Deluded Martyrs. In every social upheaval there are martyrs who sacrifice themselves for apparently very noble causes but whose unconscious reasons for their acts are much less sublime. Stupid bomb throwers who wreck a building or kill an individual, (acts most unlikely to change a social system to which they object), profess to be moved by their love for the people. Their actual motive is father hatred. Brutus and others who delivered the "people" from some "tyrant," in reality gratified an unconscious grudge and sought their own liberation from some form of authority made loathsome by infantile complexes.
The most grotesque example of it was the destruction of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 by a French mob which imagined that it was thereby freeing crowds of innocent prisoners and abolishing arbitrary death sentences. There were less than a dozen people in the fortress at that time. The mob venting its wrath on a symbol of authority pretended to be animated by a love of freedom and a desire to benefit others.
CHAPTER X
Plural Love and Infidelity
Lecture audiences often ask me whether plural love is possible. This would indicate on the part of the questioner a more or less unconscious wish to justify polygamous cravings. Plural marriages exist but I doubt whether any such thing as plural love has even been observed at any period of mankind's history.
For the most complicated examples of plural marriage, as for all the varieties of sexual complications, we must turn to Greece of the classical period. Demosthenes wrote somewhere: "We have prostitutes to give us pleasure, concubines to minister to our daily needs and wives to bear us children and to watch over our homes."
When we remember that besides the three types of women with whom they had sexual relations, many and among them some of the greatest men of those times, indulged in homosexual unions with young men of feminine appearance, we must draw two conclusions: first, that those men must have been sexual supermen, as they were at times mental supermen, second, that love as we understand it at the present day, can only have had very little to do with their sexual life.
Modern love as we shall see in Chapter XXXI means mutual love, the equal gratification of the mates thru the rites of sex communion.
Plural Love, be it of the ancient Greek type, of the Oriental or mormon type, means varietism for the male, scanty gratification for the female. At best a mild form of sexual slavery, most humiliating to the woman and possible only under a social system debarring woman from financial independence.