{"id":177535,"date":"2019-08-25T18:33:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-25T23:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/08\/25\/sadism-works-as-an-explanation\/"},"modified":"2019-08-25T18:33:00","modified_gmt":"2019-08-25T23:33:00","slug":"sadism-works-as-an-explanation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/08\/25\/sadism-works-as-an-explanation\/","title":{"rendered":"Sadism Works as an Explanation"},"content":{"rendered":"
This article makes a cogent argument that White Evangelical politics is not about fear, or biblical values, it is about sadism<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Specifically, they derive pleasure from the misery of “the other” that they have deemed unworthy:<\/p>\n

I understand why it\u2019s hard for normal people to believe that white evangelical Christians are sadists. Normal people have never been, as I was a long time ago, on the inside of that shadowy religious world. But the sooner they understand this, the sooner normal people will see that white evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump isn\u2019t rooted in hypocrisy, contradiction or merely straying from the straight and narrow. The reason they support a fascist president is simple: They\u2019re sadists.<\/p>\n

The word \u201csadist\u201d is off-putting. I get that. But if you\u2019re thinking of sex, you\u2019re thinking in the wrong way. If you\u2019re thinking of \u201cpleasure,\u201d as in sexual<\/i> pleasure, you\u2019re thinking the wrong way. The pleasure white evangelical Christians derive from the suffering of human beings deemed less human than they are is not about sex. It\u2019s about the pain, humiliation or even violence out-groups deserve by dint of being out-groups. Gay men, for instance, deserve their punishment because they are gay. Punishment for being gay is \u201cdivine justice.\u201d From such \u201cjustice\u201d comes pleasure\u2014which is sadism. <\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t come up with the term. Richard Rorty<\/a> did. I\u2019m only pushing it as far to the fore as I can, because I don\u2019t think normal people understand what they are facing, and if they don\u2019t understand, they will keep treating sadists as if they have a legitimate place in a liberal democracy. Cruelty is the point<\/i>, as Adam Serwer powerfully and famously put it<\/a> in The Atlantic<\/i>. But normal people must understand the animating force behind that cruelty. Sadists are sadistic not because they are cruel. It\u2019s much simpler than that. They are cruel because being cruel to people deserving cruelty feels good.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m still considering the arguments, but the thesis is consistent with the actual observed events, and appears to have a significant predictive properties, which puts it a step above string theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article makes a cogent argument that White Evangelical politics is not about fear, or biblical values, it is about sadism. Specifically, they derive pleasure from the misery of “the other” that they have deemed unworthy: I understand why it\u2019s hard for normal people to believe that white evangelical Christians are sadists. Normal people have …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[464,504,374,414,380],"class_list":["post-177535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-good-writing","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-psychology","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}