Narcissistic Wokeism: When Incoherent and Pathological Ideology Rules the Day
A contemplation of narcissism as a dis-organizing principle that endangers civilization
Both wokeism and narcissism share an origin story rooted in shame. Narcissism, as a personality disorder, sets into a shamed child when the child mentally sacrifices their true self in favor of a grandiose false self called the narcissist, who is omnipotent and omniscient. While genetics have a limited bearing, it is trauma and inadequate coping that compel a child to bolster a fantasy defense of narcissism against deep seated, searing pain. Narcissism, as a defense mechanism, is self perpetuating; just as the primary caregiver shamed the child, the child grows up to shame their own children and others ad infinitum, and crosshatched with other shamed individuals, systemic compensatory narcissism takes a foothold in culture. Compounding matters, it’s a so-called “positive adaptation” in a narcissistic culture to act narcissistically in order to get ahead.
Narcissism is a psychosocial and opportunistic phenomenon, and like a virus, is more than happy to fill the vacuum left in religion’s wake. Like religion, narcissism is infectious and contagious and results in mass psychosis of delusionality of epic proportions. That being said, with the decline of religion as a societal glue holding us together with pro-social values, narcissists are ravenous predators on the prowl, constantly looking for other human self sacrifices on the altar of their false self. As communities are in a decline and individuals increasingly atomized, narcissistic predators are all that much more readily able to pounce on stray lambs from the flock of religion, though to be sure, religion provides safe harbor for many unsavory predators of all stripes. Narcissists are addicts, addicted to narcissistic supply; attention, adulation, adoration, or even sadistic supply will do. The point is to constantly secure attention to bolster a delusional false self. This addiction is compulsive and like all addictions, ratchets up to achieve the same “high.” When narcissistic supply is inadequate, the narcissist will escalate tactics to garner at the worst case scenario for those who are abused, supply that is simultaneously sadistic, psychopathic, and narcissistic.
Enter opportunistic narcissistic wokeism with a backdrop of an atrophying religious landscape. Wokeism emerges on the scene with roots going back most critically 10-15 years, and hitting its stride in the last five years or so, after years of proliferating narcissism dating back to the self-esteem movement of the 80’s. The self-esteem movement metastasized and became corrupted into an embrace of its malignant cousin, narcissism.
Narcissism offers an alternative religion, the mechanics of which share in common a parallel of sacrifice, whether it's Christ or one’s self. As narcissism is compensatory for shame, it currently expresses itself through the woke pillars of anti-racism and gender ideology. Just like in the onset of narcissism, the core of racism, and its attendant anti-racism, is shame. In terms of gender, feminism has failed girls in the sense that it has led them into believing that adopting more masculine traits all the way to hard-charging psychopathy is a “positive adaptation” and that, somehow, if they only flattened their gender differences into a uni-gender (“we are all men with different genitalia”) transubstantiated cure-all, the threats of difference as an expression of microaggressions would be eradicated, so the thinking goes. Differences of opinion are a threat to the controlling narcissistic mindset that “it’s my way or the highway,” and dichotomous thinking, i.e., splitting, ensures that this infantile black-and-white, all-good/all-bad defense mechanism reigns supreme. Heralding an age of homogeneity based on the postmodern collective as an ideal is the de facto social equivalent of the strictures and uniformity of totalitarianism, down to the body level in identity politics, whether in trans rights or racial unrest.
Unified soldiers in the war against difference, the Woke disavow heterodox thinking in favor of a simplified homogenous narrative that paradoxically holds a great deal of complexity as the current social mores are unceremoniously tossed asunder during a period of anguishing transition. We find ourselves in dystopian uncharted territory with “pregnant people,” “chest feeding,” and “individuals with a cervix.” Instead of celebrating our differences, as was the classic liberal ethos, we find ourselves in a half-baked liberal/illiberal composite “solution” where everything goes, and nothing goes, simultaneously, leaving us all to ad hoc figure out the “correct” rules of engagement as long as it conforms to the prevailing and ever-shifting capricious orthodoxy.
Shifting the goalposts is also a destabilizing manipulative trait of narcissism. Lip service is given to a rainbow of “freedom of thought and expression.” In this social climate, the Enlightenment’s liberal outgrowth of free speech appears to be hanging on by a thread until, essentially, the old guard of white men dies off. Meanwhile, in Wokeistan, young people are finding it onerous to perpetually re-negotiate sexual scripts and obtain consent, relationship to relationship, if they even get to that stage. Intimacy in all of its forms, whether physical or mental, is not on trend, as it’s undesirable to “catch feelings” in hookup culture, which predominates. The cheap high of “invasion of the body snatcher” narcissist who mind jacks you is one of the only remaining simulations of bonafide connection in an increasingly lonely and fragmented planet. A fantasy of the looming Metaverse still ominously promises to be a balm to our emotionally disconnected and technically hyper-connected society. In the meantime, social justice warriors flock to the online hallowed halls of activism for a sense of meaning and for a vanishing few, to meet those who may be running an increasingly outdated “operating system” i.e., a mindset capable of authentic connection, not just transaction, for the off-chance possibility of love and intimacy. In the 1980’s people had, on average, 10.1 good friends; that number now is .9.
The clashing of liberal and illiberal sentiment leads to a gnashing of teeth with the exception of the very few for whom the Brave New World benefits. Navigating the tightrope of social complexity (pick a gender, and you are some form of racist no matter what) and concurrent authoritarian simplicity (you are a transphobe or a racist if you question the hegemonic orthodoxy), accommodates a child-like narcissistic mindset that just wants to be told what to do, with opportunities to test boundaries. This juxtaposition of both social complexity and authoritarian simplicity creates copious quantities of dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, holding two opposing thoughts or cognitions simultaneously, is the defining progenitor of anxiety.
Undoubtedly, internalized shame is a factor around being a girl; being male is more socially advantageous in a Woke culture that values power to be apex and paramount and largely conflates power with masculinity. It is in this context that girls make up a disproportionate amount of those who approach transgender clinics, erroneously thinking that their problems are to do with their sex and that they will be cured if they only transition. Structuring a society around narcissistic defenses and ideals, such as one-upmanship, competition, and the probable envy of men, is deleterious and anti-civilization. Without standardized, pro-social values that religion espoused, our civilization is on a downward trajectory, a race to the bottom.
Narcissism is a worship of the self, a false idol/god, not that religion offers a true God; both are false, fantasy defenses. Since its inception, psychology has been muzzled to not question the fantasy/delusion/psychosis of religion, thus entrenching further societal delusionality, as our postmodern day is not the first epoch to be politically correct. It is when political correctness ascends and continues to squelch dissent unabated that the question remains whether we are now better off with formalized old-school religion or new-school wokeism, both being delusional and killjoys of freedom of expression with language policing, etc. At least religion was honest about the cost of admission with decreased freedoms and wasn’t disingenuously pretending to offer a plurality of paths forward (e.g., gender ideology), while concurrently stifling dissent.
In this psychosocial climate, one could maintain “good” Christian morals; however, the incentive for doing so continues to be eroded in the age of self-serving narcissistic wokeism. No one wants to be the last beneficent person in a land of predators, lest they be prey. None of us are above social contagion, and very few of us can escape some form of mass psychosis, whether brief or sustained.
There is a growing trend of “if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” orientation around the growing narcissism epidemic or even an entertainment of the concept of “healthy” narcissism, an oxymoron on the face of it past one’s early 20s. While narcissism is a spectrum, and only one in seven are diagnosed with Cluster B personality disorder, which includes narcissism and psychopathy, there is a form of possibly transient Narcissistic Personality Disorder called “acquired, situational” narcissism, which is common to those with newfound wealth and fame — think rockstar. Additionally, some people are garden-variety jerks, and they have what professor of psychiatry, Len Sperry coined, a “narcissistic style.” People with a “narcissistic style” are not so far gone pathologically; however, it is a slippery slope into more dysfunction and threatens to take others who are in proximity down the same pernicious path to greater self-absorption, exploitation, envy, entitlement, empathic failure/lack of empathy, grandiosity, fantasy-based thinking and other untoward traits endemic to narcissism.
Wokeism has legitimized and reified moral relativism, a hallmark of postmodernism and coincidentally enough, covert narcissism, a sneaky, under-the-radar form of narcissism, marked by pseudo-humility and false modesty. Moral relativism espouses the nonsensical idea that “your truth” is just as good as “my truth” in an unbridled expression of malignant tolerance, whereby one tolerates everything and everyone. Ironically, bigoted wokeism has ushered in the idea that there is no objective truth, that it’s all been a power play of the white male hegemony (patriarchy), and that striving for unbiased truth is counterfactual. Interesting how we arrived at so many astute, logical insights during the age of rationality, the Enlightenment (Modernism), that are fading before our very eyes with the very same maligned older, white, male, demographic.
As the Enlightenment fades, we slip into chaotic dark ages once again of inchoate and incoherent ideology elevated over reality. There is no way that DEI is effective when the realities of our complicated world demand the certainty and compunctions of logical thinking, predicated on the fairness of meritocracy.
Malignant tolerance, the flattening, non-hierarchical postmodern ideal, misguidedly eradicates value differences, perfect for abusers to exploit. In conjunction with shame-based, though shameless, narcissistic wokeism, these forces may very well upend civilization as we know it, and nothing less is at stake.