It’s supposedly women who respond with desire to the “dark triad” traits of psychopathy, narcissism and a tendency to manipulate, so what do we make of the all-too obvious fact that a majority of men today react with an erotically tinged submission in the face of blatant injustices and the abuse of power?
Is this then a manifestation of the unintegrated Jungian shadow? Are we perhaps dealing with a male possession by their female anima, causing Western men to express a toxic femininity?
There are many interesting and amusing options.
This gleeful, vicarious participation in the expressions of institutional abuse of power clearly cuts across both sexes, however. In a nice example I came across a couple of months ago, an individual, ostensibly and by self-identification on the anarchist-punk-liberal left, recently exemplified this baboon psychology in two separate online outbursts.
In one of these, from a position of entitlement and with a language expressing the certainty of social approval, she derided the weakness and impurity of incel males. These boys were exhibited in a mainstream article going the rounds a few months ago, which basically described their failure to attain sexual relationships in spite of them ticking all the boxes and playing by the rules in accordance with the conventional social contract.
The response was interesting in that it expressed this marked sadism and disgust against a group of men whose only fault was their failure to command female attention in the sexual marketplace, and upon whom this extensive list of imaginary faults and vices then were projected.
No. Unsolicited love letters are for Ted Bundy, and not these pathetic excuses for men.
A further outburst from this same person was perhaps even more glaring, in that it explicitly gave support and approval to an obvious misuse of state and institutional authority, for the sole reason that it targeted a lower-status group reluctant to conform.
The fact that the directives in question were unreasonable and clearly unjust didn’t matter.
The fawning response
There’s something in the basic human psychological makeup that renders tyrannical power irresistibly attractive in certain situations, and which engenders this fawning, this submission, and often then also a vicarious participation in the abuse of power.
Yet I don’t think this attraction to tyranny is “natural”, per se. It seems much more reasonable to approach it as a form of trauma response, as a coping mechanism employed by individuals and groups facing severe and traumatic stressors - such as those exemplified by the conditions of alienated modern life, and which were strongly exacerbated over the last four years.
It’s reminiscent of how an “alpha” in groups of dogs or wolves doesn’t really exist among the undomesticated animals, but first emerges in captivity.
Likewise, in domesticated and “civilized” humans (consider mediated digitization a form of hyper-domestication), an attachment to an external authority structure tends to supersede the role of the parents, which leaves the basic psychological pattern in place so that we in certain ways remain adolescents forever.
In non-hierarchical hunter-gatherer communities, or other similar societies on the outskirts of civilization, social relations are significantly more even, and the power differential between individuals can rarely approach the distance between a child and the immense giants it’s dependent upon for sustenance and who can kill it with a snap of their fingers. This power differential, however, can easily be maintained within the framework of complex civilization and the constant threat from its organized and detached violence.
Traditional societies’ rites of passage into adulthood further exemplifies this crucial difference, especially some of the warrior cultures’ more extreme variants. The gist of these was to bring the young individual into adulthood by ritually killing the child, and having the new human being emerging victorious, sometimes through harrowing trials and tests. The point was to violently sever the connections to childhood, more often than not by inflicting wounds whose purpose was to help the young persons face darkness, death and despair, and then carry with them in their very bodies the reminders of their triumphant return from the abyss as independent, adult human beings.
All of this also tended to integrate the participants into the tribe’s authority structure, placing them on par with figures such as venerated ancestors, and rendering them independent carriers of the common customs and traditions with all of the responsibilities (and all of the agency) that this implied.
There’s a reason why we have nothing like these rites of passage anymore. There’s a reason why we permanent adolescents are much more docile, much easier to cajole, exploit and manipulate.
Walker describes fawning as “a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat,” a mirroring or merging with others’ desires or expectations in order to diffuse conflict and find safety. We surrender our boundaries and lack assertiveness when we are fawning. We over accommodate, appease and submit to the very person or people who have harmed us.
In contrast, the lack of agency and the various layers of dependency and trained helplessness that modern individuals exhibit, leave us as passive recipients of the social power structure and of the worldviews, myths and narratives that reproduce it.
We’re not active participants in the social theatre, there’s no space for us to challenge or rewrite the script, and the most obvious option to assert any modicum of agency as compensation for our deep insecurities and very real weaknesses and vulnerability is precisely “a mirroring or merging with others’ desires or expectations in order to diffuse conflict and find safety”. Something which is correctly identified as a trauma response when it occurs on the micro-level.
So in our infantilized state, and especially in a situation characterized by some form of threat and fear of violence, we fawn in response to the assumed desires or expectations of the dominant power structure of our context.
WELL BIDEN SAYS HAMAS BOMBED THEIR OWN HOSPITAL AND I TRUST HIM BECAUSE HE’S THE GOOD GUY AND EVEN IF THE IDF ACTUALLY BOMBED IT IT WAS STILL HAMAS’ FAULT BECAUSE THEY MUST HAVE USED THE ENTIRE HOSPITAL AS A HUMAN SHIELD
AND THE PALESTINIANS DESERVED WHAT WAS COMING ANYWAY SINCE THEY ELECTED HAMAS AND HAMAS WERE TARGETING CIVILIANS AND THEY’RE BAD AND WE’RE GOOD IN SPITE OF THE IDF ALREADY HAVING KILLED FOUR TIMES AS MANY CHILDREN AS THE TOTAL ISRAELI DEATH TOLL
In situations of conflict where the power structure we identify with is challenged, we also often reproduce the violent and repressive responses exhibited by the internalized authority figure.
It’s exactly the same behaviour we see when “non-targeted” children or siblings side with and amplify the attacks of an abusive parent, and when it’s maintained in adulthood, it seems to take on the character of a narcissistic, passive-aggressive compensation for one’s own weakness and vulnerability the painful awareness of which can then be pushed out of sight. Into the shadow.
The vicarious participation in tyranny and violence thus becomes pleasurable and addictive for complex reasons.
It is in sadism, where [the libido] perverts the erotic aim for its own purposes while fully satisfying the sexual striving, that we have the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. Yet even where it appears without any sexual purpose, in the blindest destructive fury, there is no mistaking the fact that its satisfaction is linked with an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, in that this satisfaction shows the ego how its old wish for omnipotence can be fulfilled.
(Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.)
Don’t volunteer for the thought police or the Ministry of Truth.
Don’t be a fucking weakling child.
There's an interesting article on the fawn response that came out yesterday.
https://hopeshortcut.substack.com/p/the-fawn-stress-response
Here's my comment on that article:
"Yes! This fawn response explains why people who questioned the governments when it came to COVID, go along with horrible wars, trusting the same governments!
It used to annoy me, but these days I see them like emotional robots.
I hope this crap becomes less common, but there's a feedback loop. A maladjusted society leads to people who are maladjusted.
Perhaps the issue is that instead of wanting to know the truth, they just want to know what's the most correct thing to say. Correct is relative to the tribe and is not always the truth."
This piece is like a JDAM on target. Whooosh. Boom.
I’m not even left standing after reading it but I’ll add this from the dead: I’ve known many such women in my lifetime and those that don’t… prove the rule and look at our political class. I grew up in the 70s learning and believing that when women hold political office, then blah blah blah. So look. Just look. We have the worst possible demonstration. Whether it means anything or not