Ilia Repin, Barge Haulers 'Burlaki' on the Volga , 1870-1873. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
The real monster was the Maggid obviously but the Baal Shem Tov is the brand. The chassidic revolution plotted to dehumanize individuals and it took two distinct paths. To the South West the Ukrainian and Polish Tzaddikim (metamagical personalities) proposed that humans are to be contained and controlled like animals and occasionally one should throw a raw meat at the caged wild beasts to make sure they are obedient and respond eagerly to their masters. To the North East in Belarus the Alter Rebbe was not satisfied with this approach. He agreed that humans are to be contained, but he disagreed about the training methods. The Alter Rebbe maintained that you can reprogram an animal to become an automaton drone (in this regard he preceded the experiments of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron). The Alter Rebbe preached that you don’t need to beat out humanity from people, like you do with the circus animals using a whip and meat, instead you change the behavior, reprogram an individual to the point that a man thinks it’s his honor and high purpose to surrender his humanity.
And then of course there was Reb Nachman, on the first reading concerned and compassionate about the human frailties. Yet despite being married when he was just thirteen, Reb Nachman pre-freudianly cast the agitation of the men specific sexual guilt as the innermost theme of a human experience. This was incidentally a direct reversal to the Kabbalah that revolved around the central metaphor of the cosmic sexual pleasure, the yihud copulation as the content of spiritually. Fiercely independent Reb Nachman was going even further than the Maggid required. The Maggid hoped for a merciful dehumanization of an individual, “for their own good”. Reb Nahman instead demanded the everlasting agony against our own creation and by proxy the Creator himself. This eternal tormented state is precisely what many crave so feverishly in our age of the dull feeling.