Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
Sadism is one of the answers to the problem of being born human when better ones are not attainable. The experience of absolute control over another being, of omnipotence as far as he, she, or it is concerned, creates the illusion of transcending the limitations of human existence, particularly for one whose real life is deprived of productivity and joy. Sadism has essentially no practical aim; it is not “trivial” but “devotional.” It is the transformation of impotence into the experience of omnipotence; it is the religion of psychical cripples. (290)
Sadistic character traits can never be understood if one isolates them from the whole character structure. They are part of a syndrome that has to be understood as a whole. For the sadistic character everything living is to be controllable; living beings become things. Or, still more accurately, living beings are transformed into living, quivering, pulsating objects of control. Their responses are forced by the one who controls them. The sadist wants to become the master of life, and hence the quality of life should be maintained in his victim. This is, in fact, what distinguishes him from the destroying person. The destroyer wants to do away with a person, to eliminate him, to destroy life itself; the sadist wants the sensation of controlling and choking life. (291)
Another trait of the sadist is that he is stimulated only by the helpless, never by those who are strong. It does not cause any sadistic pleasure, for instance, to inflict a wound on an enemy in a fight between equals, because in this situation the infliction of the wound is not an expression of control. For the sadistic character there is only one admirable quality, and that is power. He admires, loves, and submits to those who have power, and he despises and wants to control those who are powerless and cannot fight back. (291)
The sadistic character is afraid of everything that is not certain and predictable, that offers surprises which would force him to spontaneous and original reactions. For this reason, he is afraid of life. Life frightens him precisely because it is by its very nature unpredictable and uncertain. It is structured but it is not orderly; there is only one certainty in life: that all men die. Love is equally uncertain. To be loved requires a capacity to be loving oneself, to arouse love, and it implies always a risk of rejection and failure. This is why the sadistic character can “love” only when he controls, i.e., when he has power over the object of his love. The sadistic character is usually xenophobic and neophobic – one who is strange constitutes newness, and what is new arouses fear, suspicion, and dislike, because a spontaneous, alive, and not-routinized response would be required. (291)
Another element in the syndrome is the submissiveness and cowardice of the sadist. It may sound like a contradiction that the sadist is a submissive person, and yet not only is it not a contradiction – it is, dynamically speaking, a necessity. He is a sadistic because he feels impotent, unalive, and powerless. He tries to compensate for this lack by having power over others, by transforming the worm he feels himself to be into a god. But even the sadist who has the power suffers from his human impotence. He may kill and torture, but he remains a loveless, isolated, frightened person in need of a higher power to whom he can submit. (292)
The hoarding character is orderly with things, thoughts and feelings, but his orderliness is sterile and rigid. He cannot endure things to be out of place and has to put them in order; in this way he controls space; by irrational punctuality he controls time; by compulsive cleanliness he undoes the contact he had with the world which is considered dirty and hostile. (293)
The hoarder tends to feel that he possesses only a fixed quantity of strength, energy, or mental capacity, and that this stock is diminished or exhausted by use and can never be replenished. He cannot understand the self-replenishing function of all living substance, and that activity and the use of our powers increase our strength while stagnation weakens it; to him, death and destruction have more reality than and growth. The act of creation is a miracle of which he hears, but in which he does not believe. (294)
In his relationship to others intimacy is a threat; either remoteness or possession of a person means security. (294)
Roughly equivalent to the sadomasochistic character, in a social rather than a political sense, is the bureaucratic character. In the bureaucratic system every person controls the one below him and is controlled by the one above. Both sadistic and masochistic impulses can be fulfilled in such a system. Those below, the bureaucratic character will hold in contempt, those above, he will admire and fear. (294-295)
A society based on exploitative control also exhibits other predictable features. It tends to weaken the independence, integrity, critical thinking, and productivity of those submitted to it. This does not mean that it does not feed them with all sorts of amusements and stimulations, but only those that restrict the development of personality rather than further it. The Roman Caesars offered public spectacles, mainly of a sadistic nature. Contemporary society offers similar spectacles in the form of newspaper and television reports on crime, war, atrocities…This cultural food does not offer activating stimuli, but promotes passivity and sloth. At best it offers fun and thrills, but almost no joy; for joy requires freedom, the loosening of the tight reins of control, which is precisely what is so difficult for the anal-sadistic type to do. (297)
As to sadism in the individual, it corresponds to the social average, with individual deviations above and below. Individual factors enhancing sadism are all those conditions that tend to make the child or grownup feel empty and impotent. Among such conditions are those that produce fright, such as terroristic punishment. By this I mean the kind of punishment that is not strictly limited in intensity, related to specific and stated misbehavior, but that is arbitrary, fed by the punisher’s sadism, and of fright producing intensity. Depending on the temperament of the child, the fear of such punishment can become a dominant motive in his life, his sense of integrity may be slowly broken down, his self-respect lowered, and eventually he may have betrayed himself so often that he has no more sense of identity, that he is no longer “he.” (298)
The other condition for the generation of vital powerlessness is a situation of psychic scarcity. If there is no stimulation, nothing that awakens the faculties of a child, if there is an atmosphere of dullness and joylessness, the child freezes up; there is nothing upon which he can make a dent, nobody who responds or even listen, the child is left with a sense of powerlessness and impotence. Such a powerlessness does not necessarily result in the formation of the sadistic character; whether or not it does, depends on many other factors. Yet it is one of the main sources that contribute to the development of sadism, both individually and socially. (298)
When the individual character deviates from the social character, the social group tends to reinforce all those character elements that correspond to it, while the opposite elements become dormant. If, for instance, a sadistic person lives within a group where the majority are nonsadistic and where sadistic behavior is considered undesirable and unpleasant, the sadistic individual will not necessarily change his character, but he will not act upon it; his sadism will not disappear, but will “dry up,” as it were, for lack of being fed. (298)
A person whose character is sadistic will be essentially harmless in an antisadistic society; he will be considered to be suffering from an illness. He will never be popular and will have little, if any, access to positions in which he can have any social influence. If it is asked what makes the sadism of a person so intense, one must not think only of constitutional, biological factors, but of the psychic atmosphere that is largely responsible not only for the generation of social sadism but for the vicissitudes of individually generated, idiosyncratic sadism. It is for this reason that the development of an individual can never be fully understood on the basis of his constitution and his family background alone. Unless we know the location of the person and his family within the social system, and the spirit of this system, we are barred from understanding why certain traits are so persistent and deep-seated. (298-299)
Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. (332)
Another manifestation of the necrophilous character is the conviction that the only way to solve a problem or a conflict is by force and violence. The question involved is not whether force should be used under certain circumstances; what is characteristic for the necrophile is that force…is the first and the last solution for everything; that the Gordian knot must always be cut and never dissolved patiently. Basically, these persons’ answer to life’s problems is destruction, never sympathetic effort, construction, or example…Motivated by this impulse they fail to see other options that require no destruction, nor do they recognize how futile has force often proved to be in the long run. (338)
Still another dimension of necrophilous reactions is the attitude toward the past and property. For the necrophilous character only the past is experienced as quite real, not the present or the future. What has been, i.e., what is dead, rules his life: institutions, laws, property, traditions, and possessions. Briefly, things rule man; having rules being; the dead rule the living. In the necrophile’s thinking – personal, philosophical, and political – the past is sacred, nothing new is valuable, drastic change is a crime against the “natural” order. (339)
Let us begin with the consideration of the simplest and most
characteristics of contemporary industrial man: the stifling of his focal
interest in people, nature, and living structures, together with the increasing
attraction of mechanical, nonalive artifacts. Examples abound. All over the industrialized world there are
men who feel more tender toward, and are more interested
in, their automobiles than their wives.
They are proud of their car; they cherish it; they wash it (even many of
those who could pay to have this job done), and in some countries many give it
a loving nickname; they observe it and are concerned at the slightest symptom
of a dysfunction. To be sure a car is
not a sexual object – but it is an object of love; life without a car seems
more intolerable than life without a woman.
Is this attachment to automobiles not somewhat peculiar, or even
perverse?