Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:
Bruce is a description of masochistic personality disorder. Bruce's dysfunctional behavior may or may not be related to sexual masochism [safe for work], which is demonized by most people in America. Yet there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly masochistic to me:
- Eating spicy food
- Listening to the music of Anton Webern or Alban Berg (not trying to be funny; this is very serious)
- Listening to music turned up so loud that it hurts
- Fiction
- Movies, especially horror movies
- Roller coasters
- Saunas
- Enjoying exercise
- Being Bruce
Question 1: Can you list more?
Question 2: Doubtless some of the behaviors I listed have completely different explanations, some of which might not involve masochism at all. Which do you think involve enjoying pain? Can you cluster them by causal mechanism?
Question 3: When we find ourselves acting masochistically, should we try to "correct" it? Or is it part of a healthy human's nature? If so, what's the evolutionary-psych explanation? (I was surprised not to find any evo-psych explanations for masochism on the web; or even any general theory of masochism that tried to unite two different behaviors. All I found were the ideas that sexual masochism is caused by bad childhood models of love, and that masochistic personality is caused by other, unspecified bad experiences. No suggestion that masochism is part of our normal pleasure mechanism.)
Some hypotheses:
- Evolution implemented "need to explore" (in the "exploration/exploitation" sense) as pleasure in new experiences, and adaptation to any particular often-repeated stimulus. This could result in seeking ever-higher levels of stimulation, even above the pain threshold. (This could affect a culture as well as an organism, giving the progression Vivaldi -> Bach -> Mozart -> Beethoven -> Wagner -> Stravinsky -> Berg -> screw it, let's invent rock and roll and start over. My original belief was that this progression was caused by people trying to signal sophistication, rather than by honest enjoyment of music. But maybe some people <DELETION of "jaded"> honestly enjoy Berg.)
- We have a "pain thermostat" to get us to explore / prevent us from being too cowardly, and modern life leaves us below our set point. (Is masochism more prevalent now than in the bad old days?)
- An objection to this is that sometimes, when people are in emotional pain, they work through it by throwing themselves into further emotional pain (e.g., by listening to Pink Floyd).
- An objection to this objection is that primal scream therapy seems not actually to work except in the short term.
- An objection to this is that sometimes, when people are in emotional pain, they work through it by throwing themselves into further emotional pain (e.g., by listening to Pink Floyd).
- Pain triggers endorphins in order to help us fight or flee, and it feels good.
- We enjoy fighting and athletic competition, and pain is associated with these things we enjoy.
My guess is that, if it's a side-effect (e.g., 3) or a non-causal association (4), it's okay to eliminate masochism. Otherwise, that could be risky.
These all lead up to Question 4, which is a fun-theory question: Would purging ourselves of masochism make life less fun?
ADDED: Question 5: Can we train ourselves not to be Bruce without damaging our enjoyment of these other things?
I'm afraid your model of music history is no better than your model of Eliezer's mind.
I don't want to get into the numerous problems with this right now, other than to say that it is supremely annoying when people speak about popular music (such as rock and roll) as if it were the "successor" of art music of the past. The successor to the art music of the past is the art music of the present. (That means all those composers you haven't heard of.) Rock and roll is in an entirely separate category.
As regards your list of "masochistic" phenomena, I don't see what the common thread is. You listed "fiction" in general without naming any authors, but when it came to music you singled out Berg and Webern. What's so special about these two composers? I'm guessing you don't like Berg, since you call anyone who does "jaded". (How much Berg do you even know?) But what's the connection between listening to composers of the Second Viennese School and listening to (whatever kind of) music so loudly that it hurts? And eating spicy food?
If these are all just things you don't like and others do, what makes you think that masochism is involved?
You're reading way too much into that comment about rock and roll. The timeline isn't even right for it to be a serious model. But pop music is the cultural successor to orchestral music in this way: The energy and money that used to go into orchestral music, string quartets, piano recitals, etc., now go into pop music. It's seized that share of the public's attention.
I thought the connections would be obvious. I don't like Berg's music, at all, and I blame him and people who promoted the 2nd Viennese School for the death of great music. But it is no... (read more)