07/11/2007 Stockholm Syndrome
It's funny how we must always try to understand things from the base of our own assumptions. Why would one who is kidnapped become attached to the kidnapper? Why would one who is taken hostage, beaten and raped repeatedly over a period of days or weeks, then become attached to the perpetrator, make no effort to escape, and then defend them when they are rescued?
Some have attributed this to an adaptation mechanism that humans would have to develop due to the historical frequency of one “tribe” or country invading another and killing, raping or enslaving them. Would those that are taken then face a life of utter misery? Would they kill themselves en masse? Or would they form an emotional attachment to those who took them rather than face a life alone?
I think that's more an explanation that preserves prior misconceptions than anything. While safety may be the main goal of much of human behavior, we must also see the danger in it as well. Look around you, you Americans; tell me what you see. Godlessness? Existential angst? Isn't that half the problem in our lives; that when people behave selfishly, God stays aloof? Too much safety means too little justice. If we are all safe, than the people who hurt us are also safe. Safety is a slow burn.
And we fantasize about being heros. We also fantasize about being raped. Some of us fantasize about being beaten as well, though I am not among them. For many girls, their greatest dream is to meet Prince Charming and be swept off their feet. Perhaps they don't mean it so literally... but the connotation is there. Is it there for a reason?
The kidnapped person who is isolated from society is free of social proof. The victim has a new ethical framework to work with. The kidnapper creates a new world and a system of justice which often results in brutal beatings if not followed. The kidnapper often provides sexual pleasure as well. What could be better? Once the victim decides to abandon his/her thinking from the previous system, our system, which likely didn't provide much pleasure or guidance, the victim is living a fantasy. For the first time, there really is a God, one with the power to impose justice. There really is a prince charming, one that has all the powers of a God and has risked everything to be with you. One who may love you more passionately than anyone who has loved you within the boundaries of “sanity”.
What's good enough for our kids is not good enough for us? Okay, so society can never sanction such relationships, though it might be what it truly takes to make us happy. But in a “free” society, can we not understand ourselves to be voluntary slaves? Going to jobs we hate for reasons we only come to accept for lack of other options? Do we exaggerate what might happen to us if we leave our jobs, or goof off? Are we finding ways of hurting each other within the limits of the law? Finding ways of victimizing ourselves, if not physically then with our own thoughts? Do we find obstacles to narrow our own options and try to find a path given to us, rather than forging our own? Isn't our dissatisfaction with our relationships tied to disappointment in our lovers? That they don't know how to make us feel something? That they don't give our lives meaning? And isn't our dissatisfaction with our presidents that they don't impose justice? And when we go to church, don't we hope against hope that there really is a God who, somewhere, sometime, will be as brutal with the evil-doers as we wish he would have been with us before we got away with all we did?
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