually reframed as a punishment for wrongdoing, discipline, education, raising them right, raising them to have respect and be disciplined and all that kind of stuff.
So parents very much reframe their cruelty towards their children as a virtue, and the real addiction is to the story of the virtue rather than to the actual cruelty.
The real addiction is to the story about the cruelty or the reframing of cruelty as good parenting and discipline and respect and so on. And you can see this all over the place.
When you see wild children misbehaving, the comments are, you know, blindingly the same.
It's just a whole series of sadistic waterfall drip-drip, which is, oh, that's what happens when you don't spend kids. This happens when kids aren't taught respect.
This happens when kids aren't disciplined and grow wild and all this sort of stuff, right?
So the cruelty is reframed as discipline and positivity and helpfulness and so on.
And for more on this, you can listen to the character called Roman in my novel called The Future, who makes a seaman case for hurting children.
[28:44]So what do people do to justify their cruelty?
[28:50]Well, in general, what they do is, I'm talking about, let's talk about siblings here, because this is really where the genesis, I think a lot of times it's siblings, where the genesis of this kind of stuff occurs. Yes.
So, let's say older brother, younger brother. Let's just work with that.
No, no, no, let's do older brother, younger sister. That way he, she is a little bit clearer, right?
[29:11]So, the older brother is humiliated by the parents and then in turn attacks, shames, and humiliates his younger sister.
And then the younger sister becomes avoidant of the older brother, you know, after this happens a certain amount of times and her experience of him becomes more negative than positive. And remember, this sort of seven-to-one thing, right?
It doesn't take a lot of negative behavior for the negative behavior to become foundational and definitional to the relationship.
[29:41]So the older brother attacks, abuses, humiliates his younger sister.
She becomes avoidant of him and nervous of people as a whole because she doesn't have any allies. The parents aren't stepping in, right? Right.
So then what the older brother will do often is to say that the younger sibling, his little sister, is annoying because she's so nervous, shy and jumpy, it's just irritating.
So then the behavior that he has created in her becomes a justification for further insults and attacks and neglect and avoidance and humiliation and so on right so you create, submissive or avoidant behaviors through cruelty and then you say that it's not cruelty it's just natural irritation at somebody being so pathetic and and shy and lacking courage and all that so then and then it becomes that which you have broken you continue to break under the guise of toughening it up.
I mean, honestly, it's as crazy as you knock a mirror off the wall in anger and it breaks and then you keep breaking it thinking that somehow breaking it is going to make it whole again.
And the fact that it keeps getting broken every time you hit it means that you just have to hit it harder, right? So it becomes this cycle.
[31:08]Create negative traits in others through your abuse, and then you further attack them for those negative traits, claiming both impatience, annoyance, provocation, and a desire to toughen the person up, right?
So it's really desperately, desperately sad. And this is where the justification comes.
You forget that you broke the person, and then you claim to be annoyed annoyed at them being broken and you blame them for being broken right so the elder sibling will blame the younger sibling for the brokenness that the elder sibling has inflicted and then will further humiliate the younger sibling for the effects of the prior humiliation from the elder sibling right i'm sure this makes fairly decent sense this is sort of how it would work as a whole Of course, the class enemies, you think of communism and so on.
Well, you know, you're an exploitive kulak or bourgeoisie or landowner or landlord or something like that.
And so it's not sadism. It's not hatred of success or competence or excellence or initiative or intelligence or entrepreneurial spirit. or it's not any of those things.
It's vengeance against a criminal thief who has exploited and destroyed countless prior generations.
[32:35]So it's justice, right? So if you have a sadistic impulse, what most people do is they transform it into a kind of justice.
So if the younger sibling that you have abused is tentative and shy and nervous, then you will humiliate them further for being, well, it's only fair.
Like you're so jumpy, so nervous, so tentative that you are annoying and I am not going to want to spend time with you and I'm going to put you down because you bloody well need it so you can toughen up for heaven's sakes, right? So that occurs.
[33:06]And you see this in totalitarian regimes where people a particular groups of people are singled out and attacked and then the jumpiness and the nervousness is then taken as an indication of guilt which justifies further attacks which escalates more jumpiness and nervousness which is considered to be more proof of guilt and oh gosh all this kind of stuff it happens until, you run out of sadists and victims well so the the sadists run out of victims and then turn on each other.
[33:35]That's the French Revolution story, which we talked about before.
And of course, the reason why you keep going is you were humiliated.
You took the dark path of humiliating others in order to restore your own status.
And then you joined the ranks of evildoers. You joined the ranks of the cruel.
And you accumulate more and more deficit, and you kill more and more empathy.
And you really can't have more empathy for yourself than you have for others, which is, again, one of the blinding insights of Christianity, you can't really have more insight and empathy for yourself than you have for others.
And so, if you've turned off your empathy towards other people's vulnerability, you've also turned off your empathy towards your own vulnerability.
[34:16]Is what allows you to do bad things and you accumulate a massive deficit it's an ever increasing deficit and at some point you know the devil wins right the devil wins and you can't recover from the harm that you've done right you've done so much harm that it is impossible now, to apologize and to make recompense you know if you yell at someone and then you apologize fairly yelling at them and say i won't do it again i'll take some anger management you can can deal with that. We all make mistakes and that's certainly survivable.
Like probably one cigarette ain't going to kill you, but 10,000 might, right?
So you accumulate a bad conscience and then your sadism fundamentally is against yourself, against your own vulnerability, against your own sense of shame and guilt.
And also because you have become an abuser, you can't get angry anymore at the abusers who harmed you and therefore you can't free yourself from the cycle the violence right freeing yourself from the cycle of violence is getting angry at the violence that was done unto you but in order to do that you have to have a fairly clean conscience about all of this stuff so i hope this helps i hope this makes some sense i'm looking forward to getting your feedback on this different topic but i think a very worthwhile topic i hope you find it helpful and worthwhile too if you find this stuff interesting and important free domain.com slash donate free domain.com slash donate to help out the show hugely hugely appreciate it and thank you so much for listening and I look forward to hearing what you have to say. All the best. Bye.
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