What Violence! Dramatizing Sadism Validates My Worldview

When one hasn’t noticed that it’s one’s own boot that’s standing on the suffering person’s neck, one can be calmly sympathetic to the suffering person and hope that over time things will work out well for them.

Wallace Shawn, Introduction, Essays, Haymarket Books, 2010, 4

What violence!

We wish no harm to others, but if harming others makes us feel good (or at least, less bad) we do it without remit or remorse.

And stopping harm to others is really too much. Too much conflict. Too much bother. It isn’t that bad, after all. That some suffer while others inflict suffering is requisite to the turning Earth, is fundamental to the operation of Society. 

And you can’t change Earth. You can’t change Society.

As someone with takeout food in my belly and a ticket in my pocket, I recently sat in the audience of Wallace Shawn’s play, “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” at Greenwich House Theater in New York. It is not lite entertainment, a rousing, uplifting story of human triumph. 

The four characters on stage speak to you as if you were a silent counselor in a therapy room. The confessions are sad, shocking, and sometimes ludicrously oblivious to their own violence. 

It is easy to ruin people you love. 

It is easy to overlook your own insensitivity and aggression.

The play’s effect was cumulative but ultimately very important to me. Shawn’s portrayal of the selfish cruelty of the privileged, of the white, educated, upper middle class, validates my worldview. It makes me want to thank him for dramatizing sadism.

Because although I am white, educated, and upper middle class, I am also very familiar with the effects of such abuse. And I find it repellant that individuals can do so much harm yet still think of themselves as moral, upstanding citizens. Flawed human beings, but not predators, not monsters.

What abuses are you willing to tolerate?

How many people have to be hurt before you rise from your chair and consider risking something, anything, for a better world?

My life doesn’t mean much to me unless I am taking chances, unless I am finding ways to say, 

No you don’t.

Dramatizing sadism validates my worldview