“Progressing” to Fascism
Political Narcissistic Abuse and the Narcissistic Dear Leader's Dream State of Control
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The narcissist scans his victim for chinks in their armor, vulnerabilities that can be exploited to achieve the narcissist's goals, which are represented by the four S's — sex, supply, services, and safety. Narcissistic supply (or sadistic supply), the primary currency in which the transactional narcissist traffics, garners the narcissist attention and/or adoration and adulation and can be defined in short as attention.
In parallel, on a societal scale, a vulnerability in the body politic of America is democracy itself, which is being preyed upon for the 4S's by fascistic narcissistic predators as reified by the Republican Party and their enablers. This exploitation is not limited to narcissists per se; psychopaths are goal-oriented for sex, money, and power. A commonality between narcissists and psychopaths is that both are goal-oriented, psychopaths chiefly so.
The narcissist and the psychopath present differently in object relations. An object is anything — person, thing, part of a body, symbol, plan, idea, etc. — anything through which an instinct can achieve its aim of gratification — instinctual gratification. The psychopath develops a shared fantasy with his goals/power (which acts as a maternal figure), whereas the narcissist creates a shared fantasy with a person(s).
The narcissist scans you, literally scans you, as an MRI machine would do, and he tries to spot your vulnerabilities, your weaknesses, your frailties, your predispositions and proclivities, your preferences, your wishes, your dreams, your tendencies, etc. These are the chinks in your armor through which the narcissist will intrude, penetrate you and invade you in every possible way, physical and mental. ~Prof. Sam Vaknin
Liberal democracy, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment ideal of rationality, once lofty, high-minded, and noble in its idealism, has now become vulnerable in our postmodern (morally relativistic), post-truth (fact-free), and post-standards times.
As such, Western society is no longer living in the age of dignity; it's the age of (narcissistic) victimhood, according to authors Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning in their book The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, who encapsulate with this assertion society’s transition to the age of narcissism.
Along comes the narcissistic strongman in Trump, who preys upon liberal democracy’s vulnerabilities of ever-widening gaps of incoming equality, some of which are climate change induced, creating refugee crises that spur on immigration and its associated scapegoating the other for the uncertainties of modern life. Income inequality coupled with immigration and refugee crises are perfect breeding grounds for fascism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism, which is currently knocking at America's door in persona non grata Donald J. Trump.
Delusional Trump, being a narcissist, offers an escape hatch of fantasy to cushion the blow of his narcissistic over-correcting-for-societal-ills authoritarianism. However, the prize of fantasy is never worth the price of admission — objectifying, exploitative, and dominating authoritarianism. The pathological narcissistic space, an imaginary environment, a comfort zone, invented by the narcissist, for which the narcissist and victim co-create in a dance macabre, is tightly constructed through a precarious paracosm, a detailed imaginary world of fantasy that is predicated on a latticework of control.
By contrast, Biden, being non-personality disordered, offers reality, which is always dull, rigid, and stultifying in comparison to shiny, malleable, and pregnant-with-possibility fantasy. Narcissists think that they are doing their victims a favor by inviting them into the paracosm as a relief from the hardships of bruising, crushing reality. When the paracosm shatters as it invariably does when reality pierces through, the victim is left standing in the rubble, ruins, and ash heaps of disillusionment and heartbreak.
Similarly, America's continual insistence on fantastically progressing has “progressed” democracy to the end of its rope and nearly off the edge of a cliff. A greedy cultural imperative of incessant insistence on more and more progress has pushed America into the realm of entertaining a fantasy-based, grass-is-always-greener paradigmatic upset of authoritarian fascism over liberal democracy.
"I am a former progressive. I can't fly their flag anymore because they've made no progress."
Labor leader, community organizer, and Oakland, CA 2022 mayoral candidate Seneca Scott
Rather than addressing systemic corruption that has been eroding America's democracy through the years through big money interests, Americans with their penchant for extremism would seemingly prefer to chuck democracy out the window in favor of autocracy, where society's vulnerabilities of nuance, a multiplicity of dynamics and shades of gray are unilaterally decided for them by the omnipotent (all-powerful) strongman narcissist who promises the masses a vision of a one-size-fits-all, one true path.
By outsourcing agency and handing over power to the strongman narcissist, society regresses to an infantile and thus narcissistic state. The strongman narcissist lures his victims with the promise of an easier, childlike lifestyle where decisions are made for them (external locus of control). This love bombing phase induces in the victim an oceanic, in-utero feeling of bliss where there is no separation from mother, only merger/fusion; the victim is (trauma) bonded with a pseudo-mother figure in the strongman narcissist.
This en masse underlying psychological motivation to bond with the metaphorical mother through the strongman can serve as a diagnostic for the age of narcissism. Externalizing a locus of control to the strongman to make decisions for the masses is endemic to the dynamics at hand in narcissistic abuse.
America is an addict, and the addiction is fantasy on the imaginary wings of “progress,” which threatens to unmoor our civilization from reality and set us off course in an irretrievable downward spiral, the endpoint of which is unmitigated subjugation and authoritarian control.
Counterintuitively, public intellectual and self-described liberal (i.e., not a Steve Bannon type, as he’s playfully contended) Sam Vaknin argues that progress is the root of all evil and improbably links the following with a through line of reactionary ideas of progress: post-modernity, environmentalism, Marxism, Nazism, racism, liberalism, the Renaissance, and colonialism.
For example, in his presentation, Vaknin states that the concept of the “will of the people” can be utilized in both a modern and reactionary manner — modern if “the will of people” results in constitutional, parliamentary, and representative democracy and reactionary if the concept of “the will of the people” mutates into an ochlocratic revolt of the masses (mob rule/ochlocracy), i.e., Hitler and the National Socialism (Nazi) party, which led to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The fact is that at least since the 1920s, the very existence of mankind has been recurrently threatened by exclusionary ideas of progress. ~Prof. Sam Vaknin
Vaknin continues, “Communism, fascism, Nazism, and religious fundamentalism are as utopian as the classical idea of progress, which is most strongly reified by Western science, liberal democracy, and the Enlightenment.
Communists, Nazis, and fascists dispensed with the commitment to individualism. They all sought to bring on a rebirth in regression and in emulating and adopting pernicious aspects and elements of the Renaissance.
The Renaissance is the forefather and the progenitor of all totalitarian movements. Exclusionary ideas of progress led to reactionary counter-modernity.”
Fascism is a slow-motion revolutionary civil war happening in the United States today and in many other places in the world. ~Prof. Sam Vaknin
Vaknin delineates the contours of fascism:
“Fascist movements are oppositional (negative identity formation); fascism is an identity defined in opposition to others. It is about rejecting things, rejecting people, rejecting ideas, and the militarization of politics. It is opposed to liberalism, communism, nationalism, individualism, and other races. Fascists are exclusionary and racist and usually opposed to traditional conservatism, for example, free trade. The fatal flaw of fascism is that it tries to be something for everyone, replete with contradictory doctrines. Fascism tries to accommodate every known ideology and every known ideal and fuse them together uneasily.
Fascism was constantly in the making, an eternally half-baked and on-the-fly ideology subject to violent permutations, mutations, and transformations.
Fascist movements suffer from identity confusion/diffusion/disturbance. They are process-oriented and thus impermanent revolutions since fascism is based on the negation of other social forces in permanent civil war.
It was a utopian movement, fascism — in search of a utopia.
Many of the elements of a utopia were there, but hopelessly mangled without any coherent blueprint.
In the absence of a rational vision and an orderly plan of action, fascist movements resort to irrationality, the supernatural, the occult, and the magical into their brand of secular religion. Fascist movements emphasize the way rather than the destination, the struggle rather than the attainment, the battle rather than the victory, the effort rather than the outcome or, in short, the Promethean (daringly original or creative) and Thanatos (Greek god of death) rather than the Vestal (as in virgin, chaste, pure), the kitschy rather than the truly aesthetic.”
Useful Idiots for Authoritarianism
I'm reminded of woke pro-terrorist/ pro-Hamas student activists after October 7th when I think of how public intellectual James Lindsay points out that any authoritarian and/or fascist movement has its useful idiots, who are narcissistically abused and discarded, leaving shells of former adherents.
On this danger and inevitability, Lindsay writes, in part, what follows as a condensed version of his open letter to woke authoritarian activists, “A Letter of Warning to Young Woke People”:
“If your movement loses, you lose. If your movement wins, you lose. In the meantime, you lose yourselves. You are being molded into the Western equivalent of Mao Zedong’s infamous Red Guard, which he made use of for just two years before destroying them. He explained clearly that different things are needed at different phases of the revolution, and then they’re not needed anymore. He needed a youth rebellion to remove his political enemies and to consolidate his power—until he didn’t anymore…and unleashed his People’s Liberation Army to put it down. Some died. Most were sent to the countryside to get re-education in labor camps while living in squalor and primitive conditions. That was their reward. Yours will be similar…You are the agents of that manufactured conflict: change agents, or “historical agents.” History uses people and then discards them.
As a movement, Woke believes itself to be the movement of History. History is using you to move itself. Once it does, it will discard you. The conflicts of yesterday aren’t relevant today, and they won’t be needed tomorrow. The agents of History today lose their relevance in the instant they succeed, and History moves on, necessarily without you and the conflict you generated. You know how everything in Woke philosophy is “temporal,” “spacial,” and “contingent”? It’s all a matter of some time in some place? So are you.
You have been trained to hate, allegedly in the name of “stopping hate.” What you need to know about the people in the movement you’re supporting, “the people,” including your friends in the movement, is that you’re less than disposable to them. The Woke movement pretends to care about you—or, worse, “people who look like you”—but it does not. It is using you so its sociopathic fringe can gain power over society, using you as cannon fodder for their unconventional political warfare apparatus. Instead of living your life, growing, learning, preparing a future, you’re doing activism for them. And they will discard you. Why? Because you are worse than disposable once they get power: you’re a problem. You don’t just become obsolete as the revolution succeeds; you become a liability to what follows. You are being trained by this movement to be a destabilizer. That’s what all that “disrupt and dismantle” stuff is about. You are misled to believe you’re disrupting and dismantling systems of oppression, but you’re merely displacing the existing society for one they’ll seize control over.
You’re disrupting and dismantling the foundations of your own liberty so that tyrants can rule over not just the people you have been trained to hate but over everyone. They need you to destabilize the existing system but not the new one they have planned for us. Their intention is to establish a perfectly stable system with them (not most of you) on top of it, and people trained and brainwashed to be destabilizers are a problem in such a system.
Do you see any identity politics in China today? Is China Woke? Will it go Woke? No! They already did that, and that phase of their revolution is over. It is viciously suppressed there, and they laugh at you here in the West and call you baizuo, white left. They know what you are and how misinformed and misguided you are.
Look at the screen, scan your face, and smile for the government, and don’t dare signal in any way that you think anything you shouldn’t be thinking. You have been falsely convinced that you’re the protagonist in a vast morality play called “the arc of History” and that you’re “bending it toward justice.” You’re “on the right side of History,” and that feels good—right up until the boot comes crashing down on your face. ~James Lindsay
If that future is not Woke, you’re a liability to it because you’ve been trained to be a Woke destabilizer and learned to focus on social theory instead of genuine education and skills. If that future is Woke, you’re a liability to it because you’ve been trained to be a destabilizer that the incoming system not only doesn’t want but can’t abide…If it supports trans rights and reducing emissions today, you will support those things. If it changes its mind tomorrow for the glory of the new system, so will you, or you will be eliminated. Your only path to success inside the system is to become a hollow, soulless functionary in a fascistic mega-corporate and/or governmental public-private partnership machine.
They’re not really against “privilege”; they just want to redistribute and repurpose it. They need those resources. They need your enthusiasm and zeal. They need your impressionable minds. They need the future citizens and the future leaders, but History uses people and then discards them.
Start fighting for the blessings of Liberty that allowed you to have the privilege to think this way in the first place. You can and might lose it—the first generation in American history to face the loss of liberty, and you’re enslaving yourselves. You’ve been sold a false promise of “liberation” in place of liberty, and you need to realize you’ve been scammed. “Liberation” movements are lies. You need to fight for Liberty. Your chains are forged by frauds and locked only in your heads. You are the future. Your choices matter. Choose better.”
Subversion to Fascism
In an article for the Free Press on June 4th, We Have Been Subverted: What is at stake in our ability to see the threat plainly? Nothing less than the preservation of our way of life., Somali-American Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes of a former KGB agent who had a history of promoting foreign subversion, “(Yuri) Bezmenov described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization.”
Living in the West in 1983, Bezmenov gave a lecture in which he explained “Psychological Warfare, Subversion, and the Control of Society.” It began:
Subversion refers to a process by which the values and principles of an established system are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the existing social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. It involves a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system, often carried out by persons working secretly from within. Subversion is used as a tool to achieve political goals because it generally carries less risk, cost, and difficulty as opposed to open belligerency. The act of subversion can lead to the destruction or damage of an established system or government. In the context of ideological subversion, subversion aims to gradually change the perception and values of a society, ultimately leading to the undermining of its existing systems and beliefs.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes, “When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists—I saw the revolution.”
Political Narcissistic Abuse
Narcissistic abuse is the subversion of the natural order of things and the very identity of the victim. The stages of governmental subversion of society: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization correlate with and map onto the stages of narcissistic abuse: idealization, devaluation, discard, and replacement. Please see the chart below.
Here, I would like to propose a new phrase, political narcissistic abuse, to convey societal narcissistic abuse vis-à-vis politics and government. Political narcissistic abuse is narcissistic abuse that originates from pathological political leaders and their narcissistic collectives (polities/governments) who suffer from one or more personality disorders, namely narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial personality disorder (psychopathy), and/or paranoid personality disorder. These pathological political leaders can also colloquially be called narcopaths (narcissistic sociopaths) for shorthand.
Politics is the long arm of the narcissistic abuser. The closest phrases currently in the canon of narcissism are shared fantasy/psychosis, which en masse is called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”], mass psychosis, mass formation, mass psychogenic illness, and political malignant narcissism. None of these phrases capture or viscerally elicit that pathological governments — autocracy, dictatorship, gerontocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, etc. — have as their engine narcissistic abuse. Hence, there is a need for the illuminative, go-to, accessible phrase, political narcissistic abuse. This phrase describes the mechanism of politics through which narcissistic abuse is perpetrated, whereas the existing phrases capture not the mechanism or process but the result of the mechanism or process.
Similarly, I believe that there is a need for the introduction of the phrase religious narcissistic abuse to capture narcissistic abuse perpetrated by narcissistic clergymen, religious and spiritual groups, sects, creeds, denominations, etc., and systemically through religion itself.
While racism and sexism are also oppressive systems through which narcissistic abuse could be perpetrated, I'm not arguing for an expanded ad infinitum lexicon for all modes of oppression as prefixes for narcissistic abuse, as in “racist/racial narcissistic abuse” or “sexist narcissist abuse” as I believe doing so would water down and render the potency of the phrase political narcissistic abuse fatuous. Additionally, political narcissistic abuse could serve as an umbrella term that could encompass racism and sexism.
The Cycle of Narcissistic Abuse: Idealization, Devaluation, Discard,(and Replacement)
Idealization is a form of abuse in that the perpetrator disturbs reality testing for the victim by making the victim delusionally believe that she is better than she is. To deny the victim’s reality through idealization is arguably a form of gaslighting if the narcissist is not confabulating (creating plausible narratives due to dissociation and delusions) and instead acting intentionally goal-oriented/psychopathic.
Driving a wedge between the victim and reality is demoralizing even though the victim does not experience idealization as abuse. Idealization is love bombing, which feels good. It is through idealization that the victim outsources ego functions such as reality testing to the narcissist and thus forms an external locus of control to the victimizer/perpetrator/narcissist for a sense of identity that can be capriciously and arbitrarily yanked out from underneath the victim. The victim has been lulled into a fantastic space, i.e., shared fantasy through idealization/love-bombing; the controlling narcissist holds the keys to this paracosm.
The narcissist drives you to develop a grandiose, counterfactual, unrealistic, fantastic inflated self-perception. Therefore, he's driving you away from reality and weakening you because you no longer know yourself properly. Your boundaries begin to dissipate and you are not quite sure what constitutes proper behavior and inappropriate misconduct. The narcissist reframes your failures as unmitigated and unalloyed successes. This is also disorienting. The narcissist becomes the buffer, the interface, the firewall between you and reality. He takes over your reality testing. So whenever you want to judge reality, whenever you want to appraise it, you revert to the narcissist as the sole authority.
That is a cult.
Prof. Vaknin expands upon the cycle of narcissistic abuse in his presentations, From Idealization to Discard, It Is All Abuse! and Signs You are Being Idealized or Devalued:
“Idealization is a form of abuse. When the narcissist idealizes you, he doesn't see you. You're no longer seen; you are objectified as an internal object. As an internal object, the victim is not seen by the narcissist as a person with agency who has her own dreams, wishes, hopes, fears, emotions and cognizance. The victim no longer exists to the narcissist. The narcissist interacts with his internal object or representation of you in his mind. He then parentifies you by rendering you a maternal figure. He then instrumentalizes you. He uses you as a tool or instrument for self-regulation, internal homeostasis and equilibrium.
These are the three pillars of abuse through idealization: objectification, parentification, and instrumentalization.
Even during love bombing and grooming, the narcissist is abusing you. Many of these forms of abuse don't feel like abuse, not to you, not to him, but they are abusive.
Idealization feels great. You love to be idealized. You love to see yourself through the narcissist's gaze, but you are being abused. You're being driven further and further away from the reality of who you are and from the world itself. You're being objectified, instrumentalized, parentified— used.
Once idealization is complete, you have been molded and shapeshifted into the internal idealized object. You're no longer yourself. You conform to the narcissist's unspoken expectations, behaviorally. Even your thoughts and your emotions are controlled by the narcissist, let alone your moods. You're an extension of the narcissist now. You're a figment. You have indeed become an internal object. You have lost your externality, your separateness, your autonomy.
Etiology (causation of narcissism): The narcissist was unable to separate from his mother as a child because he had been abused or traumatized.
Fast forward to the narcissist adulthood. He finds you and he tries to convert you into a substitute mother, a maternal figure, a second chance at childhood. He can reenact all the dynamics between him and his original mother with you, but this time with a different resolution. This time, the narcissist is going to succeed in separating from the maternal figure, who happens to be you. This separation is the discard. The narcissist is compulsively compelled to separate from you. He is forced by internal dynamics to discard you. Discarding you is a symbolic separation from the original mother. Following separation, there's a phase called individuation.
Individuation can be defined as becoming an individual: setting boundaries, developing a well-constellated, integrated, coherent, and cohesive sense of self, regulating one's sense of self-worth, etc.
In the narcissist's mind, the only way to separate from you is to discard you. And the only way to individuate, to become an individual, is to devalue you.
The narcissist needs to devalue you in order to become an individual.
Originally, when the narcissist first meets a prospective partner/friend/colleague, etc., the narcissist takes a mental snapshot, and then he internalizes this snapshot, this avatar — called an introject in clinical terms. He internalizes it and then he photoshops it. He idealizes it and you. Then he has to get rid of you in order to separate from this new maternal figure, in order to separate from you, in order to complete the separation successfully with his new mother, who is you. He needs to discard you. In order to discard you, he needs to devalue you.”
To summarize and encapsulate the above psychological processes, narcissists suffer with hyper-reflection, which is a confusion between internal objects (internal representations/mental constructs of people) and external objects (people)). Narcissists do not relate to people as external objects, only internal objects. The narcissist confuses external objects for internal objects.
Upon meeting you, the narcissist takes a mental snapshot of you, capturing your essence, and internalizes you as an internal object/introject during the idealization phase. As you assert your own agency, which differs from the snapshot, the narcissist, being a control freak and authoritarian, mentally photoshops the tattered image to maintain idealization of you until he is unable to maintain the ideal image of you and the inevitable devalue and discard phases of your relationship ensues. The narcissist can only photoshop you so much, as you are different than a fixed moment in time when the narcissist initially met you. The narcissist wants to reduce you to a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a person to maintain his mental landscape, which is a precarious house of cards.
The narcissist sees his insignificant other/the victim as an extension of himself. Since others are an extension of himself like an arm or a leg, a narcissist relates to others in a state of what used to be called symbiosis and is now called merger/fusion. Merger/fusion represents the opposite of the healthy and necessary process of separation/individuation from mother. The blunt force trauma of the etiology of narcissism is that he never successfully separated/individuated from mother.
By recalling a primitive part in his audience’s unconsciousness that is undeveloped and wants to still remain fused with mother, he is attempting to regress his victim to his mental age of anywhere from two years to nine years old for a high-functioning narcissist. This is one mechanism by which narcissism is infectious and contagious. He wants to regress you to make you feel safe with him as the parent figure. It's a Faustian bargain as you trade away your agency and also mentally regress, just like the narcissist, who is a case of arrested development. Because the authoritarian narcissist is also a child, the relationship devolves into a dual mothership, oscillating between an authoritarian parent figure and a helpless child.
All totalitarian regimes are narcissistic, and therefore, whatever they do is by definition narcissistic abuse; it involves the falsification of reality and its replacement with a fantasy. ~Prof. Sam Vaknin
Narcissism is totalitarian by definition. The narcissist is a dictator, even in his own family. It's a cult, and he's the cult leader. So when victimhood and narcissism become the organizing principle of your life and your civilization, you're bound to end up with totalitarianism and autocracy, not with democracy.
Democracy requires the recognition that everyone is equal to everyone, everybody else, which a narcissist would never countenance or accept. And this entitled victimhood, which leads to narcissism and totalitarianism, undermines very important principles of civilization and organization, for example, meritocracy and free speech. ~Prof. Sam Vaknin
It is through the mechanism of political narcissistic abuse that a democratic society can be subverted to a base-level organization of fascism. As illustrated above, fascism can be an indicator and diagnostic tool in the evaluation of the presence of narcissism in any given society.
Resources:
Fascism — The Tensile Permanence by Prof. Sam Vaknin
Narcissistic and Psychopathic Leaders by Prof. Sam Vaknin
Very interesting stuff on Woke. Really good and helpful to understand it better.
i was unsure in: "By contrast, Biden, being non-personality disordered...". Seeing all those images where he sniffs the hair of children or adult women, i wonder if this is normal behavior. But i think the point only was, that in comparison to Trump he behaves grounded.
I wonder if RFK Jr. (third candidate) is also similar like Trump in regards to spinning a Fantasy narrative. I think there is also a cult like thing at play here, but in contrast to trump the narrative is one of high morality.