The Marquis de Sade and the End of Evil

by Ran Prieur
Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, was a French nobleman of
the late 1700s who sexually abused numerous prostitutes and servants, was
imprisoned the Bastille, served as a judge after the Revolution, was accused
of moderatism and nearly guillotined, was imprisoned again for his writings,
and lived out his years in an insane asylum, where he completed fiction and
philosophy that was decades, and in some ways centuries, ahead of its time.
Those who would condemn Sades writings because of his personal behavior
should consider Abraham Lincoln, who is widely admired for his opposition
to chattel slavery, even though he personally started and conducted an
illegal war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and admitted that
the purpose of the war was not to end slavery but to reinforce the monolithic
character of the American domination system, or as he put it, preserve
the Union. If you think Lincolns crimes were different because he was
President, then Sade would agree. . . but in reverse! To kill a man in a
paroxysm of passion is understandable, but to have him killed by someone
else after calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honorably
discharged is incomprehensible.
The fundamental difference between people who like the Marquis de Sade,
and people who dont, is their view of evil. To the anti-Sadeans, evil runs
from the frightening edge of consciousness all the way to the infinite depths
of the universe, and human society is at best a fragile shell of civility that
keeps us from plunging into bottomless horror. Therefore, good means
authorities and rules that keep the world safe and predictable, and any ethic
or practice of selfishness or wild freedom is simply a movement toward evil.
Good people who like Sade see evil as a dead end, not the default condition of
the universe but an aberration, which can keep itself going only with great
difficulty. Not only can we defeat it with good, which means something like
empathy, but we can defeat it with awareness, because evil cannot exist in
full illumination, and we can even defeat it with more evil, in the same way
that you can blow out a fire with an explosion. The worst thing we can do
is to repress evil under a veneer of civility, which keeps it both stable and
hidden.
Theres no better example of hidden evil than the long tradition of sexual
abuse by the upper classes. In every rigid hierarchy, from primitive tribes to
the Catholic church, the rulers are constantly tempted by the sexual side
of domination. Im not sure why domination has a sexual side, but it does,
and its more compelling than non-sexual domination or non-dominating
sexuality. The Marquis de Sade was on one level another participant in elite
sex abuse, and on another level its greatest enemy, because he brought it into

the light. For one thing, he left witnesses. Normal elite sex abusers kill their
victims, or intimidate them into silence, or make the abuse so unbelievable
that if the victims try to report it, everyone will think theyre crazy. Sade
was a psychic exhibitionist who seems to have wanted his victims to tell
their stories.
More important, through his writing he brought his own feelings, and a value
system that justified them, into the light. His masterpiece is Philosophy in
the Bedroom (available in PDF from the Marquis de Sade eLibrary). Heres
a typical passage:
Nature, mother to us all, never speaks to us save of ourselves;
nothing has more of the egoistic than her message, and what
we recognize most clearly therein is the immutable and sacred
counsel: prefer thyself, love thyself, no matter at whose expense.
But the others, they say to you, may avenge themselves. . . Let
them! The mightier will vanquish; he will be right. Very well,
there it is, the primitive state of perpetual strife and destruction
for which Natures hand created us, and within which alone it is
of advantage to her that we remain.
Philosophy in the Bedroom is like Nietzche, but a hundred years sooner
and mixed with graphic sex. Its like Darwin but decades sooner and without holding back. Darwin followed Sade in declaring nature a war of all
against all in which the strong are right to exterminate the weak, but he
stopped there and left the human social implications vague and unspoken,
which enabled the elite to quietly keep social Darwinism to themselves and
engineer two centuries of tyranny and ecocide.
Sade took the same idea to its logical conclusion and said that every individual human should be free to rob and rape and murder! His vision, almost 100
years before anarchism, was the total democratization of force, even force at
its most horrific. His goal was to break the alliance between savagery and
Empire, which would have denied savagery its strongest tools, made Empire
impossible, and prevented every major atrocity of the industrial age.
Of course I dont agree that every human should be free to rape and murder,
and I think his vision was naive, but its damn hard to explain why. The
whole modern age could be called the Sadean Age, because for 250 years
weve been struggling with the issues he raised. We believe in freedom,
still defined in 18th century terms as the freedom of selfish individuals
to gratify desires. We believe in equality, that this freedom should be
distributed to all. And almost everyone still holds Sades proto-Darwinian
view of nature as an amoral, hyper-selfish struggle for survival. To this day,
Sade challenges us to take these beliefs seriously or abandon them, to shit
or get off the pot.

For 250 years weve done neither. What Sade (and Adam Smith, and Jefferson, and many others) failed to understand is that enlightenment-style
freedom cannot possibly be held by all, because it includes the freedom to
dominate, and its the nature of domination to form monopolies and hierarchies. Once there is power-over, no law, religion, or ideology can stop it from
forming a giant system in which no individual has any power, but merely
channels the power of the system itself.
I said the elite kept Sades philosophy for themselves, but even they dont
get to live by it. True Sadean freedom belongs only to the Beast, the social
organism made up of every link of power-over in the world. In the modern
age, the physical form of that Beast is the industrial megamachine. It is the
worlds one and only Sadean actor, ravaging whole continents for no other
reason than the joy of indifferent brutality. Its human slaves experience this
joy vicariously through the beautiful deadness of monolithic architecture,
through the addictive rush of increasing numbers and soulless change, and
through scenes of wild freedom on television. More than would ever admit
it take secret pleasure in forests being turned into parking lots. They call
it progress or civilization or modernization or even evolution, but a
more precise term is technosadism: the spiritual habit of taking pleasure in
withholding empathy from the living while they are turned by mechanical
action into the dead.
Technosadism is a religion, and for some reason humans need religion. Its
not enough for us to say, heres a set of rules that makes a good game. We
need a Story, a Meaning, a Role in something larger. Technosadism provides
this meaning by projecting its own behavior onto nature, defined as the
whole universe. This world rests on the back of selfish brutality, which again
rests on selfish brutality, and so on all the way down. And our holy quest
is to out-brutalize nature itself, to beat it into submission: wolves, jungles,
volcanoes, planets, stars.
What this religion is missing is God, and not just a bearded sky father but
any kind of guiding intelligence. The modern machine metaphysics that
the universe is nothing but lifeless bouncing particles and waves is often
credited to Descartes, but he believed in God, and even Isaac Newton was
into esoteric spirituality. So how did we lose God? Richard Dawkins could
not say it any better today than Sade did in Philosophy in the Bedroom in
1795:
. . . if movement is inherent in Nature; if, in short, she alone,
by reason of her energy, is able to create, produce, preserve,
maintain, hold in equilibrium within the immense plains of space
all the spheres that stand before our gaze and whose uniform
march, unvarying, fills us with awe and admiration, what then
becomes of the need to seek out a foreign agent, since this active
faculty essentially is to be found in Nature herself, who is naught
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else than matter in action? Do you suppose your deific chimera

will shed light upon anything?
Supposedly the issue is intellectual efficiency why believe A plus B if you
can explain everything with A alone? But really there are quite a lot of
things we cant explain with a matter-based metaphysics, and the deeper
issue is morality. Technosadism demands an amoral universe, one with no
intelligent perspective to judge the value of our actions. This doctrine likes
to call itself scientific rationalism, but experimental testing of hypotheses
and rational thought could just as easily support other models of reality.
A more precise term for the metaphysics of technosadism is mechanistic
nihilism: the belief that matter is the root of mind, and mindlessness is the
root of matter, and therefore mindlessness and meaninglessness underlie
everything.
So-called postmodernism is really nothing but extreme modernism, an
attempt to destroy modernity with the same nihilism that drives it. This
is what I meant by evil being difficult to sustain: the megamachine needs
just enough moral emptiness to permit enslaving the human species and
exterminating life on Earth a little more moral emptiness and people have
no reason to do their jobs. Sade would have loved postmodernism, but it has
never worked for ordinary people, who want more meaning, not less.
To this day, the strongest opposition to technosadism comes not from newer
ideologies, but older ones: nationalism, tribalism, fundamentalist religion.
The so-called clash of civilizations going on right now in southwest Asia
is between, on the one side, a weird alliance of technosadism and Jehovah
sky-fatherism, and on the other side, tribalism and Allah sky-fatherism.
The worlds poorer people cling to their gods, and reject the technosadean
project, precisely because they havent shared in the benefits of the project,
the continual increase in manufactured toys and comforts. For the same
reason, as ordinary Americans get poorer, theyre sliding back into violent
tribalism and fundamentalist religion. If they cant look forward to owning
a nice house and car and giant TV, they have to look forward to destroying
enemies and going to heaven.
Of course, in Sades original vision, people dont need to look forward to
anything. His libertines, like wild animals, live in the eternal present.
Only when Sades philosophy merged with civilization were hedonism and
decadence defined as consumer products earned after a long day of wage
labor
There are human societies where people dont need to look forward to anything, where they have a meaning of life thats not based on holding tension
between where they are and where they want to be. So why do people
have to look forward to anything? Sade himself imagined his libertines,
like primitive humans and wild animals, living in the here and now. So
why do people have to look forward to anything? Can we have a spiritual
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perspective, a meaning of life, thats not based on holding tension between

where we are and where we want to be? This question leads us even farther
back, to primitive humans and wild nature.
(scraps)
Sade himself imagined his libertines getting their pleasure in the here and
now. Only when his values were merged into civilization did hedonism come
to mean a life of wage labor while looking forward to ice cream and internet
porn.
Sade (and Rousseau, and many others) had the right idea: to defeat the
Empire by learning from nature and nature-based humans. But only now
Indeed, to ordinary Americans, the word modern has lost all its human
meaning, and now refers precisely to machines and our roles inside machines
as servants and hangers-on.
Sade should be forgiven for his philosophical mistakes, because 200 years
later we are only beginning to know better. To this day, right wingers think
murder and torture are heroic if done on the orders of a right wing leader,
even if hes breaking the law. Lefties are still stuck in a cartoonish extreme
pacifism that would be forced to condemn slave revolts and the French
resistance to Hitler.
The Marquis de Sade is the reductio ad absurdum of the modern age. He
challenges us to either follow him into madness, or refute him and topple
everything we believe.
, while in the shadows, ecologists patiently gather evidence that nature is
based on cooperation. Even anthropologists hesitate to morally distinguish
among primitive humans, so that were forced to lump them all together, and
either admire the worst tribes or believe that the best tribes have nothing to
teach us.
-source