18 Negative Pleasure | The link between pleasure and cruelty

Negative pleasure is what fuels fantasies that involve hurting and being hurt.

Why are we destructive? Why do things like war and cruelty even exist? These are big, important questions; let’s find some meaningful answers.

It doesn’t really fly to just say our wrong thinking is what leads us headlong into strife. No matter how far off the mark our misconceptions might be, they couldn’t possibly hold that much power. Could they?

In a word, no. Mere negativity, when left to its own devices, is just that: negativity. It’s a bad attitude that wants to throw shade.

But when our destructiveness attaches itself to our desire for pleasure, look out. Said another way, it is when our positive life force becomes embedded in a destructive attitude that seriously unpleasant things happen.

This, friends, is the killer combination that creates evil. Without the powerful punch of the positive life force behind the negative condition, destructiveness would fizzle out fairly fast.

Exposing the root of the problem

All of us who feel called to some kind of spiritual path have endured hurts and pains as children. At the moment we were hurt a specific process took place.

Our experience of pleasure—which is the basis of the erotic force—got put into the service of our hurt, of our pain, of our suffering. The emotions that accompanied the original hurt intertwined themselves in our life force, with its pleasure current.

This is the root of the problem behind war and cruelty. In fact, all the unwelcome circumstances of our lives grow out of this root.

The place where we are particularly apt to notice this phenomenon is in the love connection. Whatever emotions accompanied the original hurt, they attached themselves to our ability to experience pleasure.

If, as a child, we experienced cruelty—and it doesn’t matter if it was real or if it happened in our imagination—our pleasure principle welded itself to that cruelty.

This shows up later in either of two ways: actively or passively. In other words, we can only experience pleasure when we inflict cruelty, or we can only find pleasure from enduring it. Or maybe both. There are many shades of grey.

In another case perhaps the cruelty wasn’t severe, but there was a vague rejection or a feeling of not being fully accepted. Then our experience of pleasure gets attached to similar situations of not being accepted.

In that case, despite our conscious desire to be accepted, our circuits only light up when we feel somewhat rejected. We find ourselves attached to ambivalence. That, of course, leads to conflict in our current-day relationships.

Making the connection with cruelty

As one might imagine, if we can only know pleasure in conjunction with cruelty, we’re going to find ourselves holding back from love. Love is not a tempting, sumptuous experience in this situation. A part of us rejects love out of fear for what else might come along for the ride.

The yearning for the pleasure of love becomes a minefield. Buried within this disturbance can be deep hopelessness that we will never—can never—feel fulfilled.

This is what fuels fantasies that involve hurting others and being hurt.

And it’s not just us. Because of this process, many of our fellow human beings can only experience pleasure in the presence of cruelty. It passes an inflection point that gives rise to cruelty as a whole and is the actual nucleus of war.

This might make us cringe with guilt, but it is more productive to calmly use this information to enlighten and transform ourselves. Only by understanding the link between pleasure and cruelty do we have a means to stop the destruction.

Rewiring pleasure

Keep in mind, when we talk about pleasure here, we’re talking about our life force. Life and pleasure are essentially the same thing. In short, people can’t live without pleasure.

This twisted wiring can make our experience of “pleasure”—of having our life force activated so that our circuits light up—feel downright unpleasant. We might avoid relationships altogether, or withdraw and numb our feelings completely.

But if we can see that this connection was just something that happened—something we can now do the work of rewiring—then feelings of guilt and shame ease.

Continuing our inner work, we’ll discover that our pleasure can shine in an all-positive light, without any twists or turns of darkness.