The Unpleasure Principle
The pleasure nodes of the brain are complex and not always rational. When we say that people all the time do things that cannot possibly be pleasurable and that seems to go against simple sanity – eating kale and tofu for instance – we are only saying that they are human.
Well, so are we all! This too is part of the human experience, however odd it seems to the outsider. It is a large tent that we are gathered under, we the entire human family, and all are welcomed.
You see this ‘pleasure in pain’ principle in everyday life in the professions that people take up, and in the people that they marry, even in the cars they drive.
In the latter case the same fellow on more days than not can be observed in the same damn muffler shop, bringing the same damn car in to have a new, old, intermittent, or sometimes entirely imaginary noise checked out.
He trails behind him like bread crumbs in the forest a string of empty checkbooks, exhausted wallets, and now-useless credit cards, and speaks to the same uncomprehending head mechanic each time he is in there, in a mutually unsatisfying conversation.
And then does it again a few days later.
Why would a person do this?
Why not get a newer car or find a better auto shop or take up the unicycle or the dirigible to get himself around?
But you see, to his mind, where as we say, the pleasure and the pain principles have been tangled like Christmas tree lights brought out once a year where the untangling of them is beyond human effort and you just throw them on the tree as they are, it is not worth the mental and emotional toll needed to get on an entirely rational automotive pleasure plan, so he just keeps going with what he has.
However ramshackle, and indeed, however contrary to his own best interests, it is what he is comfortable with.
Nice! Perfectly nice!
If we were to exclude from the club every individual with stray emotional tics or irrational habits of thought there would only be you and me left. Perhaps only me.
Come one, come all is what I say, for human nature is a multi-varied thing.
You see the same pattern in marriages.
When you hear that Donny Anderson from your high school class has married one of the Borgia sisters, Millie, you may say to yourself, “well, that is an interesting marriage, but one way to look at it is that Millie is simply a high-spirited girl with many interesting ideas to share, and here is a toast to the bride and groom,” and leave it at that.
When you hear later that Millie has tried to poison Donny and in the emotional aftermath of the divorce he marries one of the other Borgia girls, Daisy, and then she also tries to poison him, and then in the emotional aftermath of that divorce he marries yet a third of the Borgia sisters, Betty, and then so on, with this theme of attempted poisonings running through Donny’s marital history like fat running through bacon, you can only say to yourself, ‘well, that is human nature for you,’ and conclude that there must be something in Donny’s wiring that takes a thrill of pleasure in just how bad things can get, a desire for pain, even if the subject isn’t entirely aware of it, as we have already discussed in the cases of kale and tofu.
Capitalism though will find a way, and I cannot see that in our tireless efforts to penetrate every market that we have even scratched the surface on this one.
Where for instance are the sleep number beds, perhaps denominated in negative numbers, that harden the mattress under you into something that interstate highway pavement might envy? If this setting is at minus 5, this highway pavement level, then minus 11 might be actual spikes that emerge from the bedding, so that you are sleeping on a bed of nails like the Indian fakirs of old.
This is what I am talking about.
There is a market for these small helpings of discomfort dished up on a daily basis.
Shoe stores overplay, badly overplay, the comfort and gentle fit of their brands.
How much better it would be to broaden the choices to include shoes that are too tight by several sizes, that are missing a heel on one of the pair, that are pre-worn and already possessing holes in the soles? A certain type of shopper would flock to that store.
If the shop also stocked umbrellas with torn fabric, so torn in fact that it merely flaps in the wind during wet weather, well this special shopper snatches one right up and waits hopefully for the next bad thunderstorm.
Let others market to the conventional shopper and provide soothing ambient noises for them to fall asleep to at night, the nocturnal hum in the rain forest after the sun goes down or the gentle patter of a summer shower on a rose garden, all that stuff.
I say nothing against these fine people and if that is their idea of audio bliss, more power to them.
But for goodness sake let us recognize the simple fact that a non-trivial segment of the buying public would much prefer the soothing sounds of a dentist’s drill or parking lot collisions between cars driven by equally unpleasant people who look forward to a lively conversation afterwards.
The crunch of glass underfoot, and the scrape of the fingernail run along a grade school blackboard, these belong on that same audio reel.
Hippos breaking wind discreetly, or as you sometimes get with large personalities, robustly, is a sound that certain folks can’t get enough of as they drift off after a busy day, along with sonic booms and the gently churn of rock crushers working round the clock on a demolition site.
And would any array of audio offerings be complete in this line if it didn’t include a car alarm that goes on and on and on and on until the verge of madness and then on and on and on some more?
There have been some advances made in introducing dollops of pain into the entertainment field – after all, there are plenty of black and white European movies with subtitles, and plenty of others without a single ray-gun, fog-shrouded Victorian London street, or giant insect to their name – but there is surely more we can do to broaden the appeal of pure knock-your-head-against-the-wall unpleasure in the other arenas of entertainment.
The consumer of crime fiction on either the page or the screen who is also a connoisseur of dismal self-disappointment will relish the delights served up by the kind of English village murder mystery so popular on the bookstore shelves…once the plots receive the proper modifications.
In this instance, upon the introduction of the characters, the two kindly sisters, the young parson, the grouchy retired scholar, the new divorcee just moved there, and so on, the author will make a point of highlighting who exactly the guilty party is in the very first pages, even if the crime is not yet committed. The first paragraph may read:
“The young cleric greeted the Asbury sisters as they strolled in the village gardens. ‘Ladies,’ he cried, ‘is it not a beautiful day to be out?’”
In one of those authorial asides that no English village crime novel could do without, the writer next, instead of remarking on the surprised look on one of the sister’s face, or dropping some sort of hint to play out later on, such as what’s the parson doing in the village gardens at this time of day anyway, he, the writer, says:
“This guy is the killer. This guy right here. The cleric, or the village parson, if you’d rather refer to him in that manner. His name is William and he’s the killer. See him? This guy.“
Well, if you are a lover both of mysteries and plunging disappointment over a plot secret spoiled, you are in your glory at this point.
If by the same token you are horror fiction maven and also one who savors the sinking feeling of deep plot disappointment, then special lines of books will be established wherein the narrative sends newlyweds to an ancient castle which carries a curse upon the young husband’s line, and they wander around and in the course of that fateful night the walls do not seep blood, nor is there a ghostly revenant down the hall swinging the head of his latest victim in a casual manner, nor a deep boomy voices whose origins can’t quite be pinned down, nor any portraits of ancient evildoers whose eyes seem to follow you about, when none of that takes place, I say, and instead the couple make sandwiches and spend some time looking for the remote before finally finding it, and then fall asleep, well, that is the horror experience par excellence for the reader who seeks first to find and then have disappointed that human urge towards the shiver at the base of the neck.
By the same token, while out dining, no doubt on underdone chicken and overdone steak, and the strolling musicians of the evening stop by your table because everyone else has asked them to leave, and they unpack their tubas and bagpipes and piccolos, all of which were just purchased that morning and which they have never played, then it is bliss itself to simply sit back and let this musical squalor wash over you, wincing at nearly every note, if you could even call them notes.
It is an entire world opening up for the entrepreneur in this category and many a fortune will be made meeting the needs of these fine people.
It is best not to dawdle over the opportunity however; the kale and tofu guys are already well ahead of you.
