by Paul Sharp
It may seem strange to mention de Sade in the context of philosophers whose goal was to better prepare people to handle the dangers of the world, but he came from a period where political philosophers and writers were questioning established views in ways that could only be considered transgressive today. Although the Marquis de Sade gave his name to sadism in the English language because his writings were believed to indicate an interest in this practice, an objective review of his work suggests that his approach to education of men and women for the world was not too different from that of Voltaire, who lived and was writing around the same time.
Indeed, it is important to mention these men in the context of dark psychology because they understood how deficits in education can make men and women gravitate to those who might manipulate them. These men were idealists in their own way, although of a different make than the idealists of the West today. It can be argued that the approach to life and behavior in the modern West is characterized by the hypocrisy that is harmful to the sensitive souls that have the misfortune to be borne into it. As divergent as their reputations may be, both Voltaire and de Sade believed that better education could remedy the problem of men and women who were sensitive and who met unfortunate ends because they were not adequately prepared.
Although the term dark psychology is of relatively recent origin, the writings of the French philosophers of the 18th century suggest that they understood that human beings were capable of being motivated by dark or maleficent impulses, whether as a group or as individuals. Indeed, in Justine, the Marquis de Sade suggests that human beings are primarily motivated by impulses that would at best be described as narcissistic today. Although this may seem ironic to those who have not read de Sade’s writings, it, in fact, represents taking Voltaire’s occasionally conservative musings on the subject one step further.
It is important to mention these writers because there has been sort of a societal backslide since the Age of Reason which has produced ample prey for the predator using dark psychological arts. We do not mean a technological step backward, but a philosophical one in which the beliefs of common people are being influenced by doctrines again in ways that the philosophers of the Age of Reason were reveling again. Doctrine does not have to be bad. In equipping yourself for defense against dark psychological tactics you are learning a doctrine of sorts and using it to your benefit. The idea here is that the particular doctrines of today rather than better preparing us for a world fraught with danger (perhaps more danger now than there was even in 1770s France) render us more likely to be prey.
The Psychological Approach to Dark Psychology
The history of dark psychology will be described in the next chapter, but it is important to get a sense of where the psychological interpretation of this subject comes from. As was touched on earlier in this chapter, an important psychological concept to understand here is the idea of motivation and whether human motivation is primarily individualistic or if it is group-based and unconscious. Perhaps there are elements of both. Indeed, even casual observation suggests that human beings occasionally act in unpredictable, highly individualistic ways while at other times they appear to be tribalistic and lemmings.
Naturally, individual variations in people will mean that generalizations about human behavior are both hard to make and inaccurate. Some psychologists and social scientists attempt to create a picture of human behavior that falls within a narrow realm of normal, but the reality is that human behavior often falls on a spectrum. This spectrum of human behavior often flies in the face of religious or other conventions that establish behavior as being something that is simple, staid, and clearly divided into right or wrong.
Most people have a sense of right and wrong that guides their behavior, but it is important to understand that a dogmatic approach to life that does not adequately recognize how humans behave naturally will create a situation where people fall easy prey to others. For example, assuming that human beings are inherently good inclines people to be trusting of those who may lie to them, manipulate them, or have other intentions to harm them. Voltaire understood that humans often are motivated to do harm to others, and not as examples of “bad” people. His observations and the observations of others is that “badness” is not merely the preserve of bad or evil people.
Why do human beings do bad things to each other? Well, this is a question that psychologists, philosophers, and others have been attempting to figure out for hundreds of years. It appears that human beings have a capacity to act in a primal way that inclines them to do malign things that they may not due if they were behaving individualistically. This flies in the place of the school of individual psychology that was established by Alfred Adler, a Viennese medical doctor in the 19th century.
Dr. Adler was a contemporary of a more famous Viennese: Sigmund Freud. The climate of Vienna (and of Europe) at the time provided ample fodder for psychiatrists like Adler to make observations and create hypotheses based on their own approaches to human behavior. Although Freud is certainly the more famous name today, it has been argued that Adler has influence psychology more deeply. Indeed, his imprint on the study of dark psychology can still be felt today.
Individual psychology, as introduced by Adler, posits that humans are motivated by individualistic approaches to the world. These individual approaches and experiences may be motivated by imprinted experiences in early life, including the inferiority complex that Alder was particularly interested in, but they are different from the motivations that were important in the Freudian school of psychoanalysis. Freud believed that human beings were motivated by sex and libido, dividing the human psyche into the id, ego, and superego. Adler distanced himself from these notions to create a more individualistic approach to human behavior.
Adler’s approach sees human behavior as being purposive. Human beings are motivated to act based on motivations that are purposeful or intentional. Of course, the issue becomes the extent to which imprinted behaviors in early life can influence behavior and therefore make actions (and their motivations) not purposeful. Indeed, one of the arts of the dark psychological practitioner is to program or imprint their victim in such a way as to make them easy to manipulate and control.
The practitioner of dark psychological arts can teach their victim to trust them or to follow them by exposing them to signals or cues that instill these beliefs and feelings. For example, a common tactic of the narcissist or another practitioner of these arts is to send mix signals of love and hate, closeness and distance, which are designed both to instill trust in the prey and to confuse them. Human beings have a capacity to form emotional connections with other people, which means that those who are not on their guard can find themselves easily manipulated by someone using their desire and the innate tendency for emotional closeness against them.
Perhaps the best way to approach Adler’s individual motivation idea is to state that human beings behave in a purposeful way, but that those motivations can be imprinted and accessed by others for reasons that are unconscious to the target. If you are the victim of a practitioner of dark psychological tactics, you may find that you are behaving in a way that you are motivated to do, but you do not realize that your motivations have been accessed or imprinted by others.
For example, a skillful manipulator may convince you to dislike or even attack someone with such aptitude that you do not realize that you dislike of the person is not something native. A common tactic of a manipulator or narcissist is to spread a damaging rumor about someone that they dislike, feel threatened by, or have a desire to destroy and sit and watch with a smile as one by one they turn others against their target. In this example, the person who has been slandered is the target, but so too are the others who heard the rumor, believed it, and were motivated to attack a stranger who they had only heard a story about.
This is how motivations can be both purposeful and unconscious. You may be motivated to have a negative opinion of someone or perhaps behave in an unfriendly
way towards that person based on a rumor that you heard, but is this motivation your own? We have seen how your own motivation has been spurred by someone else’s motivation to damage someone else. We also might say that the motivation to attack someone that others are attacking (or to gang up on them) is actually not purposeful as it is part of human nature. Indeed, in some religions, this type of social ill behavior that some describe as human nature is rather animal nature. Some believe that human beings behave with animal nature ninety or even ninety-nine percent of the time.
This is a concept that has found a place in dark psychology. It allows the man or woman educating themselves about the dark psychological arts for purposes of defense or for other reasons to understand human behavior in a meaningful way. It must be accepted that human beings are often motivated to behave based on imprinted behaviors or as part of a group. In other words, human beings may be said to have individual, purposive motivations, but that at least some of the time we behave based on imprinting or based on the sort of synching up with others that is not fully purposive.
In some schools of dark psychological study, the argument is made that human behavior is ninety-nine percent purposive. This allows dark psychology to adhere with individual psychology theory as hypothesized by Alfred Adler while also recognizing that the practitioners of dark psychological arts are able to manipulate so well because they are tapping to aspects of the human psyche that are not truly purposive. This is the startling truth about dark psychology: mind control can be affected so well because many men and women believe that they behave with free will when they truly do not.
An Example of Mind Control Using Dark Psychology
The last woman to be hung in the United Kingdom was a startlingly beautiful nightclub hostess named Ruth Ellis. Her execution eventually leads to the end of the death penalty in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and it is also an example of the destructive power of dark psychology. Of course, the man who manipulated Ruth Ellis would not have called himself a dark psychology practitioner. He would not have read any books on the subject or have gone to internet forums to discuss his tricks with others of his ilk. He merely was motivated to destroy the life of someone else in a narcissistic way and he ended up destroying Ruth in the process.
The life and story of Ruth Ellis demonstrate several important ideas about dark psychology. Ruth lived in the early 20th century when the cult of individualism was just beginning to take its hold on the West. But Ruth’s life course did not take the direction it did because she was heedless and headstrong. Ruth had faced numerous challenges and manipulators were able to weave their way seamlessly into her life. Ruth was not executed unjustly or as a case of mistaken identity. Ruth was a confessed murderer and her sentence was perfectly legal at the time. But what the general public did not know, but which we know now today, is that Ruth had likely been manipulated by a skillful narcissist.
Ruth had been born Ruth Neilson in Wales in 1926. Her father was a musical performer who appears to have been in and out of the family’s life. Finances were strained at home and this, combined with Ruth becoming pregnant by a Canadian soldier at 17, pushed her to attempt to make her own way in the world. Ruth would become a model and nightclub hostess, her singular looks and sociable demeanor making her practically a natural for this line of work.
By the late 1940s, Ruth was living in London where she worked as a nude model and hostess. She worked at numerous clubs, some of which had a well-heeled, money clientele allowing Ruth to interact with men much outside her typical social circle in North Wales. At one of the clubs was Ruth worked, her manager is alleged to have blackmailed the hostesses as his club into sleeping with him. The hostesses may also have been encouraged or forced to sleep with customers, although for many women it would have been a choice.
In 1950, Ruth married George Ellis, a divorced dentist who was nearly twenty years older than she was. He already had two children, and it is alleged that he was an alcoholic who was abusive to Ruth. The relationship between the two quickly soured and Ruth left her husband numerous times. Ruth appeared in an uncredited movie role around this time and gave birth to a daughter months later. Indeed, in Lady Godiva Rides Again Ruth was already four months pregnant. As Ruth may have been engaged in prostitution at this time, George Ellis refused to acknowledge Ruth’s newborn daughter as his own and Ruth moved back in with her mother.
Ruth became manager of a popular nightclub in a swank part of London in 1953. It was here that she would meet David Blakely, the man she would later murder. He was a few years younger than her and he belonged to the well-connected auto racing set. He was well-educated and he and Ruth hit it off. As manager of the Little Club, Ruth had an apartment above the nightclub to allow her to perform her club duties. David moved in with her weeks after meeting even though he was already engaged to another woman.
Ruth and David’s relationship were doomed from the start as Ruth continued to the hostess, which brought her into contact with celebrity admirers and other men. David would have been aware of the sort of behaviors that Ruth was engaged in and that she met many handsome or wealthy men. Not long after David moved in, Ruth began dating a man named Desmond Cussen. Although he may not have been as well-educated or connected as Blakely, Cussen would have held his own attractions for Ruth. Cussen was a former Royal Air Force pilot who was now a partner in a successful tobacco business. Where Blakely’s expensive racing pursuits often left him broke (to the extent that he was living above a nightclub with Ruth), Cussen was an established businessman with his own property.
Ellis moved in with Cussen though she continued to see Blakely. Indeed, David and Ruth continued to see other people. David offered to marry Ruth, much to the disapproval of his aristocratic friends the Findlaters, who saw Ruth as beneath him. Ruth became pregnant in 1955 but lost the pregnancy, the second miscarriage she had had while with David. Around this time, Ruth was actively seeing Desmond Cussen who harbored a dislike for Blakely and who taught Ruth how to fire a gun.
On April 10, 1955, Easter Sunday, Ruth took a cab to the Findlater’s residence, looking for Blakely. She saw Blakely’s car driving up as she arrived and she paid the cab off and walked to the Magdala Pub, an establishment a few blocks away in London. She found Blakely’s car outside and waited for Blakely to come out. Blakely and a friend exited the Magdala at around 9:30. Ruth was standing in news seller’s next door when he walked passed her. She called out to him twice but he ignored her.
As Blakeley attempted to enter his car, Ruth removed a .38 caliber revolver from her purse and fired at him. Blakely began to run, as the first shot had missed, but then Ruth pursued Blakely and fired a second shot. This shot landed and Blakely collapsed into the pavement. Ruth stood over him and fired three additional shots into him, one of which was less than an inch from his back. She asked Blakely’s friend if he would call the police and when they arrived, she told them that she was guilty. She would later admit to the murder.
During the trial, Ruth stated that she had intended to kill Blakely when she shot him. She had gone to the bar with the revolver with the intention of killing him. The jury found her guilty of the murder of David Blakely, which carried a mandatory death sentence. Ruth’s family attempted to get a reprieve, and a new attorney urged Ruth to reveal where she had gotten the gun. She revealed that it was Desmond who had given her the gun as well as shooting practice. Desmond had allegedly harbored a rivalry with and dislike for Blakely. This did not change Ruth’s fate. On July 13, Ruth Ellis was hung for the murder of David Blakely, one of only eight women to have been executed in the preceding thirty years though sixty had been convicted of murder.
After the murder, Desmond Cussen moved to Australia and changed his name. Whether or not Ruth Ellis committed the crime of murder is not an issue. The question is the extent to which Ruth’s motivation to kill was of her own making or if it had been implanted in her by a skillful manipulator. If one examines the facts, Ruth Ellis had a history of failed, abusive relat
ionships of which the relationship with Blakely was the latest. She was seeing Blakely while living with Cussen and she knew that he was seeing other women.
When Ruth was asked why she shot Blakely she reported that her actions were due to extreme provocation, but it seems strange that she would be provoked to want to harm Blakely at this stage when their relationship had been strained throughout its two years and she was the one living with someone else. The truth seems to be that it was Desmond Cussen who wanted him dead and Ruth was just the easy tool he used to get what he wanted. The key here is that Ruth, too, wanted Blakely dead, but was this motivation purposive or did it come from somewhere else?
This is the power of dark psychology manipulation and this is why it is important for men and women to learn about it to arm themselves. Ruth Ellis murdered David Blakely and even she seemed to believe that her desire to kill originated with her. Many commentators on the case argued that history’s approach to Ruth’s story has been colored by a desire to absolve her of guilt. That is not the intention here. Ruth was guilty. She was guilty of premeditated murder and she was guilty of being easy prey for someone else to manipulate.
What is it that makes someone easy prey? It is easy to look at the life of someone like Ruth Ellis and say that she was emotionally vulnerable because of her fractured home, her poverty, her insecure social and economic situation, her multiple pregnancies and miscarriages creating a perhaps whirlwind emotional and psychological state. There are many reasons why Ruth was vulnerable to manipulation, but perhaps the primary reason was that she was not prepared. Just as Voltaire’s Candide argued that French children of the 18th century ought to be better prepared for the world as part of a humanistic approach to education, so too ought Ruth Ellis to have been prepared for the lion’s den that she was thrown into as a nightclub hostess in London.