Slave owner William Lynch (lynch mob, lynching etc) offered this advice to fellow slave owners: keep your slaves physically strong and psychologically weak. This method of slave/population control was not unique to Lynch. It was, and still is, used by those in power. It works. And its practice and effects are clearly visible in modern society.
In modern society, people’s minds have become so degraded, so dysfunctional, so weak, that they no longer recognise the appalling abuses meted out to them. Not only are people unaware of these abuses, but they have become so psychologically weak that they have grown to “love” (or admire or respect) their abusers.
In his autobiography, DJ Chris Evans unwittingly provides a beautiful example of this phenomenon. Like most other people, Evans still recognises physical abuse. Yet he seems totally unaware of psychological abuse even when he experiences it at first hand. In fact, he has experienced both kinds of abuse at first hand.
Physical abuse: when Evans was at his first secondary school, one of his teachers punched him on the chest for misbehaving in class. Evans reports that he was hit so hard as to be hurled against a classroom wall. Evans retaliated in kind: he hit his teacher over the head with a chair. Unfortunately he does not tell us of the immediate consequences of this incident other than that he walked out of that school never to return.
Evans comments that physical abuse was common in schools then (the 1970s). He condemns it. So no surprises there, then.
Psychological abuse: Evans tells us that he was so scared of his father that it was never necessary for his father to hit him if he misbehaved. The threat of his father was enough to keep Evans in line. Evans was not, however, scared of his mother. Thus when Evans misbehaved, his mother would threaten to “grass” on him to his father. The “master stroke”, as Evans called it, was what followed, namely a tense, uneasy, apprehensive, anxious wait. For Evans’ mother didn’t tell him if his misdemeanour had been reported to his father. Instead, Evans was kept in the dark, kept on tenterhooks, kept in a state of fearful, anxiety laden uncertainty, often for days at a time, as he awaited the outcome. Had his mother really grassed on him? Or not? Did his father know? If he did know, what action would he take? Would he do anything at all?
True to form, Evans talks admiringly of his parents’ methods; talks of how he would “love” his mother even more (a sort of knee-jerk reaction) in his relief if she had not grassed him up.
So Evans is like most other people I have encountered: he is psychologically weak. A symptom of this is that he doesn’t recognise psychological abuse. Furthermore, he would never in a million years believe that his parents, especially his mother, had ever abused him.
Regarding my personal experience, one episode stands out: I witnessed my grandmother abusing my cousin. My cousin had left his coat at school one day. She preyed and preyed for hours on his fears and anxieties about losing his coat, inventing all sorts of scenarios about the trouble he would get into from parents and teachers if his carelessness was discovered. And, of course, he could not retrieve his coat until the following day so he had a whole night to contemplate his fate — a fate which grew more and more terrifying the longer his imagination had to work on it. I can see my grandmother licking her lips in pleasure at reducing her young grandson to a tearful, nervous wreck.
Of course, physical abuse is much easier to identify, as the Evans’ examples illustrate. Physical abuse is visible. Physical abuse is up-front. Physical abuse is in-your-face. Conversely, with psychological abuse there are usually no identifiable physical traces, no physical scars or bruises. Psychological techniques, therefore, allow people to get away with murder. So, just because you are not aware of being abused psychologically doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The cancer you are receiving chemo for right now, your last heart attack, your angina, your depression, may be the result of the stress induced by the psychological abuses that you have experienced living in this society, a society in which such abuse is endemic.
Do you think psychological abuse is endemic in modern society?