Is masochism necessary?

PhilGoetz

9 Is masochism necessary?

by PhilGoetz

10th Apr 2009

2 min read

147

9

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?)
1. 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).
  1. An objection to this objection is that primal scream therapy seems not actually to work except in the short term.
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?

Suffering

Personal Blog

9

New Comment

Rendering 0/147 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 4:42 PM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

Moderation Log

9 Is masochism necessary?

by PhilGoetz

10th Apr 2009

2 min read

147

9

Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:

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?

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?)
1. 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).
  1. An objection to this objection is that primal scream therapy seems not actually to work except in the short term.
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?

Suffering

Personal Blog

9

Mentioned in

2Masochism vs. Self-defeat

New Comment

Rendering 0/147 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 4:42 PM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

Moderation Log

More from PhilGoetz

Curated and popular this week

147Comments

147

Comment Permalink

komponisto17y-20

In one of Robert Greenberg's music histories, he said, IIRC, that around 1800, 1 in 20 people in Vienna were professional musicians.

Even granting this statistic, this is highly selective reporting. Vienna has historically been a musical center, and was especially so at that time. The situation there was hardly typical of European society as a whole. And the phenomenon of high-quality music being played in gathering places hasn't disappeared either: buskers play Bach, and recently I heard Beethoven's 7th symphony come on between jazz selections in a coffee shop.

Mozart and Beethoven are popular today, while Schoenberg is not; history has already given its verdict against the 2nd Viennese School

That is silly and presumptuous. "Popularity" is hardly an appropriate metric for judging "the verdict of history" on a form of advanced creative intellection. I can assure you that the Second Viennese School is held in high esteem by expert composers and music theorists.

Besides -- if "history" has "ruled against" the Second Viennese School, why are you complaining about the "death of great music" resulting from their influence?

I don't say these things in order to offend you. I apologize for using inflammatory language.

That's good; but there's also a larger issue here. Assertions about music should be held to the same level of scrutiny as assertions about anything else. (As a result of discussions like this, I may be tempted at some point to do a post on rationality as it relates to the arts.)

NancyLebovitz15y00

I'm interested in why there isn't a parallel track of new music for orchestral instruments which is written for the general public. Admittedly, there's movie music, but that seems very limited compared to what's possible if there were original compositions.

3arthurlewis17y

I would love to read and comment on such a post. I would take issue with the widespread use of terms like "good," "high-quality," "real," and "art" to differentiate the Western canon of choral/orchestral music from everything else that's out there. I'm sure there are many jazz composers and theorists who wouldn't give Berg or Webern the time of day. And buskers play all kinds of music - it doesn't have to be Bach or Beethoven to be meaningful. In terms of the Second Viennese School, what I should have said in my previous comment is that there's a popular misconception that Schoenberg was the one who tipped the linear progression past the point of contemporary accessibility. i.e. that while Bach's contemporaries, for example, may not have known his music, they were not freaked out by it. But this seems to be a pretty common thing in musical history - new composer comes along, people say "what the hell is that guy doing? ack, the impropriety!" and decades or centuries later, everybody gets it. Popularity is a fine metric for judging the verdict of history; you just have to wait until it's actually history.

See in context