Vicarious Cruelty and Social Cohesion
“The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!" – Friedrich Nietzsche.
All human societies are predicated on dominance and submission. A few rule, the many serve – there are no exceptions to this. The implication of this is that in every society most will find themselves in the position of slaves, tasked with maintaining a social order in, on or through which they exert no power. There is no arc of progress where equality is attainable. Furthermore, the ubiquity of status hierarchies, and of the attendant power struggles, shape all human social interaction. There is no fellowship that does not bear the stench of the will to power, and the drive to dominate is present in even the lowest thrall. Yet in a species as hierarchical as man, obsessed as he is with status, it would be mighty strange if millennia of status jockeying had not given to some the capacity to serve and to others the capacity to rule. In short, how do we reconcile the omnipresence of the will to power with the inborn propensity towards servitude which exists to some degree in most people?
The will to power itself is only one manifestation of the universal Will. The Will is the metaphysical drive towards manifestation, achieved through differentiation and objectivization. The will to power, then, is the drive of every manifestation to impose itself on other manifestations. I do not wish to overburden my readers with too much philosophy – suffice it to say that the intention here is to show that a will is self-differentiating. It is important to understand that a will may manifest itself in many different instances and on multiple layers of reality.
We understand, then, that the will to power is not present only in the master nor is it only fulfilled by the master. There are numerous other ways that the will to power manifests – and they need not be in conflict with the master manifestation. Fulfillment of the will to power of the slaves need not depend on conflict with the masters. We can therefore distinguish the man of a naturally slavish disposition from the man who, forced into servitude by external circumstances, is given to conflict with the masters.
The natural slave is one who does not require personal agency to fulfill his will to power.
How does a slave fulfill his will to power, then, if he lacks agency? Through vicarious cruelty. A slave who identifies himself – directly or indirectly – with the master can enjoy the repression and cruelties that the master subjects other slaves to. This identification can take many shapes – from one-sided fidelity to the person of a ruler, to an obsession with law, to identifying the specter of society as the “we”. What is important is that the slave sees the agency of the master as his own.
The dependency of the natural slave on cruelty comes as a direct result of his own lack of agency. Whereas the will to power of the master is fulfilled by seeing his influence on the world around him, and especially on the lives of others, the slave can enjoy no such feeling for he lacks influence – the world does not move for him. What he can depend on are sensations which arise due to sympathetic connection, for they require no input from the slave. Cruelty, like empathy, is a sympathetic sentiment – whereas empathy arouses feelings of pain in those who witness someone in pain, cruelty arouses feelings of power and joy instead. And whereas empathy requires identification with the sufferer, cruelty requires instead identification with the tormentor.
How does this joy in vicarious cruelty present itself? Most often it presents as an excessive reverence for institutions, especially the law. The reason why institutions are popular objects of identification for slaves is because of the near-total institutionalization of life in modern societies, and also because the facelessness of an institution makes it easier for these people to identify with it, especially considering the popular myth of democracy that institutions “enact the will of the people”.
The kind of person who revers the law in particular is very common and easy enough to recognize. They are individuals who stress the importance of following the law under all circumstances and who profess that they see no acceptable reason to ever break it, coupled with an aggressive disposition and a barely contained glee when witnessing those who run afoul of the law. They frequently express a deep admiration for the police, often bordering on a kind of worship which is entirely misplaced. This type should not be conflated with the rules lawyer, someone who nitpicks the letter of the law to gain a benefit. The difference between these two types is that the latter possesses a sense of personal agency and uses the law for tangible benefits – the law is a tool for them to use. The former lacks agency and usually also any deeper knowledge of the law. Their only interest in the law is as a source of cruelty for them to enjoy.
Many right-wingers who “back the blue” are of this type. They mistakenly think that the police are secretly sympathetic to right wing causes and that they will punish Antifa if only the backers express their reverence loudly enough. This, of course, never happens. This type can also frequently be seen among the left. The aggressive enjoyment of the excessive force shown to the Capitol Hill protesters is an example of this, as are lockdown fetishists and others that have become common during the corona nonsense. It is important to note here that the anti-police sentiments of the left are not contrary to this reverence for law. When the left speaks of defunding the police, it is always with the intent that the law instead be enforced through the soft tyranny of the maternal-therapeutic state and its bureaucrats, managers, policies and regulations. Understand that, to the left, woke orthodoxy serves as a semi-judicial kind of law and Antifa and BLM are the extra-judicial enforcers of this law. Their rioting is seen as an application of this law, and the left gets a perverse enjoyment out of the destruction they sow.
Among non-judicial institutions, corporations commonly serve as conduits for vicarious cruelty. This is the source of the common sight of “muh private platform” supposed anti-capitalist types gleefully enjoying the repression of others by Big Tech. Within corporations, and within the workplace, HR serves a similar function, at least in part. Policy and humiliating HR practices are a wonderful opportunity for the office serfs to spice up their dull workday with a bit of vicarious cruelty.
Naturally, the Karen is a well-known type that gloats herself on vicarious cruelty. What distinguishes the Karen is that her enjoyment of vicarious cruelty is most often combined with a form of highly manipulative slave morality wherein she exaggerates her own frailty or vulnerability. She is often also the instigator of institutional involvement. One should not make too much of this show of agency – it is the typical female strategy of acting through men, the “my boyfriend will beat you up” tendency of women.
What remains to consider are the societal implication of this tendency among the natural slaves. As was discussed in the beginning, vicarious cruelty allows for slaves to fulfill their will to power in ways that do not threaten the masters. All of the examples given above have been of various types of people that derive sadistic satisfaction from the repressive control systems of modern societies, thereby giving tacit legitimacy to these control systems. In essence, vicarious cruelty allows for maintaining repressive systems of control without undermining social cohesion. I believe this explains in part the lack of any real resistance on the part of the populace to the expanding powers of the bureaucratic state. It isn’t simply the result of propaganda or psy-op that people enthusiastically embrace societal control and repression. Take the example of compulsory vaccination against the corona virus. While part of the enthusiasm for compulsory vaccination comes from a very real propaganda effort by the establishment, there is a kind of barely concealed glee that almost always comes out of people who are vocally in favor of these measures. You can see how they frequently begin by affirming the necessity of these vaccination campaigns, thus affirming the established view. But after that comes the glee of envisioning what will happen to those who refuse, talk of what the consequences should be for them and so forth. Since these people depend on the repression of society to feel powerful, any increase in repression equals new opportunities for them to enjoy the misery of their peers. I believe this behavior serves in part to explain the frequent occurrence of tyranny throughout human history – many are happy in the labor camps as long as those who are there with them are not.