The Pathology of Indifference

From an earlier post of mine on FB:

“If you're wondering what it is like to live in a completely artificial reality where nothing is as it seems, and where the only inevitable outcome for most is to slowly lose one's mind in an infantile effort to shield the self from the obvious fact that everything is a lie, welcome to 21st Century America.

When you look at the Cluster B personality disorders, I tend to subscribe to the theory that narcissistic personality disorder is a deficient childlike response to trauma - a defective coping mechanism that doesn't in any way work for the adult self in most interactions. But the purpose it serves the child self is to protect it from further trauma by creating a grandiose, uber-powerful alter ego that absorbs life's blows, leaving the child self insulated from harm, albeit in a state of perennial arrested development. Which is why those with NPD suffer such severe responses to narcissistic injury, which is basically anything that calls into question the superiority and awesomeness of the narcissist.

It is a deficient coping mechanism conjured up by a four year old, like an invisible friend who never disappears as they become adults.

I compare the attitude of many with that of the NPD sufferer. A grandiose but fragile (and ultimately unwarranted and incongruent) sense of superiority, childlike responses to challenge, unwillingness to consider ever being in the wrong, an inflated sense that the world revolves around them, and so on. I posit that this is a classic PTSD response to an insane society that deliberately positions things upside down - live to work in a pressure cooker of commercialized competition, bombarded by impossible images of perfection, told to eat poison as the recommended diet (food pyramid), told to inject poison for your own good (the shots), taught to memorize rather than think, have your cultural norms shattered by fringe lunacy made mainstream, inculcated with the idea it's you or them, kill or be killed in tribal fashion, violence is the solution to most problems, hook-up culture is liberating and empowering instead of destructive and demeaning, and so on. That's traumatizing at a very basic level, like learning your parents aren't really yours and they never even liked you, much less loved you - so you quickly develop the infantile coping mechanism, which is a kind of insanity, in that it interferes with every aspect of one's life: relationships, self-image, satisfaction with life, ability to get along with others, attitude, conscientiousness, right down the list.

So is it any surprise you wind up with a society that has no cohesion? What does a room full of narcissists look like? How about a city full or them? How about a state? How about a country? When everyone is defending their child self from trauma with a bombastic fake overblown entirely self-absorbed, petulant self, how's that going to work for the cooperation necessary for a culture to thrive?

Spoiler: it doesn't. If you condition an entire population to be neurotic and traumatized and living in a deluded world of lies, it can't end well.

I could be wrong. I mean, sure, many aren't suffering in this way. But my theory is that to destabilize and control a population, you don't need everyone to be broken, just enough to become critical mass. And if you can scare still more into self-censoring in order to fit in, to keep one's head down so as not to be targeted, then even better.

I believe that's what we're witnessing in real time. And like most of the Cluster B personality disorders, the prognosis isn't positive, as the disorder/insanity is assumed to be an indelible aspect of the personality. I think that's wrong, that it's really a trauma response (except for psycopathology, where there's a strong physical difference in the brain's activity in the areas responsible for emotions like empathy and remorse). It appears to me that a group is deliberately poisoning the well that's resulted in greater prosperity and longevity than at any time in human history, the better to control what's left. And it perfectly explains why some societies react like narcissistic bullies in virtually any exchanges where they're challenged.

An observation is that positive innovation that moves humanity forward is inversely proportionate to censorship and conformity, whether coerced or self-imposed.

Anyhow, how's that for a Tuesday thought? Cheery enough? Be sure to tip the waitresses. I'll be here all week...”