A sadist is a person who feels
pleasure in inflicting emotional and physical pain on another person. For the sadistic
personality, the emotional pain that is inflicted on another person for the
sadist’s own pleasure need not be associated with sex because emotional or
physical pain is broader than that which can be inflicted sexually. Hence, the
bottom-line for the sadist psychology is that pleasure that is felt by harming another
person, who thus feels pain as a direct result of the sadist, lies in the making
suffer. A sadist who does not permit oneself to feel emotion is particularly
dangerous because no sympathy or compassion operates as a constraint on how
much hurt is inflicted. In such a case, the sadist is like one of the androids
in the film Ex Machina as the knife is coldly inserted into the torso of
the programmer who built the intelligent machines. Indeed, the narcissistic sadist
can be very intelligent in knowing precisely how to inflict emotional pain
especially in an emotionally vulnerable victim. Once discovered, such a sadist
will endeavor to avoid such a victim, but not because such an unemotional
sadist has a conscience and feels guilty. In the film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015),
Anastasia Steele’s life changes forever when she meets the
emotionally-tormented billionaire, Christian Grey. She falls in love with the
sadist, and, because she wants to be with him, at some point she willingly assumes
the masochist role even though she does not feel pleasure from physical (or
emotional) pain being inflicted on her person. She loves him so much she wants
to enter his deviant world; she even embraces that world. I could see myself
doing that were I to fall deeply in love with a sadist, for accepting a person
even in spite of that person’s flaws is part of love— unless, of course, lies,
sidelining, and emotional betrayals are too much for any trust to be possible. Anastasia
may come to treat Christian’s dungeon as a playroom of sorts in which she is his
so they can be a couple with an opportunity to connect even more, rather
than as a place where he acts out his severe emotional issues in which violence
and sex are too closely related in his brain, whether psychologically or physically.
Love is to a certain extent, blind or at least purblind. Given how toxic human
life can be, can we be blamed for valuing deep connection so very much even in
cases in which meaning-from-personality comes with such a high cost?
Absent from the movie is the point
that sadists also get pleasure from inflicting emotional, nonsexual pain, such
as in taking advantage of a girlfriend’s emotional vulnerability that is simply
part of being in love, so in real life there is more of a cost to being in love
with a sadist than merely consenting to playing games in a home-dungeon even
though pleasure is not obtained from having pain inflicted by even a loved one
(i.e., a sadist boyfriend). As an example of a non-sexual infliction of pain
that is not in the film, she could really need him to be with her because she
does not want to be alone and feels emotionally vulnerable because she has just
opened up to him emotionally in telling him that she has fallen for him.
Nevertheless, feeling nothing emotionally, he could dismiss her request and even
leave her to join some friends at a bar as if they were more important. Refusing
to allow himself to feel emotional caring, he would not feel culpable for
having humiliated her; instead, the narcissist sadist would gladly feel the
pleasure from having hurt her emotionally, as well as the guiltless pleasure in
socializing with his friends at a bar without even a thought of her, except
that she is suffering. He might even go home with another woman for sex and
even brag to his girlfriend the next day that the woman “was cute.” In the
future, he might even flaunt being with that woman at a bar at which he knows his
girlfriend is present! His motive would not merely be to disrespect her, but
also to inflict still more pain on her for even more pleasure! Even were he merely
“seeing” (i.e., dating) her, such behavior would arguably—at least according to
a retired psychiatrist I informally interviewed for this essay—indicate severe
emotional issues, and thus be more than enough cause for her to bolt. In Avatar
(2012), Jake is suddenly the target of a giant beast. He asks the woman who is
the head scientist whether he should face down the animal (as he has just done
with another animal) or run. “Run, definitely run!” she exclaims. It is not as
though the beast has a conscience. A sadist can do real damage, emotionally,
and without any feeling of remorse, but, instead, with pleasure for
having done so. Such a narcissistic mentality can only be the object of self-love.
In Fifty Shades of Grey, the girlfriend loves his personality and merely
accepts (in disagreement) that he has a sordid mentality with regard to his
sexual pleasure and another’s pain.
I turn now to applying Nietzsche’s
theory on punishment so to dig deeper into the sadist’s psychology. To be sure,
that is not one of my fields, so I am merely able to present Nietzsche’s
account of how punishment arose in our species and relate that to sadism as
commonly understood. Before turning specifically to punishment, I want to
sketch and apply Nietzsche’s overall system of strength and weakness, which is
not based on moral disapprobation or responsibility. In fact, the latter are
clubs used by the weak against the self-confident powerful strong out of
resentment, or ressentiment. A sadist is undoubtedly weak in this distinctly
Nietzschean sense. Not being able or willing to overcome an intractable
instinctual urge, a weak person cannot be trusted and thus should (and does!) avoid
commitment. A person who succumbs to whatever instinctual urge (or desire) is felt
most at a given moment is untrustworthy because such a person disregards the
memory of having made a promise and thus does not value promise-keeping relative
to whatever in closest proximity is most in line with instant gratification.
A weak person is more motivated
than a strong person to inflict pain on another person to compensate (or as
recompense) for having been injured or suffered a loss, such as of money or
property. Whereas a strong person says with an overflowing, self-confident feeling
of power, “What are those parasites to me?”, a weak person is oriented to
striking out, as if a master, out of ressentiment, to redress his injuries
or loss as if the pain inflicted in another person were an equivalent and
thus as a remedy. For example, is pain inflicted on a debtor who has failed to
repay a loan equivalent to the money lost? In Shakespeare’s play, Merchant
of Venice, Shylock insists on a pound of flesh in “payment” for the loss of
the money that he lent, though by the end of the play, when a pound of his flesh
is demanded, suddenly he no longer believes in the equivalence of physical pain
and a monetary loss! Such an equivalence Nietzsche states is “strange.” It is
deeply rooted in primitive, prehistoric humankind, but even so, the equivalence
is artificial. To the extent that a sadist’s pleasure from inflicting pain is felt
to pay off an earlier, perhaps even childhood (nonsexual or sexual) trauma,
the equivalence is further strained because the masochist is not even the same
person as had injured the sadist! The vicarious satisfaction may be felt as
reducing the hurt from the injury, but I suspect the effort to do so is in
vain. A strong person accepts the fact of the past injury and the resulting
emotional harm, and moves on. A weak person festers in resentment and from
this motive, pain is sought even in a person who had not committed the injury. Such
pain cannot fill a hole from an injury caused by another person. Even inflicting
pain in the same person is not equivalent to the loss from the injury,
according to Nietzsche.
Having anticipated Nietzsche’s
own words, it is time to turn directly to them for support for my claims. Filmmakers,
including screenwriters, could do worse in reading his words than ponder how some
of his ideas could have been inserted into the dialogue between the sadist and
the non-masochist girlfriend in Fifty Shades of Grey, for my overall
thesis is that film is an excellent medium for philosophical discourse through
dialogue enveloped in a narrative. After all, what are sadists to us? I know of
none such people. Nietzsche would undoubtedly reply, good, for a pathos of
distance is advisable lest you become inflicted.
We associate punishment with
moral responsibility, free will, and accountability, but Nietzsche claims that “’the
criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted differently’—is
in fact an extremely late and subtle form of human judgment and inference:
whoever transposes it to the beginning is guilty of a crude misunderstanding of
the psychology of more primitive mankind.”[1]
Free will came before the notion of moral responsibility and hold
holding the culpable accountable. The genealogy of punishment shows quite
another dynamic at work—one whose primitive origin shows up not only in why
immature parents punish their children, but also, I contend, in sadists! “Throughout
the greater part of human history punishment was not imposed because one
held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, thus not on the
presupposition that only the guilty one should be punished: rather, as parents
still punish their children, from anger at some harm or injury, vented on the
one who caused it—but this anger is held in check and modified by the idea that
every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid bac, even if
only through the pain of the culprit.”[2]
Although Nietzsche’s empirical claim, presumably unsubstantiated by any scientific
evidence, that parents during Nietzsche’s life in nineteenth-century Europe
were still punishing their respective children out of anger in order to inflict
pain as a sort of requital for the injuries inflicted on the parents by the
disobeying children is questionable, Nietzsche’s focus in the passage is on the
“idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid
back, even if only through the pain of the culprit.”[3]
Nietzsche describes the “idea of an equivalence between injury and pain” to be strange.[4]
How is it that the pleasure obtained from pain inflicted on, and thus felt by,
a person who has caused pain in the initial aggrieved pay back latter such that
one’s own initial pain from the initial injury is lessened? Wouldn’t one’s
own hurt from having been injured last until either the loss is made up in
kind or until the natural process of emotional healing has run its course? Nietzsche
seems to be skeptical that the pleasure from inflicting pain on the culprit can
facilitate the natural healing process, though perhaps by such pleasure it is
easier to let go of the hurt from the injury or loss. To the extent that the
medium of film is ultimately about the human condition, the dynamic that Nietzsche
viewed as strange could be made explicit for audiences, who could then look at
themselves in the mirror.
The equivalence that lies at
the root of the origin of punishment according to Nietzsche is so strange to
him because he argues that the ‘primeval, deeply rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable
idea” drew its power “in the contractual relationship between creditor and
debtor, which is as old as the idea of ‘legal subjects’ and in turn
points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade, and
traffic.”[5]
Especially relevant for the case of the modern sadist, in the ancient world a “creditor
could inflict every kind of indignity and torture upon the body of the debtor;
for example, cut from it as much as seemed commensurate with the size of the
debt” that was not paid back.[6]
“Let us be clear,” Nietzsche states, “as to the logic of this form of
compensation: it is strange enough. An equivalence is provided by the creditor’s
receiving, in place of a literal compensation for an injury (thus in place of
money, land, possessions of any kind), a recompense in the form of a kind of pleasure—the
pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless,
the voluptuous pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire,’[7]
the enjoyment of violation.”[8]
That such pleasure could make up for the loss of money is to Nietzsche “strange,”
especially if some other asset, such as land or even useful equipment, could
instead be taken to make up for the money lost.
Of course, a sadist would
easily recognize pleasure in being allowed to vent one’s power on a person who
is powerless—perhaps tied up or held to the floor—by inflicting pain on that
person. What, therefore, is the pleasure meant to be equivalent to, and thus in
recompense of what loss or injury? Clearly not one in which the person being tied
up sexually is the culprit, for the inflicted pain is not deserved—hence the
power is vented freely, irrespective of desert (i.e., whether the pain
is deserved). Is the pleasure desired by a sadist only for the sake of feeling
the pleasure itself, especially if it is sexually arousing, or is it unconsciously
sought as recompense to make up for a past injury or loss? If the latter, can
the pleasure from the pain of a person who did not cause the injury or loss be
said to be equivalent to the injury or loss such that the pain from the injury
or loss can be removed by the pleasure from inflicting pain on an innocent
person? If these questions are on target, then perhaps psychologists treat
sadists by helping them to deal with pent-up emotional hurt from having been
subject to abuse of some sort. Perhaps unblocking the natural psychological
healing process would leave a sadist no longer motivated to feel pleasure by
inflicting pain on a person. Cleared of the sordid pleasure, perhaps a more
emotionally intimate sort of pleasure that comes with making love (i.e., sex with
a beloved) could see the light of day. Once tall weeds are cut in a garden, the
native fauna underneath can finally feel disinfectant sunlight directly and
thus strengthen and even grow.
In Fifty Shades of Grey,
the alternative to the girlfriend agreeing to play the role of masochist is not
broached; she does not say, for example, I will let you inflict pain on me
for your sexual pleasure, but you must see a therapist every week. Because she
is not a masochist, her role-playing would perhaps not be longstanding if her
boyfriend takes the therapy seriously rather than just a requirement. A narcissist
sadist would manipulate both the girlfriend and the therapist, and only seem
to be recovering so to continue having it both ways—retaining his girlfriend
while satisfying his instinctual urge to feel pleasure by inflicting pain on
innocent people. At least in the case of the ancient creditors, the pain was
inflicted on culprits. Sadism can thus be thought of as a distortion of
the origin of punishment rather than as a direct modern manifestation of it.
Rather than being viewed as a legitimate sexual practice, sadism can be viewed
as a manifestation of severe emotional issues that have not been properly processed
psychologically. Unclog the drain, as it were, and the strange equivalence,
which is even more of a stretch than that which arose with ancient creditors
and debtors, will naturally dissipate. In its place, the emotional intimacy of
being in love mutually can deepen such that even making love in terms of
two bodies may be viewed as not close enough, and thus as only on the surface. In
contrast, a sadist does not transcend sexual pleasure and thus is incapable of true
love. Ironically, amid such pleasure, a sadist is alone, without real
connection, and thus is utterly unhappy. In Fifty Shades of Grey, the
sadist is fortunate indeed that his girlfriend loves him. The unasked question is
whether he loves her.
But what do I know about
sadism? Had I inadvertently crossed paths with an actual sadist bent on
inhaling pleasure by inflicting emotional pain, she would have coldly carved a
line down the middle of her bed to keep me at a distance, as a remote acquaintance
at best, and I, in turn, would have instituted a pathos of distance from
such a creature lest I be infected by all the inhaling and inflicting. “What
are needy parasites to me?” she would perhaps have went on to coldly remark with an air
of primped superiority in briefly alluding to me, as if I were merely a footnote,
to her countless subsequent men.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 500. Shakespeare drew on this practice in writing his play, The Merchant of Venice. The common modern expression, a pound of flesh, comes from that play.
7. Of doing evil for the pleasure of doing it.
8. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, pp. 500-1.
