Dear Editor,
Apparently, it seems as though humans possess a psychological need and are biologically hard wired to endure and inflict pain on both members of its own species and other members of the animal kingdom. And so this acute awareness of our seemingly inherent capacity to initiate, administer and absorb suffering may have led the stoic, Marcus Aurelius, to conclude centuries ago that “Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.” Marcus, having witnessed some of mankind’s most savage and barbaric atrocities, knew a millennium ago what we as a species were capable of as donors and recipients of inhumane pain. Marcus understood that to inflict, experience and endure pain is at the core of what essentially makes us humans.
Nature ostensibly has equipped or rather endowed us with capacities to commit unimaginable cruelties against our fellow man and other life forms. This internal capacity to unleash suffering and destruction on other living organisms including our own may very well account for the manner in which the much prophesied apocalyptic end of times is likely to occur – the end of life on earth as we know it may be of our own machinations, it’s oncoming however painful. As a species humans display unredeemable tendencies to hurt and maim others continuously, oftentimes with an air of indifference while remaining completely oblivious to the recipient’s obvious unbearable absorption of their pain. Instances of this horrifying but supposedly natural inclination of man abound throughout the short history of our species, with war, global conflicts and genocides being some of the most glaring examples.
Man it seems has long concluded that he is predisposed to ghoulishly decapitate and slaughter the anatomies of his fellow man; and whenever he is not engaged in his acts of anatomical annihilation he is nonetheless occupied with executing the techniques of psychological warfare consciously destabilizing and deranging the minds of his fellow man ruining their lives in the process populating numerous asylums. It appears that Man’s capacity for tormenting is a constant of his Character. Arthur Schopenhauer would have captured this characteristic trait of man poignantly when he stated, “No animal ever torments another for the mere purpose of tormenting but man does it and it is this that constitutes the diabolical feature in his character which is so much worse than the mere animal.” Schopenhauer, oftentimes during his mortal lifespan was dismissed as an eternal pessimist but he was nevertheless on point regarding the validity and accuracy of the foregoing observation.
The intentional and conscious administering of pain or the threat of its employment has been and continues to be used as a tool for extracting compliant behavior and in countless other cases to deter undesirable human conduct. The lingering awareness that pain can be readily brought to bear on deviant human behavior assures its donors of its effectiveness in ensuring favorable outcomes from its potential recipients. The fear which perennially accompanies the possibility of being subjected to punishment for societal infractions is daunting. It requires copious amounts of intestinal fortitude to overcome and not become paralyzed by the threat of institutional pain whose sole objective it seems is to ensure rigid conformity to societal laws and conventions: which in itself increases the risk of us living largely unfulfilled, cowardly and impoverished lives. Man is so at home with his desires and impulses to unleash pain on his mortal equivalents that he has codified circumstances and situations under which it is legally and morally justifiable to morbidly prescribe the utilisation of pain.
To eradicate pain from man’s experience whether as a naturally occurring sensation – one of our endowed or evolved default setting – or as a conscious human creation we as a species thus far have been unable to achieve. And this might be more wishful thinking than a sincere desire of humans to sequester afflictions from the frame of human experience since man continues to perpetuate the weird paradox of deriving pleasure from the very experience he is seeking to extinguish from the totality of his existence – pain. Whether as a self-inflicted or sadistically administered means to an end, torture’s longevity will persist indefinitely as a reliable enabler of pleasure for the multitude of masochists and sadists in our midst.
Pain, torture, suffering, affliction and the entire literary oeuvre which narrates the collective experience of discomfort are the enduring and supposedly necessary binary opposite of pleasure. Apparently, the equitable coexistence of one with the other is essential for maintaining our psychological equilibrium. So, as much as we may continue to demonstrate and promote our preference for a pleasurable existence, pain will nonetheless continue to be a necessary force in the inventory of our psychic reservoir. Its utilisation and deployment are determined in part by our expressed desire for self preservation, dominance, pursuit of power and control and in extreme cases our diabolical tendencies to derive pleasure from pain itself.
Orlando Patterson
