sadism and the horror of liberty

"The horrible twist in Sade’s hedonism is that someone who seeks mainly personal pleasure should offer no apology for taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering. Again, the reasoning is starkly naturalistic: moral constraints on egoism are based on dualistic delusions; fundamentally, we are beasts and so our highest good is to behave as beasts. Moreover, we learn from biology that species divide into the weak and the strong; the strong prey on the weak, both between and within species. Thus, there are both predator species as well as alpha leaders of smaller groups. This is a broad natural pattern and so not only do we tend to emulate it, but we ought to do so. And so there are strong, wealthy classes of people that prey on the poor masses. In addition, predatory behaviour is natural and thus good for the Malthusian reason, which is that predators are needed to thin the herd, maintain biological variety, and prevent mass starvation from overpopulation. Predatory people may be diagnosed with sociopathy, but they can appeal to libertinism and say that their egoistic mastery of vice and their wholesale contempt for altruistic morality follow from the modern, Enlightenment assumptions (rationalism, materialism, and so on).

...The real world is materialistic, whereas fanciful notions about a human’s special worth and otherworldly destiny are fantastic and thus immoral. Sade thus reverses traditional notions of virtue and vice. What mass society regards as virtues—asceticism, altruism, mercy, cooperation, empathy, civility—are actually vices, from the esoteric perspective. For the libertine, the wise individual is what an ignorant or deluded person might regard as an evil genius, a sort of corrupted Batman, someone who not only acts on all of his lusts without pity or remorse, but who has the power and the social connections with likeminded predators, to escape the wrath of the masses. In the US, for example, the Wall Street plutocrats who seem too big to fail and who thus threaten to destroy the global economic system should their Ponzi schemes be regulated and their oligopolies be broken up in the name of fair competition, would be the best and the brightest in the moral sense—as would all the amoral math and computer whizzes who flock to Harvard Business School to become multimillionaires by exploiting the broken economic system.

For Sade’s libertine, anything that curbs private pleasure is bad, but not everyone can be happy in nature. On the contrary, the atomic interactions that are at the bottom of all natural processes are indifferent to moral inequalities; indeed, the gaps between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, and the happy and the miserable may be required by a broader and thus a normatively higher pattern. Nature is full of inequalities, and so the more unequal a society may be, the better. The upshot is that libertinism isn’t fit for everyone, but only for the elite, for the aristocrats, oligarchs, or autocrats who are strong enough to follow their unbridled impulses with impunity. If you lack the power to evade, bribe, or otherwise control the police, for example, you’re better off following herd morality, but this morality for the weak is, according to the libertine, nothing but a procedure for being bad. According to Sade, then, selfless people who sacrifice their lusts to get along with others, because they lack the power to live above the law, are the unhappiest, while the libertine who is the most free just by being the most independent is the one who enjoys the most pleasure.

....The obvious question, then, is how even the masters can be free if we’re all just slaves to our impulses. Indeed, for Sade there’s no miraculous self-control, but our actions can be more or less out of line with broader natural patterns. When we act naturally in that sense, we fulfill our biological and physical purpose and we live the good life, which is just the most selfishly pleasurable one. When we act unnaturally, by pretending that we’re above nature, that we don’t fit into larger biological and physical patterns, nature punishes us for our error, namely for the effrontery that deluded people call virtue. Liberty here is a matter of lacking restraint, of having the courage and the power to do what you really want to do, if not the power to supernaturally choose your own desires in violation of natural law. And just as God is supposed to use even evil-doers to fulfill his grand design, so too nature uses unnatural, “saintly” people in the furtherance of the game in which we play our roles: again, altruists serve as sheeple, as slaves whose suffering pleases the sadistic masters. For the libertine, this is a mechanistic means-end relationship that’s fundamentally the same as any purely physical process. Just as we hunt weaker or dumber animals for food or sport, for example, so too the most powerful people should kill weaker folk for fun or profit. This is because powerful people ought to have predatory impulses, which means they ought to be sadistic, to derive pleasure from lesser people’s suffering, to delight in this natural game that’s played out all around the world throughout our history, including the Age of Reason."