ecosophia | Reflections on Entryism

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Reflections on Entryism

One of the things I've been thinking about of late has been entryism -- the habit, very common in certain extremist political groups, of having people join some other, larger group with an unrelated focus in the hope of taking it over, or at least using it as a venue for recruitment and propaganda. I noted on this week's post over at the main blog that American secret societies, all through the years when they were large and culturally significant, had to fend off attempts at entryism, and noted with a certain wry amusement that the two groups most famous for entryism back in the day were socialists, on the one hand, and the Ku Klux Klan on the other.

I wasn't exaggerating. On the one hand, it took the Masons a long bitter fight in the 1920s and 1930s to identify and throw out Klansmen who had joined Masonry with the goal of turning the Craft (that's what Masons call Masonry) into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Klan. On the other, quite a few other lodge organizations had to engage in similar struggles to keep socialists from taking them over -- that's when a lot of lodges started making the Pledge of Allegiance part of the opening ritual; socialists hated that and usually wouldn't say it, which made it easy for them to be identified and rendered harmless in various polite but effective ways.

The irony? There are two groups of people who quite frequently pop up on my blog, either trying to post links to articles on their websites unrelated to the topic of the weekly essay, or trying to give my feet a tongue bath because they think they can then talk me into agreeing with their positions. You guessed it: it's either socialists on the one hand, or people from the racist right on the other.

It's interesting that this should still be the case a century after the examples I'd studied. Now of course socialism and racial politics both have ghastly track records -- between them, they're responsible for most of the major genocides of the last century and a half -- and that's got to be a problem for recruitment. Still, given the abysmal historical ignorance of most Americans, it shouldn't be that insuperable. Some sort of subcultural heredity? Or some other factor?

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I think you're on to something very important, Violet--something that we don't talk about nearly enough in our discussions here: political manoeuvres are very often erotic manoeuvres. Sometimes they are even orgasmic ones.

One of the unspoken foundations underlying all our institutions is "skin hunger," that is, our compelling need for at least a little skin-to-skin contact with all our fellow humans.

In our culture, skin hunger has three standardized expressions: sex, nurturance, and violence. All three are capable of producing orgasmic delights: there are women who experience orgasm while nursing their babies (though they are very wise not to talk overmuch about it, even with other women), and there are men who experience it while rolling around in the dirt and the mud and the blood, fighting outside a bar. I'll not try to speak for women here, but as for men, there are definitely men--straight men who enjoy sex with women--who get a more intense orgasm from a knock-down, drag-out fight than from any sexual encounter they can imagine. (And not just when it is other men whom they hit, btw.) They won't talk about it, even with other men, in specifically erotic terms, but the delight they take in recalling their acts of violence is unmistakably erotic. Nor is this simple sexual repression; there are sexually unrepressed men who find violence more erotic than sex.

Our cultural stereotypes permit women two of the three satisfactions of skin hunger (nurturance and sex) and men two of the three (violence and sex), but every human is capable of all three, stereotypes notwithstanding. Our cultural stereotypes also insist, with panic-stricken intensity, that each of the three has nothing to do with the other two. (At present our "woke" culture is more than a little panicked about all three of them--even about nurturance.)

So, of course, one needs safe ways to sublimate these unacceptable needs and facts. At present, in our society, politics offers just such a safe way.

Many thanks for this meditation, Robert! That makes a good deal of sense. Basically I tend to think that politics attracts a lot of unmentionable ulterior motives, and skin-hunger certainly seems to fit the bill and is not a category I would have formulated otherwise.

That sounds like an elegant hypothesis but it doesn't seem to match the reality. Young people tend to be more active in both extreme ends of the political spectrum while the same young people are also more active in sexuality, so these two "actions" don't seem to be substitutes for each other. Of course, this opinion is based on my own observations, while your hypothesis must be based on yours. One should gather statistically "enough" amount of real data about these issues and analyze it seriously before entertaining Freudian theories about a supposed relation between them.

I didn't say, and I don't think, that the two things are substitutes for one another. They are two forms of one and the same thing, not two different things--even though we have different words for them and our own culture isnists quite loudly that they are two different things. It is you who are seeing things through Freudian mud-caked glasses here.

Words always get in the way of understanding how reality "works." Words are all we usually have to think with, but they really are horribly inadequate tools for that job: like trying to use a hammer to unscrew a nut from a bolt.

Robert's comments make a great deal of sense when you consider for how many animal species (including our own) there is a direct relationship between violence and sex. For some species it is the need to drive off a male rival, for others there is violence in the actual act--stallions seize the mare by the back of the neck while mounting her, as do cats and mink. In mink, and I suspect some other species, the female does not ovulate unless bitten and shaken about by her partner. Theses aren't just coy love bites; commercial mink breeders are seriously inconvenienced by the damage to the pelts.

Obviously we humans are not 'just' animals, but last I checked, we were not angels either. (read Paradise Lost for Milton's ideas about angelic intercourse--seriously, it's in there) So it completely makes sense that violence is eroticized for some people.

Rita

So perhaps an intelligent, aggressive woman is not a slave to society’s disapproval and is actively deciding what she wants to do with the erotic dimension of her life on the basis of conscious choices: the choice to be socially and verbally violent towards lower classes, with or without ethics, as men are permitted to do, especially in war. It’s a politcally acceptable way to sublimate her hunger to fight. Or maybe men’s joy juice fighting hormones are socially permitted precisely because there is more money for men in social constructs that privilege male aggression and display disgust towards male nurturance. It is cheaper for society to lessen women’s financial rewards as a class.

Of course there are women who hunger to fight, just like the men I was describing, and for much the same reasons and physiological rewards. I have one of those women among my ancestors, too. She was the wife of my Danish King's-Guard ancestor. The two ofm them were well suited to one another, by all accounts I had from their daughter (my grandmother).

What would it say about me as a man that I find fighting like that to be something to avoid if possible and sickening when forced to do it?

Nothing at all: there are many sorts of men, as there are of women. In what odd universe could it possibly be otherewise?

For whatever it may be worth, I, too, hate to fight, or even watch others fight, and I feel sickened when I watch fighting. I am no less a man for that. Different strokes for different folks.

Perhaps it shows that you are a man with a high ‘nurturance quotient’ or distaste for conflict. This could be based in biochemical/etheric body composition or lived experience or both or neither. There have always been men who have a bent towards general social affinity, care for the weak, ill, wounded, etc. In history and fiction they often show up: as intelligent servants, comedians, diplomats; priests with large-souled, loving compassion; peacemakers, tribal chieftains, shamans, scouts, judges; farmers, shepherds, horse breeders, and many other lifepaths that require a talent for everting or avoiding open conflict.

As one of the men "who experience it while rolling around in the dirt and the mud and the blood, fighting outside a bar." I don't know that I find it "more erotic than sex." But will certainly acknowledge the pleasures to be had therein.

One thing that people seem to miss is that pain releases endorphins. It just does. It doesn't matter what kind of pain, but those endorphins are powerful and addictive. Similar to an adrenaline junky, there are endorphin junkies. As both I can testify to that.

Having experienced that pain pleasure line in the above situations of sex and violence I can tell you that is part of the line for me. A little pain sharpens the intensity.

If you'd like to get into the most taboo part of this I would say it is the strange joy of losing a fight. That would seem to be the ultimate taboo to me, analogous to the receptive partner in a homosexual encounter. The joy of being dominated isn't just for women.

There is also male bonding that results from a fight. I've made several deep friends from fighting. Of the sort that seem closer, more "intimate" than typical male friendships.

There is the build up to the fight-
Foreplay-chest thumping
Crashing into each other
The struggle for domination
The release
The "post coital" shame or bliss. The shame sometimes from revealing too much to someone, the bliss from the "You hit hard, let me buy you a beer!"

Another aspect is a fight partner so to speak. The same guys who fight each other over and over again. Eyebrows raised "why do you hate him so much?"

There's a joy of fighting that many people mistake as hate. They've tied violence to hate, but hate interferes with your ability to think, clouds judgement. Hate and violence aren't necessary bedfellows. Indeed the most dangerous people I know enjoy a fight. They view it more as a predator prey relationship. Cats don't hate mice. They are excited by them. The joy of a predator taking down a larger prey is very real too. I caution people that it isn't necessarily hate to look out for. Flat affect during an adrenaline dump is a worrying sign. Those are people who can think in the midst of the most potent drugs the human body can dump into the system. "I didn't come here to talk I came to fight."

I don't often get to share that aspect of myself.

Thank you, Anonymous!

From what my grandmother told me, and from what I have been able to learn from old newspapers, her father was much the same kind of man. He deeply loved violence (as well as women and strong drink), and he probably lacked the capacity to feel fear. He was a very tall, strong and resourceful man, who had been a soldier in the Livgarde (King's Guard) back in Denmark before his taste for violence and women put him in a situation where he had to flee his homeland in very great haste.

A friend of mine had a neighbor who was always trying to pick a fight with him, to no avail. My friend said that his neighbor's favorite Friday night recreation was to go down to the Newport Navy Yard when the sailors were let out for their Friday-night leave, and to pick fights with them then and there.

In short, such men are not all that rare.

I greatly appreciate your sharing.

Well, thank you for doing so. It was enlightening! As well as enfightening...

—Lady Cutekitten

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Reflections on Entryism

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sex and violence

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