When Everyone is Talking About Torture

[Joe Hillshoist]

Cheers PW.

Good on you for writing that.

And for surviving.

[LilyPatToo]

It's taken me an hour, Willow, to be able to type a reply, but I wanted to thank you for putting into words the mishmash of emotions that the current national focus on torture has created in me. And I wish I could just give you a hug in thanks for your bravery in first surviving, then remembering and then speaking out.

Maybe this torture scandal will at the very least get it through to more people that we share the planet with legions of depraved, amoral sociopaths who look and act in public like normal human beings. They live among us and copy our behaviors so well that, unless you've been their victim, it's damned hard to believe that whatshisname down the street is the walking embodiment of evil. Let them find a well-funded agency where their worst impulses are rewarded and you get true monsters.

LilyPat

This torture subject really brings to mind the Gnostic concept of Adamic and pre-Adamic man. In the Gnostic cosmology there were human beings on the earth before Adam, they were biologically identical to post-Adam humans in every way except that they had no soul and no empathy, they could commit inconceivable brutal deeds and feel no remorse. According to the Gnostics, Adam represented the divine spark entering the human form - but over time the two groups intermingled and were essentially indistinguishable from one another.

This cosmology really seems to reflect the world today, with this segment of people in society doing things that most of us are incapable of believing because we can't even conceive that humans would be capable of such things. It's like these certain people are so incredibly divergent that they are almost a different species.

That's fascinating. I've never heard of it before, either, so thank you. I know of 2 families that each had one sociopath and also normal kids. Both sets of parents were well-educated and caring and did everything they could to help the impaired ones, but it was obvious from a very early age that they lacked any kind of conscience or empathy and enjoyed inflicting pain on anything or anyone capable of feeling it. It was eerie for me to watch them growing up and know that my ex and other handlers I've tentatively identified must have been very like them as children.

And ditto for the torture pros hired by the intelligence agencies and the amateurs in the military prisons who abased and abused prisoners. We're breeding the occasional monster and I cannot tell you how much it pisses me off when liberal friends look deeply offended when I say that. If they'd lived through my past, there would be no question of how alien these individuals are. I wonder what has to happen and be exposed publicly before it's acknowledged as a deadly serious problem that urgently needs to be addressed differently?

LilyPat

[BrandonD]

That's fascinating. I've never heard of it before, either, so thank you. I know of 2 families that each had one sociopath and also normal kids. Both sets of parents were well-educated and caring and did everything they could to help the impaired ones, but it was obvious from a very early age that they lacked any kind of conscience or empathy and enjoyed inflicting pain on anything or anyone capable of feeling it. It was eerie for me to watch them growing up and know that my ex and other handlers I've tentatively identified must have been very like them as children.

And ditto for the torture pros hired by the intelligence agencies and the amateurs in the military prisons who abased and abused prisoners. We're breeding the occasional monster and I cannot tell you how much it pisses me off when liberal friends look deeply offended when I say that. If they'd lived through my past, there would be no question of how alien these individuals are. I wonder what has to happen and be exposed publicly before it's acknowledged as a deadly serious problem that urgently needs to be addressed differently?

LilyPat

We're not only breeding the occasional monster, our culture form top to bottom encourages the development of psychopathic traits. Lying, selfishness, violence and manipulation are considered strengths and rewarded - while empathy is considered a weakness.

I don't know if there is a way to acknowledge such a deep rooted problem, other than just little steps at a time. My good friend is a textbook John Stewart liberal who believes everything that you would expect him to believe. He is a good person, with empathy and kindness, and yet even he would never believe such things are taking place. The real world and the storybook world are so different from one another that a "regular" person cannot contain it and still keep their ordinary life intact. That is my impression, such revelations would so fundamentally disorder their life that they must simply reject it.

[Nordic]

It completely changed my life when I was victimized by one of these consciousless people. I wasn't physically tortured, or indeed faced any physical violence at all, but the realization that this person was simply evil was mind-blowing and earth shaking. It truly seemed like this person was missing a part of the brain that the vast majority of people had. Like it was some sort of deep mental defect, similar to someone born without eyes, or legs.

Since then I have felt, or I should say known, that these people need to be removed from the population. Killing them would in most ways be moral because it would protect others.

But these people get away with so many of their actions because what they do is literally UNTHINKABLE to others. And this is such a key to so many evils in the world. Do the unthinkable and nobody will believe you've actually done it. They will not think to stop you because they would never dream you would do such a thing.

It's incredible how it works. And how effective it is.

And to see these people able to get most other people to believe that only those "OTHERS" would do such a thing. Like 911. Most people can't wrap their heads around people like us doing that. Meaning white westerners. But due to social and cultural conditioning controlled by the evil people they have no problem believing that "others" did it. Darker, swarthier, subhumans of a different scary religion and language.

Evil takes over our entire civilization because most people are too nice and cannot comprehend that anyone would actually be so evil!! It's really that simple. And it's what drives me so nuts because honestly in our society most people have never faced another evil person and been victimized by them and fucking HAD this realization.

Prior to my experience with this evil person I believed that all people were born inherently good. All were children of god, and if they behaved abominably its because they had their psychological reasons, they were damaged, and were ultimately lost souls who had the potential for redemption. What bullshit.

Evil people are without souls, without compassion, without empathy, and cannot comprehend that these emotions exist in others. Because they are blind they cannot conceive that others have eyes. Therefore they think they should kill before they are killed, hurt before they are hurt, steal before they themselves are robbed. To them no one has a soul or any inherent worth. Nothing has value, not truth, not beauty, not the sacred, not love. They are predatory demons stalking the earth.

And most of us let them take over our positions of power.

LilyPatToo put it do beautifully and succinctly, and I've been thinking about it since I read it:

Maybe this torture scandal will at the very least
get it through to more people that we share the
planet with legions of depraved, amoral
sociopaths who look and act in public like normal
human beings. They live among us and copy our
behaviors so well that, unless you've been their victim, it's damned hard to believe that
whatshisname down the street is the walking
embodiment of evil. Let them find a well-funded
agency where their worst impulses are rewarded
and you get true monsters.

[Grizzly]

Joseph mengele — 'The more we do to you,the less you seem to believe we are doing it.'

[coffin_dodger]

But these people get away with so many of their actions because what they do is literally UNTHINKABLE to others. And this is such a key to so many evils in the world. Do the unthinkable and nobody will believe you've actually done it. They will not think to stop you because they would never dream you would do such a thing.

It's incredible how it works. And how effective it is.

Absolutely. Not thinking about a subject is that subject's best defence.

[BrandonD]

If someone were to ask me how to bring a greater awareness of these subjects to the general public, I would suggest the release of a hollywood fictional movie that explores this idea. Just as The Matrix brought the questioning of consensus reality into greater public acceptance, so would something like a classical Gnostic-themed film introduce the idea of a group of people among us who are indistinguishable from the outside, and yet drastically different internally.

Fiction is one of the best means to open people's minds to a concept that they would normally never consider, had it been presented as reality.

[lucky]

If someone were to ask me how to bring a greater awareness of these subjects to the general public, I would suggest the release of a hollywood fictional movie that explores this idea. Just as The Matrix brought the questioning of consensus reality into greater public acceptance, so would something like a classical Gnostic-themed film introduce the idea of a group of people among us who are indistinguishable from the outside, and yet drastically different internally.

Fiction is one of the best means to open people's minds to a concept that they would normally never consider, had it been presented as reality.

Get your biro out and start the script

.....but yeah look at Orwells 1984 , Huxleys Brave new world - and that was 50-60 years ago.

I believe as others do from reading some of these threads that some people are born evil, whether its a chemical imbalance or brain damage of some sort or a fucking alien hybrid who knows but they exist - met a couple myself.

[Plutonia]

There is another possibility other than the just-born-evil antihimans who-walk-among-us conception of our predicament ie that trauma can make it difficult or impossible for the Spirit (need a better word?) to fully inhabit the Body, which leaves the organism (person) vulnerable to possession by dis-incarnate beings - whether tulpas, aliens or entities. I'm fairly sure that I've seen this phenomena in addicts, for example, as well as more than one survivor of abuse.

The idea that there is a strain of evil humans is a dangerous one and likely to get used by the "evil ones" themselves against a vulnerable target group. This is already happening to some extent with the fear-mongering about autistics in the media, and though most fictional representations of autistic people are more positive, the award-winning film We Need To Talk About Kevin breaks ground by purporting to represent the biography of an undiagnosed autistic school shooter.

Remember that parents have real power over their children and it's common enough for parents to use their children as poison receptacles (Lloyd deMause) - off-loading their own psychic distress onto the child, who they can then punish, control and blame. This idea recognizes implicitly that we humans are not the nonporous, autonomous individuals that we appear to be. I recommend looking into the work of Donald Winnicott, particularly his concept of "Holding" in context of the mother's treatment of the infant body:
"the mother... foster[s] the ability to experience the body as the place wherein one securely lives."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Win ... of_holding


Willow: Thank you for sharing your harrowing experiences. I am familiar with various instances of institutional abuse of children, but getting a first-person account is rare and invaluable. So thank you for your perseverance and courage too.

I have a question and an observation:

Can you say what signs one would look for if one suspects that one may be a survivor?

My observation is just that it seems to me that in the High Culture phase of a society, the social norm becomes so removed from nature and the natural - so abstract and mannered - that the adults of the culture are compelled to interfere with the children at younger and younger ages in order to produce future "well socialized" citizens and that, as there are natural limits to child development and function-ability, this cripples the society and precipitates it's fall. Any thoughts?

[LilyPatToo]

A movie's an excellent idea, but you'd have to pick your story's elements very carefully. The PTB have managed to poison settings like SRA or military/intel MC so effectively that the Left would shrug off a movie that set the story there. And without the Left, there will be little progress in changing society. I just *hate* that, back when I was telling my story online, most of the support came from the far-Right.

And I lost trust in a bunch of Lefty friends who knee-jerk rejected what I confided in them, too. Even though most of the friendships were decades old. That still hurts a lot, but it gave me a valuable lesson in how disinformation works on intelligent people. Imagine confiding to old friends that you'd been exploited and subjected to physical and mental torture and watching faces go blank. It was like a nightmare. I became more graphic and detailed in describing what I clearly remembered, leaving aside the awfulness I'd simply inferred, and, incredibly, that backfired too.

The friend who'd gotten everyone together, expecting to create an activist group of these women, was appalled. She's still my closest friend and still believes me, but it was a very discouraging and painful moment for her too. Never underestimate people's need to "not see" awfulness.

LilyPat

[Nordic]

LilyPat ... Don't know what to say. I feel bad for you. That is certainly a nightmarish scenario.

Talking of movies, it made me think of Rosemary's Baby.

[BrandonD]

There is another possibility other than the just-born-evil antihimans who-walk-among-us conception of our predicament ie that trauma can make it difficult or impossible for the Spirit (need a better word?) to fully inhabit the Body, which leaves the organism (person) vulnerable to possession by dis-incarnate beings - whether tulpas, aliens or entities. I'm fairly sure that I've seen this phenomena in addicts, for example, as well as more than one survivor of abuse.

The idea that there is a strain of evil humans is a dangerous one and likely to get used by the "evil ones" themselves against a vulnerable target group. This is already happening to some extent with the fear-mongering about autistics in the media, and though most fictional representations of autistic people are more positive, the award-winning film We Need To Talk About Kevin breaks ground by purporting to represent the biography of an undiagnosed autistic school shooter.

Remember that parents have real power over their children and it's common enough for parents to use their children as poison receptacles (Lloyd deMause) - off-loading their own psychic distress onto the child, who they can then punish, control and blame. This idea recognizes implicitly that we humans are not the nonporous, autonomous individuals that we appear to be. I recommend looking into the work of Donald Winnicott, particularly his concept of "Holding" in context of the mother's treatment of the infant body:
"the mother... foster[s] the ability to experience the body as the place wherein one securely lives."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Win ... of_holding

Thanks very much for these comments, they are much appreciated. I've been trying to figure out how to say exactly what you're saying here but you've done it quite nicely. I am wary of considering the "absolute evil" idea to be a proven fact, though at the same time I am also open to the possibility.

Particularly as a child, I displayed some traits of abuse, though I cannot recall ever being abused. In particular, extreme dissociation and fear of people. Even today it is quite easy for me to dissociate. My brothers have memories of me doing some violent things to them when I was young and I have no memories of these things at all, such as cutting up their hands with scissors and sitting on their head in our backyard kiddie pool and trying to drown them (my dad had to actually pull me off of my brother's head). I have no memories of these things and I have never been a violent person, when I hear these stories it sounds like someone else - it makes me wonder about other people who do violent things.

Your concept of the spirit/body connection becoming weakened and allowing for "possession" makes sense, and actually fits with other observations I've made in my life. These observations are related to alcoholism and sleepwalking, two other things that are generally related to a weakening of the spirit/body connection. I have multiple experiences of people in such instances doing things that are entirely unlike them, and immediately afterwards having no conscious recollection of what they've done.

[Project Willow]

The real world and the storybook world are so different from one another that a "regular" person cannot contain it and still keep their ordinary life intact. That is my impression, such revelations would so fundamentally disorder their life that they must simply reject it.

It's absolutely true. It's one of the reasons we have religion, and victim blaming, "good world" belief, etc. In order to survive, humans must be able to maintain relationships to each other and to ourselves through concepts and expectations of what it means to be human. Functioning relationships require certain baselines of safety, predictability, and trust. Where these may be lacking, belief systems and culture provide overrides so that fear and estrangement do not become debilitating. Revelations about the extremity of human violence taking place within one's community can threaten these belief systems, making it impossible for people to maintain an adequate level of connectedness with self and other for functioning in society.

I lost a very good therapist due to this process. She simply could not alter her world view enough to accept what I was telling her. She did try for a long time, but it caused a huge upheaval in her life, as well as grief and depression.

There is another possibility other than the just-born-evil antihimans who-walk-among-us conception of our predicament ie that trauma can make it difficult or impossible for the Spirit (need a better word?) to fully inhabit the Body, which leaves the organism (person) vulnerable to possession by dis-incarnate beings - whether tulpas, aliens or entities. I'm fairly sure that I've seen this phenomena in addicts, for example, as well as more than one survivor of abuse.

This is an updated version of very old defensively exculpatory beliefs and practices. Sure, humans could never behave so terribly if it weren't for those meddling (name your favorite dark god or minion). I'd suggest considering dissociative reactions, which can manifest in ways often interpreted throughout history as "possession". We've got lots of evidence of and are able to treat dissociation, while metaphysical explanations strip us of our power (and responsibility) to heal and affect change.

Willow: Thank you for sharing your harrowing experiences. I am familiar with various instances of institutional abuse of children, but getting a first-person account is rare and invaluable. So thank you for your perseverance and courage too.

I have a question and an observation:

Can you say what signs one would look for if one suspects that one may be a survivor?

If you mean a survivor of similar things to what I went through, yes, there are some self observations one could make. One is to pay attention to the internal voice, the voice one uses while thinking. Is it consistent and singular, the same as the speaking voice or does it vary? Does it sound younger or older at times? Another is memory reliability in general, do you remember your childhood? Do your memories stretch back in a rather continuous line or do things get fuzzy at intervals, such as after few days, every 3 months or every 6 months? Do you have PTSD symptoms, seizures, excessive fear, avoidance etc., that aren't necessarily connected to known experience? Missing time or evidence of missing time such as finding belongings rearranged, or items that you don't recognize.

It has been such a long and slow process for me, many stages over many years of gaining awareness and grieving, realizing how I'd rationalized symptoms, it's not at all as straight forward as filling out a patient inventory. I will say however that noticing changes in the internal voice was a big wake up call. Along those same lines, one thing you can do is simply ask inside, and be ready to hear the answer.

My observation is just that it seems to me that in the High Culture phase of a society, the social norm becomes so removed from nature and the natural - so abstract and mannered - that the adults of the culture are compelled to interfere with the children at younger and younger ages in order to produce future "well socialized" citizens and that, as there are natural limits to child development and function-ability, this cripples the society and precipitates it's fall. Any thoughts?

Could you elaborate a little? I'm not certain I'm exactly sure what you're referring to, except perhaps multi-layered and complicated efforts to control behavior aren't necessarily associated with "high culture", AFAIK.

..................

Thank you for the kind words everyone.

[Plutonia]

Willow thanks for your response and particularly your description of internal & external markers of institutional abuse. So far, I'm in the clear.

Regarding your response to my first point:

This is an updated version of very old defensively exculpatory beliefs and practices. Sure, humans could never behave so terribly if it weren't for those meddling (name your favorite dark god or minion). I'd suggest considering dissociative reactions, which can manifest in ways often interpreted throughout history as "possession". We've got lots of evidence of and are able to treat dissociation, while metaphysical explanations strip us of our power (and responsibility) to heal and affect change.

I am familiar with dissociative reactions via my own trauma as well as other survivors I've known and been in therapy with - one of whom was dx'ed DID and who integrated most of her alters while I was in group with her. But. I've also seen and experienced weird phenomenon that clearly don't fit that explanation, including having at one time been yanked out of my body by a large ogerish entity. I've seen things gazing out of human faces, that I swear were not human - even briefly dialogued with one. And I don't shirk from looking at very dark human behaviors, so it's not that I'm denying that aspect - I'm just trying to make sense of my data-set.

One thing I picked up from Rene Girard's description of the unifying effect of sacrificial violence on a social group, is the possibility of an inversion of the mechanism in order to achieve a false autonomy - for brevity, here are some notes I made some time ago regarding how that might work:

We can hypothesize an inversion of the mechanism of mimesis; a sort of inoculent to the contagion of a "group mind", for those who seek to act on the collective rather than being acted on by it. via participation in sacrificial violence outside of the mimetic cycle, upon victims whose innocence cannot be occluded - children. The victim would be selected to receive the unwanted projections of the sacrificers – in this case their positive projections.

And the sacrifice does not necessarily require the death of the victim (child?), only the symbolic death of the positive projections of the participants - their innocence, their goodness.

Is this the way that powerful actors remove themselves from the collective mind, the inherent interdividuality that Girard speaks about?

What if you allow a general state of mimetic “consensus reality trance”, or for Sheldrakes’ morphogenetic field, to be sticky and difficult to get free of?

The birth of gods (theogony) becomes the birth of a god-like super-human and his sacrificial victims (children) in turn become, not deified, but rather sub-human?

Is this why our fascination with the mythology of unholy hordes; the resurrection of the once innocent as the undead, vampires, zombies?

IMO, none of the above precludes the possibility of interference from disincarnate, non-human entities, though.

My observation is just that it seems to me that in the High Culture phase of a society, the social norm becomes so removed from nature and the natural - so abstract and mannered - that the adults of the culture are compelled to interfere with the children at younger and younger ages in order to produce future "well socialized" citizens and that, as there are natural limits to child development and function-ability, this cripples the society and precipitates it's fall. Any thoughts?

Could you elaborate a little? I'm not certain I'm exactly sure what you're referring to, except perhaps multi-layered and complicated efforts to control behavior aren't necessarily associated with "high culture", AFAIK.

My understanding is that human societies cycle through phases of lesser to greater and then again lesser levels of complexity, with the phase of greatest complexity marked by pronounced un-natural, or even anti-natural, intellectual and aesthetic ideals; social codes become baroque and exclusive, so that the most elite caste displays their prestige through elaborate costume, make-up, body modification (plastic surgery!) and mannered behavior.

Parts of US culture are showing signs of being in a High Culture phase, which is perfectly visible to outsiders via US news and talk programs - the presentations of the newscasters/hosts are weird, as is their the tone of voice and how they interact with guests. Affected, is a good descriptor.

So it's not an uneducated hick from the sticks who can fit seamlessly into that environment (or would necessarily want to) ie understand, communicate and participate in it's subtle social codes and values, it's the adult who was the child whose natural development was displaced by cultural conditioning.

Think Roman Patricians, Versailles, the British Royals, Lady Gaga.

Does that make sense?

[lucky]

It's really quite odd reading these posts as it makes me think back to my childhood - where there are huge chunks that i have no recollection of mostly snap shots of being outside rather than in the house and up til I was a teenager the memories are just me with no interaction with others, or very few. and with that, my recurring dream of being in a hotel - always different and the possible metaphorical representation of the many rooms being different parts of my mind? Maybe I'm thinking too hard about all this but these threads keep pulling me back and I don't know why.