Sadistic apects in everyday life or «wealthy elites' generations-long sadistic orgy of licentious greed-gratification»

“Climate-change”; non-'gendered' public-toilets; vegetarianism or vegan “life-styles” versus a carnivore type; the widening gulf between those who comprise, from Silicon Valley to Sumatra, the “Haves,” versus the “Have-nots, whether that is technologically or materially and socially measured; even the supposedly “grand” “big-picture” protest-movements such as “Extinction Rebellion”; all of these—a bewildering virtual Smörgåsbord of an enlightened person's, a progressive social-activist's, “choices”— these are also just so many distractions from an even bigger and more sinister problem. That problem I have in mind is, perhaps, typically ignored in favor of these 'flavor-of-the-month' movements because its roots are so very deep in all of us and, so, their consequences run through and through so much in and about our society.

I take Professor Lynn S. Chancer of Hunter College's observation in a work published in 1992* as my point of departure here:

... “reflecting deeply-embedded aspects of our social and psychic experience far more widespread than is generally realized. Rather than sadomasochism being merely the property of individuals, our culture itself is deeply oriented in a sadomasochistic direction. We are living in a society sadomasochistic in that it bombards us with experiences of domination and subordination far more regularly than it exposes us to sensations and inklings of freedom and reciprocity.” (1)

Moreover, the current obsession with Donald Trump as the political (so-called) left-wing's “poster-boy” for every imaginable and supposedly recently-virulent world-ending pathology is naïve to a biblical “mote-and-beam” extent.(2) Though, writing in 1958, the sociologist and political analyst Wright Mills didn't put it exactly as I do here: a «wealthy elites' generations-long sadistic orgy of licentious greed-gratification» that is one way to describe what has ensued since Mills wrote about the formation and the common pursuits of a “power-elite”:

“The unity of this elite rests in part upon the similar psychology of its several members, but behind this kind of unity there lie those institutional hierarchies over which the political directorate, the corporate rich, and the grand military now preside. … “The unity of the elite is not a simple reflection of the unity of institutions, but men and institutions are always related. That is why we must understand the elite today in connection with such institutional trends as the development of a permanent war establishment, alongside a privately incorporated economy, inside a virtual political vacuum. For the men at the top have been selected and formed by such institutional trends.

… “Such coordination is neither total nor continuous; often it is not very sure-footed. The power elite has not emerged as the realization of any plot. Yet we must remember that institutional trends may be defined as opportunities by those who occupy the command posts. Once such opportunities are recognized, men may avail themselves of them.” ...(3)

With remarkable foresight sixty-some-odd years ago, he described certain aspects of what, today, we find as a common-place plague of our daily existence in the so-envied technologically-advanced and wealthy industrial world:

“In the expanded world of mechanically-vivified communication the individual becomes the spectator of everything but the human witness of nothing. Having no plain targets of revolt, men feel no moral springs of revolt. The cold manner enters their souls and they are made private and blasé. In virtually all realms of life, facts now outrun sensibility. Emptied of their human meanings, these facts are readily got used to. In official man there is no more human shock; in his unofficial follower there is little sense of a moral issue. Within the unopposed supremacy of impersonal, calculated technique, there is no place to draw the line and give the emphatic no.

"This lack of response I am trying to sum up by the phrase 'moral insensibility,' and I am suggesting that the level of moral sensibility, as part of public and private life, has sunk out of sight. It is not the number of victims or the degree of cruelty that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts are committed and the acts that nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in an uncanny, even schizophrenic, manner. The atrocities of our time are done by men as 'functions' of the social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the human beings who are their victims and, as well, their own humanity. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal. They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; They are not aggressive but merely efficient; they are not emotional at all but technically clean-cut”(4) ...

Had Mills had the advantage of our view of society's experience in the years ensuing since his death, he may have come to prefer a finer and more pointed distinction between those who issue the commands and those who execute them. For, while it is still largely the case that “(t)he atrocities of our time are done by men as 'functions' of the social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view”, it is not easy to maintain today—if it ever was—that those who issue the commands are quite as robotically-functionary as may be (and, indeed, very often probably are) those who execute their commands.

Both the order-giver and those who execute the orders can quite understandably be cold, calculating, methodical and otherwise emotionally-remote from the eventual victims, recognized or not, of the orders and their execution. But there is really no reason which I can see to assume that any of that is inconsistent or incompatible with a quite genuine sadism on the part of many of those issuing the orders—and even some number of those functionaries who carry them out.

Regardless of whether one is on the order-making or the order-taking end of the process, if one already has a tendency to feel and to gratify sadistic impulses, then there is little or no reason to suppose that, merely because Mills' society was technologically less integrated and complicated than today's society, it was therefore “not (or less) sadistic but merely (more) businesslike” by comparison to our own time.

“The notion of fate is at the bottom of all notions of history as beyond human decisions.” …
________________
(5)

“So understood, fate is not a universal constant rooted in God, in Nature, or inherent in The Nature of Man or in The Nature of History.

“Fate is a feature of the specific kinds of social structure

“The extent to which the mechanics of fate are the mechanics of history-making is itself a historical problem. How large the role of fate may be, in contrast with the role of explicit decision, depends first upon the scope and the concentration of the means of power that are available at any given time in any given society. …

… “Events that are beyond human decisions do happen; social arrangements change without benefit of explicit decision. But in so far as such decisions are made—and in so far as they could be but are not made—the problem of who is involved in making them—or in not making them—is the basic problem of power.”
______________
(6)

“In those societies in which the means of power are rudimentary and decentralized, history is fate. The innumerable actions of innumerable men modify their local milieux, and thus gradually modify the structure of society as a whole. These modifications—the course of history—go on beind men's backs. History is drift, although in total 'men make it.'

“But in those societies in which the means of power are enormous in scope and centralized in form a few men may be so placed within the historical structure that by their decisions about the use of these means they modify the structural conditions under which most men live. Nowadays, such elites of power make history—'under circumstances not chosen altogether by themselves,' yet compared with other men, and with other periods of human history, these circumstances do indeed seem les overwhelming.

“I am contending that 'men are fee to make history' and that some men are now much freer than others to do so, for freedom requires access to the means of decision and of power by which history can now be made. To assume that men are equally free to make history is to assume that they are equal in power. But power is a hierarchy; the shape of that hierarchy is itself subject to historical change, and at any given moment of history it opens to different men different opportunities to exercise their wills in the making of history. What to powerless men is an overwhelming event to men of power is a decision to be made or an abdication to commit. It is a challenge, an obstacle, an opportunity, a struggle, a fear, a hope. In our time if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers and the mere objects of history-making.”
_________
(7)

…

In a serial comparison of the two dominant world-powers of his time, the United States and the Soviet Union, Mills sets out a number of aspects which he observes as parallels going on simultaneously in both nations. Thus, for each aspect, he begins either with “In both, ...” or “In neither...” to highlight the similarities:

(II) “The power of both (i.e. referring to the United States and the Soviet Union) is based on technological development which has been made into a cultural and social fetish, rather than an instrument under continual public appraisal and control; to this military and economic fetish, the organization of all life is increasingly adapted. The means of production are so arranged that, in the name of efficiency, work is alienated; the means of consumption are culturally exploitative.”

(III) “In both … as the political order is enlarged and centralized, it becomes less political and more bureaucratic; less the locale of a struggle than an object to be managed.”

(IV) “In neither … are there nationally responsible parties which debate openly and clearly the issues which the world now so rigidly confronts. The two-party state is without programmatic focus and without organizational basis for it. We must recognize that, under conditions, the two-party state can be as irresponsible as the one-party state.”

(V) “In neither … is there a senior civil service firmly linked to the world of knowledge and sensibility and composed of skilled men who, in their careers and aspirations, are truly independent of corporation interest (in the U.S.) and of party direction (in the U.S.S.R.)”
___________________

( My Ed. Note: what is now most interesting and striking about this observation is that, with the collapse and (formal) disappearance of the former Soviet Union, it is today equally the case that this observation is valid as it applies to both “corporation interest” as well as and as much as to “party direction”— although, in the U.S., there is a somewhat less farcical pretense of a two-party establishment, the difference is still amazingly slight.)

(VI) “In neither are there voluntary associations, as central facts of power, that link individuals, smaller communities, and publics with the state, the miitary establishment, and the economic apparatus. Accordingly, there are no readily available vehicles for reasoned opinions, few instruments for the rational exertion of public will.”

(VII) “The kind of public that democratic theorists imagined does not prevail in either..., nor is it the forum within which a politics of real issue is regularly enacted.”
_________________

( My Ed. Note: That this observation should remain so manifestly true today is a terribly damning indictment of our political order and our failures to it and to ourselves. Almost 28 years since the collapse of the Soviet regime, for the US to be still in such a state as this demonstrates more clearly than anything else I can think of that our political ills and deficiencies are of our own making and perpetuation, not the fault of some external forces or actors on the international stage.)

(IX) “In their classic period, liberal observers expected and assumed that universal education would, no doubt, replace ignorance with knowledge, and so indifference with public altertness. But educational matters have not turned out this way. Nowadays, precisely the most 'liberal' educators feel that something has gone wrong. Like religion, educational in the United States competes with, and takes place alongside , the other mass means of distraction, entertainment, and communication. These fabulous media do not often truly communicate; they do not connect public issues with private troubles; they seldom make clear the human meaning of impersonal, atrocious events and historical decisions. They trivialize issues; they convert publics into mere 'media markets.'

“In both …, education becomes a part of the economic and military machines. Men and women who are trained to fulfill technical functions in bureaucracies have little to do with their (i.e. their bureaucracies') ends and meanings. In underdeveloped countries, of course, we witness a movement from mass illiteracy to formal education; in the overdeveloped nations the movement is from mass education to educated illiteracy. ...”
___________________

( My Ed. Note: Today, circa 2020, the partisan polarity of that view is largely reversed: the most so-called politically-conservative educators are today those who most vehemently feel that “something has gone wrong” with education.)

(X) “Everywhere, the image of the self-cultivating man as the goal of the human being has declined. It is the specialist who is ascendant in both …. The man whose field is most specialized is considered most advanced. Many cultural workmen, especially Social Investigators, try to imitate the supposed form of Physical Science. As a result they abdicate the intellectual and political autonomy of the classic traditions of their disciplines.”
______________________

(My ed. note: and, now, above all, the feminist, or the 'L-G-B-T'-specialist or the person-of-color-specialist on people-of-color, or the specialist of one or another particular “cultural studies” area)

(XI) “In both … the specialist's ascendancy is underlaid, of course, by the ascendancy of Physical Science in the form of military and economic facts. In America today, man's very relation to nature is being taken over by science machines, which are at once part of the privately incorporated economy and the military ascendancy. Now “Science” is regularly identified with its more lethal or its more commercially relevant products; it is less a part of broad cultural traditions than of a closed-up and secret set of internationalist enterprises; less a realm in which the creative individual is free to innovate than a bureaucracy in which its cultural legacy is exploited by crash-techniques. The secrets of nature are made the secrets of state, as science itself becomes a managed part of the machinery of World War III, and the United States a part, also, of the wasteful absurdities of capitalism.”

(XII) “There is no set of free and influential intellectuals in either country—in or out of the universities—that carries on the big discourse of the Western world. There are no truly independent minds that are directly relevant to powerful decisions.”

(XIII) “The classic conditions of democracy and democratic institutions do not now flourish in the power structure of either …. Publics, voluntary associations, and responsible parties have, at most, a restraining role in the making of their history. Accordingly, most men of decision in these countries are not men selected and formed within such associations and parties and by their performance before such publics. Within both, history-making—and so war-making—is virtually monopolized by those who have access to the material and cultural means by which history is now powerfully being made.” ( My Ed. Note: In a word, today, these are obviously and of course, the top wealth—the .001% of the world's wealthy.) (8)

______________________

* The 1992-93 publishing year was remarkable for the notable books published that year: Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Alfred A. Knopf division of Random House, Inc.) and John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Simon and Schuster Publishers) to name only two of them.
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(numbered) References:
(In all citations, unless otherwise stated, the emphasis is in the original text.)

(1) Chancer, Lynn S., Sadomasochism in Everyday Life : The dynamics of power and powerlessness (1992) New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
(2) Matthew 7:1 (KJV)
(3) Mills, C. Wright, The Causes of World-War Three (1958) New York: Ballantine Books, Inc. (pp. 38-39) (Emphasis in the original)
(4) ibid, Mills (1958) pp. 88-89
(5) Ibid, Mills (1958) p. 26)
(6) Ibid, Mills (1958) p. 27)
(7) Ibid, Mills (1958) p. 28)
(8) ibid, Mills (1958) pp. 31-34

^There went 10 seconds of my life I will never get back.

No, seriously, does anyone ever read this shit - I mean, past the first 10 or so words?

#2--be careful. He's going to cut you off and never speak to you again.

>2 JGL53:

I do try to respectfully read what people take the trouble to post, but like you I found it very difficult to get past the first few words. I really have no idea what point proximity is trying to make here.

>3 lriley:

I think that's already happened to me, although I did see my name mentioned in one of proximity's recent posts so perhaps they still take sneak peeks at those of us who are beyond the pale.

#4--Prox looks.

I don't see any point to this either other than he is afflicted. One thing I find amazing is all the effort he puts into this--the beliefs he's come to have about the Donald. Proximity can write, can think, has a sense of historical perspective and yet he uses all that to defend someone who has none of that and no respect for anyone or anything, betrays his own people and allies constantly and acts without respect for the office he holds or the law. Donald is a dangerous delusional narcissistic sociopath.

Donald doesn't have the mental capacity or reading level to in a zillion years write up some of the stuff that I've seen Proximity write here. He's barely literate enough to handle a twitter account and yet Prox defends him on all levels--even seems to think he's some sort of genius. It's crazy.