Stop fuckin' with me,
I'm the accused
I'm not the enemy
You're so confused
no way you could enlighten me,
No freedom trapped in slavery,
deceitful honesty mother fuckin' human not a machine
Mudvayne, Everything and Nothing, L.D. 50
In 1954, the science fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt had encountered a curious anomaly whe he was studying male authoritarian behavior for a novel called The Violent Man. He was intrigued by the number of divorce cases in which habitualy unfaithful hisbands had expected total fidelity from their wives; such a husband might flaunt his own infidelities, while erupting into murderous violence if his wife so much as smiled at another man. Such men obviously regarded women with deep hostility, as if they expected to be decieved or betrayed-- this is why they chose to marry gentle and unagressive women. Their "conquests" were another form of aggression, the aim being to prove that they were masterful seducers who could have any woman they liked. Their whole unstable structureof self esteem was founded upon this notion taht women found them irresistable; so it was essential for the wife to behave like a slave in a harem. This also explained another characteristic of such men: that they could not bear to be contradicted or shown to be in the wrong; this also threatened their image of themselves as a kind of god or superman. If confronted with proof of their own fallibility, they would explode into violence rather than acknowledge that they had made a mistake. For this reason, Van Vogt labeled this type "the Right Man" or "the Violent Man." To his colleagues at work, he might appear perfectly normal and balanced; but his family knew him as a kind of paranoid dictator.
Only one thing could undermine this structure of self-dillusion. If his wife walked out on him, she had demonstrated beyond all doubt that she rejected him; his tower of self dillusion was undermined, and often the result was mental breakdown, or suicide.....
It is obvious that the Right Man syndrome is a compensatory mechanism for profound self-doubt, and that its essence lies in convincing others of something he feels to be untrue; in other words, it is a form of confidence-trickery. it is, that is to say, a typically criminal form of "shortcut," like cheating in an exam, or stealing something istead of saving money to buy it.
Now, the basic charictaristic of the criminal, and also of the Right Man, is a certain lack of self-control. Van Vogt writes that the right man "makes the decision to be out of control"-that is, makes the decision to lose control at a certain point, exploding into violencem rather than calling upon a more mature level of his personality. But he is adept at making excuses that place the blame for this lack of self-control on other people for provoking him. One Brittish sex killer, Patrick Byrne, explained that he decided to terrorize women "to get my own back on them for causing my nervous tension through sex."
But the lack of self-control brings its own problems. Every time it happens, he is, in effect, lowering his own bursting point.
