The psychopathology of international politics
Neither left nor right understand that human beings and their nations are driven by powerful sadistic and masochistic impulses.
Some years ago, an extremely irritating professor sneered at me, “Are you saying people like being oppressed?”
I cannot remember the precise context of the remark, but I imagine it was occasioned by a dissenting opinion. That is to say, I probably disagreed with one of his frequent anti-American or anti-Israel rants. He was a dedicated Chomskyite leftist, after all, and I most certainly was not.
The professor’s question was clearly nothing but an attempt at emotional blackmail typical of the bullying sophistry usually employed by academic leftists when they find themselves cornered. But I think it also unintentionally demonstrated something rather important about how the two sides of the Western political divide view the world, and it has been much on my mind due to the Russia-Ukraine war.
For the most part, the Western right and left take very different views of international politics. Speaking in broad terms, as there are always exceptions, the left tends to take a moralist view and the right tends to take a cynical view.
The left is moralistic because it wants to create a world based on moral ideals like justice, equality, and peace. It seeks to accomplish this by building an international structure based on principles like human rights and self-determination, in which, it is hoped, all peoples can enjoy freedom from all forms of oppression—economic, social, racial, or otherwise. As a result, the left emphasizes international law and diplomacy over war, which it generally sees as an aberrant phenomenon caused by evil actors or simple misunderstanding.
The right, of course, sees things quite differently. Overall, it is cynical in the classic sense of the word: to live according to the world as it is. And for the most part, the right sees the world as a state of nature, an arena of predators and prey in which, as Thucydides put it, “The strong do as they like, and the weak suffer what they must.” The imperative, then, is to see to it that you and your allies are strong and your enemies weak. This does not necessarily mean war, but it does mean being ready for war in order to deter, intimidate, and if necessary, overcome one’s enemies. The right believes that weakness, not moral evil, is the greatest enemy of peace.
It should not be a surprise that each side of this divide views the other in decidedly negative terms.
The left sees the right’s cynicism as self-serving, morally corrupt, indifferent to injustice and suffering, and more likely to cause than prevent war. And in a nuclear age, this means the potential destruction of the planet. In effect, the left believes that cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, the results of which could be apocalyptic.
The right sees the left as at best hopelessly naïve and incapable of understanding how things work in the “real world.” Moreover, this naïveté could have horrendous consequences, because it means turning nations into prey in a world where the predators are always circling. It is not a coincidence that the right often cites the Munich Agreement as its ultimate proof, given that it is the paradigmatic example of causing a war by seeking peace.
Given the fact that war, conquest, and conflict have been a constant in human history, the right’s cynicism is understandable. But it is only fair to point out that its critique of the left as unrealistic is not necessarily correct. The left believes that the world can be changed for the better, and there is certainly historical evidence that it can be—such as the British empire’s destruction of the slave trade and the success of various movements of liberation. Violence and aggression are certainly part of human nature, but so are compassion and altruism, and there is no reason to believe that the one will always overwhelm the other. People, after all, usually do want peace of some kind. The choice to emphasize this desire for peace over the desire for war is perfectly defensible.
Where the left goes wrong, I think, is where the right goes wrong as well. Both either elide or choose to ignore a certain if disturbing truth, just as that old professor of mine did.
This truth is that human beings have a strong streak of sadism in them and an equally strong streak of masochism. Put simply, people gain pleasure from both ruling and being ruled, dominating and being dominated. Contrary to the right’s worldview, it is not so much that weakness invites aggression, as that the basic impulse toward sadism or masochism—or both—is always at work. And contrary to the left’s worldview, justice, equality, and human rights are, one regrets to say, nothing against the pleasures of the whip.
The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war seems to be a case in point. Putin and his subordinates are clearly driven by a desire to rule driven by the sadistic impulse, which is most clearly expressed in the scorched-earth brutality of Russian tactics. At the same time, however, the Russian people are displaying a masochistic impulse toward Putin himself. As best as can be determined, he remains widely popular, despite his well-known and decades-long malfeasances both inside and outside Ukraine, not to mention his brutal crackdown on dissent. The Russian people, as they have often done throughout their history, want to be ruled by a strong and dominating leader. It is difficult not to conclude that, on some level, they like being oppressed, and that Putin likes oppressing them just as much. He wants to rule, they want to be ruled, and on that basis, they have built a functioning if twisted relationship.
It is likely that the most pathological expression of the sadism/masochism dichotomy is empire. Empire is unquestionably a form of tyranny, but contrary to the left’s post-colonial theorizing, it usually does not have to impose day-to-day systemic violence on its subjects. It only needs to tap into the masochism of the ruled. As George Orwell, a fervent anti-imperialist, once noted, “The British Empire is a huge heterogeneous organization held together largely by mutual consent.” At the same time, however, empire allows the imperialists to justify the occasional eruptions of sadism necessary to maintain it.
The Roman Empire, for example, generally preferred to be at least moderately generous toward its subjects, playing on the masochistic impulse in order to reconcile them to imperial domination. At the same time, however, when it was deemed necessary, the Romans were openly and unapologetically sadistic, committing genocide and ethnic cleansing on several occasions—such as against Carthage, Gaul and Judea. Indeed, the secret of the Roman Empire’s longevity may have been that it adapted itself so perfectly to the human impulses toward sadism and masochism, both in others and in themselves. There were more than a few times, after all, when the Romans happily submitted to sadists like Caligula and Elagabalus. Sadism and masochism were intertwined even on the most basic spiritual level of Roman society, with its emphasis on submission to fate and the gods, along with the belief that Rome was destined to dominate the world.
As noted above, both the right and the left are in denial of this sadism/masochism dichotomy at the heart of human nature. The right sees things in terms of strength and weakness, which are not at all the issue. The strong can be as masochistic as the weak, and the weak as sadistic as the strong. This is how terrorism works, for example, as shown by the reaction to Islamist terror by many countries in Europe. Despite being infinitely more powerful than the terrorists they face, these countries clearly enjoy getting their noses bloodied too much to take effective action.
The left has a more serious problem, which is that it simply cannot conceive of a world in which sadistic and masochistic impulses do not only contend but also interact in distinctly pathological ways. The left’s moralistic approach to the world means that the utter amorality of pleasure and pain is unimaginable. When the left encounters this amorality, it almost immediately re-moralizes it in terms of good and evil.
This moralism, moreover, alienates the left not just from the world, but also from itself. Whether it chooses to see it or not, the left is profoundly influenced by sadistic and masochistic impulses. For example, the left identifies so passionately with the “wretched of the earth” that it is impossible not to conclude that they take at least some pleasure in doing so. The extent to which today’s leftists attempt to adopt oppressed identities is quite striking, with some going so far as to pretend to be members of other races. Being the “other,” the subject of power and violence, is clearly a source of considerable delight. Put simply, they like being oppressed.
At the same time, however, though they may try to deny it, the left is as sadistic as the right. Marx, for example, borders on the gleeful when he contemplates “smashing” the institutions of society—an impulse that may also go a long way toward explaining his racism and antisemitism. And the left’s fetishization of revolution rarely acknowledges that, as Mao noted, revolution is simply an act of violence. This point was echoed, with admirable honesty, by Michel Foucault, who asserted against Noam Chomsky’s moralism that the revolution has no morality except to seize power. Indeed, one can hardly ignore the obvious pleasure taken by much of the left in the actions of Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot and numerous others whose tendencies to sadism—and their peoples to masochism—were remarkable in scope and intensity.
Perhaps both the left and the right, in their views of international politics, suffer from one of the most basic human failings: They fail to understand that they are as human as the rest of us. They do not grasp that humans are both savage and submissive in equal measure and sometimes simultaneously, and that this drives their behavior to a much greater extent than we would like to think. The dichotomy of sadism and masochism in human affairs does not and cannot explain everything, but when it comes to relations between empires and subjects, nations large and small, tyrants and tyrannized, moralists and cynics, it is perhaps the most accurate of our meager attempts to understand the world we live in.
Photo by Remy Steinegger/World Economic Forum