You may wish to expand on 2 points that you touched upon in that piece, as in my opinion, a fundamental understanding of Narcissism can be more appreciated when connecting the dots between those ideas and the mental illness of narcissism. Specifically:
1. The zero sum game point; and
2. Envy.
With regard to #1:
It may not be completely obvious (not even to certain narcissism experts) but narcissists view the ENTIRE world (or more accurately their distorted view of the world) as a Zero Sum Game.
E.g. :"if you have freedom of speech, they cannot have freedom of speech" , "if you have money, that was money that they should have had, but for you taking it", if you have "happiness" they cannot be happy, because you have "their happiness"--they can't be happy unless you are miserable; "if you are successful, it is because you stole your success from others."
Essentially, they view the world in terms of finite resources, a conflict between scarcity and prosperity.
{There are a few scholarly articles on this, Google it} . Narcissists only see scarcity in the world.
Since they view these items (money, happiness, freedom, and any other thing you can imagine) as a finite commodity, they have no choice but believe everything is a zero sum game. Does that make sense? Essentially, because the entire outside world (including people) are a fictionalized, snapshot introject in their mind, they can't imagine that the world/universe is actually larger than the introject they have created . That is how they interact with the outside world. They are actually interacting with the introject of the the outside world they have created in their own mind (which is seriously limited and stunted). They can't imagine that prosperity, or freedom , or love , or money actually are not limited. Vaknin would probably agree with most of this analysis.
In many narcissists (especially the covert types) this stems from early childhood-for example: a child has 2 siblings, if a parent gives attention to 1 sibling, she is not giving attention to the other at that moment, the child views her parent's "love" as a zero sum game i.e. "if mom gives love to my brother, i am deprived of that love". The child doesn't understand that the mother loves all of her children equally, and that the mother's love has no bounds and is more voluminous than the child can possibly imagine (or should, but when that is lacking in the mother, that is a topic for a different day, and obviously a cause of the #1 thought process as well ). This is were the trouble starts....which leads me to the next point...
With regard to #2:
You discussed ENVY. (which can be caused by #1 above, among other things), but why stop there?
why not continue on and expand on pride, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony and sloth.
Without getting religious, the bible's 7 deadly sins, pretty much encapsulate the narcissist (both grandiose and vulnerable), the histrionic, the borderline and the psychopath.
The Judeo/Christian religious philosophy, which contributed significantly to the rise of western civilization, was obviously "on to" something from a psychological standpoint.
Yes ENVY is the hallmark of the the narcissist, but so is PRIDE (the grandiose), GREED (also the grandiose and psychopath), LUST (the borderline and histrionic), gluttony (a lack of control exhibited by all cluster B's) and Sloth (the narcissist-is both physically and intellectually lazy).
At a certain point, after studying this topic for years, everything starts to make sense in light of the above. It is truly a conflict between the truly virtuous and the virtue signalers. Between civilization and chaos. Some would argue it is a battle between Good and Evil.
I have learned that there are a lot of seriously ill people out there (if you can even call a narcissist a person, as they are physical being who's ego {in the Freudian sense} is virtually non existent, and because of this, cannot be a part of human society, because they have no true self).
"It's a zero-sum game in the sense that the other's gains are your loss. And your gains are their loss. And it's a hundred to zero. It's winner-takes-all. It's you or me."
"Both of them regard the situation as a zero-sum game because of this skewed viewpoint, they are incapable of reaching any accommodation, striking a deal of coexistence and perhaps mutual prosperity. Instead, they kill each other's babies, women and the elderly, and of course, each other's military.
In terms of the main thrust of your comment, this piece is by no means comprehensive, more impressionistic on the war on the West. As it is, this post did not fit into the email notification and was truncated, as I tend to run long. So, it looks like you did some of the legwork for me in terms of expanding upon zero-sum and envy and I agree with your points as you outlined above. The only quibbles I would have with what you shared above in your comment is that some narcissists are far from lazy as they toil to buttress their false self, intellectually (Cerebral narcissist) or physically (Somatic narcissist); also, narcissists do not have an ego period, as I understand it. https://gingercoy.substack.com/p/a-consummate-narcissistreckless-calamitous
Being an atheist myself, I have never appreciated Christianity more than I do now in terms of the good values that it espouses as you note with the seven deadly sins. It's interesting to me that so much of life boils down to good versus evil. As I wrote in this piece, I am concerned about the role of moral relativism in flattening these distinctions, producing a wayward world off its axis.
I enjoy your writing. I imagine if you didn't have a word limitation on the stack, you could go on and on (which, might not be a good thing as you want people to read it).
I will check out the transcript above, should be interesting.
I came to the zero sum game conclusion years ago, and then when i resumed my research into narcissism and disorder B types (due to pandemic induced captivity), I stumbled across some writings (mostly by Ph.D candidates) addressing the issue, and was like ....."I guess i am on to something here." Unfortunately, many in the Psych profession happen to be narcissists themselves, hence the literature on the subject is somewhat sparse (as i believe most narcissists are aware of their own narcissism).
Re: Narcissists laziness, i think it is a type of laziness that isn't clear at first blush. E.g. the narcissist expends a tremendous amount of energy to buttress their false self (which is not laziness) BUT the end result that they desire (being rewarded for their talent or for their societal stature) is not commensurate with a work ethic. They want to be treated better than everyone else, be showered with praise, be given money etc. without having to "put the work in" to achieve those goals as normal people do. They expend the energy to portray themselves to the world. They don't expend energy to actually get results (some do, and they are probably more accurately psychopaths). The college student who gets a BA in some Bull**t major actually expects to be handed the world upon graduation. That is the lazy part.
I think they do have a "Freudian Ego" but it is so severely stunted, that it is almost completely non-existent. I believe they actually know their Ego is basically not there, but they still have a need to have an ego, hence they create a false one.
Moral relativism is an evil that will destroy society, reverse civilization, and return humanity to barbarism, making us all no different than animals, but with the intellect to cause great harm to others. Belief in a "higher power" has a tendency to allow one to more easily adhere to virtue, generally speaking. Some need that help as they can't get there on their own, without that belief.
I agree with you that many academics in psychology are narcissists themselves, which is why quality narcissism information is somewhat limited. And yes, narcissists know that they are narcissists. I also took a deep dive on Cluster B during the pandemic. The lazy part--narcissists want acclaim, accolades incommensurate with their efforts, for sure. Glad we're on the same page with the role of moral relativism in destroying civilization, ugh!
The sad thing is, once you figure out what the Cluster B's are all about and have looked into their psyche, you really can't "un-see it". It's as if you have looked into the mind of a lunatic, figured out how he thinks, and when you see the same behavior from others, you say to yourself "holy crap, this person is actually deranged". The only good part is that they become highly predicable, which helps out, the bad part is --you realize that there are A LOT of crazy people out there.
Fully!! I'm glad to finally have a roadmap to deal with the insanity. I've spent over 40 years racking my brain to try to crack these nuts. You can spend a whole lifetime studying narcissism/Cluster B and still learn more. The twists and turns that their minds take are staggering. While not fluent because I'm not a native speaker, I do think I speak cluster B at this point as an alternate operating system. I've had to translate narcissism to normal too often in this lifetime because as you point out, the crazy is everywhere!
But we were all narcissists at one point in our lives. A child is a narcissist until he individuates fully from his primary caretaker, and developes his mature ego functions. Until that happens, everyone is a narcissist. Most people develope into normal humans, the ones that don't continue as narcissists, and devolve into psychopathy. The histrionic and borderline are just slightly different manifestations which is probably a reflection of personality types.
So, in a nutshel, we all have the capacity to "speak cluster b" if we try hard enough to introspectively dig down into our own psyche. In doing so, you become aware of what is normal, and what is not. It is enlightening..
Excellent article. Thanks for writing. And thank you for sticking up for western civilization. That is to say, modern civilization. Even the Chinese, the oldest culture among us, has been affected by what we built.
It has become tiresome to see a collection of white liberals and assorted immigrants take potshots at what we have created. However this is so egregious I have noted some are beginning to notice a very large elephant in the room. Namely the lack of gratitude we are seeing.
There is a lot being taken for granted these days. This surely culminated in the Queers for Palestine posters held aloft by pampered people absolutely clueless about how barbaric the world really is.
I'm also seeing something of a backlash for ungrateful immigrant groups who reject assimilation and join with the destructive forces already present in the West. Seeing a Muslim woman in a headscarf talk about how oppressive white culture is to her people, in a country where she can attend university, marry anyone she likes, including marrying no one, and has freedoms her own grandmother could not access, well what can you say to this lack of awareness? It seems beyond parody at this stage.
Hi Spaceman, you must have seen that Rep. Rashida Tlaib was censured over her remarks around the war? She essentially called for the eradication of Israel. Talk about a failure to assimilate and appreciate America! I agree with you about the lack of gratitude for the West, especially America. It has become beyond tiresome. Things are upside down and ridiculous! I've been enjoying following Xi Van Fleet, Lily Tang Williams and Kenny Xu, all congressional candidates and/or authors, who survived Mao's cultural revolution and are grateful to call America home.
All too many are ungrateful. Obviously exceptions exist. But combined with the Left's obsessions with oppression those who emigrate and struggle to make it have plenty of cheerleaders encouraging them to blame the people who built the country.
For the narcissistic left, the grass is greener in the Dark Ages.
Agreed, Nathalie! Progressive equals regressive, seems to me. We are being gaslit!! Truly Orwellian.
The panderfuckingverse
Yup!
Excellent article.
You may wish to expand on 2 points that you touched upon in that piece, as in my opinion, a fundamental understanding of Narcissism can be more appreciated when connecting the dots between those ideas and the mental illness of narcissism. Specifically:
1. The zero sum game point; and
2. Envy.
With regard to #1:
It may not be completely obvious (not even to certain narcissism experts) but narcissists view the ENTIRE world (or more accurately their distorted view of the world) as a Zero Sum Game.
E.g. :"if you have freedom of speech, they cannot have freedom of speech" , "if you have money, that was money that they should have had, but for you taking it", if you have "happiness" they cannot be happy, because you have "their happiness"--they can't be happy unless you are miserable; "if you are successful, it is because you stole your success from others."
Essentially, they view the world in terms of finite resources, a conflict between scarcity and prosperity.
{There are a few scholarly articles on this, Google it} . Narcissists only see scarcity in the world.
Since they view these items (money, happiness, freedom, and any other thing you can imagine) as a finite commodity, they have no choice but believe everything is a zero sum game. Does that make sense? Essentially, because the entire outside world (including people) are a fictionalized, snapshot introject in their mind, they can't imagine that the world/universe is actually larger than the introject they have created . That is how they interact with the outside world. They are actually interacting with the introject of the the outside world they have created in their own mind (which is seriously limited and stunted). They can't imagine that prosperity, or freedom , or love , or money actually are not limited. Vaknin would probably agree with most of this analysis.
In many narcissists (especially the covert types) this stems from early childhood-for example: a child has 2 siblings, if a parent gives attention to 1 sibling, she is not giving attention to the other at that moment, the child views her parent's "love" as a zero sum game i.e. "if mom gives love to my brother, i am deprived of that love". The child doesn't understand that the mother loves all of her children equally, and that the mother's love has no bounds and is more voluminous than the child can possibly imagine (or should, but when that is lacking in the mother, that is a topic for a different day, and obviously a cause of the #1 thought process as well ). This is were the trouble starts....which leads me to the next point...
With regard to #2:
You discussed ENVY. (which can be caused by #1 above, among other things), but why stop there?
why not continue on and expand on pride, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony and sloth.
Without getting religious, the bible's 7 deadly sins, pretty much encapsulate the narcissist (both grandiose and vulnerable), the histrionic, the borderline and the psychopath.
The Judeo/Christian religious philosophy, which contributed significantly to the rise of western civilization, was obviously "on to" something from a psychological standpoint.
Yes ENVY is the hallmark of the the narcissist, but so is PRIDE (the grandiose), GREED (also the grandiose and psychopath), LUST (the borderline and histrionic), gluttony (a lack of control exhibited by all cluster B's) and Sloth (the narcissist-is both physically and intellectually lazy).
At a certain point, after studying this topic for years, everything starts to make sense in light of the above. It is truly a conflict between the truly virtuous and the virtue signalers. Between civilization and chaos. Some would argue it is a battle between Good and Evil.
I have learned that there are a lot of seriously ill people out there (if you can even call a narcissist a person, as they are physical being who's ego {in the Freudian sense} is virtually non existent, and because of this, cannot be a part of human society, because they have no true self).
Thoughts?
Good to meet you here, Publius, a fellow student of Sam Vaknin I, I see! If you haven't already seen it, you can check out the transcript where Sam mentions zero sum here: https://gingercoy.substack.com/p/the-israeli-palestinian-conflict
"It's a zero-sum game in the sense that the other's gains are your loss. And your gains are their loss. And it's a hundred to zero. It's winner-takes-all. It's you or me."
"Both of them regard the situation as a zero-sum game because of this skewed viewpoint, they are incapable of reaching any accommodation, striking a deal of coexistence and perhaps mutual prosperity. Instead, they kill each other's babies, women and the elderly, and of course, each other's military.
In terms of the main thrust of your comment, this piece is by no means comprehensive, more impressionistic on the war on the West. As it is, this post did not fit into the email notification and was truncated, as I tend to run long. So, it looks like you did some of the legwork for me in terms of expanding upon zero-sum and envy and I agree with your points as you outlined above. The only quibbles I would have with what you shared above in your comment is that some narcissists are far from lazy as they toil to buttress their false self, intellectually (Cerebral narcissist) or physically (Somatic narcissist); also, narcissists do not have an ego period, as I understand it. https://gingercoy.substack.com/p/a-consummate-narcissistreckless-calamitous
Being an atheist myself, I have never appreciated Christianity more than I do now in terms of the good values that it espouses as you note with the seven deadly sins. It's interesting to me that so much of life boils down to good versus evil. As I wrote in this piece, I am concerned about the role of moral relativism in flattening these distinctions, producing a wayward world off its axis.
Good to meet you too!!!!
I enjoy your writing. I imagine if you didn't have a word limitation on the stack, you could go on and on (which, might not be a good thing as you want people to read it).
I will check out the transcript above, should be interesting.
I came to the zero sum game conclusion years ago, and then when i resumed my research into narcissism and disorder B types (due to pandemic induced captivity), I stumbled across some writings (mostly by Ph.D candidates) addressing the issue, and was like ....."I guess i am on to something here." Unfortunately, many in the Psych profession happen to be narcissists themselves, hence the literature on the subject is somewhat sparse (as i believe most narcissists are aware of their own narcissism).
Re: Narcissists laziness, i think it is a type of laziness that isn't clear at first blush. E.g. the narcissist expends a tremendous amount of energy to buttress their false self (which is not laziness) BUT the end result that they desire (being rewarded for their talent or for their societal stature) is not commensurate with a work ethic. They want to be treated better than everyone else, be showered with praise, be given money etc. without having to "put the work in" to achieve those goals as normal people do. They expend the energy to portray themselves to the world. They don't expend energy to actually get results (some do, and they are probably more accurately psychopaths). The college student who gets a BA in some Bull**t major actually expects to be handed the world upon graduation. That is the lazy part.
I think they do have a "Freudian Ego" but it is so severely stunted, that it is almost completely non-existent. I believe they actually know their Ego is basically not there, but they still have a need to have an ego, hence they create a false one.
Moral relativism is an evil that will destroy society, reverse civilization, and return humanity to barbarism, making us all no different than animals, but with the intellect to cause great harm to others. Belief in a "higher power" has a tendency to allow one to more easily adhere to virtue, generally speaking. Some need that help as they can't get there on their own, without that belief.
I agree with you that many academics in psychology are narcissists themselves, which is why quality narcissism information is somewhat limited. And yes, narcissists know that they are narcissists. I also took a deep dive on Cluster B during the pandemic. The lazy part--narcissists want acclaim, accolades incommensurate with their efforts, for sure. Glad we're on the same page with the role of moral relativism in destroying civilization, ugh!
Ditto on the UGH!
The sad thing is, once you figure out what the Cluster B's are all about and have looked into their psyche, you really can't "un-see it". It's as if you have looked into the mind of a lunatic, figured out how he thinks, and when you see the same behavior from others, you say to yourself "holy crap, this person is actually deranged". The only good part is that they become highly predicable, which helps out, the bad part is --you realize that there are A LOT of crazy people out there.
Fully!! I'm glad to finally have a roadmap to deal with the insanity. I've spent over 40 years racking my brain to try to crack these nuts. You can spend a whole lifetime studying narcissism/Cluster B and still learn more. The twists and turns that their minds take are staggering. While not fluent because I'm not a native speaker, I do think I speak cluster B at this point as an alternate operating system. I've had to translate narcissism to normal too often in this lifetime because as you point out, the crazy is everywhere!
But we were all narcissists at one point in our lives. A child is a narcissist until he individuates fully from his primary caretaker, and developes his mature ego functions. Until that happens, everyone is a narcissist. Most people develope into normal humans, the ones that don't continue as narcissists, and devolve into psychopathy. The histrionic and borderline are just slightly different manifestations which is probably a reflection of personality types.
So, in a nutshel, we all have the capacity to "speak cluster b" if we try hard enough to introspectively dig down into our own psyche. In doing so, you become aware of what is normal, and what is not. It is enlightening..
Excellent article. Thanks for writing. And thank you for sticking up for western civilization. That is to say, modern civilization. Even the Chinese, the oldest culture among us, has been affected by what we built.
It has become tiresome to see a collection of white liberals and assorted immigrants take potshots at what we have created. However this is so egregious I have noted some are beginning to notice a very large elephant in the room. Namely the lack of gratitude we are seeing.
There is a lot being taken for granted these days. This surely culminated in the Queers for Palestine posters held aloft by pampered people absolutely clueless about how barbaric the world really is.
I'm also seeing something of a backlash for ungrateful immigrant groups who reject assimilation and join with the destructive forces already present in the West. Seeing a Muslim woman in a headscarf talk about how oppressive white culture is to her people, in a country where she can attend university, marry anyone she likes, including marrying no one, and has freedoms her own grandmother could not access, well what can you say to this lack of awareness? It seems beyond parody at this stage.
Hi Spaceman, you must have seen that Rep. Rashida Tlaib was censured over her remarks around the war? She essentially called for the eradication of Israel. Talk about a failure to assimilate and appreciate America! I agree with you about the lack of gratitude for the West, especially America. It has become beyond tiresome. Things are upside down and ridiculous! I've been enjoying following Xi Van Fleet, Lily Tang Williams and Kenny Xu, all congressional candidates and/or authors, who survived Mao's cultural revolution and are grateful to call America home.
All too many are ungrateful. Obviously exceptions exist. But combined with the Left's obsessions with oppression those who emigrate and struggle to make it have plenty of cheerleaders encouraging them to blame the people who built the country.