Pain is the tool that binds the detached outsider back into practical purposes.

Evidence

Madmen are not held spellbound by the goals and purposes people serve today, in the same way that proper people are. This makes them into sinister observers, who must be eliminated. The evil deed will be undone if the witnesses are killed. Pain plays a special role here. The madman appears to be detached, to be standing outside, he lives in another world, removed from the constraints of the present. Pain calls us back into the present (think of the various ways of waking people from sleep!), and reduces people to defensive reactions, to seeing an escape from pain as being their one goal, it binds them to that purpose. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 330

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that the outsider’s crime is his non-participation in present purposes, and that pain is deployed to force participation, resists easy summary.
• XREF: Echoes Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish that punishment reconstitutes the subject; also connects to the Frankfurt School’s work on the ‘manipulative type’ scored earlier.
• SHARE: The line ‘the evil deed will be undone if the witnesses are killed’ is a razor-sharp formulation of why authoritarian movements eliminate inconvenient observers.