The Problem
In the late 1960s, along with many other young people, I began experimenting with psychedelic drugs. We were trying to discover a new kind of personal freedom and spontaneity that would rid us of the inhibitions that limited our creative expression and kept us shy socially. LSD was giving us benevolent, expansive, oceanic feelings. We thought the drug would cause the same feelings in anyone who took it. We didn't realize that when someone whose inhibited tendencies are destructive takes LSD, those destructive tendencies would come to the fore instead of benevolence. So when Charlie Manson took his girls into the desert and tripped out on LSD the murders they did after unleashed a horror that terrified the whole nation. Manson might well be the most hated man since Hitler. At that time, I began to wonder about certain people I met whose mentalities seemed the opposite of the free-flowing nature we held as ideal. It turned out that many of these people were diagnosed schizophrenic; some were not. Hitler and Manson are extreme types of the evil mentality with that certain charisma that allows them to act and gain a following. More usually, in everyday life, you meet people whose values seem to be twisted and you have to deal with them. I don't mean to suggest that all people diagnosed as schizophrenic are potential dictators. But some among them are determined to relate to others as they see fit, and they refuse any suggestion that they could be in the wrong. I call them the power trippers, along with those normal people who need to dominate in every relationship.
In this essay I take upon myself the role of the humanist and play it out against that evil mentality. In the beginning, as I attempted to understand, I started playing mind games. There arose in my mind certain dialogues, and sometimes it seemed like these dialogues were actually telepathic conversations, arguments even. Since some people can't at all accept the possibility of telepathy, I would like to introduce a double premise here. Whether my own mind split off to form the character of my enemy, thus allowing an objective point of view, or whether there was actually a telepathic contact is difficult to say. I leave it to the reader to accept the premise toward which he is most inclined. There could very well be a mixture of both. But to those people who cannot accept the possibility of telepathy, I may seem a bit schizophrenic myself.
One has never thought of mental illness as being contagious, yet it is in its own subtle way. In Europe, World War II was a culmination of this contagion. This insanity is like an underground stream with a constant potential for breaking through to the surface. Even if it remains invisible it has its influence by trying to spread itself out in society. Those infected with power lust inflict it upon the people they meet. If a person adapts himself to an emotional atmosphere of dissonance, especially while growing up in his family situation, might he need to create such an atmosphere as an adult? He would feel out of his element with a harmonious relationship. He would have the feeling that it just wasn't "right" somehow.
The schizoids I've known fall into two groups. Those in one group are never prone to the power trip. When I use the word schizophrenic, I'm referring only to those in the other group who practice the power trip in an exaggerated manner. But one must not equate power tripper with schizophrenic in all cases. Each person has to be understood first from the way he relates.
There's an initial fear this second schizoid feels with some people. The fear fuels a hate, which in its turn creates a fantasy of dominance. The schizoid wishes to turn the fantasy into reality, that is, to dominate the fear by dominating the person who seems to be the cause of it. He is frustrated at not being able to play the dominant role in a relationship and so he attempts to force it upon certain sensitive persons telepathically. The persons who are being put upon are those with a real empathic gift, those who are able to share the emotions of another person.
Now this relationship does have a partial telepathic reality, perhaps, which helps to reinforce a false sense of truth. To further create a false sense of truth, the fantasy becomes a belief; I mean, a BELIEF, in gilded gothic letters, rigidly clung to. This is the split from reality that happens in schizophrenia. The Belief has to be strong enough to produce the emotional intensity that reality would have in order to reinforce the false sense of reality. The schizoid believes that he can force the person he wishes to dominate into a telepathic relationship. The victim takes in his mind the role projected upon him by the scenario of the schizoid's fantasy.
When you get enough people sharing the same Belief, it solidifies into ideology. The Belief has to be shared by all to reinforce the "rightness" the followers feel. When the followers of the ideology take political power and create the camps, the make-believe gets to become adult reality: real torture, real death. As an extreme, the people I'm singling out would run the concentration camps in a totalitarian regime.
It's the transfer to reality that betrays the evil. The power trippers are seen for what they are, but by that time it's too late because they have the political power. The power to fulfill all those fantasies that lay repressed from childhood and adolescence. Of course this fulfillment is intoxicating and the good feeling they experience reinforces their belief that they have a right to dominate. They place themselves beyond good and evil.
The Façade
I always wanted to discover how the power tripper thinks and what motivates him. I kept that quest in mind when I related to people. The process I'm using here is intuition rather than strictly observation. I'm speculating and theorizing with a base in certain patterns that emerged from external observation. And it is what I have gleaned from the minds of power trippers. Telepathy is the tool. Since the power tripper is hiding behind a façade of liberal humanism, I had to get behind this stage setting to see the struts holding it up. In a psychoanalytic situation, for example, they give no material that is analyzable unless tricked into it.
This façade they hide behind is a tapestry woven from half-truths, evasions, and conceits. They hope that a normal, rational person will be unable to see through it. This is an artificial complexity. One can sweep away the façade when one realizes that its only function is to hide the truth.
The Incentive to Power
The rationalizations such people use to justify power are fabricated from the purest air. Even power for its own sake is a fabrication. Power hunger is a result of insecurity. The exercise of power quells the anxiety of the question every person sometimes faces, "What should I do?" Life's simple perplexities can get overblown into something cosmic and impossible to deal with, though, and anxiety results. Anxiety goes away, like an appetite would. If you let the anxiety pass, then the difficulty becomes a simple perplexity once more, sometimes with little significance. I have the feeling that the schizophrenic-power tripper takes simple problems and blows them up into something cosmic (the Jewish "Problem" in Nazi Germany, for example). But if anxiety became the all-pervasive emotion in a person's life, it would demand a release (hence the need to dominate), like an appetite that returns only more strongly to demand satisfaction, even if its necessary to justify the means through rationalization. (Of course, the power trippers are going to say it's not rationalization but a real necessity of their dominant beings.)
Anxiety could be what initiates a person to power-but thereafter, power becomes an end in itself. The power trippers get caught up in the drama of their own ego trip and it becomes a part of their personality.
But how their anxiety colors their interpretation of things: "Excessive freedom is anarchy, chaos," they say. They suffer from freedom anxiety. The perplexity of making a choice causes them anxiety. "But doesn't everyone have the same fears?" they must be asking now. No. The chaos is in their own minds, their own emotions. Not ours. Not everyone's. Only theirs. The perplexity of choice is not an anxiety for us-it allows us to use our judgment. When our judgment is honed, we can act with confidence in the world and seek adventure.
The Assumptions of Power
To have the whole thing work, the power trippers make certain assumptions about human psychology. They assume they know the unconscious motivations and desires of a person better than that person himself. As a result, they think they can control a person's values, urges, and desires from the unconscious. That could happen only if we internalized their system. We do not take their worldview and make it our own. But as we cling to our independence, they scoff, hiding behind the role of one who knows. They don't feel the need to offer up any proof-as if any could be offered up because these things remain in the realm of unverifiable knowledge. They would have to demand our faith or force us to believe them. They speak nonsense when they claim knowledge that is unverifiable. What they can mostly claim is that they are willing to torture you into admitting the falsehood or to con it out of your unconscious through the emotions.
So they say, "I know your true inner nature." How do they convince themselves of this? "That's the way I am and that's the way you are-and you can't claim to be any different." Which by "different" they imply "better".
I can imagine them saying to me sternly: "You're a part of this! And you are whether you like it or not!" They have swept me up into an ideology with their minds. Along with this assumption goes another: Any struggle I make will be in vain. That logic is very good as long as I continue to relate. As I relate to them, and give the relationship my emotional energy, I help sustain the whole process.
The inarticulate lesson: They learn, and in turn teach, a lesson that is never put into words. Mystery has a charming attraction and it's convenient to hide behind as well. You're "smart" if you can grasp the lesson and leave it at that. But let's write it out anyway: If you accept power you can do as you please with people. "Well, isn't it obvious? There it is, you fool, and still you won't accept power? You aren't acting in accordance with your rational self-interest." Or am I?
Motivations
The schizophrenics who practice the power trip think they know the Laws of Human Motivation by which they can manipulate anyone.
Theirs is a motivational system based on coercion, the stick instead of the carrot (with some exceptions). A person will do "good" only in fear of punishment for failing to do so.
They think that for anyone to do anything they have to be prodded out of their inertia and driven to it.
In schizophrenia I see the unwillingness to make an effort. The ones I've known don't know the pleasure of making an effort and reaping the rewards. The satisfaction of solving a problem, even a simple, practical problem like opening a clogged drain. For them, effort equals grueling work, no more, to be avoided whenever possible. To make an effort is to be a dupe of the capitalistic system. They sure make a grand effort to keep their illusions, though.
Motivations are mysterious things sometimes. Do we really always understand our own?
Take this schizophrenic behavior. It's the frame of mind that makes you do the opposite of what you're told, break every rule. The schizophrenic, for example, who, when his therapist tells him she cannot get involved with her patients outside the clinical situation, writes love letters to her asking for a date. He perceives the rule as a challenge to break it. Rejection is built into the way he relates to people. As if rejection were sought as a stimulus to bad emotion. And a justification for bitterness.
If I talk about an accomplishment, a friend would share in my good feeling. Schizophrenics assume that you are boasting and take offense; they think that you're merely trying to put them down. Even at a minor critical suggestion they take offense. They have no concept of overcoming. Their world is built around learning to cope. Relief is their only comfort; exultation is unknown to them. "Oh, you claim all these fine emotions, but do you really feel them? Exultation! How can you expect me to believe that? What a put-on you are," they might say.
And yet it is real, as real as this tattered book in front of me. As real as the cold of an early winter morning, with the sun. Familiar, though not familiar enough. Exultation may not be the kernel of our lives, but we never forget the ideal it represents. Exultation, a Christian might say, is "Christ with us." I'm sure it can be a more earthly emotion as well. (A feeling at one with the earth.)
Do all these fine emotions really exist or not? Could they possibly be made up by the so-called "good" people to convince the bad of their badness? Quite an invention, just to make up such emotions. Emotions are like colors, experienced; it is only later that you learn to name them. That is the same way we know exultation. Our emotions are like perceptions.
How can you encourage young people to make an effort, then? By telling them that there may be rewards they haven't yet suspected. And one of those rewards might be exultation.
Another of the rewards of effort is that easy feeling you get when the first hard steps are over. There are other rewards. For instance, catching on when someone tries to avoid an issue or put one over on you. No concepts hinder us. Only the lines of force, the tyranny.
Since the schizoids' egos are so intrinsically entwined with the success of their cause, they are able to join their personal emotions with their intellectual effort and overcome fear and reticence. They believe to achieve strength in that way. And with that belief, they are able to act strong. Each step reinforces the whole process.
The Moral Bind: Reproach and Guilt
Guilt. On one hand, it's tied up with idealism. Does the power tripper think, since I'm generous with my concern, that I must condemn myself when I can't quite feel concern for anyone at all, power trippers included? On the other hand, do they believe that we are overwhelmed by them, the new rule makers, and must feel guilty when we break one of their rules? In either case, I don't know what they mean by this guilt since I don't feel it. I would feel guilt if I intentionally used someone even if out of necessity.
We have to grapple with this thought: a sense of honor. It seems these people are thinking that I operate from a certain ethic, which allows them to behave as they like, even at my detriment. Instead, my ethic implies a give-and-take of concern whereby my respect goes only to those who share that sense of honor. They're positively excluded from my concern. For how can I admire someone who deserves it if I give my concern to those who merely use it against me to spite me?
Every once in a while I used to take thought and go visit an ex-friend simply because I hadn't seen her for a while. I ceased to do that when she came into town after a nine-month absence several years ago to heckle and mock at me. My concern for her evaporated when she amply proved to me that she would not reciprocate it.
Did she think she had my "wires" crossed? Did she think I was in a moral bind and confused emotionally? Power trippers sometimes believe also that I have guilt feelings, feelings of dread and anxiety, just as a child would who has displeased a stern parent. In their imaginations, they punish me for wrongs I have done them. Yet they make the rules to further their own convenience. So from my angle, it looks like the trick of the con-artist man here. One could even call it fraudulent. It's the trick of the gangster. We don't have to feel guilty if we can foil a villain. That is the way they use guilt to make sport with people.
The power trippers project an undifferentiated feeling of reproach-amorphous-without a specific wrongdoing as referent. The victim is supposed to supply the form, the specific wrongdoing (as if most of us didn't usually have a reason, however small, to reproach ourselves) then internalize the whole process. "Make them punish themselves? Save us that effort, even!"
Claims to Superiority
The power tripper thinks that power is the ultimate thrill of life, and that everyone would pursue it except that they are too weak of will or too inhibited still by Christian and bourgeois value systems. Power has an elation that pales everything else for them, an elation that would naturally attract any "strong" person.
The power tripper thinks the humanist covers his weakness with "good," the good life, to live life well, and so makes his weakness a virtue. He scorns the humanist calling his idealism a sham, a false superiority, and he uses the humanist to his own ends. (Humanist, artist, journalist, or any creative person; think of Speer in nazi Germany.) The power tripper plays with his idealism then crushes him with a sneer, saying, "Oh, you thought it was all for real, didn't you." The power tripper knows, in his mystical superiority, what the real world is like. It is humans the humanists tend to idealize, humans capable of a splendid heroism. The power tripper knows what humans are "really" like, a fluke of nature, a misfit, nothing admirable at all. Does he know this through introspection?
The power trippers think that if they take their superiority for granted then other people will have to accept it. "Here we are and you have to relate to us as we expect." Now, how is this that they expect us to be? The elation of power requires the victim to play a certain role to reinforce the superiority complex of the power tripper. To bring the power into reality, consciousness. Now, what role is it they expect me to play? Humiliation and inferiority, feeling bad about myself, guilt. And they have the gall to reproach me if I don't play my part. I find that horrendous. To use the victim as a mirror. Looking at me, they see a reflection of their own power. They need that mirror to feel the reality of their power. They themselves are the objects of awesome admiration, of course. They are naïve in their own way if they expect me to play this role for them.
They alienate themselves from their own humanity. In setting themselves up above others, they cannot be granted the same rights as a human being. They claim certain rights, but we can't grant them anything.
For example: "We have the right to treat people the way we feel."
"You have the power, not the right."
"Well, we have the right, too."
We can see the same relationship in connection with racial prejudice. The Jew or the African-American has been created for the power tripper as an object of abuse and if they retaliate they're loathed that much more for having stepped out of place. And of course it's just "understood" that the power tripper is beyond attack. He looks at you with repulsion and says, "Why, how can you upset the natural order of things?"
The power trippers claim an innate superiority because of the way they use the telepathic lines of force, bending a person towards them in attraction, then they turn around and offer to teach it: "You can do it too." It's not "innate" if it can be taught. What is innate is the bent of mind that needs to manipulate people.
All of their energy is invested in creating and maintaining these relationships because without them they feel insecure and unstable. The relationship sustains them.
The Pullaway
How can my reaction to all of this be any other than outrage? With all of their threats and attempts at intimidation, I had to complete the telepathic dialogue finally by shouting into my empty room at one of them: "You egocentric, self-aggrandized, overblown idiot with your foolish arrogance and your overblown superiority complex, you utter fool. Blow yourself up into a pompous idiot, why don't you? You don't even have the reality of a proper monster or villain, over-inflated ego that you are. You want to know what you are? Just complain to me about it, just try once, I'll be glad to tell you exactly what your are…sewer mind."
That we share their good opinions of themselves the power trippers take for granted. They suppose that everyone secretly admires the power tripper. They don't know that some of us find them disgusting. They remind me of caged animals, of muzzled rodents with their concentration-camp mentality. If you know the truth there's nothing awesome or admirable about power at all. The very effrontery of these people. They're an affront to our decency and our intelligence. In their dependence on a victim they're parasites, that's all. Dreaming of a world order based on their lack of security. Foisting it onto us in still another miserable way. If we're disgruntled, they're happy. They take satisfaction from our irritability. Sometimes it all becomes so trivial.
The power trippers sublimate their animal nature, that's the nitty-gritty part of us, the emotional part, so it becomes a hideous monster and they can't express themselves in a natural way but only as a highly technical and sophisticated weapon-machine. Man does have a tendency to turn his tools and gifts into weapons. This time the gift is one of the MIND: psychic. Perhaps they can guess our thoughts, eavesdrop on our internal monologues and attempt to censor our thinking from the moment it takes form in our minds. "Too bad for you, we know your secrets?" they assert. "Not so" I say, "you're snooping where your nose doesn't belong, that's what you're doing. It's none of your business."
Oh, but they do love to stir a person's emotions; so I have to cultivate an indifference to the whole lot of them, put the whole project away for a while, and so regain my humanistic perspective.
Solzhenitsyn observed at close hand the death camps in the Soviet Union for ten years, and near the end of The Gulag Archipelago he comes to a startling conclusion about tyranny:
"The state of our society can be well described in terms of an electromagnetic field. All the lines of force point away from freedom and toward tyranny. These lines are very stable, they have etched their way in and set hard in the grooves; it is almost impossible to perturb them, deflect them, twist them about. Any charge, any mass introduced into the field is blown effortlessly in the direction of tyranny, and can never break through toward freedom. For that ten thousand oxen must be yoked." (Vol. III, page 479)
This electromagnetic field exists around individuals. It is the "lines of force" that make the tyranny, whether personal or political. They resemble the pattern seen when iron filings are sprinkled on a sheet of paper placed on top of a magnet. The "lines of force" in society, where there is no actual magnet, attain their energy from the emotions of those involved. We have to draw our emotions away from the tyranny to weaken it. We must cultivate an indifference toward those that would dominate us. They would use our very energies to bind us. Even when we give them our attention we reinforce them.
Empathy's greatest intensity is in love, harmony. Our empathy must go toward those who can respond in kind and deprive the "lines of force" of their energy.
In the late 1960s, along with many other young people, I began experimenting with psychedelic drugs. We were trying to discover a new kind of personal freedom and spontaneity that would rid us of the inhibitions that limited our creative expression and kept us shy socially. LSD was giving us benevolent, expansive, oceanic feelings. We thought the drug would cause the same feelings in anyone who took it. We didn't realize that when someone whose inhibited tendencies are destructive takes LSD, those destructive tendencies would come to the fore instead of benevolence. So when Charlie Manson took his girls into the desert and tripped out on LSD the murders they did after unleashed a horror that terrified the whole nation. Manson might well be the most hated man since Hitler. At that time, I began to wonder about certain people I met whose mentalities seemed the opposite of the free-flowing nature we held as ideal. It turned out that many of these people were diagnosed schizophrenic; some were not. Hitler and Manson are extreme types of the evil mentality with that certain charisma that allows them to act and gain a following. More usually, in everyday life, you meet people whose values seem to be twisted and you have to deal with them. I don't mean to suggest that all people diagnosed as schizophrenic are potential dictators. But some among them are determined to relate to others as they see fit, and they refuse any suggestion that they could be in the wrong. I call them the power trippers, along with those normal people who need to dominate in every relationship.
In this essay I take upon myself the role of the humanist and play it out against that evil mentality. In the beginning, as I attempted to understand, I started playing mind games. There arose in my mind certain dialogues, and sometimes it seemed like these dialogues were actually telepathic conversations, arguments even. Since some people can't at all accept the possibility of telepathy, I would like to introduce a double premise here. Whether my own mind split off to form the character of my enemy, thus allowing an objective point of view, or whether there was actually a telepathic contact is difficult to say. I leave it to the reader to accept the premise toward which he is most inclined. There could very well be a mixture of both. But to those people who cannot accept the possibility of telepathy, I may seem a bit schizophrenic myself.
One has never thought of mental illness as being contagious, yet it is in its own subtle way. In Europe, World War II was a culmination of this contagion. This insanity is like an underground stream with a constant potential for breaking through to the surface. Even if it remains invisible it has its influence by trying to spread itself out in society. Those infected with power lust inflict it upon the people they meet. If a person adapts himself to an emotional atmosphere of dissonance, especially while growing up in his family situation, might he need to create such an atmosphere as an adult? He would feel out of his element with a harmonious relationship. He would have the feeling that it just wasn't "right" somehow.
The schizoids I've known fall into two groups. Those in one group are never prone to the power trip. When I use the word schizophrenic, I'm referring only to those in the other group who practice the power trip in an exaggerated manner. But one must not equate power tripper with schizophrenic in all cases. Each person has to be understood first from the way he relates.
There's an initial fear this second schizoid feels with some people. The fear fuels a hate, which in its turn creates a fantasy of dominance. The schizoid wishes to turn the fantasy into reality, that is, to dominate the fear by dominating the person who seems to be the cause of it. He is frustrated at not being able to play the dominant role in a relationship and so he attempts to force it upon certain sensitive persons telepathically. The persons who are being put upon are those with a real empathic gift, those who are able to share the emotions of another person.
Now this relationship does have a partial telepathic reality, perhaps, which helps to reinforce a false sense of truth. To further create a false sense of truth, the fantasy becomes a belief; I mean, a BELIEF, in gilded gothic letters, rigidly clung to. This is the split from reality that happens in schizophrenia. The Belief has to be strong enough to produce the emotional intensity that reality would have in order to reinforce the false sense of reality. The schizoid believes that he can force the person he wishes to dominate into a telepathic relationship. The victim takes in his mind the role projected upon him by the scenario of the schizoid's fantasy.
When you get enough people sharing the same Belief, it solidifies into ideology. The Belief has to be shared by all to reinforce the "rightness" the followers feel. When the followers of the ideology take political power and create the camps, the make-believe gets to become adult reality: real torture, real death. As an extreme, the people I'm singling out would run the concentration camps in a totalitarian regime.
It's the transfer to reality that betrays the evil. The power trippers are seen for what they are, but by that time it's too late because they have the political power. The power to fulfill all those fantasies that lay repressed from childhood and adolescence. Of course this fulfillment is intoxicating and the good feeling they experience reinforces their belief that they have a right to dominate. They place themselves beyond good and evil.
The Façade
I always wanted to discover how the power tripper thinks and what motivates him. I kept that quest in mind when I related to people. The process I'm using here is intuition rather than strictly observation. I'm speculating and theorizing with a base in certain patterns that emerged from external observation. And it is what I have gleaned from the minds of power trippers. Telepathy is the tool. Since the power tripper is hiding behind a façade of liberal humanism, I had to get behind this stage setting to see the struts holding it up. In a psychoanalytic situation, for example, they give no material that is analyzable unless tricked into it.
This façade they hide behind is a tapestry woven from half-truths, evasions, and conceits. They hope that a normal, rational person will be unable to see through it. This is an artificial complexity. One can sweep away the façade when one realizes that its only function is to hide the truth.
The Incentive to Power
The rationalizations such people use to justify power are fabricated from the purest air. Even power for its own sake is a fabrication. Power hunger is a result of insecurity. The exercise of power quells the anxiety of the question every person sometimes faces, "What should I do?" Life's simple perplexities can get overblown into something cosmic and impossible to deal with, though, and anxiety results. Anxiety goes away, like an appetite would. If you let the anxiety pass, then the difficulty becomes a simple perplexity once more, sometimes with little significance. I have the feeling that the schizophrenic-power tripper takes simple problems and blows them up into something cosmic (the Jewish "Problem" in Nazi Germany, for example). But if anxiety became the all-pervasive emotion in a person's life, it would demand a release (hence the need to dominate), like an appetite that returns only more strongly to demand satisfaction, even if its necessary to justify the means through rationalization. (Of course, the power trippers are going to say it's not rationalization but a real necessity of their dominant beings.)
Anxiety could be what initiates a person to power-but thereafter, power becomes an end in itself. The power trippers get caught up in the drama of their own ego trip and it becomes a part of their personality.
But how their anxiety colors their interpretation of things: "Excessive freedom is anarchy, chaos," they say. They suffer from freedom anxiety. The perplexity of making a choice causes them anxiety. "But doesn't everyone have the same fears?" they must be asking now. No. The chaos is in their own minds, their own emotions. Not ours. Not everyone's. Only theirs. The perplexity of choice is not an anxiety for us-it allows us to use our judgment. When our judgment is honed, we can act with confidence in the world and seek adventure.
The Assumptions of Power
To have the whole thing work, the power trippers make certain assumptions about human psychology. They assume they know the unconscious motivations and desires of a person better than that person himself. As a result, they think they can control a person's values, urges, and desires from the unconscious. That could happen only if we internalized their system. We do not take their worldview and make it our own. But as we cling to our independence, they scoff, hiding behind the role of one who knows. They don't feel the need to offer up any proof-as if any could be offered up because these things remain in the realm of unverifiable knowledge. They would have to demand our faith or force us to believe them. They speak nonsense when they claim knowledge that is unverifiable. What they can mostly claim is that they are willing to torture you into admitting the falsehood or to con it out of your unconscious through the emotions.
So they say, "I know your true inner nature." How do they convince themselves of this? "That's the way I am and that's the way you are-and you can't claim to be any different." Which by "different" they imply "better".
I can imagine them saying to me sternly: "You're a part of this! And you are whether you like it or not!" They have swept me up into an ideology with their minds. Along with this assumption goes another: Any struggle I make will be in vain. That logic is very good as long as I continue to relate. As I relate to them, and give the relationship my emotional energy, I help sustain the whole process.
The inarticulate lesson: They learn, and in turn teach, a lesson that is never put into words. Mystery has a charming attraction and it's convenient to hide behind as well. You're "smart" if you can grasp the lesson and leave it at that. But let's write it out anyway: If you accept power you can do as you please with people. "Well, isn't it obvious? There it is, you fool, and still you won't accept power? You aren't acting in accordance with your rational self-interest." Or am I?
Motivations
The schizophrenics who practice the power trip think they know the Laws of Human Motivation by which they can manipulate anyone.
Theirs is a motivational system based on coercion, the stick instead of the carrot (with some exceptions). A person will do "good" only in fear of punishment for failing to do so.
They think that for anyone to do anything they have to be prodded out of their inertia and driven to it.
In schizophrenia I see the unwillingness to make an effort. The ones I've known don't know the pleasure of making an effort and reaping the rewards. The satisfaction of solving a problem, even a simple, practical problem like opening a clogged drain. For them, effort equals grueling work, no more, to be avoided whenever possible. To make an effort is to be a dupe of the capitalistic system. They sure make a grand effort to keep their illusions, though.
Motivations are mysterious things sometimes. Do we really always understand our own?
Take this schizophrenic behavior. It's the frame of mind that makes you do the opposite of what you're told, break every rule. The schizophrenic, for example, who, when his therapist tells him she cannot get involved with her patients outside the clinical situation, writes love letters to her asking for a date. He perceives the rule as a challenge to break it. Rejection is built into the way he relates to people. As if rejection were sought as a stimulus to bad emotion. And a justification for bitterness.
If I talk about an accomplishment, a friend would share in my good feeling. Schizophrenics assume that you are boasting and take offense; they think that you're merely trying to put them down. Even at a minor critical suggestion they take offense. They have no concept of overcoming. Their world is built around learning to cope. Relief is their only comfort; exultation is unknown to them. "Oh, you claim all these fine emotions, but do you really feel them? Exultation! How can you expect me to believe that? What a put-on you are," they might say.
And yet it is real, as real as this tattered book in front of me. As real as the cold of an early winter morning, with the sun. Familiar, though not familiar enough. Exultation may not be the kernel of our lives, but we never forget the ideal it represents. Exultation, a Christian might say, is "Christ with us." I'm sure it can be a more earthly emotion as well. (A feeling at one with the earth.)
Do all these fine emotions really exist or not? Could they possibly be made up by the so-called "good" people to convince the bad of their badness? Quite an invention, just to make up such emotions. Emotions are like colors, experienced; it is only later that you learn to name them. That is the same way we know exultation. Our emotions are like perceptions.
How can you encourage young people to make an effort, then? By telling them that there may be rewards they haven't yet suspected. And one of those rewards might be exultation.
Another of the rewards of effort is that easy feeling you get when the first hard steps are over. There are other rewards. For instance, catching on when someone tries to avoid an issue or put one over on you. No concepts hinder us. Only the lines of force, the tyranny.
Since the schizoids' egos are so intrinsically entwined with the success of their cause, they are able to join their personal emotions with their intellectual effort and overcome fear and reticence. They believe to achieve strength in that way. And with that belief, they are able to act strong. Each step reinforces the whole process.
The Moral Bind: Reproach and Guilt
Guilt. On one hand, it's tied up with idealism. Does the power tripper think, since I'm generous with my concern, that I must condemn myself when I can't quite feel concern for anyone at all, power trippers included? On the other hand, do they believe that we are overwhelmed by them, the new rule makers, and must feel guilty when we break one of their rules? In either case, I don't know what they mean by this guilt since I don't feel it. I would feel guilt if I intentionally used someone even if out of necessity.
We have to grapple with this thought: a sense of honor. It seems these people are thinking that I operate from a certain ethic, which allows them to behave as they like, even at my detriment. Instead, my ethic implies a give-and-take of concern whereby my respect goes only to those who share that sense of honor. They're positively excluded from my concern. For how can I admire someone who deserves it if I give my concern to those who merely use it against me to spite me?
Every once in a while I used to take thought and go visit an ex-friend simply because I hadn't seen her for a while. I ceased to do that when she came into town after a nine-month absence several years ago to heckle and mock at me. My concern for her evaporated when she amply proved to me that she would not reciprocate it.
Did she think she had my "wires" crossed? Did she think I was in a moral bind and confused emotionally? Power trippers sometimes believe also that I have guilt feelings, feelings of dread and anxiety, just as a child would who has displeased a stern parent. In their imaginations, they punish me for wrongs I have done them. Yet they make the rules to further their own convenience. So from my angle, it looks like the trick of the con-artist man here. One could even call it fraudulent. It's the trick of the gangster. We don't have to feel guilty if we can foil a villain. That is the way they use guilt to make sport with people.
The power trippers project an undifferentiated feeling of reproach-amorphous-without a specific wrongdoing as referent. The victim is supposed to supply the form, the specific wrongdoing (as if most of us didn't usually have a reason, however small, to reproach ourselves) then internalize the whole process. "Make them punish themselves? Save us that effort, even!"
Claims to Superiority
The power tripper thinks that power is the ultimate thrill of life, and that everyone would pursue it except that they are too weak of will or too inhibited still by Christian and bourgeois value systems. Power has an elation that pales everything else for them, an elation that would naturally attract any "strong" person.
The power tripper thinks the humanist covers his weakness with "good," the good life, to live life well, and so makes his weakness a virtue. He scorns the humanist calling his idealism a sham, a false superiority, and he uses the humanist to his own ends. (Humanist, artist, journalist, or any creative person; think of Speer in nazi Germany.) The power tripper plays with his idealism then crushes him with a sneer, saying, "Oh, you thought it was all for real, didn't you." The power tripper knows, in his mystical superiority, what the real world is like. It is humans the humanists tend to idealize, humans capable of a splendid heroism. The power tripper knows what humans are "really" like, a fluke of nature, a misfit, nothing admirable at all. Does he know this through introspection?
The power trippers think that if they take their superiority for granted then other people will have to accept it. "Here we are and you have to relate to us as we expect." Now, how is this that they expect us to be? The elation of power requires the victim to play a certain role to reinforce the superiority complex of the power tripper. To bring the power into reality, consciousness. Now, what role is it they expect me to play? Humiliation and inferiority, feeling bad about myself, guilt. And they have the gall to reproach me if I don't play my part. I find that horrendous. To use the victim as a mirror. Looking at me, they see a reflection of their own power. They need that mirror to feel the reality of their power. They themselves are the objects of awesome admiration, of course. They are naïve in their own way if they expect me to play this role for them.
They alienate themselves from their own humanity. In setting themselves up above others, they cannot be granted the same rights as a human being. They claim certain rights, but we can't grant them anything.
For example: "We have the right to treat people the way we feel."
"You have the power, not the right."
"Well, we have the right, too."
We can see the same relationship in connection with racial prejudice. The Jew or the African-American has been created for the power tripper as an object of abuse and if they retaliate they're loathed that much more for having stepped out of place. And of course it's just "understood" that the power tripper is beyond attack. He looks at you with repulsion and says, "Why, how can you upset the natural order of things?"
The power trippers claim an innate superiority because of the way they use the telepathic lines of force, bending a person towards them in attraction, then they turn around and offer to teach it: "You can do it too." It's not "innate" if it can be taught. What is innate is the bent of mind that needs to manipulate people.
All of their energy is invested in creating and maintaining these relationships because without them they feel insecure and unstable. The relationship sustains them.
The Pullaway
How can my reaction to all of this be any other than outrage? With all of their threats and attempts at intimidation, I had to complete the telepathic dialogue finally by shouting into my empty room at one of them: "You egocentric, self-aggrandized, overblown idiot with your foolish arrogance and your overblown superiority complex, you utter fool. Blow yourself up into a pompous idiot, why don't you? You don't even have the reality of a proper monster or villain, over-inflated ego that you are. You want to know what you are? Just complain to me about it, just try once, I'll be glad to tell you exactly what your are…sewer mind."
That we share their good opinions of themselves the power trippers take for granted. They suppose that everyone secretly admires the power tripper. They don't know that some of us find them disgusting. They remind me of caged animals, of muzzled rodents with their concentration-camp mentality. If you know the truth there's nothing awesome or admirable about power at all. The very effrontery of these people. They're an affront to our decency and our intelligence. In their dependence on a victim they're parasites, that's all. Dreaming of a world order based on their lack of security. Foisting it onto us in still another miserable way. If we're disgruntled, they're happy. They take satisfaction from our irritability. Sometimes it all becomes so trivial.
The power trippers sublimate their animal nature, that's the nitty-gritty part of us, the emotional part, so it becomes a hideous monster and they can't express themselves in a natural way but only as a highly technical and sophisticated weapon-machine. Man does have a tendency to turn his tools and gifts into weapons. This time the gift is one of the MIND: psychic. Perhaps they can guess our thoughts, eavesdrop on our internal monologues and attempt to censor our thinking from the moment it takes form in our minds. "Too bad for you, we know your secrets?" they assert. "Not so" I say, "you're snooping where your nose doesn't belong, that's what you're doing. It's none of your business."
Oh, but they do love to stir a person's emotions; so I have to cultivate an indifference to the whole lot of them, put the whole project away for a while, and so regain my humanistic perspective.
Solzhenitsyn observed at close hand the death camps in the Soviet Union for ten years, and near the end of The Gulag Archipelago he comes to a startling conclusion about tyranny:
"The state of our society can be well described in terms of an electromagnetic field. All the lines of force point away from freedom and toward tyranny. These lines are very stable, they have etched their way in and set hard in the grooves; it is almost impossible to perturb them, deflect them, twist them about. Any charge, any mass introduced into the field is blown effortlessly in the direction of tyranny, and can never break through toward freedom. For that ten thousand oxen must be yoked." (Vol. III, page 479)
This electromagnetic field exists around individuals. It is the "lines of force" that make the tyranny, whether personal or political. They resemble the pattern seen when iron filings are sprinkled on a sheet of paper placed on top of a magnet. The "lines of force" in society, where there is no actual magnet, attain their energy from the emotions of those involved. We have to draw our emotions away from the tyranny to weaken it. We must cultivate an indifference toward those that would dominate us. They would use our very energies to bind us. Even when we give them our attention we reinforce them.
Empathy's greatest intensity is in love, harmony. Our empathy must go toward those who can respond in kind and deprive the "lines of force" of their energy.
Copyright © 2001 Psychic Freedom Now
POWER TRIPPER
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