LUST FOR PAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 126, 23 November 1935, Page 6

LUST FOR PAIN

STRANGE PHENOMENON

REVEALED IN WORLD TODAY

DICTATORS AND MASSES

Recently..l made some remarks on the decrease of cruelty and its value as a mark of civilisation; but, while the eagerness to make blood or blows the argument has certainly dwindled in certain sections of society, it is unfortunately apparent that he who gets slapped and enjoys it wil 1 remain one. of our social problems, writes Ivor Brown in the "Manchester Guardian." When the clown receives a resounding blow or is trampled underfoot, most people regard it as extremely funny; after all, the fellow is earning good money and it doesn't hurt him much. (Or at least with such reflection the humane members of the audience can console themselves.) It is also true that people receiving blows and kicks may regard the process as exhilarating; what we think funny they may «yen regard as fine. ( The other afternoon-;I was: watching a Rugby football match at close quarters and had a most, intimate view of a player "going down to the ball" amid a rush of forwards. He was kicked on the head and emerged bleeding and half-stunned. To me; in an ordinary frame of mind,'there would be nothing strange in this; it is part of a t tradition of British sport to which I have been accustomed all my life. But, once free the mind of schoolboy notions arid traditional ideas, once admit a fresh , logic, and then could anything be more preposterous than for an adult citizen to find his Saturday'afternoon amusement in submitting his head and limbs to. a wild cavalcade of tramplip" boots? "ARE THEY MAD?" A person with no previous ideas of "sport" who was suddenly introduced to a football or a hockey mateh1 must inquire, "Are these people mad, that they tear, maul, kick, and strike each other with sticks in order to find refuge from boredom?" One can see some reason in a boxing match, where two men submit themselves to suffer for the large sums of money which are paid by bloodthirsty spectators. But this footballer who exposed himself to concuss.ion in a whirl of boots and a sea of mud was not only" a,volunteer but an amateur, a devotee! This, indeed, he proved by. returning to the field as soon as he had assuaged his flow of blood and was able to stand up in a semi-conscious condition, and I have not the faintest doubt that he will be sorely disappointed if he does not get another chance to roll about among the boots next Saturday. He who gets.slapped, or kicked, and enjoys it is not a lonely specimen of psychological perversion He is the | average man. He always has been, and it is an important question for society whether he is always going to be.. If the slap-seeker can find satisfaction in being hit about the legs by a cricket ball or kicked in any and all portions while; fighting for possession of a football, if he is content to pick up: bruises'in-"the boxing ring or the speed track, to exhaust himself by prodigious days of walking or pedalling on a push-bike, or to take such knocks and tosses as come to even the best riders of horses across country,' if he is what is called a good sportsman and content t6;-*emain so, his wounds and weariness aret'h'is own affair, ih-this country we are fortunate]; the slapseekers are sated with games." ' MUST-BE MARTIAL. But abroad the slap-seekers are not so lightly satisfied. Their zest for heroworship, is : n6t assuaged when they have cheered the latest maker of a speed record in some irrelevant form: of violent motion. They cannot slake their thirst for self-prostration by rolling about beneath the feet of footballers. Their-'hero must be martial, their cause political, their sacrifice not of a broken skin or a wrenched muscle but of mind and body in absolute ■surrender. All these millions of men who, all over Europe, are consenting and even demanding to be drilled and marched and loaded with gear, even to suffer that most dreadful of human indignities" the wearing; of a gas-mask, are slap-seekers. Of course the training is wearisome, uncomfortable work, and the end of, that'training, war,, is mildly described as torture. But they are not only putting 'up with it; they are . often ' cheerfully,; demanding it. They are in a blissful'fever of selfimmolation. The last .thing that the average man wants is. a quiet life. If there is- no fighting, there must be football. If he cannot get shot he will at least get kicked. If he cannot find somebody to exchange the slashes of a sabre, he will plunge into a game of hockey for the sake of slashing and being slashed' with a stick on hands and legs. Furthermore, there are always people who are ready to live in tents without the cofnpulsion of a drillsergeant. When I see the Holiday campers in the miserable bedragglement of a rain-swept field I marvel at their notions of enjoyment. But my taste is singular. I belong to the slap^ avoiders, the quiet-lifers; I lack the lust for discomfort, the appetite for pain which are the governing passions of my fellow-men. ■ TOO RATIONAL. Yes, governing passions. The seekers after peace have never really faced the psychological issue. They argue interminably ' with each other about the cause of war; is it pressure of population? Is national enmity inevitable under a capitalist economy? Is peace possible without Socialism?The discussion is usually far too, rational. It assumes more calculation than is common to mankind. The real basis of bellicosity is man's infinite craving for pain, that craving which the English do to some extent alleviate by providing plenty of "hard knocks" in school and on the playing-field. Thus the slap-seeker may feel himself to be a hero without the necessity of lethal warfare. But elsewhere the will to suffer is not so conveniently sated. It demands all the apparatus of prostration, flags, salutes. goosesteps, grand marches, exhausting manoeuvres. It may be true that, when your slan-seeker has got his war, he might discover that he is having rather too much of a good thing and even become so disenchanted as to be a pacifist for the next few years or even for life. ; But the next generation will soon be demanding to be drilled for destruction, or at least they will be cheering and obeying anybody who hards them in a mass and informs them that nothing is more entrancing, nothing more ennobling, than to bp stifled with noison gas by somebody whom you have just failed so. to poison. SECONDARY. The familiar opinion about the inevitability of war is false because it stresses 'he desire of a man to hit the other fellow on the nose. The lust for inflicting pain is secondary to the lust for enduring it. That is why all wars have to be explained and justified to the troops as wars of defence. Nowadays you do nothing so vulgarly aggressive as conquer; you safeguard your right to expand. The dictator cannot cry aloud. "What fun to go and hit that man!" He has to say, "What