With the inter­net being now almost access­ible to any­one there is an abund­ance of inform­a­tion being made avail­able even on the most bizarre top­ics. When you can­not find it using one of the well known search engines, you usu­ally will find some­thing about it on Wiki­Pe­dia. The life­style my slave and I are choos­ing to live is no excep­tion to this phe­nomenon, tying in Total Power Exchange and hit­ting the search but­ton yields a copi­ous amount of results. 

There is one topic that even our com­munity does not like to talk about. By put­ting myself into a pos­i­tion of abso­lute power I am mak­ing myself vul­ner­able to all of the cog­nit­ive biases that we come fit­ted with from birth on. I have to make a con­scious effort to Mas­ter the Mas­ter within me or else that Mas­ter will start to Mas­ter me very soon. 

The Cor­rup­tion Through Power

Some of you might be famil­iar with a very well known cog­nit­ive bias which quite blatantly states that “people feel­ing in power tend to not con­sider per­spect­ives of other people” which has fur­ther been out­lined in an exper­i­ment of which a paper has been pub­lished. As if that was not enough, Deborah Gru­en­feld states on her intro­duct­ory page at Stan­ford that:

…asserts that power is dis­in­hib­it­ing: by redu­cing con­cern for the social con­sequences of one’s actions, power strengthens the link between per­sonal desires and the acts that sat­isfy them. Recent papers doc­u­ment also that power leads to an action-orientation (Journal of Per­son­al­ity and Social Psy­cho­logy) lim­its the abil­ity to take another’s per­spect­ive (Psy­cho­lo­gical Sci­ence), and that it increases the tend­ency to view oth­ers as means to and end (Journal of Per­son­al­ity and Social Psychology).…

The Mani­fest­a­tion of a Catch Twenty-two 

All of the afore­men­tioned sci­en­tific­ally proven beha­viours are easy to apply to a dys­func­tional Mas­ter and slave rela­tion­ship. I can never put myself in a pos­i­tion where I should freely dis­reg­ard com­pletely what my slave tells me or what her emo­tional state sug­gests. It is very easy to do so though. There are no retri­bu­tions, at least not imme­di­ately, and there is no one that could pos­sibly fault me for what I am doing. 

Not being held account­able for my actions is a catch twenty-two of the way our soci­ety tries to treat this life­style. In any other rela­tion­ship you are held account­able for all your actions by dir­ect influ­ence through a third party, for example fam­ily or your next of kin or maybe even the best friend you have. 
Most people, which includes even myself and my slave, do not choose to divulge our life­style and how we inter­act to oth­ers, which removes that second layer of account­ab­il­ity from me.

One could argue that I might be account­able towards a wider audi­ence of other Master’s and slaves and that it would be det­ri­mental for my stand­ing in that com­munity if I did not act to a cer­tain stand­ard, but as most of those people choose to not identify them­selves either, I am won­der­ing who that might be. 

Oh, To Be Good

I am not quite sure and I doubt that I will fig­ure it out any­time soon how to impose meas­ures of self con­trol on me and my rela­tion­ship which are out­side of my imme­di­ate con­trol, so that it becomes hard for me to change them. I have a per­sonal desire to be a good Mas­ter, to be the best owner my slave could pos­sibly want, yet I recog­nise that even I am human. I am greedy and I some­times might want to see my opin­ion and my wishes put first even when it would be smarter to take a step back, show some patience and then try again.

From Con­trolling to Destructive

There is much con­tro­versy around the layman’s term brain­wash­ing, yet in an APA Report sub­mit­ted in Novem­ber 1986 a few beha­viours towards an indi­vidual are lis­ted which can be con­sidered destruct­ive when over­used. I thin that these are eas­ily applied to a M/s relationship:

• Isol­a­tion from social supports
• Select­ive reward/punishment
• Den­ig­ra­tion of self and of crit­ical thinking
• Dis­so­ci­at­ive states to sup­press doubt and crit­ical thinking
• Altern­a­tion of harshness/threats and leniency/love
• Con­trol ori­ented guilt induction
• Act­ive pro­mo­tion of dependency
• Debilitation
• Phys­ical restraint/punishment
• Pres­sured pub­lic confessions

I feel that it is easy to see how each point in that list above can cause harm to any rela­tion­ship, yet with the lack of third party account­ab­il­ity and the know­ledge that I am in abso­lute con­trol, they are able to wreck havoc not only on the rela­tion­ship I would be hav­ing with my slave, but also on her emo­tional and psy­cho­lo­gical state.

Con­clu­sion

In sum­mary there is only one con­clu­sion that I can come to. It is neces­sary for me to be a good Mas­ter by ques­tion­ing how to be a good Mas­ter. It is also neces­sary for me to re-evaluate what being a Mas­ter means. It seems clear to me that it is much more than simply being a dom­in­ant indi­vidual.
I am pledging to myself, with this art­icle and every­day, that I will keep close watch on the points lis­ted above and that I will strive to police myself bet­ter than any third party ever could.