Thirty Seconds Over San Francisco...

I have a favorite blog I follow, kind of a tabloid offering really: pretty girls harvested from across the web who don't suffer from any excess of modesty, and appearing alongside the pretty girls a variety of other articles and essays, offerings from the digital domain on a wide range of topics, things to think about.  Like I said, a tabloid. 

Several weeks ago I followed a link to a commentary on an essay  that kicked off a quite a discussion in some circles.  The work is the observations and musings of a woman who left New York to go to San Francisco with the specific purpose of observing a bdsm porn operation producing some of the most disgusting content available on the web.  I'm not going to speak to her descriptions of the porn, what she describes is solidly in the category of death-eater grade depravity and despair.

Nor am I going to speak to the thoughts the several commentators presented in the debate her essay inspired, specifically a discussion of the morality of presenting for profit sexuality degraded to bestial levels of brutality where the producers attempt to defend their right to contaminate the common reality on no more than the consent-to-abuse of those who participated in the production.  I'll leave those subjects to those who've already engaged with them.  No, I’m going a bit deeper into the reasons for such obscenities.  There is a  reason, and until some effort is made to expose that reason it isn’t likely much will be accomplished by way of attenuating the obscenities, much less any enduring healing.

Perhaps at this point you’re thinking something along the lines of  “isn’t it rather presumptuous of you to proceed from such assumptions?  And anyway, what makes you think you, who are not any part or portion of those people’s world, what makes you think you’re qualified to say anything at all about how they earn their living?”  A fair challenge, one I’ll answer in the following manner.

It is obvious western civilization is in the process of unraveling, equally, any serious examination of the observed failures that focuses on the motivational factors involved reveals a common defect and deformity in the empirical humanity of the protagonists.  Her essay makes an excellent entrance point for the subject because pornography drawn from the realms of bdsm is one of only a few places where the deformity is of such extreme prominence as to allow a reference standard on the pathology involved to be discerned and defined. 

I am not interested in the least in the life and times of the bdsm porn performers, what I'm interested in is how their product is both symptom and contagion vector of a disease that is doing deep and potentially lethal harm to my species.  I claim the right to speak to the subject as a matter of public health, for a contagious psychosis is every bit as much a plague as any flea borne bacteria.

Yes, that is exactly what I just said.  I just compared bdsm and the porn it inspires to bubonic plague.  Nor will I apologize for the comparison to any who might self-identify with the bdsm lifestyle, far from it, in point of fact I thank them most sincerely.  Whatever degree of self inflicted misery they've endured will not have been in vain if their endurance allows the pathogen to be identified and neutralized while still the organism of civilization has the strength to throw off the underlying affliction and recover.

Well now, that makes a pretty decent campaign speech if I do say so myself.  Lots of room to wave the flag and beat the drum, lots of room for tears and cheers and resolve renewed.  Not a bad speech.  But a speech is just words, and until the words carry understanding words can't do a damn thing to fix anything. 

Step back and take a good hard look at this sad mad world of ours.  What is the single most common attitude to be seen?  It's a total no-brainer it damn sure isn't anything to be called love.  Respect is in short supply, compassion rather hit and miss.  Greed might make a run for the title, but greed is an external comparison more than an internal attitude so greed, powerful as it is, must step to the side.  Fear?  Ah, fear is indeed very common, but fear isn't a singular thing, fear comes in ten thousand different forms, each a bit different than the other.  Fear, rational or not, is still in response to something external.  The ten thousand forms of fear are indeed power players on the stage of life, but hardly one homogenous motive.  If it isn't any of those then what is it?

I'm going to make the case the contagious pathogen corroding society, the common driving factor initiating everything from recreational perversions of the most debauched nature imaginable to financial policies that in objective fact work cruelty on a thousand times the number of people involved in some arrangement of whips and shackles might best be titled Inverted Empathy.  Two words.

Take 'em in order.  Inverted.  Upside down.  Reversed.  The opposite.  In Boolean logic it translates as "NOT." Whatever the situation might be, whatever the focus of perception, to the degree a thing is part of that perception take the exact opposite to the exact same degree.  Inverted.

Empathy?  Ah, now empathy is a much more complicated concept.  Inverted is a thing of logic while empathy is a matter of emotion.  Empathy in its' full form is a physical sensation, a manifestation in visceral perception symbolic of the emotional response to the observed  state of being of another human being.  Empathy plays a critical role in defining the polarity, for good or for ill, of the interface between any two individuals, and to a lesser degree between any individual and the society that individual inhabits. 

To explore the concept and consequences of empathy polarized into positive and negative phases is deep thought, very heavy, and please understand if you decide to pursue it very far trying for full understanding it's likely to become a very uncomfortable thought.  Take what follows as a gentle warning: taken to the extremes of the human condition it can become more than uncomfortable, it can become downright painful.  To those who are sensitive it can become more than passing painful, it can become omnipresent, subtle and cruel.  But painful or not to understand the fate and function of the uniquely human thing called empathy is the key to understanding what is happening in our world, what is happening to our world. 

I have it from those who know that in the realms of recreational pain there is an all but universal protocol known as the safe word.  The recipient has but to pronounce the agreed upon word and whatever is happening to them is to stop immediately, by that word and only that word are they released from their request.  Whispered, whimpered or screamed when they can endure no more the safe word puts an end to the matter. I mention it here because it is a needed definition for what is to follow. Like many such things it is self explanatory within the appropriate context, and like many such things a full understanding can only occur within the appropriate context.

The first fact that must be understood to understand the state of our world is this: for a person possessed of full rational humanity there is no such thing as a safe word to disable  empathy,  empathy does not understand the concept.  To greater or lesser degree empathy will effect every human being who chances to observe a moment from another human being's life.  Empathy is an inherent function of human nature, not an abstraction of the intellect internalized by some and not by others.  Empathy was, and is, nature's reminder that to a prey animal such as the weak and fragile man-ape the fate of every individual ultimately impacts the fate of the collective, perhaps the last true instinct of the species to evolve, an instinct required by the first primative social structures... the extended family, the troop growing into the tribe.

Please, don't bother to get up, I'll say it for you... bullshit.  Empathy may be real but it isn't a big deal.  Not one person in ten has done more than heard the word much less pays it any mind day to day, and if you spend thirty minutes living in the real world you'll find out just how many people really do not give a tinker's damn about their fellow man.  Just what kind of obsolete liberal crap are you trying to hustle on us? That bunch of losers are the only folks who even mention the word, and they're just trying to work someone's feelings to get a freebie handout from the government.  C'mon dude, do you really expect anyone to take you seriously?

Yes, I do expect to be taken seriously because the case can be made using the same logic used in engineering.  Granted the blocks in a diagram would be representing common emotional structures providing motive, and granted there is a statistical distribution associated to each block in the diagram giving the chances that particular structure is a major influence on any given individual, but still, when the curves are overlaid one on the other to represent reality and the numbers are run down it can be shown that it is entirely possible for a great many well known motives to effectively cancel out leaving a less than well known influence to be the key factor in the decisions that define the society.  Just because the ever more polarized nature of empathy is not a well understood thing doesn't mean it isn't a massively powerful thing impacting reality.

Empathy is like a lot of other words describing an emotion, in the dictionary they all sound like an all or nothing proposition.  Perhaps the infatuations of physical lust masquerading as love might qualify as a totally different frame of mind, but for the most part any emotion is actually just a force vector modifying a person's frame of mind, not replacing it.  In the dictionary a word representing an emotion is most usually defined in the most common polarity of that emotion, but unless the language has a defined antonym little to no mention is made of the opposites, the inverses created as the inevitable negation of the original definition. 

I will assert to you an immense amount of genuine anti-life evil flourishes in the English speaking lands, evil sheltered and hidden by a language that provides no symbols by which to label and examine what is hidden in the perceptual voids created by omissions in the very language that provides the form and structure of thought. 

If language is accepted as a primary defining element of culture then a language which does not have a specific word-symbol to represent a thing most likely serves a culture where that thing is not well known.  Conversely of course if there is a discrete word-symbol it is reasonable to believe a thing is common enough in the culture to require such a symbol.  English is the preeminent language of Great Britain and the United States, it is a common tongue across the world, and English does not mount an antonym for the (assumed) positive nature of the actions and decisions induced by the instinct of empathy.

So, what does empathy look like when it's operating on the negative side of the line?  Just what does inverted empathy look like?  What causes empathy to invert in the first place?  Fair questions all, it is time and high time to begin exposing the symptoms of this all to common disease. 

The second fact of life that must be brought into clear focus to understand the state of the modern world is this:  the human being is in nature's scheme of things a prey animal and as a prey animal is by instinct always in search of security from the predators that threaten life.  

The bottom line on empathy is it began as part of the human animals' defense mechanisms.  As pre-tool, and therefore pre-weapon, prey animals we humans really only had cooperation to protect ourselves against our natural enemies.  Acting as a group we could mount a viable defense, acting alone the chances of victory were usually suicidal slim.  Empathy evolved to enhance the group's defense efforts by transferring to those most able to mount a rescue counterattack the terror and pain of the one under attack already converted into aggressive rage focused on the source of threat.  Empathy is activated by the perception of distress in another human, the enduring value of the instinct the enhanced survival of the species. 

If empathy is a survival based instinct how has it become so deformed as to effectively become a major threat to survival?  The answer?  As an instinct empathy is only motivation to action, instinct does not mandate the nature of the response.  That is quite open to tactical interpretation in the moment, it has to be.  Of all instincts empathy more than any depends on the actions of the intellect to fulfill the function of the instinct.

As any who have ever experienced the visceral impact of empathy will know it can be very uncomfortable.  The rational response to that pain is the same as the rational response to any other pain: find a way to put an end to the discomfort.  Nature's intent was the discomfort be ended by securing the well being of a fellow human known to be in distress. But humanity no longer lives in the world nature intended for it, humanity lives in the ever more conflicted and conflicting environment of the social. 

No longer prey for creatures hunting sustenance humanity is now its' own predation, in a very real sense we have become cannibalistic compared to our primitive beginnings. Everyday a hundred forms of media advertise the nature of humanities newfound cannibalism.  With each exposure the instincts of every human so exposed are battered and besieged by situations where the conventions of society contradict the primal instincts of group survival.  The situation has been emotionally untenable for quite some time, something had to give.  And something has.

It is common to hear people called heartless, uncaring, selfish and cruel.  It is not uncommon for many to conclude that true empathy and all that empathy empowers is dying if not dead in the modern world.  Oddly enough our situation would be more        manageable if empathy did actually die.  But it does not, what is called dead is simply dormant, apathetic, near some zero value on the x-axis of a graph showing the ethical range of behavior found in the human being. 

It is when the discomfort of empathy frustrated forces responses that in objective fact fall  below the ethical zero, responses in the negative values of callous cruelty that the instinct of empathy becomes the driving force for a diverse and often disgusting spectrum of behaviors.  Inverted Empathy occurs as continual exposure to the duress of others desensitizes a human, and the human in defense of his own comfort chooses to respond in the negative rather than endure the ever increasing discomfort of not being able to respond at all. 

Indulge me a bit for the next few days and test the theory.  Consider the brutality found in pornography based on sadomasochism, but equally hold in mind the fear based cruelties of the socio-political, the callous disregard of a greed driven marketplace as representing inversions of the other manifestations of the primal human.  Consider the responses and rationalizations offered by those who defend the viability of each of these social structures.  Some might say while all three certainly create distress there really isn't enough in common between them to make a comparison viable, but I disagree.  I'll assert to you that the commonality becomes crystal clear when you examine the misery created by any of the three from the perspective of polarized empathy, empathy inverted to avoid the discomfort of empathy held impotent to alleviate the misery observed. 

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Oh, concerning the title of this essay?  I really had a bit of trouble with that, in the end decided to go with something taken from history.  The last time an enemy threatening the United States sat smug thinking it was safely out of range a character named Jimmy Doolittle did what was considered impossible, launching medium bombers from an aircraft carrier to strike the enemy homeland.  It was more a propaganda mission than anything, just a way to let the enemy know we could reach him, a morale boost for a population reeling from defeat after defeat to the hands of that enemy.  As a combat mission it really wasn't that much of a much, but it served its' purpose: it was gutsy and heroic and it did make the enemy think twice about being so very smug about things. 

The full story of the raid was told after the war in the book become movie "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo."   But the threat facing us now is just as severe, more severe in some ways than a conventional enemy nation, and the porn production company the lady detailed in her essay that got me thinking on the whole business is an absolutely prime example of the threat, and it does operate out of San Francisco, the very port from which Doolittle and his raiders sailed.  So somehow it just seemed an appropriate title for an essay attempting to reveal where the enemy of today really hides. 

A bit of history in need of repeating, you know?  The decent folk of today are reeling every bit as much to the victories won by the perverts as the nation was to the defeats suffered to the hands of the Japanese in 1942, it is time and high time to let the enemy know he is known as an enemy, and that the decent folk can indeed reach him... it's time to spend thirty seconds over San Francisco and make the perverted fuckheads taking profit by contaminating the common reality realize they're not as safe as they thought they were.