Now, I would be lying if I said no one has ever done anything nice for me. Many people have, and no doubt many have tried that I pushed away. But at no time in my life have I ever not felt like my life was my burden and mine alone, and that it was likely to be that way forever.
This is the thing in dealing with narcisssists: they isolate you. They separate you from your true self, from your own reality, from the free expression of your own emotions. In my own case, the early trauma combined to make the narcissistic effect much stronger. It is a miracle I am not a really fat, perpetually angry, overly intellectual computer geek obsessed with video games and utterly indifferent to any and all emotions. Hell, I am some of those things any way, but I have traveled far.
Any time you get strong abreactions, that is a positive thing. That means growth. Some, of course, can put some people in the hospital, but I can take just about anything that can be thrown at me, albeit sometimes with some booze as a narcotizing agent.
The point I wanted to make, though, is this: living with narcissists is like living in prison. But conversely, living in a totalitarian state is like living with narcissists. What is the essence of a Fascist state like the old Soviet Union, or current regimes like Cuba and North Korea? It is that individuation is strongly discouraged. If you fall outside the lines, you are immediately labeled defective, in a society they are trying to build like a personality and belief assembly line.
In Cuba a very high percentage of the population gets a bit of extra money every month to spy on their neighbors. Clearly, they would build a massive surveillance apparatus of the sort, say, China has built in Tibet to suppress monk suicides, which apparently continue to this very day, but their system doesn’t work, so they have no money.
Ponder a world in which you have to suspect everyone you meet–including close relatives–of betraying you if you say anything coherent and TRUE about the abominable condition of having suppress every last vestige of your spirit, your individuality, your soul? There was an aspiring member of the Resistance in East Germany, who was betrayed by his wife.
Societies cannot grow spiritually. Only individuals can do that, and only societies which permit liberty, which permit individual quirks, obsessions, ideosyncrasies, journeys without clear destinations, can possibly grow morally, can possibly grow in the only ways that ultimately matter.
Aspiring totalitarians are narcissists. They are unable to separate the needs of the world from their own psychological need to find meaning by “helping” others. It is not OK with them that most people don’t NEED helping, so where need is not present, they manufacture it.
Again, the so-called War on Poverty is a good example. If existing economic processes had simply been allowed to continue in the black community, they would have reached a middle class average 20-30 years ago at the latest. Instead, all sorts of perverse incentives were introduced, which rewarded single parenthood, which rewarded laziness, and which encouraged people to work the system, rather than work a job, all while making sure that all blame for everything bad was laid at the feet of white men, and specifically Republicans. The truth is that if blacks had not been “helped”, they would have been vastly better off. I don’t think they are intrinsically inferior. Democrats do.