Politics as a Reflection of our Shadow

Leadership implications in an era of narcissism

As another episode of our Trump “reality show” of fantastical spectacles draws to a close with Trump’s arrest (and mug shot!) in Georgia, it seems an apt time to take a look at how we got here as a nation in America.

Presidential mug shot of inmate No. P01135809

The United States of America is ground zero for the narcissism epidemic. As a primary disseminator of media throughout the world, our collective narcissism, as reflected on our screens, spreads like a social contagion.

Below are pertinent bolded passages from my teacher on narcissism, Prof. Sam Vaknin’s lecture on narcopath leaders, with which I will splice in my own commentary.

Politics is a reflection of our collective unconscious (shadow), to borrow a term from Jung. The leader and the led, the leader and the electorate, the leader and his nation, the collective, they form a self-enhancing and self-reinforcing feedback loop, a diode of mirrored adoration and reflected love by elevating and idealizing their fear, their leader, the mob, because it's a mob. It's autocracy. The mob actually is elevating and idealizing itself. The leader is the mob.

Hannah Arendt in The Origins Of Totalitarianism 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.

Hitler, who was fully aware of this interdependence, expressed it once in a speech addressed to the SA: “All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, I am through you alone.”

…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. The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet

Narcissistic and psychopathic leaders reify the pathologies of their cultures, of their societies. They are not an isolated phenomenon. They don't come from outer space. They embody. They're like a blank screen upon which everyone projects their pathologies. The narcissistic or psychopathic leader is the culmination and reification of his period, culture and civilization. Such a leader is likely to rise to prominence in narcissistic societies.

The malignant narcissist invents and then projects a force, fictitious self, for the world to see, to behold, to fear, to admire.

Such a leader maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with, and this is further exacerbated by the trappings of power. He is surrounded by yes-men and sycophants and acolytes. No one dares to tell him the truth. There's a bubble forming around him. The narcissist's personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism, a whiff of disagreement.

The narcissist's grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are supported by real life authority.

The leader's personal, intimate life, and the leader's persona, personality rather, may be utterly different to his political public persona. There is an abyss. There is a gap between the public image and the truth. It is an unsettling Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde effect.

Most narcissists are paranoid. They have persecutory ideation or even persecutory delusions. Many of them suffer from ideas of reference or referential ideation, the delusion that they are being mocked or discussed when they are not. Narcissists often regard themselves as victims of persecution.

Trump displayed his paranoia of being persecuted (a persecutory object) in his hellish arraignment speech closer below:

They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away my freedom. They want to silence me, because I will never let them silence you. They want you silenced. And I am the only one that can save this nation because you know they're not coming after me. They're coming after you. And I just happen to be standing in their way.

The narcissistic leader fosters and encourages a personality cult with all the trappings and hallmarks of an institutional religion, a secular religion, with him as the godhead.

Very often such leaders will say, I'm sacrificing my life for you. Look how hard I'm working for you, for you, not for me, for you. The narcissistic leader is a monstrously inverted saint, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that his people, or humanity at large, should benefit.

Trump in Wisconsin: “I Didn't Need This, I Had a Very Nice Life”

By surpassing, by suppressing his humanity, the narcissistic leader becomes a distorted version of Nietzsche's Superman, Übermensch.

There are many narcissistic and psychopathic leaders, just look around you, because by my estimate, 40% of the countries of the globe are ruled by narcissists and psychopaths, at least 40%, if not more.

Many narcissistic and psychopathic leaders delude themselves that they are warriors against corruption and against crime.

In this restricted sense, narcissistic leaders are postmodernists. They are moral relativists.

Narcissistic leadership is about reproduced copies, not about originals. It is about the manipulation of symbols. Symbols matter. It's not veritable atavism or true conservatism. It's opportunistic play, game, mind game, power play, and all of it within the symbolic realm. Narcissistic leadership is a theater production.

…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. The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet

The cultish leader demands the suspension of judgment and the attainment of depersonalization and derealization and loads and loads of amnesia. The narcissistic leader is a dissociative leader. He thrives on forgetfulness, on lies, on distortions, on negating the truth and facts.

Narcissism is nihilistic, not only operationally or ideologically. Its very language and narratives are nihilistic.

Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism, ostentatious rejection and hatred of life.

The cult's leader is the role model. He annihilates “the man” only to reappear as a preordained and irresistible force of nature.

I am not human anymore. I represent history. I'm not human anymore. I represent a drive, an anti-corruption drive. I'm not human anymore. I'm a crime fighter. I'm not human. I'm a principle. I'm not human. I'm an ideology. I'm a religion.

Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the corrupt order, the establishment.

Narcissistic movements are pure, real, adolescent—a reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon narcissistic and sometimes psychopathic toddler nation states or group or upon the leader himself.

It is the narcissistic leader who establishes an authoritarian surveillance state. He is everywhere. He has eyes everywhere—a system of snitching, a system of shaming and yet he blames the minorities, immigrants, others, of being everywhere.

Narcissists thrive on hatred. They thrive on pathological envy. They invent enemies where they're none, because it is by opposition that their fuzzy identity coalesces and crystallizes and congeals.

Narcissists, like borderlines, have difficulties with identity. They have identity diffusion or identity disturbance.

And this is precisely the source of fascination with the epitome and the quintessence of narcissistic and psychopathic leaders, e.g., Joseph Stalin, as a malignant narcissist. He was an inverted human. His unconscious was his consciousness. He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies and wishes. He didn't have an ego. He had an id, only an id, using Freud's trilateral terminology.

Hitler's unconscious became the conscience of the world. Hitler provided us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates and what it was like before we invented civilization.

Many of us did not emerge. Hitler was not the devil; Hitler was one of us. He was what Hannah Arendt aptly called the banality of evil. He was just an ordinary petit bourgeois, middle-class, mentally disturbed failure, a member of a mentally disturbed and failing nation at the time, people who had lived through disturbed and failing times. He was a perfect mirror, a channel. He channeled the pathologies of his age, a voice and the very depths of our souls.

“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

— The Origins Of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

The narcissistic leader prefers the sparkle and the glamor of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments. The reign of the narcissistic leader is all smoke and mirrors. There is no substance there. It's devoid of substance. It consists of mere appearances and mass delusions.

And in the aftermath of the regime of the narcissistic and psychopathic leader, the narcissistic leader having died, having been deposed, having been voted out of office, it all unravels.

The tireless and constant prestidigitation seizes the sleight of hand. The entire edifice crumbles like so much dust.

What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely held empires disintegrate, laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. Earth-shattering and revolutionary scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem. As their end draws near, as they come to the end of their regimes, narcissistic psychopathic leaders act out. They lash out. They erupt. They attack with equal virulence and ferocity, compatriots, erstwhile allies, neighbors, foreigners, minorities, loved ones, so-called nearest and dearest, intimates.

It is important to understand that the use of violence must be egosyntonic (comfortable). It must accord with the self-image of the narcissist. It must abet and sustain his grandiose fantasies and feed his sense of entitlement. It must conform with the narcissistic narrative and ideology: I'm violent because I'm fighting crime. I'm aggressive because they are aggressive. My aggression is intended to forestall aggression. It's in self-defense.

All populist charismatic leaders believe that they have a special connection with the people, a relationship that is direct, almost mystical, a relationship that transcends institutions and the normal channels of communication such as the legislator or the media.

And so a narcissist who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite, such a narcissist is unlikely to use violence at first.

But this pacifistic mask crumbles when the narcissist has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, that his constituency, his grassroots fans, the prime sources of his narcissistic supply, that they have turned against him.

At first when he develops this paranoid ideation, this persecutory delusion that everyone is against him, at first in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction, underline his chaotic personality, the narcissist strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment.

Why is he not popular anymore? What has happened?

He says, the people are being manipulated. Foreign powers are provoking them against me. People are duped by the media, by big industry, by the military, by the elite. They don't really know what they're doing. They are following this phase. They will revert to form. They will realize how good they had it with me.

But when these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology, when these attempts fail, the narcissist is injured. This injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized is not discarded with contempt and hatred. Hitler gave instructions to destroy Germany days before he had died. This primitive defense mechanism is called splitting.

To the narcissist, dichotomous thinking, is the technical term. To the narcissist, things and people are either entirely bad, entirely evil, entirely enemy and hostile or entirely good, entirely supportive, blemishless.

The narcissist projects onto other people, his own shortcomings and negative emotions, thus becoming a totally good object. He deposits his negativity, his shortcomings, his inadequacies in human repositories, in other people.

And then what's left is totally good, his perfection, perfection and body.

A narcissistic leader is likely to justify the butchering and slaughtering of his own people by claiming that they had intended to assassinate him. They were about to undo the revolution, devastate the economy, harm the nation or the country. The small people, the rank and file, the loyal soldiers of the narcissist, his flock, his nation, his employees, they pay the price.

The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated, it's a drawn out process.

It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the narcissist.

This is his sole legacy, a massive complex post-traumatic stress disorder, C-PTSD.

Strong men engage in political theater. I call it the “being there” syndrome.

Four decades ago, the Polish-American Jewish author, Jerzy Kosinski, wrote the book Being There. It describes the election to the presidency of the United States of a simpleton, a gardener whose vapid and trite pronouncements are taken to be sagacious and penetrating insights into human affairs.

The “being there” syndrome is now manifest throughout the world.

Given a high enough level of frustration, triggered by recurrent endemic and systemic failures in all spheres of policy, even the most resilient democracy develops a predilection for strong men.

Leaders with self-confidence, apparent omniscience all but guarantee a change of course for the better, “make our country great again”.

These are usually people with a thin resume, having accomplished very little prior to their ascendance. They appear to have erupted on the scene from nowhere. They are received as providential messiahs precisely because they are unencumbered with a discernible past.

And so they are ostensibly unburdened by prior affiliations, commitments and failures. Their only duty is to the future. They have no past. They are a-historical. They have no history and they're above history.

Indeed, it is precisely this apparent lack of biography that qualifies these leaders to represent and to bring about a fantastic and grandiose future.

They act as a black screen upon which the multitudes project their own traits, wishes, personal biographies, needs and yearnings.

People say, he's so much like me. He's so much like me. People derive hope from this.

They say he's so much like me. One day, I can be like him.

The more these leaders deviate from their initial promises, the more they fail, the dearer they are to the hearts of their constituents.

Their constituents love them because they fail, love them because they lie, love them because they don't keep promises, love them because they are like their constituents.

Their new chosen leader is struggling, coping, lying, trying, failing, exactly like they are, exactly like they are.

He uses shortcomings and vices exactly like they do.

This affinity is endearing and captivating. It helps to form a shared psychosis fully ecclesial, a kind of psychotic disorder between ruler and people. It fosters the emergence of a hagiography.

Putin calls it sovereign democracy. There are votes, there's voting, you know, there's a parliament.

Such charades are devoid of essence and proper function. They are replete and concurrent with a personality cult or the adoration of the party in power.

In most developing countries and nations in transition, democracy is an empty world. Granted, the hallmarks of democracy are there, candidate lists, parties, election propaganda, a plurality of media and voting, but its quiddity is absent.

The democratic principles are institutions. They are all being consistently hollowed out and rendered mock by election fraud, exclusionary policies, cronyism, corruption, voter intimidation, collusion with foreign interests, both commercial and political.

The new democracies, so-called, are thinly disguised and criminalized plutocracies. There are oligarchs everywhere. These are authoritarian regimes. These are puppeteered heterarchies.

The new democracies suffer from many of the same ills that afflict veteran role model democracies.

Campaign finances, vinyl revolving doors between state administration and private enterprise, endemic corruption, nepotism and cronyism, self-censoring media, socially, economically and politically excluded minorities and so on.

Many nations have chosen prosperity over democracy. Yes, the denizens of these realms can't speak their mind or protest or criticize. They can't even joke, lest they be arrested or worse.

But in exchange for giving up these freedoms which they regard as trivial, they have food on the table, roof above the head, they are fully employed and they receive ample healthcare and proper education. They save, they spend to their heart’s content, they travel all over the world. That's the Faustian deal that they have made, a strong leader or a strong collectivist leadership, authoritarianism, dictatorship, but I live well. My lifestyle is great. I'm enjoying myself and therefore if I consume, probably I'm happy.

In return for all these worldly and intangible goods, popularity of the leadership which shields political stability, prosperity, security, prestige abroad, authority at home, a renewed sense of nationalism, collective sense, community sense. These are the goods that the strong leader provides.

He's popular because the country is stable, because there's prosperity, because everyone is safe and secure, because the country has prestige abroad. He has authority at home because he's a nationalist, and he encourages a sense of collective and community.

The citizens of these countries forgo the right to be able to criticize the regime or change the regime once every four years.

Many insist that they have struck a good bargain, not a Faustian one.

The thing is that well-established democracies, including the United States, are on the way exactly to this model, this middle ground. I am free economically, but I'm subjected politically.

There's a strong man or a strong collective leadership who will take care of my needs, make sure that I'm safe and allow me to travel abroad once a year.

How dismal, how dismal this scenery is and how abused and exploited by ruthless, reckless, callous, relentless psychopaths and narcissists. They are all over. They are taking over and we are doing nothing to stop them.

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Excerpt from INTERVIEW Narcissists, Psychopaths Are Among Us! (with MIKE CROSS)

Narcissists are far more irrational (than psychopaths). They are divorced from reality. They are unpredictable. Their internal organization is much more chaotic and disorganized. They are much more dysfunctional than the psychopath and so on.

So narcissists usually rise to the top, but then self-destruct. They self-destruct, and if we have the misfortune of having a narcissist in a position of authority, they destroy everyone else around them.

Narcissists are far less predictable, far less amenable to the give and take of politics, far more disorganized and chaotic, and thereby far more likely to self-destruct and other destruct.

If he is a narcissist, narcissists self-destruct, that is inevitable. All of them do it.

Faced with stress, faced with strain, faced with deficient narcissistic supply (attention), they implode, and then they explode. They wreak havoc and destruction upon everyone around them, and themselves, and especially themselves. They do it publicly because the very process of destruction or self-destruction is meant to attract attention, to restore the balance by extracting narcissistic supply.

Experience shows that psychopaths, emotions are feigned constructs, collaborations that the psychopath needs to believe in, in order to convince those around him that he is genuine, that it's real, and that it's lasting.

It is none of the three.

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Excerpt from Narcissist’s Rant: I Want to Go Home

The irony is that the more narcissistic the world becomes, the less comfortable the narcissist feels.

A narcissist is a predator, and of course if everyone is a predator, there's no prey left.

The competition on scarce, ever more scarce targets, ever more scarce sources of supply, and the growing self-awareness of these targets and victims and so on, makes the narcissist's life very difficult.

The fact is that the world today, our civilization, Western and Eastern, go to China, it's the same like the United States, if not worse. Our civilization, our global civilization, is utterly, utterly grandiose, malignantly narcissistic, and beginning to be, in many important respects, psychopathic, for example, defiance, lack of impulse control, lack of long-term consideration of consequences, inability to delay gratification, low tolerance for boredom, etc. These are all psychopathic traits, not narcissistic ones.

Narcissists easily manipulate systems or create systems that they can manipulate. They are pillars of the community. They reach the top of their professions in many professions. They gravitate towards professions which provide narcissistic supply, such as the medical professions, law enforcement, show business, the media, academia, and so on. These are high paying professions. So they are the elite, the new elites in the Western, not only, we used to be in the West, but today all over the world. It's a good world to be a narcissist and a psychopath in.

You must understand that. In this world, in the last 20-30 years, shall we say, it's great to be a narcissist and psychopath. It's rewarding, it's gratifying, and it pays.