Mark_Eichenlaub comments on Why do people ____?

It’s called Intrusive Thoughts, and apparently most people have these:

London psychologist Stanley Rachman presented a questionnaire to healthy college students and found that virtually all said they had these thoughts from time to time, including thoughts of sexual violence, sexual punishment, “unnatural” sex acts, painful sexual practices, blasphemous or obscene images, thoughts of harming elderly people or someone close to them, violence against animals or towards children, and impulsive or abusive outbursts or utterances.[6] Such bad thoughts are universal among humans, and have “almost certainly always been a part of the human condition”.[7]

When I first read this, I thought “woah, that’s kinda weird and worrying”. Then I realised I do something similar. I sometimes rehearse violent confrontations in my imagination.

I’ve been involved in a few violent confrontations as an adult, and they’re nothing like you imagine them to be. People like to imagine all the badass things they would have done in those situations, but when you suddenly find yourself in a brawl, your thoughts are generally “what the hell’s going on here? Is this really happening?” I’ve heard accounts of highly trained martial artists experiencing the same thing. Even if you’re physically prepared for a fight, you’re not necessarily prepared for the social situation of a fight.

I assume that when I imagine violent first-person scenarios it’s some sort of long-term rehearsal process where I’m psychologically preparing myself for conflict at some point in the future. I generally try and avoid situations which have a high risk of physical conflict, though, so my sample size is so small as to be useless when trying to figure out if it does any good.

I fantasize about horrific situations to subject fictional characters to. This I recently recognized as being due to my long-term work on decompartmentalizing new information. Essentially I find rules of the fictional realm, put them together in ways not intended by the original author, and get the small rush of self-congratulations for “taking an idea to its logical conclusion.” This results in being “too realistic” for many fantasy settings. On the other hand, it is why rationalist fiction so pleases me—it reminds me of how I think!

The amateur psychoanalyst simulation I’m running would latch on to this:

It’s very rare that I show anger, and I don’t think I’ve ever punched someone as an adult.

Violence is just as much an inherent drive as sex for males. Violent narratives for entertainment are almost universal among human cultures.

I have a variant of imagining someone saying something annoying, and then trying to figure out an answer to it. I think the sequence is more likely to end with me giving up because the imagined annoying person just won’t listen.

Fortunately, when I realized (after some decades of doing this) that it was a waste of mental and emotional cpus—why am I inventing occasions to be annoyed?-- I found that I did a lot less of it, and could bail out of it quickly if I found I was doing it.

Why do people have it?

It’s just an evolutionary ad-hoc story, but I think that in an ancient environment you would have real fights sometimes. An impulse to imagine fighting, even when you are not, is an opportunity to rehearse the techniques and learn from mistakes.

I remember reading some article that if some skill requires N hours of time, imagining the practice realistically with full attention, is almost as good as the real practice. This probably assumes that you had the real practice before, so your imagination is realistic enough. In ancient environment, your imagination of fight would be realistic enough.

Personally I don’t fantasise about violence in itself as much as the exercise of power and control. Not sure how common that is, but possibly if you generally feel out of control the most obvious way for you to exer some seems to be violence (whereas for me its people doing what I tell them to).