I think it was the Buddha himself who said “if you meet me on a road, kill me.” People read this and think “oh, how clever he was. What a good story that is.” This is missing the point completely.
To worship is to separate. To worship is to push away, not to reel in.
And I really think worship in a great many cases is a form of narcissism. It is a way of creating the image of yourself participating in something great, without actual participation. “Social Justice” is something a certain sort of person worships in our own age. They don’t do the work of improving anything. No, they do the work of celebrating the ideal in public, and demanding others do the same.
I will add a comment I think I can fit in here. If you consider what narcissism is, which is, in my view, having had the proper social, empathetic brain taken off-line to some greater or lesser extent by Developmental Trauma, then its connection with outright sociopathy becomes clear.
What guides all morally sane people is some combination of empathy–which is a direct emotion felt at specific times, for specific people, for specific reasons–and principle, with the Golden Rule being the most common, most obvious, and by and large the most useful.
As a principle, the Golden Rule asks you to ask yourself if you would be OK with other people doing to you what you are about to do to them. If not, don’t do it.
But sociopaths are unable to place themselves, imaginatively, in anyone else’s shoes. They see through their own eyes, and their own eyes alone, and from that perspective, morality is limited only by what they can get away with, without corresponding violence to themselves.
I might state this as a general rule that “violent people require violent laws.” This, in important respects, is the major disconnect between European standards of justice, as they have evolved, and the Islamists among them.
Be all that as it may, whether someone is only a narcissist or a full blown sociopath really depends upon where a fear of consequences was placed in them, if it was. And I have to say, imaginatively, I am having a hard time myself distinguishing them. All the narcissists I have known were capable of great cruelty. Maybe the difference is the guilt response. True psychopaths feel no remorse, and narcissists do, even if they can’t usually tell where and when guilt is warranted. Although even there, guilt can be a conspicuous display, which provides narcissistic supply.
I’m not sure where I am going with this. I will leave it for now.