If we visualize the world as a sort of undifferentiated gray cloud, then a tubaform is a lens which, when we look through it, causes patterns to emerge. They may or may not of course be accurate, but particularly if the pattern remains over time–over motion–then provisional truth claims can be reasonably reliably made.
Have to run, but thought I might clarify that. I may not have, but it is a small effort in that direction.
I have recently begun reading about Narcisstic Personality Disorder, and am finding that this particular prism–Tubaform, I have called this sort of thing–can be used to create order in many places.
Consider that a primary trait of narcissists is the need for attention and power. Logically, these traits–the need for these outcomes–will lead to greater efforts at attaining professional recognition and political power than would be the case for people without the disorder.
Logically, in a free society, this will lead over time to narcissists occupying much of the top strata of society.
Consider further that most historical democracies only last perhaps 200 years. This was the case, roughly, with the Athenian democracy, and roughly the case with the Roman Republic.
What one would expect to see, and what one does see particularly in true democracies like that of Athens, is the rise of the demagogue. Who is the demogogue? That person who says WHATEVER he needs to say to keep the people behind him. His motto is “the voice of the people is the voice of ME” (vox populi, vox ecco? I am no Latin scholar), where he silently substitutes God for “me”. He is not thinking long term. He does not care where the antics forced on him by the need to stay in front of a mutable mass of ridiculous human beings leads him. He is led, but he is for his purposes the leader, which is to say the object of attention.
Look at our current political scene. We have hordes of people either crying out to be the ones to “save America” by pursuing short-sighted, failure-certain policies, and it is difficult not to believe that on some level they KNOW IT.
This is the core reason why there are so few principled politicians: principled people do not survive, and in most cases lack the drive of the narcissists to be in power.
When we look at most Republicans, what we mostly need to see are intelligent narcissists who crave power for its own sake, who like being in the limelight, and who may believe somewhat the bullshit they peddle about caring about the national debt, and blah, blah, blah, but who are quite willing to forget what they “believe” if it means risking losing out on continuing to walk in the halls of power.
On the Left, there is a double layer of narcissism. They have the same desire as Republicans to stay in power, but they also believe, truly believe, the counterfactual claim that socialism improves human lives. They can’t explain the failure of Detroit and other cities, who were targeted with their supposedly “best” policies, to thrive, but they don’t care. They inhabit a magical world–one of the traits of narcissists–in which failures need not be explained, and if they are, all one needs do is blame someone else. Narcissists never take responsibility for anything.
I truly believe that BOTH Obamas are clinical narcissists. So is Nancy Pelosi. So is Harry Reid. But so too, in all likelihood, is much of the Republican leadership.
Look at our cultural heroes: movie stars and rock stars. It is considered a great compliment to say someone is a “rock star”. What does this mean? He is universally loved. We are deifying on some level the people who are emotionally the most shallow, least principled, and least able to offer us positive examples of how to live our lives with internalized senses of meaning.
Reality TV panders to this dynamic. I have not watched the show, but it seems obvious to me that every major person on Jersey Shore is likely a clinical narcissist.
More generally, the phenomenon of reality TV has long seemed to me to be symptomatic of a generalized cultural failure. Standards of conduct are no longer self evident. Children in many cases acculturate themselves through osmosis, which include mimetic repetition of what they see on TV. Lacking an internalized inner direction and sense of self, they try to find their way by watching other people. This is what narcissists do: lacking empathy and a sense of self, they must depend on environmental cues to pretend to be incorporated into the social space, which in fact they are not and can never be.
When one considers that we are now two generations down the road from the “Me Generation”, it also becomes attractive to speculate that no previous generations of Americans has ever been exposed to such pervasive parental and social selfishness and self preoccupation, and that what one expects in particular from the children of narcissists has become generalized.
What one expects to see are latent and apparently inexplicable rage. This is quite obviously present in our culture.
One expects to see inexplicable but recurrent bouts of depression. Check.
One expects to see feelings of rootlessness, shallowness, and unreality, caused by lacking a core sense of self. This is much harder to measure, but I think one could reasonably look at our pop culture and infer the presence of these traits as well. For those who have traveled, it is hard not to feel on some level a greater sense of the gravity of life in other countries. That has been my own experience, at any rate.
We have not always been like this. We were serious, sober, generous and idealistic in a good way 50 years ago.
Solutions: as I see it, the only block to this dynamic is the firewalls intended by our Founders, which is to say constant and structural obstacles to the consolidation of power either locally or nationally. States had the right to make moral decisions, but within the limits set by the Bill of Rights. As Madison argued, correctly I believe, the only realistic block to what I would term the rise of the narcissist is to put the narcissists in competition with one another, and prevent any of them from ever winning finally.
Our Supreme Court has failed us badly. This much is clear. Having arrogated to themselves the right of judicial review–not granted in the Constitution–they finally used it to enact law, and thereby began what is to my mind what may in the end be the decisive wound to the walls intended to protect us.
Of course there are ways to rectify this. I have been arguing for years that we need a Constitutional Amendment granting either the Senate or Congress as a whole the right to overturn Supreme Court decisions by a two thirds majority.
We of course further need to return to the era before the New Deal, when States could and often did provide safety nets for their citizens, but without Federal Government support.
Of this I am certain: given the capacity for collecting power, the narcissists who seek and win power will continue to aggregate it until they have it all. Every step in that direction is bad for psychologically normal people who just want to live and let live. Narcissists cannot do that. They do not live, and therefore need victims, or what is termed “narcissistic supply”.
Actually, one last note: one can see in vampires, werewolves, and zombies another expression of this dynamic. Vampires are not alive, but they need the blood–here, the attention–of others.
Werewolves are the concrete expression of rage which appears without warning, and in otherwise normal people.
Zombies are people who have lost a sense of self, of self direction, of purpose. They are the result of being exposed to narcissism as children. They have not stopped moving, but they lack a sense of unity as in-dividuals.
All thoughts worth pondering, in my view.
All of us can be broken, over some period of time. There is no doubt of this. The question is: do you stay broken? Life, to me is that aggregating bit of energy, that pulling together towards order, and its opposite is not pulling apart, but disorder at its basic, primitive level.
I could put it this way as well: if the Darwinians were right, then there could be no life. It is a self contradicting system, in that it rejects at the outset the possibility of intelligence within life; and yet it needs it to explain it.
Superficial people will misunderstand this. I retain hopes for a new “life science” actually worthy of the name.
I posted this some time ago, but only recently noted a typo which made my meaning unclear. Since I can’t find this in the Edit screen for some reason, I am simply reposting it.
While I am at, though, I will the following “prescript”. As I see it, there is no meaningful difference culturally between the Thuggees of India, who killed and stole in the service of their goddess Kali, and Communists. In both cases the GROUP is empowered to abandon all moral restraints against ALL other groups. The people within the group gain not just material benefits, but a larger whole in which to drown their individual soul, to commit what amounts to a sacrifice of the self, for the good of the whole. Yet, who can truly grant their “self”, without rage?
Recently I have been reading about the systemic affects of narcissism, and am figuring ou some very interesting–to me–things, and asking what I think are interesting questions.
For example, a trait of narcissists is that they expect their children to be exactly like them, little carbon copies. Yet, is this same demand not made in traditional cultures, where conformity ie expected, often to very rigidly enforced social codes of behavior? When there is no demand that a “self” be formed, is narcissism present or not? We assume that it must, because we believe in the power and importance of individual perspectives, but such value inheres in systems in motion, in which new accurate decisions must be made in complex situations. If your people has lived the same way for a 1,000 years and nothing changes, is there value in independent thinking? To argue otherwise one needs, I think, to begin to introduce notions of spiritual growth.
Many years ago, I read some conspiratorial large black book that suggested a link between Marxism and Satanism, the name of which I have forgotten. It was suggested to me by a friend whose family was politically connected. Well, I Googled those words today, and found this interesting link.
There are numerous interesting quotes from Marx here, but this will need to stand in for all of them:
With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pygmy giant whose fall will not stifle my ardor.
Then will I wander godlike and victorious through the ruins of the world
And, giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.
In the intervening years I have developed this notion, that of Cultural Sadeism, in which the simple desire for pain, death and destruction is expressed politically and disguised–as indeed all Satanic naratives must be–in the rhetoric of compassion and community. No proper Sadeist tells the truth, unless in so doing he can hurt someone. That is just how it works.
When you add to this the frequent admiration that Saul Alinsky expressed for Lucifer, you see a common pattern. Now, I am not a Christian, per se, but it is manifestly obvious to anyone with eyes that there are evil people in this world, those who enjoy the power that comes with being able to hurt other people.
This is, I am increasingly convinced, the task which those who run the IMF in particular, and to a lesser extent the Federal Reserve, have set themselves.
In the end, I only perceive two primal motivational structures in this world: that of Love, and that of Power. In this, I agree with the Christians. Both are mixed in most people, and each expressed to varying extents during the course of their lives.
Yet, every Bell Curve has a beginning and an end: these are our saints, and our demons. Marx was a demon, as have been his followers ever since. No beliefs in non-material realities are needed to accept this view. One simply need term him an aggressively violent sociopath, who worked through his books–as did, by and large, Sade himself–to accomplish pain and destruction.
We see this metaphor of emotional “scars”, which more or less follows the idea that if you are cut, you can heal, but scar tissue is left.
I don’t believe this applies to emotional energies. I think that the process of “healing” is not that of returning to a condition of status quo ante, but rather of developing a qualitativelyi new gestalt.
Emotional healing is thus really emotional growth.
Pateience and time can break any watch.
I have a specific meaning, but will leave that as a cognitive Rorschach Test.
It has long been my contention that whenever mainstream science wakes up and considers the possibility that life is something more than material elements happening to fall together continually over millions of years, they will realize that there is something in life I have often called “non-statistical coherence”. There is a pattern and order to life that is broader and deeper than can be explained by purely materialistic models. OF COURSE we understand how DNA molecules replicate, how embryos grow, etc. What we do not understand is how the intelligence is added, by which undifferentiated stem cells become differentiated (red blood, bone, etc.) cells, and go to the right places, and build the right shapes.
The way I visualize life is that a spirit enters a prepared place, and builds the body around it. It brings with it a template, an order, and the material responds to it, with the mechanical tools provided by the DNA and various proteins.
The thought I had the other day I wanted to pass along, though–this is all more or less repetition–is that there are orders of life. The first aspect of life is awareness, by which I mean the capacity to react to environmental circumstances systemically. Plants, as an example, seem to have “feelings”. If you have never watched it, “The Secret Life of Plants” is worth the watch. (I have not watched this link, but assume it is OK.)
Now, the Jains have this idea that different sorts of life have different numbers of “senses”. If memory serves, plants have one (although it may be stones–since I think they believe everything is alive, making plants 2).
In my typology, then, plants have one grade of life. Animals have a second, the capacity for directed and thus purposive motion. They have the ability both to react and to make decisions.
Humans are capable of being conscious of being conscious, as individuals. I can think “I think”. This is a third level.
Extrapolating, though, I come up with a fourth level: that of being aware of OTHER consciousnesses, not just theoretically, but in actual union. This is the capacity for love, and the next stage of evolution.
Finally, logically, it seems to me that there is a superconsciousness, God, permeating everything, and that my consciousness can be conscious of this other grade of consciousness. This may or may not be the highest level.
These are of course just words, but may lead somewhere for someone. Good luck!!!
The more I study the matter, the more obvious it seems to me that the root cause of totalitarianism–particularly that sponsored by intellectuals–is the prevalence amongst such people of clinical narcissism, the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Quite literally, such people are capable neither of conceiving that other points of view might be valid, or that their own conceptions other than perfectlyh correct. They are incapable of empathy, of feeling other people’s pain, other than in the abstract, which is useful to them in that they can then become, again in the abstract, the “saviors” of people who have not asked for their help, and who generally cry for them to cease and desist once they realize in what their “help” consists.
It is said (by Christopher Lasch, among others) that we live in the Age of Narcissism. If we posit that there is no such thing as a NONmalignant narcissist, perhaps it is easier to see why we are surrounded by oceans of self doubt, rage, intellectual incoherence, pervasive muttering by our so-called leaders, and are on a runaway train directed over the cliff of national bankruptcy. All of this is plain to a casual observer of our media.
It is perhaps ironic that what are arguably the two most pernicious influences on the American landscape–Leftism and Objectivism–were both brought into being by Russians, whose harsh world perhaps encourages the sort of inwardness that causes them to forget that Others exist at all.
Again, with regard to Objectivism, I will deal with it presently. For the time being, let me simply note that in her own lifetime, what she created was a Cult of Personality, one characterized by purges and even literal loyalty oaths. That is not freedom: it is, as some percipient observers even then noted, Fascism.
Here is Santorum’s position on cutting spending, plank one in his program: “Commit to cut $5 trillion of federal spending within 5 years.”
That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But you know what? It doesn’t mean a fucking thing, and it pisses me off.
Once you learn how these fucking clowns ruining our country do their math, you realize that what he is almost certainly talking about is cutting $5 trillion from planned INCREASES in spending, and that spread out over as many as a ten years or more. He may be talking less than the $20 billion–one sixth of what we borrow MONTHLY–Romney has planned to cut from the annual budget.
I want to be crystal clear: if we do not elect Ron Paul, it will not make one fucking bit of difference if we reelect Obama or any of the other three knuckleheaded cowards running for the Republican nomination.
WE ARE GOING BROKE. THIS IS ALL SERIOUS PEOPLE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT. Period. All of our power–political, economic, military–depends on being able to pay our bills. We will lose our liberty within 15-20 AT MOST if we keep electing crass cowards and fools. This is the simple and unavoidable truth.
For my part, I see no serious reason to object to a third party run by Paul, if he can’t get the nomination. There is so little substantive difference fiscally between Obama and the Bobsey Triplets that I really would prefer the chance of Obama to the certainty of futility; and in any event, Mitt Romney is the only who would even be able to beat Obama.
I’ve had a few, and have some long serious posts to make, but am choosing to postpone them. For now: “To fear the new is to fear personal growth; and to do this is to choose death.”
It’s not bad. I have been playing a lot lately with the notion of qualitative growth. We develop selves that are a cluster of habits, but often those selves are constructed to solve problems which no longer exist once we leave our homes. They solve the wrong problems, and quite often prevent the solution of new problems, or even create problems in and of themselves.
It is in my view a useful and often true belief that we are enabled by birth to solve emotional difficulties, and that the challenge is less to create solutions, as to not PREVENT the emergence of solutions. To some greater or lesser extent, I think all of us regularly kill our better, higher selves, out of fear.
Again, I’ll have more to say. Tonight I am going to watch some mindless TV. It’s like drinking a Coke: what you do rarely will not hurt you too much. My mind has been very, very active today, and I think I have some good ideas to ponder, develop, and eventually deploy.