Why We Succumb…
F
irst of all, other people can be manipulated in a way that, say, our teeth cannot. We can convince another person that he alone is to blame for the problems in our relationship
, but we cannot “convince” a tooth that it is not infected when it is. We can bully another person into believing that he is responsible for our overeating; we cannot bully the fat off our bellies.
Secondly, the general lack of integrity
in those around us positively enables the kind of “blame game” that goes on in relationships. People who are raised badly, who end up with weak wills, weak characters and manipulative habits, can be easily blamed and controlled.
If we could only achieve the kind of integrity
that, say, a tooth has, we would do an enormous service to the mental health and happiness of the world.
Enabling and the Vengeance of the Slave
Allowing other people to treat us badly is a subtle form of aggression against them.
It arises from a fairly primitive time in our species, when slavery and hyper-control dominated our interactions.
If a slave hates his master – as deep down he surely does – but cannot retaliate against him in any violent or assertive manner, what are his options?
Well, when you want somebody dead, but you cannot kill him openly,
your best option is to exacerbate his unhealthy habits
.
In other words, a slave
can eventually take vengeance on his master by continually bringing him a drink, sitting with him while he drinks, and endlessly offering to refill his glass.
On a psychological level, the slave
can effectively re-create his own misery in the mind of his master by
both provoking and submitting to bullying
.
Every time the master
beats the slave, the misery and self-loathing of the master increases. Every time the master screams at the slave, the soul of the master dies a little more. Every whip of the lash kills the master’s capacity for love, contentment and peace of mind.
This, of course, is Nietzsche’s
“slave morality,” in which the slave takes a form of masochistic satisfaction and dark glee in the spiritual destruction of his master. The passive-aggressive “moral superiority” of the slave is the only satisfaction that such a beaten-down creature can hope for.
The problem, however, is that by continually pursuing the insidious satisfaction of passive-aggressive masochism, the slave
often becomes dangerously addicted to this form of vengeance.
In other words,
the slave becomes addicted to having a master
and finds life without this form of underhanded revenge entirely lacking in stimulation and satisfaction.
It’s not entirely in the past…
Now, since most of us are raised as virtual slaves within our families and schools, it is all too common for us to become addicted to having masters – and thus attempting to “master” our rulers through self-pitying moral superiority and the enabling, or supporting, of self-destructive behaviours on the part of those who command us.
If left unexamined, this drive to destroy those who control us inevitably leads us to seek out those who will control us, and then endlessly attempt to destroy them.
As mentioned earlier, the weapon of the slave is “moral superiority,” or beatific self-righteousness. To
really
undo his master, the slave must set up a standard of “forgiveness,” and “unconditional love,” by which he tortures the infected conscience of his master.
The way that this paradigm translates itself into modern relationships
– particularly romantic, but also parental – is that both parties intermittently take on the roles of master and slave, or persecutor and persecuted, or “unjust attacker” and “self-righteous victim.” Since their lives are based on attack, condemnation, self-righteous vengeance and frustrated control, they remain in a continual state of provocation, attack, withdrawal and moral pomposity, creating an endless closed loop of ever-increasing frustration, bitterness, fear and resentment.
On a more overt level, we can see this kind of interaction occurring in the typical cycle of an abusive marriage
. Let’s be stereotypical and talk about the husband as the abuser.
Over a few weeks, Bruce
becomes increasingly tense and snappy. In turn, Sheila responds to his growing aggression through provocation, either in the form of complete obsequience – which irritates him – or endless questions and nagging defiance, which inflames him. Bruce then asserts his dominance and releases his tension by attacking Sheila in a titanic blow-up either physical or verbal in nature.
However, since Bruce
has asserted his dominance in such a hysterical and abusive manner, the power in the relationship now passes from Bruce to Sheila.
Since Bruce
has acted so obviously unjustly, Sheila now gains control of the moral narrative of their relationship, and uses it to bully Bruce.
After his attack, she threatens to leave him. He comes crawling back, apologizing and begging for forgiveness
– now playing the part of the slave instead of the master. Sheila withholds her “forgiveness,” enjoying the new power that she has over him, and abusing him in turn, both by torturing him morally and staying in the relationship.
When we disapprove of someone morally but remain in an intimate and supporting relationship
with him, we are acting entirely immorally ourselves.
If I work for a corrupt
boss, and am fully aware that he is stealing from his customers but continue to work for him, I am enabling his corruption as surely as if I were performing it myself. I may attempt to assuage my conscience by nagging at my boss to be a “better” man, or tentatively bringing up my “objections” in meetings, but as time goes on, and I do not quit, everyone understands that my nagging is just a ritual designed to enable me to continue to take money from a corrupt person or organization while continuing to pretend to myself that I am moral.
By continuing to work for this corrupt
man – while professing my own devotion to moral principles – I am clearly communicating to him that morality is simply a tool for self-deception, and that ethical exhortation is merely self-medicating hypocrisy. This “enables” his corruption even more so than the customers he steals from, who would doubtless flee his predation if they discovered it.
Thus remaining in relationships
with immoral people while complaining that they are immoral is one of the most subtle forms of abuse in the world. It is revoltingly hypocritical, insofar as it uses ethics to enable and justify corruption.
This is the difference between the mugger who steals from you because he wants to buy a drink, and the socialist who steals from you because she wants to
“help the poor.”
When you look closely for this kind of interaction in the relationships
of those around you – or your own relationships, for that matter – it becomes blindingly obvious and virtually omnipresent.
A man
“persecutes” his wife for her lack of sexual desire, and then plays the victim when he is criticized for not helping around the house. When the woman is attacked for her lack of sexual interest, she responds with a passive aggressive “moral” argument: “I do not feel like having sex because you are not emotionally available, or we are not close enough, or you yelled at me yesterday, or I am worried about finances, or I am stressed out because I have too much housework, or you don’t help enough with the kids etc etc etc.”
If we break down the man’s moral
argument, he is basically saying: “I agreed to pursue a monogamous relationship with you, giving up sex with all other women. This creates an implicit obligation on your part to have sex with me since you hold a monopoly on sexual interactions. By continually refusing to have sex with me, you are setting a terrible and unjust trap wherein I will be tempted to pursue an affair, which will result in my personal and financial destruction. Since you are using sex to punish and control me in our relationship, but I am not allowed to pursue sex outside of this relationship, you are putting me up against the wall, which is a most hateful and unloving thing to do.”
His wife, on the other hand, is saying something like:
“I do not feel close to you, because you are not emotionally available, which is a failure of your duties as a husband. You also yelled at me yesterday, which is abusive, and also a failure on your part as a husband. I complain about finances because you do not make enough money. I’m stressed about housework because you do not help enough. The kids are driving me crazy because I always have to be the disciplinarian, while you get to be the ‘fun’ dad who just plays with them. Thus, you are cold, lazy, unambitious and abusive. In fact, asking for sex when you know that I feel this way is further evidence of your coldness and abusive tendencies!”
As we can see, if we look closely, what is really going on here is a not-too-subtle tug of war over the
moral narrative
of the relationship, which is essentially a revolving slave-to-master interaction.
Deep down, we all know that if we can get someone to admit that a certain behaviour is morally wrong, he can in no way continue to defend that behaviour, and must change.
As I have argued from the very beginning of my podcast series, morality is the most powerful tool in the arsenal of mankind.
Whoever controls
“morality” controls the relationship.
We all understand this instinctively, and so continually use stories
and mythologies to attempt to gain control of the moral narrative of a relationship.
The reason that we never fully succeed is that we are perpetually creating
“rules” for our partner that we do not follow ourselves.
We are all perfectly aware of this kind of hypocrisy
in others when we read about priests who molest children, anti-homosexual Congressman who solicit gay sex in bathroom stalls, or people like Oprah who continually talk about feminism and “woman power” while simultaneously presenting an endless cavalcade of fear-mongering stories about attacks on women. Dr. Phil is another example of this kind of phenomenon. He continually attacks those who use violence to resolve their problems while praising soldiers to the skies.
There are several common mythologies at work in romantic relationships
, which we would be wise to learn by heart.
“You Lack Empathy“
The first and most common moral
mythology – particularly for women – is the essential criticism: “You lack empathy.”
The criticism of
“selfishness” is so common that it can be hard to hear after a while.
Many, many women truly believe that if their husbands were genuinely empathetic, their marriages would be enormously improved, and their needs would be met.
The simple truth of the fact, though, is that most people are happy to talk about what they think and feel if they meet with genuine acceptance and respect.
What women are really saying when they complain that their husbands
“lack empathy” is that their husbands are not thinking and feeling what their wives
want
them to think and feel.
Let’s look at a common example.
The horror of chores…
A fairly constant complaint from women is that their husbands seem supernaturally resistant to initiating chores
.
“
Why oh why is it that I have to ask him a dozen times to take out the garbage? It’s not like garbage day magically changes from week to week! Why can he not get it through his head that I don’t want to have to manage him like some sort of mother? And if he’s
not
going to take out
the garbage, why doesn’t he just
tell
me so I can do it
myself
, instead of just continually promising that he’s going to do it ‘in a few minutes’?”
This is a clear example of
“moral positioning.” Here is a translation of the subtext:
“
You’re sooo not going to get laid!”
Or, alternatively:
“He does not respect my needs, he is not pulling his weight in this household, he is just manipulating me by appeasing me in the moment, while having no intention of doing what I ask. He is passive-aggressively frustrating me – he is selfish and lazy, and is turning me into a nag, so that
I
end up looking like the bad person when
he’s
the one who’s not doing his chores!”
On the surface, this seems like a seductively appealing narrative. Who could fail to sympathize with such a hard done by and put upon woman, struggling to maintain a household while her husband lazes and obfuscates on the couch?
Sadly, it is all pure nonsense.
By attempting to control his behaviour through nagging
repetition, this woman is bypassing the most important question she needs to ask about
why he is doing what he is doing
(or not doing).
In other words, she claims that he is not being empathetic towards
her
needs, while at the same time she is not being at all empathetic towards
his
needs.
Clearly, by not taking out the garbage, he is communicating to her that he does not want to take out the garbage.
By making up a story that portrays him as lazy and negligent, his wife is
creating a mythology about his motivation
rather than honestly attempting to understand it.
This is not science
or logic or empiricism or common sense or intimacy, but
religion
.
Remember, when bad things happen in the world of religion,
“sinners” are invented to take the blame.
In this case, the
“sinner” is laziness – or the husband in general.
We may as well say, when striving to understand the cause of an illness,
“Satan made me sick!” Sure, it’s a comforting story with a protagonist and antagonist and a satisfyingly vindictive moral theme.
Sadly, it just has nothing to do with reality
whatsoever.
If I am genuinely
“lazy,” I may possess that trait for any one of a myriad number of reasons. I may be depressed or lonely, or feel over-controlled, or sense that my life is going in the wrong direction, or have any variety of medical deficiencies or ailments, or I may believe that my life lacks meaning and purpose, or I may be worried about possible moral transgressions on my part, or I may feel that I am embedded in a corrupt or compromising work environment, or my children may be going through a certain phase that reminds me of sad times in my own childhood, or I may be worried that I no longer love my wife…
There can be 10,000 or more reasons underlying my
“lack of motivation.”
A wife who does not sit down with sensitivity
and empathy to ask her husband why he is unmotivated is just a bully and has no moral right whatsoever to criticize her husband for
his
lack of sensitivity and empathy.
Nagging and Humiliation
She is also humiliating him in a way that can be hard to see.
If we are married to someone, we must certainly claim to love
and respect him above all others. If we treat him, however, as if he is a “defective household chore robot,” then we are implicitly denigrating him in truly terrible ways.
When a wife marches up to her husband, demands that he take out the garbage, and implies that he is lazy and selfish
, she is clearly communicating the following:
“
I know that I promised to love and respect you for all eternity, but right now getting the garbage outside the house is infinitely more important to me than understanding your soul. In fact, I’m perfectly willing to attack your nature, ethics and initiative in order to get you to take the trash out. On my scale of values, moving the trash is an infinite plus. Understanding your soul
is not even on my list!
”
To see that your true personality and being is not even on the list of your wife’s priorities – and that you have been displaced by empty and trivial tasks – is unbearably humiliating.
If this humiliation were truly
felt
by all the spouses in the world, it would be like a neutron bomb in the world of marriage.
Marriages, like buildings, would be left standing – there would just be no people in them.
The Abuse of Assumptions
As I talked about in my book
“On Truth,” morality is almost always used as a weapon of control and dominance.
When your wife marches up to you and demands in a shrill and exasperated tone for you to
“PLEASE take out the
garbage
!” – implying that you are lazy and selfish – there are really only two possibilities.
You are in fact lazy and selfish..?
Naturally, if you
are
lazy and selfish – and we assume that these pejorative terms accurately represent the entire sum of your personality – then attacking you for being lazy and selfish after voluntarily choosing you as a life partner is patently ridiculous.
If my wife could have married any man with any accent in the world, but chose me, it would seem rather strange for her to attack me for having a British accent, claiming that every man with a British accent – who is not currently residing in
England – is a pretentious phony.
If I
am
a pretentious phony, then it is quite silly for my wife to attack me for
being
a pretentious phony. If I am not a pretentious phony, then my wife would only use that abusive term to hurt me – and she would only be able to hurt me with it if I was not in fact a pretentious phony, or disliked pretentious phonies myself.
If I were a pretentious phony, then clearly I would have developed that personality trait because I lacked self-esteem
, and so felt a need to portray myself as wiser or smarter than I actually was in order to gain the good approval of others. (In other words, as a self-defensive “initial strike” against potential attacks.)
Now, I would only have developed this low self-esteem
and dependence upon the approval of others if I had been persistently attacked and condemned by my parents when I was a child.
If, when expressing my authentic opinions, I had been dismissed as an ignorant philistine, I would then be sorely tempted to manufacture more
“sophisticated” opinions in order to avoid being attacked.
In other words, I would be
“pretentious” as an adult because I had been verbally abused as a child.
It is, then,
entirely abusive
for my wife to verbally abuse me for traits that have resulted from a history of having been verbally abused.
If you are
“lazy,” it is generally because you feel a significant disconnect between your choices, your actions, and the effect you can have on your environment.
In psychological studies, when chickens or rats are given random punishments and rewards, they tend to become inert, because they cannot create any sense of rational cause and effect between their choices, their actions and their environment.
Personal energy and initiative, in other words, generally arise from a feeling of
efficacy
.
Depressed or inert people feel that their
“locus of control” resides somewhere outside themselves. A micromanaged child will not easily develop a sense of personal initiative since his entire being is dedicated towards satisfying the endless and contradictory demands of other people.
It’s tough to plan your future when you’re dodging bullets.
I knew a woman who, when making toast, had to suffer through her mother hovering over her and constantly correcting everything she was doing. She should have brushed the breadcrumbs off the bread before putting them into the toaster, the heat was on just a little bit too high, she should not turn away from the toaster while it was in operation, in case something caught fire – and when all was said and done, she did not clean the toaster nearly well enough!
The amount of stress involved in heating two slices of bread was ridiculous. This woman had virtually no chance to develop her own methodology of thinking, of testing cause and effect, of deciding
for herself
how even minor goals could be best achieved.
Inevitably, she found herself largely paralyzed in the realm of major life decisions, and tended to navigate from moment to moment, based on the approval or disapproval
of those around her. She wanted to achieve great things with her career, but ended up working as a secretary despite a very good education, because she had simply not developed the capacity to identify and pursue goals on her own accord, and according to own judgment – and, of course, remained hypersensitive to criticism, which crippled her ability to negotiate, and so progress in any career.
Sadly, her paralysis also invited micromanagement from others. She would proclaim her desire to achieve a certain goal, but then would take no steps towards it, while continually complaining about the difficulties of achieving it. This would invite an endless stream of people into her life who would help her set up action plans, alternative approaches, proactive time management goals and so on.
I never did see anyone actually ask what she felt when she sat down to attempt to achieve her goals.
If that question had been asked, and an honest
answer had been provided, real progress could have been made.
Unfortunately, by telling her how to achieve her goals, people were in fact stepping into the role of her mother
, since when we tell people what to do, we automatically denigrate their existing abilities. If I met you on the street and explained to you in great detail how to put your left foot forward, and then your right foot forward in order to walk, you would scarcely feel elevated by my opinion of your existing ability to walk.
In the same way, when a wife denigrates her husband for failing to initiate and complete chores
without instruction, she is actually abusing him, denigrating him, and re-creating exactly the same circumstances – and exactly the same abuse – that prompted his inertia to begin with.
And yet, if you listen to her surface story, you will likely walk away entirely convinced that
she
is the victim in the interaction with her husband.
On the other hand, if you are not lazy, but your wife tells you that you are, then clearly she is using the pejorative to manipulate you.
Keep your eyes peeled. Do not be fooled.