Amerika

As we exit the Age of Symbolism, some interpretations of religion and politics are increasingly being viewed as psychological phenomenon. They are pathologies: an obsessive need to act out a certain narrative without achieving real-world benefits outside of that narrative.

In this way, they are similar to paraphilias, or symbolic acts carried out for the gratification of the user but not to his benefit. The classic example is the serial killer who dresses his victims as Alice in Wonderland; he gains no benefit but needs the symbolism to complete his sexual or power fantasy.

Symbolic acts reflect emotional need. People want freedom from fears, doubt, confusion, and ambiguity. They find these in talismans, or things which seem to make everything alright, and scapegoats, or things upon which they can blame all of their failures. Humans tend toward narcissism and this demands and is created by symbolism.

It turns out in fact that most of human history can be revealed as narcissism versus realism. When we get realistic, or measure our actions by their consequences to the whole of reality, our fortunes rise; at that point, people pursue self-interest and become narcissistic, denying reality and laying the groundwork for negative consequences.

Leftists exist as apologists for the decay. They are anti-strength and anti-reality. They want the individual to be king instead of having some power which can decide in favor of realism. Leftists, ultimately, are either narcissists or victims of narcissists who promote narcissism in order to keep the peace.

It turns out that narcissism is a complex pathology:

“Narcissism is a complex personality trait. We all exhibit narcissistic features to varying degrees, which can be expressed in both grandiose and vulnerable forms. Individuals who exhibit more grandiose features are self-assured and socially dominant whereas individuals who exhibit more vulnerable features are introverted and have lower self-esteem. Both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism share an antagonistic core, demonstrated by high levels of entitlement and willingness to exploit others.”

Men scored higher on grandiose narcissism while women scored higher on vulnerable narcissism.

We see the two sides of Leftism in narcissism: pretense of moral superiority (grandiose) and use of guilt to enforce it (vulnerable).

Narcissists need total control in order to enforce acceptance of narcissism. If people start to notice that narcissism is in fact the oldest, most pervasive, and worst of human delusions, they will no longer accept narcissism as a mode of behavior. This leads to a loss of power for narcissists.

The narcissist needs social power in order to validate his narcissism to himself, and then to see his desires reflected in others, confirming his fundamental view that he alone is the power controlling his universe. Narcissism seems to be at its core symbolic, confusing the memory-object of the world with the world itself.

Political control gives the narcissist the best chance of enforcing tolerance of narcissism through political control:

Relying on three studies in the United States and Denmark, two nationally representative, we find that those scoring higher in narcissism, as measured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory 40 (NPI-40), participate more in politics, including contacting politicians, signing petitions, joining demonstrations, donating money, and voting in midterm elections. Both agentic and antagonistic components of narcissism were positively and negatively related to different types of political participation when exploring the subfactors independently. Superiority and Authority/Leadership were positively related to participation, while Self Sufficiency was negatively related to participation.

With political control, narcissists can demand tolerance for narcissism, therefore both making them safe from herd retribution against free riders and other parasites, as well as making them safe inside their own minds by validating their narcissism through (perceived) group approval.

Using group approval, they can enforce the tripartite attack of the narcissist: misdirect everyone else to false goals, hide behind an aegis of altruism or victimhood, and simultaneously act behind the scenes to break the rules and take what they want. All human opportunistic and criminal behavior follows this pattern.

Narcissists aim to increase their social status so that they have commanding power in the social pecking order:

Narcissists vigilantly attend to cues related to the status they and others have in these situations and, on the basis of these perceived cues, appraise whether they can elevate their status or reduce the status of others. Narcissists engage in self-promotion (admiration pathway) or other-derogation (rivalry pathway) in accordance with these appraisals. Each pathway has unique consequences for how narcissists are perceived by others, thus shaping their social status over time. The model demonstrates how narcissism manifests itself as a stable and consistent cluster of behaviors in pursuit of social status and how it develops and maintains itself over time.

A pecking order is different from hierarchy because it is dynamic. Pecking orders are based on the trends of the day, not long-term abilities.

Social status reflects the fiction-absolute as discussed by Tom Wolfe and has been discussed elsewhere, particularly in the analysis of egalitarianism as self-interest.

Narcissists seek to elevate themselves politically through altruism and other pleasant notions that people are afraid to oppose for fear of seeming mean-spirited. The narcissist switches from vulnerability to dominating behavior like someone at a BDSM event on sedatives that suppress long-term memory.

It turns out that Leftism attracts narcissism because it enables those with antisocial traits to hide behind prosocial signaling:

Further, as individuals with leftist political attitudes can be assumed to be striving for social equality, we expected left-wing authoritarianism to also be positively related to prosocial traits, but narcissism to remain a significant predictor of left-wing authoritarianism above and beyond those prosocial dispositions.

The camouflage offered by both altruism and social chaos allow narcissists to claim to be doing good things for everyone while acting covertly for themselves.

This mirrors the process of egalitarianism taking over societies where individualists offer others the ability to be individualistic as well as a means of getting egalitarianism accepted by the group.

While researchers divide narcissism by gender it more likely represents a palette of traits used to manipulate others:

The narcissistic personality in males appears to be more commonly associated with the traditional concepts of narcissism, expressed as grandiosity, exhibitionism, entitlement, and inflated self-esteem. Conversely, narcissism in females appears to more commonly reflect the feminine form displayed by Echo, characterized by shame, hypersensitivity and low self-esteem.

When the narcissist has the crowd behind him, he can act in a pretentious and domineering manner (grandiosity); when he does not have crowd support, he can play the victim and energize the crowd to attack those who seem to be opposing or impeding his will.

Human defects exist on a scale of individualism which stretches from rugged independence that refuses to cooperate with others, through a series of altruistic deceptions, all the way to outright sociopathy which is just selfishness taken to its most extreme form:

“Vulnerable narcissism” characterized by low self-esteem, anxiety about attachments and extreme sensitivity to criticism and “grandiose narcissism”, which manifests as high self-esteem, self-aggrandizement and self-importance (Dickinson & Pincus, 2003; Rohmann, Neumann, Herner, & Bierhoff, 2012; Wink, 1991). This distinction has shown itself to be fruitful – vulnerable narcissism is associated with low self-esteem, life-satisfaction, and interdependent self-construct. Conversely, grandiose narcissism is associated with high self-esteem and life-satisfaction and an independent self-construction (Rohmann, Hanke, & Bierhoff, 2019; Rose, 2002).

Grandiose narcissism seems to resemble psychopathy in many respects, which raises the possibility that the tessellation of these conditions could be improved. It appears to be the case that grandiose narcissism might be better understood as a manifestation of psychopathy.

Reinforcing our notion that narcissism is born of insecurity and is linked to self-elevating behavior, both narcissism and FLEX also significantly correlate with insecurity.

In other words, someone who believes that they come first before the world has stepped onto a spectrum that in its mildest form is simply bad behavior but leads all the way to criminality and psychopathy. The psychology is the same and differs only in a manner of degree the same way democratic socialists and communists believe the same thing with different schedules and methods of achieving it.

The narcissist pursuing social status seeks to use peer pressure as a weapon to force others to comply with his goals:

Narcissists vigilantly attend to cues related to the status they and others have in these situations and, on the basis of these perceived cues, appraise whether they can elevate their status or reduce the status of others. Narcissists engage in self-promotion (admiration pathway) or other-derogation (rivalry pathway) in accordance with these appraisals. Each pathway has unique consequences for how narcissists are perceived by others, thus shaping their social status over time. The model demonstrates how narcissism manifests itself as a stable and consistent cluster of behaviors in pursuit of social status and how it develops and maintains itself over time.

Narcissism cannot be separated from peer pressure; the two coexist together because the narcissist uses peer pressure to maintain his own power. He “gifts” others with the “freedom” to be individualistic only so that he may be individualistic and use the group individualism to manipulate others.

Human societies that do not suppress narcissism die of it. In the long calculus, narcissism probably always exists but becomes an advantageous evolutionary trait as soon as a crowd is created by the wealth and means-over-ends proceduralism of a society rewarding obedience over ability to act toward goals independent of method.

Not surprisingly, Leftist ideologies correlate more highly with narcissism:

Also, higher pathological narcissism was related to stronger self-identification as a feminist; however, pathological narcissistic grandiosity explained some variance in the involvement in feminist activism over and above feminist self-identification. In exploratory secondary analyses, we found that higher pathological narcissism was associated with specific feminist conversational interaction behaviors (e.g., correcting other’s non-feminist language).

Feminism (as understood by all except the TERFs) is egalitarianism for women; it prioritizes the female individual above social order, natural order, history, culture, and the divine. In other words, it uses peer pressure to make the choices of female individuals more important than wider and deeper concerns.

Not surprisingly, narcissists are drawn to concerns about victimhood because causing the crowd to see itself as comprised of victims is how the narcissist engenders the resentment that is necessary for selling the group on anti-realistic ideals:

The results of the multiple regression analysis showed that higher narcissistic traits predicted an individual’s higher involvement in anti-sexual assault activism over and above the covariates. However, this relationship was evident only for the women in this sample. Notably, a higher level of altruism in an individual was also substantially associated with higher involvement in anti-sexual assault activism.

When the narcissist labels himself as a victim, he makes it easy for others to project their own fears of victimhood or insufficiency onto him, and therefore he becomes the leader of the victims like a cult prophet, and gains the allegiance of many in the herd.

As it turns out, the means-over-ends thinking that results often leads to low quality decision-making because the narcissist cannot consider anything but his own perspective:

We show that grandiose narcissists’ overconfidence, impulsivity, and a willingness to ignore expert advice results in a higher likelihood of making a bad decision. In addition, after getting the wrong answer, grandiose narcissists are more likely to blame others and remain self-confident in their judgment.

Burroughs like Nietzsche sees control as an emotional gambit, where the controller needs resistance in order to feel his own power, and this may be true, but there might be an even simpler explanation.

As it turns out, being able to predict the positions of other objects in a relativity field gives power to those who make the prediction, but power of a literal sort: prediction transfers energy through knowledge of information:

The team’s information engine consists of a tiny bead in a water bath that is held in place with an optical trap. When fluctuations in the water cause the bead to move in the desired direction, the trap can be adjusted to prevent the bead from returning to the place where it was before. By taking accurate measurements of the bead’s location and using that information to adjust the trap, the engine is able to convert the heat energy of the water into work.

At some primal level, the narcissist seeks to harvest energy from the herd because for whatever reason, his ability to bond his self to his world is broken, and therefore he cannot process energy normally. By enforcing control, the narcissist generates the energy needed to keep his own parasitic organism alive.

Tags: age of symbolism, categorical imperative, consequentialism, crowdism, grandiose narcissism, narcissism, paraphilia, realism, thermodynamics, vulnerable narcissism