3. The Sadomasochistic Personality

To Freud, the sadistic personality was someone who, regardless of his sexual proclivities, needed to feel in control of others, often demeaning them and making them feel dependent upon his strength and power. The masochist, in turn, was not just a person with a sexual perversion, but one who felt safe and secure under the control of a stronger person who told him what to do and how to live.

The sadist is the active man of history. As a man alienated from his own nature, the sadist is in an overt war with the enemy – himself. The power that he gains over others is a confirmation of the indestructibility of his eternal ego. His willing subjects look on him as their savior and as the person who protects them from the terrifying sword of constant change and therefore holds their fate, as well as his own, in his hands. Although their obedience is often gained by force, the sadistic man prefers those followers that enjoy his bullying and allow him unrestricted power over themselves to the point of becoming extensions of his will.

The sadistic person, like his masochistic subjects, is afraid to love his own life and is dependent upon his sycophants to produce for him an illusion of his own invulnerability. Sadism is a form of repression. By controlling his environment, the sadistic man perceives himself as able to stem the tide of constant change that threatens him with vulnerability and mortality. The sadistic man creates and maintains an all-powerful identity through the weak and submissive eyes of his followers.

Masochistic man is naturally obedient to authority figures, whether they are religious leaders, military commanders, or baseball heroes endorsing a product that he chooses to buy. Masochistic man is also alienated from himself, but because he is not strong enough to resist the threats of his mortal enemy, he seeks reunification through another object of alienation – the sadistic man. While sharing the masochist’s feelings of alienation, the sadistic man offers the weak man the strength to resist the very flow of nature.

The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. To accept authority is to submit to domination, to subjugate oneself to an individual, to a group, or an ideology, whether religious or political; and this subjugation of oneself to authority is the denial, not only of intelligence, but also of individual freedom.

J. Krishnamurti

1. Introduction

Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must realize that the basic principle of our freedom is freedom to choose, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds.

Dante

There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all of its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

Henry David Thoreau

Liberalism, as the term is used in American politics, encompasses a number of labeled ideologies, including socialism, statism, communism, fascism, Maoism, Marxism, and even welfare-statism. As the term is used in this blog, as well as how it is used throughout America, liberalism refers generally to the advance of the power of the state over the individual and is often juxtaposed to American conservatism, which, while advocating the preservation of many social traditional values, has generally come to represent the preservation of individual liberty from the violent authority of the state.

Liberalism itself is not just an ideology; it is, in fact, an ideology of ideologies; a “meta-ideology,” referring to the more general notion that men should be ruled by ideas of one form or another as opposed to by their own free will (within the bounds of laws whose non-ideological purposes are to prevent the savagery that arises from mankind’s natural covetousness, of course). Liberals in America, while belonging to many specific ideological faiths, generally believe that the lives of men should be ruled by ideas that may or may not be their own. In this regard, they stand in direct opposition to the founding fathers in the American political tradition who believed, and implemented in their constitutional laws, that each individual should, as much as possible, have the liberty to pursue his own happiness.

This blog is an inquiry into the reasons why people continue to be liberals in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence that it simply does not work. The history of the last four-hundred years clearly demonstrates that ruling ideas eventually reduce society’s members to abject poverty and tyrannical cruelty. The efficacy of liberalism is not an issue here, it being assumed that any well-informed readers have already seen the evidence that it, in all of its forms, is simply a recipe for social disaster. The idea that governments (as opposed to customers) are always right has consistently led to bankruptcy and starvation wherever it was tried in the twentieth century, the three centuries previous to that, and the current young century that we live in now.

In addition to its economic unfeasibility, the idea that one man’s ideas should rule another man has consistently led to the natural violence of determining which man’s ideas should be the ruling ones. In turn, this competition of ideas has consistently lead to the rule of one man whose sociopathic personality has allowed him to most easily eliminate competing ideas and the men who spawn them.

That only leaves us with the question of why does liberalism persist as a bad idea – a bad idea of bad ideas. Liberalism flourishes in the face of failure because it is a part of man’s nature. Liberalism will always exist for the same reason that rape will always exist – because fear, guilt, and envy reside in the heart of man. External violence over others will always be an appetizing alternative to men who suffer the internal violence of their own alienation from themselves.