Monthly Archives: October 2013

The Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death

In “The Cult Leader as Agent of a Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death,” Stewart Twemlow and George Hough examine the case of Jim Jones and his followers of the Peoples Temple. On November 18, 1978, in Guyana, approximately 900 men, women and children perished after drinking from a metal vat of grape Kool-Aid mixed with poison.

The authors analyze the transcript (based on a tape recording) of the very last “White Knight” sermons delivered by Jones to his followers. As external threats against Jonestown mounted, Jones increased his demands, ultimately insisting that his followers be prepared to die for him as the “ultimate expression of their loyalty.”

As Jones expounds on why he embraces death—and why other members of the group should do so—the crowd becomes “audibly more enthusiastic.” Later in his sermon, as Jones reiterates that it is time to die, members of the community are “cheering exuberantly at the idea.” From this point forward, there will emerge numerous spontaneous exhortations by audience members—for the community to embrace its death.

In the midst of the numerous calls for their communal death, a lone female audience member raised objections. However, there were no other objections. Appeals for communal death and farewell testimonials increased exponentially. One loyal member spoke to Jones in tears: “We’re all ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we’re ready. All the rest of the sisters and brothers are with me.”

On February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels spoke before 15,000 people at the Sportpalast. The German sixth army had just suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, and the seriousness of the war began to come home to the German people. Goebbels exhorted his flock to commit to the war effort. Please view an excerpt of the speech here.

After pointing to “rows of wounded soldiers” sitting in the front, Goebbels posed a series of questions. The audience, Goebbels said, represented the whole nation, and their answers would be “answers for the German people throughout the world, and especially for our enemies who are listening to us on the radio.”

Goebbels asked: “Are you ready to follow the Fueher and to wage war with wild determination through all the turns of fate”? And: “Is your confidence in the Fuehrer greater, more unshakable than ever before”? And: “Are you absolutely and completely ready to follow him wherever he goes and do all that is necessary”? An ear-splitting Ja! (yes) was the reply to each question. Stormy applause increased in intensity with each of Goebbel’s questions.

At the climax of his speech, Goebbels screamed: “Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, more total and more radical than we could ever imagine today”? Pandemonium broke out in the Sportpalast. “Now, Volk,” Goebbels raved, “arise and storm, break loose.” Shouts of “Heil” flowed through the hall, thousands of voices joining in as if one man. “Fuehrer command, we follow.”

“The tide had irrevocably shifted against the German war effort in the fall of 1942. The German military was perfectly aware of this situation. General Alfred Jodl: ‘When the catastrophe of winter 1941-42 broke, it became clear especially to the Fueher that victory could no longer be achieved.’

The machinery of destruction and annihilation went into high gear at the very moment the war was lost. The Wehrmacht fought for three years and the nation was mobilized in a total war effort notwithstanding the leadership’s knowledge that this war effort would not make a difference in the eventual outcome.

Death was talked up as the only way for soldiers to redeem themselves. In the cruel metaphysics of the Third Reich, the only way to be a man was to be dead. Goebbels and Hitler deliberately prepared for death—their own and that of the nation—on the funeral pyre made of the ruins of their imperial dreams.”

Michael Geyer in Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany

In their study of Jonestown, Twemlow and Hough state that a charismatic leader can “inspire his followers to actualize a psychotic and co-created fantasy of masochistic group death.” Group members may “heroically choose to die rather than to become crushed by enemy forces closing in.” The leader is like a pied piper who “leads the community of the faithful” precisely where they have “unconsciously directed him to lead them.” Joseph Goebbels was the pied piper of Nazi Germany, leading his people into the valley of death.

In subsequent speeches and published documents, Goebbels continued to exhort the German people to die. In another speech at the Sportpalast on June 5, 1943, he explains that “the laws of war are harsh. Millions of German soldiers today have to be ready to die on the battlefield for their people.” As the war on the Eastern Front progressed, he was satisfied to note that German soldiers “go into battle with devotion, like congregations going into service.”

In his pamphlet of September 26, 1943, Goebbels explained that “the duty of the individual during war extends to sacrificing his life for the life of his nation.” On a speech delivered on April 20, 1945, on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday—near the end of the war and Germany’s devastating defeat—Goebbels stated:

We will never desert him, no matter how dangerous the hour. We stand with him, as he stands with us—in Germanic loyalty as we have sworn, as we shall fulfill. We do not need to tell him, for he knows and must know: “Fueher command!—We will follow!”

What is the difference between how Jim Jones seduced and led his followers to die at Jonestown…and how Joseph Goebbels seduced and led his people to sacrifice their lives for Germany? Weren’t Hitler and Goebbels “charismatic leaders,” “pied pipers” who “led the community of the faithful” by inspiring their followers to “heroically choose to die rather than to become crushed by enemy forces closing in”?

Wouldn’t it be fair to say that Hitler and Goebbels led the German people to “actualize a psychotic and co-created fantasy of masochistic group death”? The difference between Jonestown and Nazi Germany is that Jim Jones led 900 people to their deaths, whereas the words and actions of Hitler and Goebbels led to the deaths of nearly 8 million Germans. The difference is in the number of people who participated in the social movement, and the magnitude of destruction that was generated. Yet, as I observed in a previous issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter, we rarely if ever use words like masochism and psychosis in relationship to political and historical phenomenon.

Well over 200 million people were killed in the twentieth century as a result of political violence generated by nations. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says that the twentieth century was dominated by the “politics of organized insanity.” Yet nowhere do we find a concept of psychopathology to characterize the destructive and often bizarre events in that occur on the stage of politics. Why is this the case?

Why don’t we use terms like “masochism” to describe how soldiers (and citizens) are willing to “die for their countries”? Daniel Goldhagen (1996) observes that the Nazis were in the grip of a “hallucinatory ideology” and that their writings about the Jews were so fantastic and divorced from reality that “anyone reading them might conclude that they were the produce of the collective scribes of an insane asylum.” Why do we hesitate to use a term like “psychosis” to characterize the Nazi belief system?

For further reading on this topic, please see my paper on collective psychopathology.

Despite the fact that defeat was staring the Nazi regime in the face, it persisted in its attempt to restructure Europe’s racial composition through mass murder. During the summer of 1944, after the Allied landings in Normandy, German casualties reached levels never before seen: over 215,000 German soldiers were killed in July, and nearly 350,000 in August. With defeat unavoidable, the Nazi regime persisted in sending its soldiers to their deaths in hundreds of thousands.

The result was casualties on a colossal scale—so much so that Germany in January 1945 became the site of what perhaps was the greatest killing frenzy ever seen. The last months of the war were by far the most bloody. In January 1945 alone, more than 450,000 German soldiers lost their lives (a considerably greater number of soldiers than either the United Kingdom or the United States lost during the entire war). In February, March, and April, the number of German military dead approached 300 thousand per month.

Richard Bessel (2004) in Nazism and War

Heroic Masochism (new paper)

Perhaps nothing has been more detrimental to scholarship than the dissociation of the study of politics and history from psychology. Why this will to separate one domain from the other? Perhaps in order to maintain the illusion of politics and history as a “sacred space”—not bound to limitations and ordinary human motives.

During my many years studying societal or collective forms of violence, I’ve often used the term “sacrifice” in writings and lectures. More recently (e.g., discussing the First World War in this Newsletter), I’ve preferred the terms “slaughter” or “destruction” or “self-destruction.” By using these words (as compared to “sacrifice”), one strips radical forms of collective violence of transcendental meaning.

I often reflect on the fact that I rarely (more accurately, almost never) have come across the term “masochism” in hundreds of books I’ve read on battle, warfare and soldiers. The title of Steven Gardiner’s paper, “Heroic Masochism,” provides illumination. By linking the term “masochism” to the term “heroism,” the idea of sacrifice for one’s nation loses its glamor.

A veteran of the Second World War stated that, “The basic hero is the dead soldier.” According to Carolyn Marvin, “Blood sacrifice preserves the nation. Society depends on the death of its own members at the hands of the group.” If there was no such thing as a hero (a human being willing to die for his or her country), there could be no such thing as blood sacrifice. Without blood sacrifice, what would become of the idea of the nation?

We prefer to separate political causes from the behavior of soldiers. Though we may disagree with a particular war, we honor and revere soldiers for their sacrifices. However, is it possible to separate warfare from the behavior of soldiers? Doesn’t the very existence of warfare depend on the fact that some people are willing (or required) to sacrifice their lives?

We are aware of the social and historical meanings bound to the ideology of warfare and behavior of soldiers. Military organizations function according to the idea of “honor.” Soldiers conceive of their actions as noble sacrifices made in the name of and for the sake of the group.

However, what about the actual experience of soldiers: the psychic meaning of his or her endurance of pain and suffering; willingness to entertain the possibility of death and bodily mutilation. This is the subject of Steven Gardiner’s important paper.

The extracts here have been substantially edited by the LSS staff—for purposes of ease of reading and comprehension in Newsletter format. We hope you will read this important paper in its entirety, which appears here.

Thanks so much for your time and attention.

Excerpts from Heroic Masochism appear below

Soldiers, Misery and Death

Soldiers practice being miserable, and thereby learn to cope with the heightened emotions and flaring tempers brought on by chronic fatigue, unpredictable meals, and bad weather. Soldiers learn about their own mortality, the most ambivalent lesson: the reality and finality of death. It is precisely death that is the center of what it means to “be a (military) man.” Instead of being the one who expels, I become that which is expelled, leaving behind not myself, but a rotting corpse.

Purging Weakness

Every soldier is monitored and expected to self-monitor constantly for signs of weakness—that must be purged. Such weakness, of course, already exists in each of us by virtue of the actual fragility of our bodies, and our lives in the face of punishing climates, deadly weapons, and opportunistic infections.

To turn abject, penetrable and soft bodies into soldiers, institutions perform comprehensive surveillance. They create and demand high stake performances, monitor and test urine, blood and feces—and measure body fat percentages. The despised properties become a permanent part of the soldierly self. He (or she) must never forget what must be rejected, and this is paired with the special understanding that every soldier—no matter how hard—always risks slipping into abjection, and thus expulsion from the social/institutional body of the military.

In this context of ruthless competition, the myth of masculine plenitude is generated, a myth that amounts to the displacement of a shared human legacy of inevitable abjection—displaced not only onto women, but onto feminizable subjects. It is the context in which gender-authorizing institutions—men’s clubs, fraternities, religious organizations, schools, colleges and professions—have thrived. These institutions certify certain forms of masculinity and its privileges, often marking such belonging with rites that paradoxically involve reminders and experiences of abjection, including whipping, flailing, beating, and other forms of terrorization. The very rites so often used both to solemnize institutional awards of gender and to train the bodies and minds of initiates—almost invariably subject applicants to the very forms of abjection that masculine status supposedly will allow them to elide.

Heroism and Erotic Masochism

The mechanism of inclusion typically involves the use of pain and inculcation of heroic masochism. What allows heroism—other than association with countless narratives that showcase necessary suffering as a stage in the development of heroes (from the Labors of Heracles to the Passion of the Christ)—is the repression of the erotic potential of abjection.

This is not to say that this desire is eliminated. Rather, it is attached—not to the experience of abjection—but to the socially authorized purpose: group belonging, thwarting the enemy, preserving comrades, obedience to the institution, the redemption of the world—glossed in the phrase “the greater good.” This requires the pretense that “such sacrifices” have nothing to do with the horrifically fascinating and perverse attraction of the abject.

Heroic masochism, then, is the socially useful suppression of abject masochism. It valorizes sacrifice and finds meaning and purpose in suffering. Yet at the level of erotic arousal, its distance from abject masochism is never more than the flip of a switch. The selfish and the selfless merge in the uses of pain.

Heroic masochism achieves its most socially potent forms precisely in those cases where pain is multiplied to infinity—in burning, dismemberment, and crucifixion. Few can imagine the victim to harbor secret and equally infinite pleasures. Yet the construction of such experiences as sublime and transcendent depends precisely on the capacity to imagine the unimaginable: that annihilation through suffering and abject masochism is linked with something desirable: union with the infinite, communion with the divine, or obtaining permanent victory in the name of a nation.

Taking it Like a Man

Low crawling involves dragging yourself along with your body pressed as closely to the ground as possible, on your belly, keeping your head down: a useful technique if you are taking fire with little cover. It is, however, extremely uncomfortable and creates a lot of friction. Uniforms and body armor in the field minimize the bruising and scraping.

A drill sergeant liked to assign his soldier to low crawl in the barracks, along the smooth linoleum floor, in their underwear. The result was copious self-inflicted friction burns, like rug burns, on the knees, toes, elbows and at times faces and ears—as the sergeant stomped along behind those being punished, demanding they go faster and stay down.

Such non-standard physical punishment is frowned upon in the US Army but is nonetheless common. In my interviews and my own experience, I have encountered dozens of soldiers and veterans who were personally subjected to unauthorized, technically illegal training techniques. Not every soldier will be under the direct authority of a sadistic drill sergeant who makes it a point to go beyond the prescribed training techniques, but virtually every US soldier will have witnessed or heard of such excesses.

The excesses become part of the training milieu. And while soldiers with less “hardcore” trainers often feel sorry for those subjected to such punishments, soldiers in these platoons often take perverse pride in what they endure, and develop an awestruck respect for the drill sergeant.

The Privilege of Suffering

While risking injury or death in war might not seem like a privilege, it has been repeatedly constructed as such: as an opportunity to bond with the sacred nation. The benefit to those who become casualties might be considered as evanescent. However, the privileges accrue collectively, not just to soldiers, but to men as a class. Their participation as victim or perpetrator enmeshes men in a system that is reinforced by the most popular and well known narratives our culture has produced. Who doesn’t want to be a hero? This is more than a rhetorical question. The warrants for masculine privilege have their roots in the notion that suffering is, or ought to be, good for the soul.

Pain and its psycho-emotional kindred—humiliation, shame, anxiety—are at base forms of arousal that can be, and often are, invested with erotic energy. The investment, because perverse, and doubly perverse in the context of masculine homosocial environments, is to an extent unspeakable, unknowable. It is a powerful font of affect that attaches men to groups via the narrative of the greater good.

Suffering, then, has a purpose: service to the group, the family, the nation. The perversely alluring dread and ambivalence associated with initiation in the group—with acts of heroism, sacrifice, and death—are tamed. This structure underwrites masculine privilege and bonds men together—concretely and in the general sense of overvaluing values associated with a capacity to suffer willingly: toughness, self-discipline, emotional control, and discounting consequences to self or to others.

gardinerAbout the author: Dr. Steven Gardiner is assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. His research focuses on military institutions, nationalism, gender (particularly masculinity), and social movements. His 2010 chapter, “Relationships of War: Mothers, Soldiers, Knowledge” was included in Women, War and Violence: Personal Perspectives and Global Activism. His entry on “Militia Groups,” was included in The Encyclopedia of War and American Society (2006). He previously served the Portland-based Coalition for Human Dignity as an editor and director of research.