Joker’s Era of Narcissistic Collapse

Resorting to Fantasy and Self-Supply

Source

On Friday, January 24th, I had the opportunity to interview the inimitable Prof. Sam Vaknin, who has clearly put in the time and applied his intellect over the years to help us unpack the cultural moment we find ourselves in one week into the Trump 2.0 regime. He contextualizes this moment in the hundreds, if not thousands, of years rather than limited to the last 100 years. The results and insights are thus profound.

This conversation zigs and zags and covers a lot of ground. I think it’s worth a repeat listen to digest the profundity offered up.

He offers an encapsulation at the outset of this video interview which sums up and provides a cohesive framework for what otherwise could be construed as a meandering conversation. His capacity to distill our cultural angst into a sense-making narrative is unparalleled. I’m unaware of any other public intellectual who combines the gravitas, fighting spirit, and yet a deep, abiding acceptance about our collective fate. The result is an intellectual swirl that I find strangely comforting. To have an opportunity to step outside of the framework of the contrived narrative perpetuated by both mainstream media and bloggers alike, who often act as feeder cells on the MSM, is a breath of fresh air that offers incisive perspective, the likes of which you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

Bottom line, Prof. Sam Vaknin is an intellectual powerhouse and an international treasure. It was a pleasure to meet with him and discuss these historic times in the context of narcissism.

May our dialogue offer you solace and relief from the status quo. Vaknin has a way of punching down walls that need not be there so that we can see the full picture.

-GC

Vaknin’s Encapsulation

 Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was financed by the titans of industry and technology of his time and age: Thyssen, Krupp, and even the American Henry Ford. Adolf Hitler was a prime mover of industry and technology. He was a first user; he leveraged technologies such as radio, the airplane, and microphones.

In order to captivate his audience, this affinity with technology, this close collaboration and collusion with industry are very reminiscent of the relationship between people like Donald Trump and people like Elon Musk. And, of course, this is happening all over the world from Russia to Israel and from Israel to the United Kingdom; there is a confluence of power of the ultra-rich, the technology sector, industries, and charismatic demagogues — autocratic leaders and authoritarian regimes.

And this confluence challenges democracy all over the world. My money is on autocracy, because democracy, like many other ideologies, in my view, has failed.

Source

You’re about to watch a talk I had yesterday with Ginger Coy. She runs an incisive and erudite Substack titled Concerning Narcissism, and concerning it indeed is. Before you watch this lengthy interview, I would like to emphasize a few points. I think we are entering the era of the Joker. Remember the film Joker with Joaquin Phoenix, the inimitable, amazing, mind-bogglingly talented actor?

The film Joker advocates anarchy, violence, and libertarianism taken to an extreme in order to unshackle the long-suppressed and suffering individual from the oppression of social and cultural norms, mores, and institutions and from the tyranny of ideologies. In short, the film Joker advocates what Emil Durkheim called in the 19th century, anomie.

So, societies without norms, societies without mores, guidance, scripts, and a consensus underlying the societal structures and institutions — what are these societies good for? In the interview, I made clear that the idea of society is very new and that in the vast majority of the history of mankind as a species, there were no societies.

And so, we are going back to the future. Some jokers have sprung up all over the world. They are very reminiscent of the movie and the character in the movie, and they’ve attained political prominence lately. Like Hitler before them, these charismatic demagogues collude with industry and technology because industry and technology, by their very nature, resist regulations, and they are anti-government.

And so these anarchic forces, these destabilizing, undermining forces, usually collaborate in order to bring on a new order — a new order characterized by self-dealing corruption, cronyism, nepotism, income inequality on the one hand and on the other hand, a kind of liberty, a kind of freedom that is much desired by individuals all over the world.

When individuals are not reined in by rules and institutions, they do not thrive. They become self-destructive and a menace to others. That is a fact well substantiated in both sociology and psychology. Moreover, you cannot pick and choose which rules to follow and which institutions, for example, the family, to sustain conservatism and traditionalism— it’s oxymoronic. If you liberate people, if you give them unbridled freedom, if you dysregulate or deregulate everything, if you eliminate rules, if you destroy institutions or shut them down, and so on and so forth, there is no way to sustain only specific institutions that you like. Like the family, the tidal wave sweeps everything before it.

When you unleash this genie, it destroys the bottle. And so the irony is that self-styled conservatives and traditionalists are destroying the very social institutions they seek to uphold. And they claim to believe they’re catapulting us back to the hunter-gatherer phase of civilization, where each to his own, the law of the jungle, “might is right.”

And in this sense, conservatives and traditionalists are reactionary. It is an unfortunate choice we have to make between the tyranny of ideologies, especially leftist and far-left ideologies, and the personality cult of the far right — and the libertarianism that is actually disguised as self-destructiveness and disguised anarchy.

It’s a choice. It’s a Hobson's choice. It’s a choice that is very hard to make. And people all over the world are grappling with this dilemma. They don’t know what to do. They don't know what to do. They’ve tried the solutions of regulation and normal/normative behavior and ideologies. They’ve tried these solutions. They’ve tried communism; they’ve tried socialism; they’ve tried Nazism; they’ve tried fascism, every -ism known, and yet all of these have failed miserably.

Science has failed us as well, leading as it did to, for example, nuclear weapons. And so there is a wave, a reactionary wave of anti-institutions, anti-intellect/anti-intellectualism. There is an elevation, glamorization, and glorification of the act of destruction — destruction for its own sake, not as a prelude to building new institutions, but as a prelude to vacancy.

The idea is not dissimilar to Schumpeter’s disruptive or destructive innovation. Schumpeter said that disruption and destruction are positive because they lead to rejuvenation, reinvention, innovation, and renovation. That’s not the case here. What’s happening throughout the world right now is the exaltation of destruction for its own sake, destruction as a goal, not as a means, destruction as a religion; there’s a theology of destruction.

And the belief is that even once everything has been devastated, every institution has been obliterated, every rule has been erased, and every norm has been abandoned, even after all this, the world is likely to be a better place than it is today. The present is perceived as dystopian, not the future.

There is actually a focus on what’s wrong in the here and now, not on what likely may turn out to be wrong in a future without any constraints. Individuals gather in mobs. We are headed towards what is known as ochlocracy. And ochlocracies, mob rule, are always herds. They’re always herded and managed by elites. These tiny elites are usually the super-rich, and this is known as plutocracy or oligarchy — the super-rich and the demagogues that help them to control and navigate the masses.

And so this is the world we are headed into; it is in many respects eerily reminiscent of the 1930s, and the comparisons to Hitler are not over the top. They’re not exaggerated by any means in terms of the paradigm of pathological narcissism, Western civilization, and when I say Western civilization, I also mean Russia. I also mean Israel. I also mean, to some extent, India, which has been exposed to British rule. They’re all parts of Western civilization. Western civilization is in a state of what is known as narcissistic collapse. It is unable to hold itself as morally, institutionally, or functionally supreme anymore.

The self-deception and grandiosity have all dissipated and evaporated in the face of harsh and abrasive reality. Reality pushed back, and so now Western civilization is decadent, decomposing, and collapsing from the inside. It’s rotten. And this is a state of narcissistic collapse.

There are two solutions to narcissistic collapse that we know of: one is fantasy, and the other is self-supply. In the current state of civilization, the postmodern phase, the way to self-supply is to engage in fantasy, fantasies that are self-aggrandizing — Make America Great Again, fantasies that are gratifying, fantasies that fend off reality and help to suppress it or ignore it, fantasies that require no investment, emotional or otherwise, fantasies that are based or founded on magical thinking, and these fantasies help Western civilization to self-supply. These fantasies are self-contained. And so, within the fantasy, people feel good. People feel they are riding or surfing the right wave to the future. People feel that they are somehow chosen or superior. These fantasies have sprouted all over the Western world. The United States, with its Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the two jokers, the two clowns in the circus the civilization has become — the United States is no exception at all.

There’s no exceptionalism, ironically. There’s no manifest destiny. The United States is just a part of a global wave of anti-incumbency and anti-intellectualism, and anti-realism — the belief that it’s better to dream than to cope with reality. It’s better to fantasize than to work hard. It’s better to pretend and fake than to be authentic and real. It’s better to reside in the future than somehow manage the present, and it’s better to have complete freedom to do as you wish and to be who you please rather than succumb somehow to rules, regulations, norms, laws, and institutions.

It is a tidal wave of destructiveness, and it has some characteristics that have never happened before in history because, make no mistake, this reactionary wave is not the first in history.

I mentioned in the interview, at least another one, the counter-reformation in Europe, but this particular reactionary wave has highly specific features that have never occurred before in human history. Suffice to mention the collapse of gender roles as one example, but there are other features that are unique to the 21st century.

We are, therefore, in uncharted waters. We have no experience to learn from, no lessons to derive, no guidance, and no precedent, and so we are meandering in these new dystopian alien territories, trying to generate maps and create a modicum of orientation and failing miserably. As for the rest of it, listen to the interview.