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.

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