A controlling Narcissistic Totalitarianism
A controlling Narcissistic Totalitarianism
As based on The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet
An increase in personal and societal narcissism leads to an increase of solipsism, or self-referential thinking. As people become more fearful of an increasingly repressive society, i.e., woke totalitarianism, the more they turn inward and become more solipsistic, atomized, narcissistic, and anti-social (psychopathic). The repressive external and internal forces become a mutually reinforcing vicious feedback loop.
Narcissistic abuse can be defined as the gradual, insidious squelching and evisceration of one’s voice. Overtime, the abused begins to run all thoughts through the introjected abuser’s voice in their minds, repeatedly and suffocatingly asking themselves, “what would my loved one (abuser) think or do in any given situation"? It would not be hyperbolic to think of narcissistic abuse as mental chloroforming.
It is through the mechanisms of a slew of manipulation tactics, such as intermittent reinforcement (hot/cold, push/pull dynamics) and gaslighting (targeted invalidation and undermining of one’s sense of reality), that the abuser invades the psyche and headspace of the abused. The abused are put back on their heels, constantly ruminating to make sense of the senseless in a dance macabre game of 4-D chess.
The end-state results in the abuser shutting down the abused’s free will/agency by turning the abused functionally into background white noise and ultimately, what's known as a “narcissistic corpse.” When the abused no longer has any agency, having steadily outsourced their agency over time to their abuser for approval, the abuser grows bored and will move on, much like a predator who has picked over the carcass of its prey. This process plays out critically, when the abused abrogates their internal locus of control to an external locus of control, the abuser.
The cult-of-one dynamics of narcissistic abuse overlap with the onset of totalitarianism on a larger scale of mass formation.
How did we get here? What should we anticipate? How can we chart the through line of the narcissism epidemic to totalitarianism?
I've culled an assemblage of pull-quotes, a synopsis of sorts, below that make up the backbone of The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet, published in 2022. While I have some questions about his bottom line analysis that totalitarianism is a defining feature of the Enlightenment, and I am not in agreement with his assessment of government overreach on COVID-19 protocols, which strikes me as über libertarian, and/or Republican and overwrought, I do think it's worthwhile to examine some key takeaways from his book.
Introduction
The Grand Narrative of society—the story of the Enlightenment—no longer leads to the optimism and positivism of yesteryear, to put it mildly.
Coercive control leads to fear, and fear leads to more coercive control. Just like that, society falls victim to a vicious circle that inevitably leads to totalitarianism, which means to extreme government control, eventually resulting in the radical destruction of both the psychological and physical integrity of human beings.
Totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence. In the final analysis, it is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.
As such, totalitarianism is the defining feature of the Enlightenment.
Part I: Science and Its Psychological Effects
Truth-telling is a way of speaking that breaks through an established, if implicit, social consensus. Whoever speaks the truth breaks open the solidified story in which the group seeks refuge, ease, and security. This makes speaking the truth a dangerous endeavor. It strikes fear in the group, and results in anger and aggression.
At its birth, science was synonymous with open-mindedness, with a way of thinking that banished dogmas and questioned beliefs. As it evolved, however, it also turned itself into ideology, belief, and prejudice.
In short, the scientific discourse, like any dominant discourse, has become the privileged instrument of opportunism, lies, deception, manipulation, and power.
To the extent that the scientific discourse became an ideology, it lost its virtue of truth-telling.
Our interpretation of objectivity is wrong, excessively based on the idea that numbers are the preferred approach to facts.
By attempting to measure the unmeasurable, measurement becomes a form of pseudo-objectivity.
This is the real drama of fields like medicine and psychology: They have abandoned the classic research, such as thorough case studies conducted by experienced clinicians, and replaced it with research that might look scientific but often is not.
Metrical data might seem like a more sophisticated and objective way of describing the research object, but it often conveys less than a skillful description by means of words.
This led, in part, to the other problems that surfaced in the scientific crisis: the ubiquitous errors, sloppiness, and biased conclusions, which we talked about earlier. Anyone who tries to squeeze the unmeasurable into numbers will sense that his research has little real value and will be less motivated and lack a sense of duty to deliver accurate work.
Peer review stands or falls on the ethical and moral quality of the expert—that is, his subjective, human characteristics.
Both great Science (the science that maintains an open mind and pursues Reason) and small science (the science that degenerates into ideology) eventually re-encounter what they originally had pushed out of view: man as a subjective and ethical being.
To the extent that science has degenerated into ideology, belief, and dogma—small science—it has also confirmed that the human being, in its subjective dimension, is the central point of focus.
Human subjectivity also reclaimed its throne in small science as well.
The same applies to a large part of the population, blindly trusting this scientific ideology, with no other ideological hiding place, given the fall of religion.
It is at this level that Hannah Arendt situates the ideal subject of the totalitarian state: the subject that no longer knows the difference between (pseudo)-scientific fiction and reality. Never before were there so many such people as in the beginning of the twenty-first century; never before were the societal conditions so prone to totalitarianism.
Each added convenience came at a price, including a weakened connection to the natural and social environment.
The invention of radio and television led to the rise of the mass media and a corresponding decline in direct human interactions…
…anxiety plays a crucial role in mass formation and totalitarianism.
If human relationships are characterized by fundamental distrust, life becomes hopelessly complicated and society spends its energy at creating all kinds of “security mechanisms,” which in fact fuel mistrust even more and are, above all, psychologically exhausting.
A society where human relationships are impoverished and toxic, life will be difficult and unbearable, however “advanced” such society may be in terms of mechanical-technological evolutions.
While mechanistic science sought to make the human condition more comfortable, in many respects it also made it more dangerous.
Enlightenment tradition had promised people autonomy and freedom, but, in a way, it brought people greater (feelings of) dependence and powerlessness than ever before. This powerlessness caused people to increasingly mistrust those in power.
The Enlightenment tradition arose from man’s optimistic and energetic aspiration to understand and control the world, it has led to the opposite in several respects: namely, the experience of loss of control.
Humans have found themselves in a state of solitude, cut off from nature, and existing apart from social structures and connections, feeling powerless due to a deep sense of meaninglessness, living under clouds that are pregnant with an inconceivable, destructive potential, all while psychologically and materially depending on the happy few, whom he does not trust and with whom he cannot identify. It is this individual that Hannah Arendt named the atomized subject. It is this atomized subject in which we recognize the elementary component of the totalitarian state.
In a controlling narcissistically totalitarian state, you are alienated from yourself and even your own thoughts, lest your thoughts become known to the collective, imperiling both you and those in your orbit.
In classical psychoanalytic theory, depression is associated with the frustrating experience of helplessness, induced by the passivity or absence of a loved one (usually a parent, in childhood).
Digitalization dehumanizes a conversation.
People feel psychologically safer and more comfortable behind a digital wall but pay a price for it with the loss of connectedness.
Science adapts its theory to reality, whereas ideology adapts reality to theory.
Some argue that menstrual periods are a superfluous inconvenience and advocate for eliminating them with artificial hormones and turning the female cycle into a single, flat line…artificial wombs…transhumanism…mechanistic ideology that considers it desirable, even necessary, that future humans merge physically and mentally with machines.
Transhumanists want to replace the chaos of writhing bodies with a strictly technological internet of bodies. The fourth industrial revolution, in which man is expected to physically merge with technology—the transhumanist ideal—is increasingly seen as an unavoidable necessity.
The Enlightenment man could hardly help but cling to utopian optimism. In the nineteenth century, industrialization heralded the disappearance of the aristocratic and class society, and associated local social structures. Man tumbled out of his social and natural context, and as he fell, meaning dropped away too. In this “disenchanted” mechanistic world (Max Weber), life became meaningless and a-teleological.
…(the machinery of the universe runs without meaning or purpose), and religious frames of reference also lost coherence. Anxiety and unease, once tied to the oppression and abuse of the aristocracy and clergy, began to drift ineffably around in the human soul. Frustration and aggression, once held in check by fear of hell and the last judgment, proved increasingly easy to mobilize.
The prospect of an afterlife dwindled and was readily replaced by belief in an artificially created, mechanistic-scientific paradise.
It is here that we, together with Hannah Arendt, situate the undercurrent of totalitarianism: a naive belief that a flawless, humanoid being and a utopian society can be produced from scientific knowledge.
The Nazi idea of creating a purebred superman based on eugenics and social Darwinism, and the Stalinist ideal of a proletarian society based on historical-materialism are prototypical examples, as is the current rise of transhumanism.
As Hannah Arendt states, totalitarianism is ultimately the logical extension of a generalized obsession with science, the belief in an artificially created paradise: “Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”
We will delve more deeply into one of the core features of both the mechanistic and totalitarian discourse: a naive belief in the measurability of reality and the excessive use and misuse of data and statistics.
The universe is a machine, the components of which are measurable—that is the basic assumption of this ideology.
Until this recent crisis, societies were not primarily governed on the basis of numerical data. They were guided by stories, first by mythical and religious stories and later by political stories. The mechanistic ideology cannot accept this trust in stories because they are essentially irrational and subjective in nature; they say more about the author of the story than about any so-called objective reality it represents. Stories consist of words, words that can mean anything; they have no solid, rational relationship to facts.
Numbers have a unique psychological effect. They create an almost irresistible illusion of objectivity…numbers are always relative and ambiguous…science has continued to struggle with an epidemic of errors, sloppiness, forced conclusions, and fraud.
…the mechanistic ideology aims to instate a technocratic society that is governed on the basis of “objective,” numerical information and in which subjective preferences and abuse of power are eliminated. But at the end of this chapter, we conclude that naive belief in the objectivity of numbers leads to the exact opposite.
Alternative voices are stigmatized by a veritable Ministry of Truth, crowded with “fact-checkers”; freedom of speech is curtailed by censorship and self-censorship; people’s right to self-determination is infringed upon by imposed vaccination, which imposes almost unthinkable social exclusion and segregation upon society.
The discourse surrounding the coronavirus crisis shows characteristics that are typical of the type of discourse that led to the emergence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century: the excessive use of numbers and statistics…
…frantically trying to avoid any danger has, paradoxically, become very dangerous.
…societal increase of fear and insecurity leads to two other psychological phenomena: narcissism and something I call regulation mania.
Like narcissism, this is a frantic attempt to contain the surge of fear and insecurity in human relationships. It is indeed a striking phenomenon: Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new morality has arisen from the belly of Enlightenment thinking, which in a number of respects is stricter, more vagarious, more irrational, and more hypocritical than the prior religious morality, which the Enlightenment sought to obliterate in order to set people free. With the rise of the woke culture, society fell prey to implicit and explicit rules that made every detail of human interaction more precarious.
…as Freud pointed out, the repressive nature of the new morality is fueling an exacerbated “return of the repressed”: Between 2015 and 2020, the use of sexist language doubled and the use of racist and menacing language tripled on social media.
This is why narcissism and regulation mania are fallacious solutions for the uncertainty and fear that language introduces into human relationships. They lead to social isolation and are ultimately self-destructive.
Little by little, it limits the individual’s freedom of choice and makes choices for him…
Narcissism and regulation mania intensified the problem they seemed to solve, resulting in a psychologically exhausted population that craves an absolute master. It paradoxically looks for that master, in accordance with the dominant view of man and the world, in the mechanistic ideology—that is, the ideology that caused the problem to begin with.
…condition of the population—fearful, socially atomized, and yearning for direction and authority—that is the perfect breeding ground for the emergence of a specific social group, which increasingly manifested itself through the Enlightenment and beyond and which formed the psychological-social basis of the totalitarian state: the masses.
Part II: Mass Formation and Totalitarianism
…psychological characteristics of a totalitarian population: the willingness of the individuals to blindly sacrifice their personal interests in favor of the collective, radical intolerance of dissident voices, a paranoid informant mentality that allows government to penetrate the very heart of private life, the curious susceptibility to absurd pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda, the blind following of a narrow logic that transcends all ethical boundaries (making totalitarianism incompatible with religion), the loss of all diversity and creativity (making totalitarianism the enemy of art and culture), and intrinsic self-destructiveness (which ensures that totalitarian systems invariably annihilate themselves in the end).
In the first five chapters of this book, I described how the emergence of the mechanistic worldview brought society into a specific psychological condition over the past centuries. Society was increasingly gripped by a fanatical, mechanistic ideology that degenerated into dogma and blind belief (chapter 1); experiences of meaninglessness and social isolation increased hand over fist (chapter 2); hopes were increasingly placed on a utopian, technological solution to the problems inherent in human existence (chapter 3); public space was increasingly dominated by a pseudoscientific discourse of numbers, data, and statistics that completely blurred the line between scientific facts and fiction (chapter 4); and epidemic fear and uncertainty made the population yearn for absolute authority (chapter 5). In the present chapter, I’ll describe how, from here, the socially fragmented population suddenly reunites into a unit through the process of mass formation.
Gustave Le Bon—the French sociologist and psychologist who published one of the most important works on mass formation, Psychologie des foules in 1895—argued that the “individual soul” in the masses is completely taken over by the “group soul.”
…rise of totalitarian states in the twentieth century. Where did this intensification of mass formation come from? It was a logical consequence of the effects of rationalization and mechanization of the world.
More and more people entered a condition of social atomization and as soon as their numbers exceed a critical limit, the process of mass formation begins.
There are four conditions in particular that have to be present in a society for large-scale mass formation to occur. These four conditions were present prior to the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and they are also present now. I’ve already mentioned them as consequences of the mechanistic ideology. The first condition is generalized loneliness, social isolation, and lack of social bonds among the population. The Enlightenment is characterized by an emergence of this phenomenon, but today the scale has grown…loneliness epidemic.
This deterioration of social connectedness leads to the second condition: lack of meaning in life. Man, as a social being par excellence, lives for the Other. Remove the bond with the Other and he will experience his life as meaningless (whether he sees the connection with his loneliness or not).
The third condition is the widespread presence of free-floating anxiety and psychological unease within a population. A person who has lost his bond with the Other and does not feel meaning typically experiences an indefinable unease and anxiety. This condition has been strongly present in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The fourth condition, in turn, also follows from the first three: a lot of free-floating frustration and aggression.
How exactly do these conditions lead to mass formation?
…object of anxiety…free-flowing anxiety will attach itself to that object and there will be broad social support for the implementation of the strategy to control that object of anxiety.
The essence of mass formation amounts to the following: A society saturated with individualism and rationalism suddenly tilts toward the radically opposite condition, toward radically irrational collectivism.
…the absurd elements in a story do not matter to the masses: The masses believe in the story not because it’s accurate but because it creates a new social bond.
The individual must at all times show that he submits to the interest of the collective, by performing self-destructive, symbolic (ritualistic) behaviors.
Totalitarianism also expurgates the private sphere of alternative voices by inducing far-reaching social fragmentation and isolation. Totalitarian systems typically make it nearly impossible for people to gather in larger groups, and they strive to sever all social and family ties and replace them with the only allowable bond: the one between the individual and the totalitarian system (that is, the collective).
…what’s expressed in numbers and graphs has the effect of being (wrongly) perceived as facts. As such, the psychological process of mass formation seems to ensure that mass media, almost intuitively, chooses to perpetuate the mass formation by using graphics for only the information that supports the story.
This was, by far, the most astonishing observation for the chroniclers of twentieth-century totalitarianism: The almost limitless tolerance for the enormous personal damage the population endured.
We have to add one more important characteristic to the problematic psychological properties of mass formation: radical intolerance of other opinions…
To the masses, dissident voices appear…antisocial and devoid of solidarity… and confront the masses again with the negative situation that preceded the mass formation (lack of social bond and meaning, indefinable fear and unease)…
This radical intolerance ensures that the masses are convinced of their superior ethical and moral intentions and of the reprehensibility of everything and everyone who resists them: Whoever does not participate is a traitor of the collective. Snitching is therefore commonplace; the population itself is the main branch of the secret police.
The masses are inclined to commit atrocities against those who resist them and typically execute them as if it were an ethical, sacred duty.
Hannah Arendt’s famous expression that totalitarianism was a true demonstration of the banality of evil: Totalitarianism is not about monstruous people—it is about normal people who stick to a morbid, dehumanizing way of thinking or “logic.”
What characterizes the leaders of the masses is not greed or sadism, but their morbid ideological drive: Reality must and will be adjusted to the ideological fiction…The ultimate goal is to realize an ideological fiction…
…the individual soul is replaced by a common group soul, noted Gustave Le Bon…Le Bon described the “contagiousness” of thoughts in a crowd.
…conspiracy thinking—the thinking that reduces all world events to one big conspiracy—fulfills the same function as mass formation.
Ultimately, there is such fundamental distrust that many people assume that whatever “the mainstream” considers right must certainly be wrong: For example, if the mainstream story says the Earth is round, it must be flat. Conspiracy thinking also leads invariably to the dehumanization of a certain group (in fact, dehumanization sometimes has to be taken literally: The elite consists of reptiles or aliens).
…the dominant ideology is mechanistic in nature. This ideology typically derives its appeal from the utopian vision of an artificial paradise. The world and man are a machine and they can be comprehended and manipulated as such. The hitches in the machine that cause suffering can be mechanically “repaired.” Yes, even death can be eliminated in the long run. Moreover, all this can be done without man having to reflect on his role in his own misfortune, without questioning himself as a moral and ethical being.
The ultimate master is the ideology, not the elite.
…conspiracy thinking can be a reaction to mass formation…conspiracy thinking arises as an explanation for the phenomenon of mass formation…
…the problem cannot be solved by the violent elimination of an evil elite. The essence of the problem of totalitarianism lies in enormous mass dynamics. This means the elimination of totalitarian leaders will be to no avail; they are utterly replaceable.
Arendt put it: In substance, the totalitarian leader is nothing more nor less than the functionary of the masses he leads; he is not a power-hungry individual imposing a tyrannical and arbitrary will upon his subjects. Being a mere functionary, he can be replaced at any time, and he depends just as much on the masses he embodies as the masses depend upon him.
…nonviolent resistance…is remarkably successful against totalitarianism.
Mass formation, as a form of hypnosis, is a phenomenon where individuals are in the grip of the resonance of a voice—the voice of the leader of the crowd.
Three groups that form when a mass rises: the masses themselves, who truly go along with the story and are “hypnotized” (usually about 30 percent); a group that is not hypnotized but chooses to not go against the grain (usually about 40 to 60 percent); a group that is not hypnotized and actively resists the masses (ranging from 10 to 30 percent). The first and foremost guideline for members of this third group is that they should let their voices be heard and in as sincere a way as possible so as to not let the resonance of the dominant, hypnotic voice become absolute.
The way in which this can happen varies throughout the process of totalitarianism (the dissident voice is progressively more censored and banned from mass media and from the public sphere)…
If the opposition is silent, the totalitarian system becomes a monster that devours its own children.
It is important to note that the counterargument should never aim at reversing the process of mass formation and a return to the prior prevailing state (“ the old normal”) because this is precisely the environment from which mass formation arose.
Attempting to convince people to return to this is completely nonsensical and will provoke the opposite effect: Those who are in the grip of the mass formation will cling even more stubbornly to their narrative.
One of the most pernicious effects of totalitarianism: the destruction of every social bond and structure.
The third group [the resistance] speaks for itself. This group usually becomes, to a greater or lesser extent, the object of the frustration and aggression of the masses. It is typically dehumanized, presented as creatures of inferior humanity. If this group ceases to assert its voice, it confirms the stigma. Speaking and rational reasoning is what distinguishes humans from animals; to stop speaking out paves the way for dehumanization.
Everyone who, in his own way, speaks out about the truth, contributes to the cure.
Remember that the masses (the totalitarized portion of the population) usually consist of only about 30 percent of the total population, and the 40 or 50 percent who meekly follow do so mainly because the masses form the largest contiguous block and have the loudest voice, which to them is the most convincing. However, the absurdity of the discourse of the masses also plays to their detriment. If this remaining 10 to 20 percent can form a countergroup (without becoming a crowd themselves) and is able to assert an alternative voice in a sensible way, this group will then be able to undo the mass formation, or at the very least, to free society from its grip.
Moreover, the nonconformist group has to always bear in mind that the masses (and the totalitarian system) are intrinsically self-destructive and always destroy themselves in the long run. The totalitarian system doesn’t have to be overcome so much as one must somehow survive, until it destroys itself.
A more strategic option to break through the mass formation could also be considered: replacing one object of anxiety with another. Mass formation occurs when free-floating, unbound anxiety attaches itself to an object of anxiety.
The rise of the masses and totalitarianism is ultimately grounded in mechanistic thinking…
Part III: Beyond the Mechanistic Worldview
The mechanistic ideology has put more and more individuals into a state of social isolation, unsettled by a lack of meaning, free-floating anxiety and uneasiness, as well as latent frustration and aggression. These conditions led to large-scale and long-lasting mass formation, and this mass formation in turn led to the emergence of totalitarian state systems.
Mass formation and totalitarianism are in fact symptoms of the mechanistic ideology.
The most fundamental change that we as a society have to aim for is not a change in practical terms but a change in consciousness. In the first part of this book, we examined the psychological problems caused by the mechanistic ideology; in the final part, we will examine how we can transcend this ideology. In this chapter, we will reflect upon one of the core characteristics of the mechanistic ideology. This ideology sees the universe as a logically knowable, predictable, controllable, and undirected mechanical process. And above all, it sees the universe as a dead and meaningless given, as the blind, mechanistic interaction between dead, elementary particles. While such a view of the world and matter imposes itself as the only scientifically valid view, a thorough examination teaches us that, from a scientific point of view, this world view is actually outdated.
Those particles were already called atoms, which means “indivisible” or, more literally, “unsliceable” (atomos). It was not until the Enlightenment, however, that mechanistic thinking became dominant and provided the only remaining Grand Narrative of Western culture.
A society primarily has to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. If a society fails to respect these fundamental rights of the individual, if it allows fear to escalate to such an extent that every form of individuality, intimacy, privacy, and personal initiative is regarded as an intolerable threat to “the collective well-being,” it will decay into chaos and absurdity.
Totalitarianism always chooses to abolish laws, or fails to implement them, and prefers to rule “by decree.” This means that, each new situation will require the formulation of new rules on the basis of a (pseudo) rational assessment of such situation. History abundantly illustrates that this leads to erratic, absurd, and ever-changing rules, which ultimately destroy all humanity in society.
Hannah Arendt’s thesis that ultimately totalitarianism is the symptom of a naive belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.
Mechanistic-materialistic science started from the assumption that the world is logical and predictable and, in particular, that it essentially is a dead mechanical process. Science aimed to reduce living phenomena—the organic, the consciousness, etc.—to dead processes (for example, to mechanical chemical processes). Quantum mechanics and chaos theory shake this worldview.
Chaos theory heralds, maybe even more than quantum mechanics, the era that historically and logically follows the Enlightenment; an era when the universe is once again pregnant with meaning.
On the other hand, the world is still firmly in the grip of the mechanistic view of the world and mankind. Maybe even more than ever before. Within this ideology, everything belonging to the domain of consciousness and the psychological experience is ultimately considered an insignificant by-product of the biochemistry of the brain. Man’s desires and aspirations, his romantic longings and his most superficial needs, his joys and his sorrows, his doubts and his choices, his pleasures and his sufferings, his deepest aversion and his most lofty aesthetic appreciations—in short, his complete subjective world of experience—is reduced to a consequence of elementary particles in his brain that interact according to the laws of mechanics. Obviously, such a viewpoint has to consider any psychological approach to life—and by extension any religious or spiritual practice—as a form of irrationality.
Several authors (e.g., Gustave Le Bon) have pointed out that the beliefs of a crowd (the group of individuals who identify with one another) have the same influence on the body as hypnosis. When society as a whole is in the grip of anxiety and the accompanying images of illness and death, those images in themselves become a causal factor. As described above, this happens in part because psychological distress radically changes the biological environment in which the virus enters by diminishing the immunity of such environment.
Also think of the statement by Antoine Béchamp, which Louis Pasteur also endorsed at the end of his life: “The microbe is nothing, it is the environment that counts.”
Totalitarianism is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society. It aims to create a utopian, artificial society led by technocrats or experts who, based on their technical knowledge, will ensure that the machine of society runs flawlessly. In this view, the individual is completely subordinated to the collective, reduced to being a cog in the machine of society.
It is with this backdrop of primitive and ritualistic human sacrifice, we are devolving into a death spiral culture which embraces narcissism as the New World religion, each of us as godheads/nodes in a distributed system; the narcissist sacrifices his/her true self on the altar of the false self.
Good news/bad news, as it's both an empowering and disempowering message—the complicity of and codependency of the masses in playing a role in their own woke totalitarian victimization, parallels adults who are narcissistically abused, who have a hand in their own toleration and perpetuation of abuse.
It's on us to not succumb and regress into a cesspool of controlling narcissistic totalitarianism. It's incumbent on us, individually and as a collective, to adult/grow up, unshackle and free ourselves.