The Perilous Journey of Ionian Virtues, Part 2
Sado-masochistic norms, values, modes of behavior, and style acquired a cachet and attracted followers as early as the 1950s and 1960s in America and Europe. Among those who styled themselves cognoscenti, bien-pensants, avant-garde, and other terms of fashionable self-regard, these modes of behavior signified their rejection of bourgeois credos of family and social life. Both the avatars of this revolution and the great many engaged in less exalted pursuits felt these louche activities to be harmless or inconsequential or both.
Post-modernist De-sacralization of Beauty. Far removed from the sphere of political economy, ancient ideas of aesthetics and ethics were deemed obsolete by a group of philosophers who became known as post-modernists. They attracted followers throughout academia, though their arguments were often incomprehensible to others. Yet their influence surpassed even their own ambitions. Since Ionian times, beauty, truth, and morality were thought to be aspects of nature, intuitively perceived, memorably evoked in Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.1 Kant found in these links between seemingly disconnected realms some hints of metaphysical experience, of things beyond the immediate perception of our senses.2 So, unbeknownst to many in more practical fields of endeavor, the post-modernist effort to de-sacralize beauty, truth, and morality really mattered a great deal. Art and music, proclaimed the avatars of this new creed, would no longer celebrate beauty, but instead would simply reflect the prevailing chaos, disorder, and strife. If this was repugnant, so be it. Let viewers be shocked, it was good for them, went their mantra. The more repulsive, the more suitably it fitted the reality of contemporary life. In personal behavior among the acolytes of post-modernism, the old morality gave way to situational ethics, cobbled together on-the-fly as the occasion seemed to demand. The social sciences, which had discovered so much that was artificially produced rather than naturally or divinely given, supplied the data and concepts to de-legitimize all of the natural order. If society and human relations were mere artifacts, then they could be de-constructed and reassembled. The post-modern nihilists were keen on destruction and cagey on who would re-assemble the remains or what they would look like. Personal identity, science, and all that had previously been regarded as objective truth could be discarded, because, guess what, there was no such thing as objective truth. It was all socially created. Later, it became evident that what they really meant is that objective truth is whatever those who are in a position to issue diktats say it is.
Post-modernist prose is tortuously opaque, one reason why business and political practitioners wrote it off as gibberish. Yet they ignored it at their peril, for the post-modernists did in fact have an agenda, which filled the thought-vacuum left by the banishment of Ionian virtues and Western Civilization. Clues to the post-modernists' agenda may be found in their peculiar allegiance to the Marquis de Sade, both as intellectual progenitor and role model. In an essay on the interplay between thought, word, and action, the sociologist Dmitri Shalin writes:
The references to Sade are common in the postmodernist discourse. He is treated reverentially as a daring intellectual who envisioned “profoundly egalitarian institutions of pleasure”. The man is somewhat of a patron saint to French postmodernists who find in his honest cruelties a healthy antidote to the hypocrisy and injustice of modern society. Although postmodernist writers avidly dissect the Marquis de Sade’s literary corpus, they have little to say about his real–life exploits. Yet, this literary giant did not simply imagine his sadistic pleasures; at every opportunity, Sade sought to bring his fantasies to life. You can find this out by placing side by side the depositions that witnesses made at his trials and the pages from his novels. This bard of nonconsensual sexuality honestly believed that if you torture your victims physically, sexually, and emotionally, and do so imaginatively enough, they will come to love the torture and the torturer.3
Incredible as it may seem to those whose pursuit of happiness does not include torture, there is apparently no shortage of people who do seek out such perverse pleasures. Their motivations vary – boredom with normality, experimental exploration, self-loathing, folie à deux, job stress acting-out, and so on. The most widely cited prophet of post-modernism, Michel Foucault, reveled in 'paeans to pure violence' and 'the joys of torture', participated avidly in sado-masochistic practices, and opposed rape laws4. His philosophy and his life were one, and he invited his followers to judge whether his words and actions were consistent. Apparently they were, and served as an example to be emulated by others. Thus sado-masochistic practices acquired philosophical legitimacy in avant-garde intellectual circles. Decades later, political discourse adopted their academic style, essentially a playing-out of sadism in thought, word, and deed.
The Guilt of the Nouveaux-Riches. Another strain of sado-masochistic temperament appeared in the arts and social justice, called forth by those who had enriched themselves and felt guilty about their wealth. Celebrities, tech oligarchs, financiers and overpaid corporate CEOs – insecure, wary of and yet inured to others' envy – devoted themselves to the pursuit of social approval. Virtue-signaling to express their deservingness, they conspicuously adopted causes that seemed worthy. In this way they absolved themselves of sin. Fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who bilked investors of billions of dollars, claimed his illicit gains were an exercise in 'effective altruism', spinning it as a demonstration of the evils of capitalism while gifting politicians, save-the-planet scams, and public health agencies5 with the proceeds. One expert practitioner of moral extortion, BLM founder Patrice Cullors, garnered hundreds of millions of dollars from guilt-ridden corporate CEOs, whereupon she concluded her Black life mattered so much that she deserved her own multi-million-dollar house6. Contemporary art offers buyers the opportunity to pay grossly inflated prices for images so repugnant, offensive, or just plain ugly that they can suffer twice for the privilege – once in being swindled, again with every glance at the wretched acquisition. Such gratuitous suffering, vicariously or symbolically, sometimes devolves into physical degradation.
The realm of vicarious or symbolic suffering is well-represented in Western art history, as a stroll through the Medieval section of any Museum clearly shows: The Stations of the Cross record in excruciating detail the indignities, false accusations, and fabricated offenses conceived by the Roman authorities to break the Spirit of Christ and justify His murder. Of these innumerable variations of torture, stripped of religious significance, all that remains is the sadism7. This artistic tradition continues into the current secular age, where it evokes similar feelings of revulsion with different artistic devices. For every billionaire beset by guilt about his wealth, an artist with a PR-machine in tow appears to shock and 'challenge' his sensibilities. For a small share of his fortune, the billionaire can enter the ranks of the cognoscenti who buy art that everyone finds offensive, professing to find it attractive.
The Art of S&M. Surely no artwork was more gratuitously offensive than photographs of sado-masochistic acts depicting obviously painful insertions of large objects into bodily orifices where they don't fit. The whips, chains, leather, and other trappings of the S&M lifestyle that adorned other photographs elicited recognition from appreciative viewers, as if they were given privileged access to a secret ritual. An exhibition of these at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1987 drew lavish financial support from the New York old-money elite. The show was proudly opened by no less of an art-world doyenne than Flora Biddle, granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney who had founded the Museum. This gave an unmistakable signal to other fashionable patrons of the arts that it was not only acceptable, but something close to obligatory to endorse this theme with their presence, their influence, and their money. Whitney Associate Curator Richard Marshall did his part to legitimize it by referring matter-of-factly in the exhibition catalogue to one photograph as 'Self Portrait with a whip inserted in his ass'8. The artist himself, dying from AIDS, positioned himself at the show in his wheelchair beneath 'Jim and Tom, Sausalito, his 1977–1978 triptych of two men in black leather, adorned with the accoutrements of sadomasochistic bondage and torture. In the photographs, Jim, the master, is urinating into the willing, even eager, mouth of Tom, the tied-up slave. 'Marvelous, said one after another of the fashionable crowd as they surveyed the work'9. The artist's patron, partner, promoter, and avid collector, Sam Wagstaff, had died of AIDS earlier that year, leaving seven million dollars to the artist. Another promoter, Barbara Jakobson, said, of one sado-masochistic photograph, 'I can’t believe that a human being would allow this to be done.' [The artist] replied, 'The person who had it done wanted it to be done. Besides, he heals quickly'.10 And so, another chapter in the cultural conditioning of Americans unfolded. This too, like the post-modernist cult, was remote (except for controversies that erupted over public funding) from the domain of political economy.
Spycraft and Sex-Slavery. However, a third arena of sado-masochistic activity is part of official covert spycraft – torture and kompromat, research on or entrapment into compromising information. Military psychologists have debated the utility of torture in extracting actionable intelligence, the standard objection being that a subject will say whatever he thinks his captors want to hear, which may or may not be true, in order to stop the torture. One way of surviving torture, and extremely painful situations in general, is to compartmentalize, that is, distance oneself from the person being tortured or experiencing extreme pain11. Some people who have been abused as children develop this compartmentalizing ability to such a high degree of refinement that they can be useful to spy agencies as couriers. Instructed to remember messages until delivered and then to forget them, they have been used for confidential high-level communications. It has been alleged that forcible sex-slavery was used to reinforce the mind-control required to ensure cooperation.12 Whether true or not in that instance, since then it has become possible to exert mind control on a mass scale, taking advantage of the vast amount of private information that users voluntarily surrender to social media. 'Psy-ops' highly attuned to masses of self-defined hopes and fears were used to topple regimes in Libya and Ukraine, and to induce billions of people to have experimental gene-altering drugs injected into their bodies. Educated people are generally more susceptible than the less-educated to this mental conditioning, probably because the content of their education included similar messaging.
The career of Jeffrey Epstein illustrates the uses of sex-slavery to obtain kompromat on prominent persons, and incidentally provides a glimpse of how sado-masochistic practices have been institutionalized in government spycraft. Only because he went rogue and privatized what had been a government monopoly did these covert activities become visible. We don't know what exactly he was doing for the spy agencies, but he had a particular facility for bringing high-powered scientific and technical talent into his orbit, a resource they had not then sufficiently penetrated. Epstein's generous contributions to Harvard ($6.5 million13), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($7.5 million14), and intellectual impresario John Brockman's Edge Foundation, netted him such stars as Marvin Minsky, Steven Pinker, Nathan Myhrvold, Gerald Edelman, Murray Gell-Mann, Lawrence Krauss, and others, according to Epstein's black book and 'Lolita Express' flight logs15. Epstein was 'clubable', ingratiating himself among the scientific elite with intellectual patter that some found intriguing, and others considered shallow or incomprehensible. But the financial and sexual incentives he offered them spoke volumes. The spy agencies may have been seeking to get ahead of the artificial-intelligence curve and may have even subsidized his donations, as it has never been clear where Epstein's vast wealth came from16. Videos of the sex sessions on Epstein's Caribbean island, his New Mexico ranch, and his New York mansion were taken, but have not (yet) been made public. It is obvious, however, that young women and teenaged girls in isolated surroundings did not have sex with much older men voluntarily. Some combination of inducements (modeling jobs, etc.) and coercion probably did the trick. Studious as always, Epstein ordered how-to books from Amazon on sado-masochistic practices. Here, then, is another locus of sado-masochistic activity, derived from the spy world where it is routine though covert – revealed only because its protagonist had become too visible.
Due to the natural repugnance normal people feel toward intentional infliction of pain, and toward those who derive perverse pleasure in such a relationship, these three areas of sado-masochistic activity remain unacknowledged despite their growing influence on the larger society. Post-modern nullification of aesthetics, ethics, and objective truth still seems remote enough from practical political economy to be ignored. Likewise the celebration of S&M imagery in art museums and galleries today might elicit only a bored shrug: So what, why bring down the wrath of the sodomites, and anyway where's the harm now that these things are out of the closet and in your face? And as Bill Gates famously responded to NPR reporter Judy Woodruff when she asked him whether he would do anything different going forward about his relations with Jeffrey Epstein – 'Well', Gates smirked in his classic college-dropout smart-ass manner, 'he's dead…' Nevertheless these practices, institutionalized in academia, the arts, and spycraft, do not confine themselves to their seemingly isolated precincts. They set an example for others to follow. And their followers seek to justify their behavior in terms of traditional precepts. Thus the post-modern nihilists seek scholarly reognition for their diatribes, and covet prestigious academic appointments. The producers and promoters of images celebrating S&M represent them as great art, printing them in deluxe editions, priced accordingly. The spies violating the Constitution (itself based on Ionian principles) claim a 'higher loyalty'. Thus normalized, humiliation and submission become the default response of a demoralized and terror-stricken populace.
[Full essay also published by Isonomia Quarterly, featured at Real Clear History for March 7, 2024.]
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1 John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.
2 Roger Scruton, in Beauty and the Restoration of the Sacred (2017), articulates these links.
3 Dmitri Shalin, Signing in the Flesh: https://cdclv.unlv.edu/archives/articles/shalin_ph.pdf, p 205.
4 Shalin, p 206.
5 https://theintercept.com/2022/08/05/crypto-lobby-ftx-pacs-sam-bankman-fried/
6 https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-organizational-structure-of-black-lives-matter/
7 Only Piero della Francesca painted a triumphant Christ, emerging from his coffin and dwarfing some somnolent Roman soldiers – one of the greatest paintings of the Renaissance, and of all time.
8 As noted by Vanity Fair society chronicler Dominick Dunne in The Mansions of Limbo.
9 Dunne, The Mansions of Limbo.
10 Dunne, The Mansions of Limbo.
11 Bruno Bettelheim's interviews of concentration-camp survivors reports 'Ego defenses were varied and extreme, with split personalities practically universal.'
12 https://trance-formation.com/ . Some critics question Kathy O'Brien's testimony, which names Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Robert Byrd, among others, as her employers. Jeffrey Epstein's allegedly forcing young girls to have sex with Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, Larry Summers, Prince Andrew, and many other prominent people, follow a similar pattern, though those charges also are disputed.
13 Harvard's then-President Derek Bok stated that the University had no intention of returning Epstein's donation even after his conviction as a sex offender.
14 To the M.I.T. Media Lab.
15 Epstein black book; Epstein 'Lolita Express' flight logs.
16 Certainly not from financial acumen, nor from client fees, as he had only one client, Leslie Wexner, the proprietor of lingerie-maker Victoria's Secret. Victoria's Secret also supplied many of the models used in the information-gathering division of Epstein's enterprise.
Elliott Werner writes: 'Peter, I read this posting with interest. I like to think of myself as someone who is fairly well read and who likes to keep up with what is going on in the rarified atmosphere of academia, but who also remains in touch with a lot of ordinary people. I believe (without really being able to cite any evidence) that the “group of philosophers who became known as post-modernists” have about as much influence on western culture as the foam on top of a wave has on the underlying ocean.'
Excellent, thought-provoking piece. I never thought about sadomasochism in the context you put it, but it makes perfect sense. If you're a group looking to bring down a country or civilization itself, the best ways to do that is to de-sacralize every component of society: the family unit, religion/spirituality, ethics, morals, individual sovereignty, one's relationship to nature, the biological differences between men and women, etc. I never understood post-modernism in its heyday, but I see it clearly in retrospect. It was a way for people to indulge perverted fantasies with the imprimatur of society. If you despise the narrow, puritanical constraints of an era, what better way to overthrow them than to trash everything sacred? Only much later did we recognize the post-revolutionary wreckage and the cost of jettisoning social mores.