As I See It: Our pleasure from the pain of others 

By JON HUER

Published: 03-24-2023 2:11 PM

Of all things, “pleasure” is simple enough to define: It is the “agreeable feeling” we have when we get what we want. “Pain” (or displeasure), on the other hand, is our inability to avoid what we don’t want. For most of us most of the time, pleasure is experienced physically, such as water for thirst, food for hunger, or coolness to escape heat, and so on. We could call this type of pleasure our natural pleasure, which in essence is proportional to our ability to control our physical environment, such as finding water when we are thirsty, or driving instead of walking.

Emerging as a frontier nation lacking civilized comfort and convenience, American society has pursued this physical pleasure with the greatest zeal known to humanity: first as survival, then as comfort and convenience, then as natural pleasure on demand. “Everyone is preoccupied,” Alexis De Tocqueville famously described 19th-century frontier Americans, “caring for the slightest needs of the body.” Historian Ross Robertson similarly commented: “A disproportionate number of innovations that make life easier had their first practical applications in the United States.” Given such historical origins, our zeal for easy life in America is perhaps understandable, to the extent that American society consumes more natural pleasure-creating energy than any other single nation on earth. Our beer is almost always cold and restaurant water almost always comes with ice. Such preoccupation with comfort and convenience may be the sign of an immature civilization, but still seen as harmless and even appealing in its childlike delight.

But there is another kind of pleasure we as humanity have developed that’s rather peculiar to the Homo Sapiens, quite harmful and mostly evil: an agreeable feeling that is created at the pain of other human beings. This type of pleasure is released in the master who controls his slave, or a Nazi guard who controls his death-camp inmates, or a CEO who terrorizes his employees. As opposed to the natural pleasure, such as water for thirst, we could call this type of agreeable feelings our social pleasure since it involves other human beings. Such social pleasure materializes in our ability to control other people — with political power, military ranks, wealth — in short, institutionalized power. As a rule, the pleasure of hollering at people, and watching them cower in powerless terror, belongs to the CEO, not the mailroom clerk. The slave master, the Nazi guard, or the CEO can enjoy the power to dehumanize human beings into things — almost God-like power — that creates immense social pleasure. In this process of creating social pleasure, “people” are mere things to their controllers; they are not human at all. Such pleasure is actually “anti-social pleasure” (and evil) because power that creates it, by definition, is used only to deprive humans of their humanity.

All pleasures, both natural and social, are experienced — unlike collective comfort and convenience — as solitary acts and cannot be shared with others. In a dictatorial society, nobody can share the dictator’s absolute pleasure. The pleasure of water means nothing unless you are thirsty. All of such pleasure-producing activities are conceived alone, done alone and enjoyed alone. People who value pleasure above communality are, inevitably, a sad lonely crowd.

Of course, natural pleasure can be obtained as a single person’s solitary pursuit that begins and ends in that person alone in his desire-and-satisfaction cycle, such as hunger and eating. If a man overeats himself to death, that’s his own sorry funeral and nobody else’s. But social pleasure is produced only at the pain of another human being: Wealth means nothing unless there is a poor man to lord over. No social pleasure is possible in anything we do in society unless it is obtained at the pain of another human being experienced to the same extent of pleasure. There is no pleasure of great power or wealth on a deserted island where there is nobody else around to suffer the pain for your pleasure. We don’t get any agreeable feeling by beating a tree or a rock. All social pleasures are created by another human being’s suffering, preferably screaming in pain and begging for your mercy. On the other hand, there is no social pleasure in brandishing your power or wealth to an otherworldly monk like Saint Francis or threatening to inflict pain to a die-hard stoic like Marcus Aurelius. Thus, the social pleasure of power rises and falls at the same rate as the pain of its victim rises and falls, and the pain of its victim rises and falls at the same rate that the controlling power’s rises and falls. Simply put, the pleasure of power only at the existence of its suffering victim.

Why is there so much frenzy in America to be successful — to get ahead and cause pain in others weaker than ourselves — in a society sworn to uphold equality among all as its national creed? The painful, but truthful, answer is that we as Americans claim equality but don’t actually believe in it. Nothing would be more painful, almost like eternity in hell, than being condemned to equality in society, everybody being forever equal to one another. In a nation of so many losers (99%?), no self-respecting American could bear the idea that they would all go to their graves as equals. Why even bother to live if we cannot get ahead (in essence, to inflict pain on others)? Doesn’t success bring power? Doesn’t power bring victims? Don’t victims suffer under your power? Isn’t success your American Dream?

The only trouble is that, by the sheer logic of probability, you are more likely to become a loser than a winner.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and Professor Emeritus, lives in Greenfield.

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