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Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 4

The Fear of Losing Success

Now that a possible protagonist has learned to understand how they feel "castrated" when having to deal with criticism, like in Part 1 of this series, and has discovered a form of True Self in Part 2, and has battled with self-hatred in Part 3, this part of the series looks at what a protagonist may go through when they are to embrace the Work side of Freud's equation of Work and Love as a goal for mental health. With the success of any cultures and institutions, and expanding marketplaces, like with all things in life, there are limitations and drawbacks to all systems, and even if there are improvements, they are taken for granted. The mind moves onto the next problem. How can we progress? Because we are all mortal, there will always be a medical problem, and because we work, there's always a labour problem. We have relationships that go through bouts of integration and disintegration. There's always a room for complaint and a desire for a rescuer or a hope for a new system to usher in a better world. Those desires can be partially improved as technology and social systems react to injustice with real improvements, but there are also cults where promises are not fulfilled and failed attempts at reform are discarded into the dustbin of history. This is usually due to one kind of ignorance towards practicality or another. For there to be a real improvement there has to be real manifestation. It usually shows up as an improvement that is real and tangible, is exciting due to novelty, and begins to show some drawbacks, albeit less drawbacks than what prior generations had to suffer. The drawbacks lead to boredom and a new desire to transcend those drawbacks returns. Political, economic, and cultural development. We often learn the most from our mistakes and contrasts when walking down a wrong path, but with the intention of walking down the right one. Many books are written about progressives and often what some people call success, others call failure. Everyone wants to be part of a utopia, or to feel like part of a vanguard ushering in a better future. In the modern world, people seek to look for success in the marketplace or in government. Each of these institutions has their benefits and dangers.

One of the best compendiums of social complaint related to weaknesses of the marketplace was Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kołakowski. Being a philosopher he was able to tap into his experiences of being a Marxist in the Soviet Union. Marxism is about alienation under Capitalism and the painful self-consciousness encountered in modern life. As Leszek moved from one strain to another, to try and revive the best humanist aspects of Karl Marx's writings, he saw that he undervalued Western society and overvalued Marxism, because of it's difficulty in finding ways to advance without embracing one form of oppression or another. Those Western influences go far back before Marx as well. Leszek found that Plotinus and Hegel were able to look at the sense of suffering in the goal orientation connected with self-consciousness. Again, like with many Western writers, you'll find lots of meditative connections towards oneness and a need to reduce the feeling of alienation in the sense of self. The Buddhist example is to weaken that impulse of Subject > Object > Time as much as possible. In the West there is a desire to use the Ego as an ally, to develop it, expand it, and to continue to transcend obstacles to life as they appear. One can adopt a sense of healthy challenge with obstacles. As soon as one obstacle is done away with, there is a momentary celebration, but then to avoid depression, it's on to the next obstacle, and there can be a zest and meaning to life when it's viewed as a game of trying to transcend limitation. Yet, medical breakthroughs are limited and the Ego has to shrink back to basic consciousness with age and with the hope that there's something more on the other side of total obliteration. God to us is continued existence, but as human consciousness grows up from adolescence, and when witnessing the death of older generations, those experiences bring in the feeling of our own finality. We are not God because we do not continue forever. An Ego desire to transcend can be presumed with its motivation to manipulate the environment to enhance life and increase independence. Plotinus describes what that would be like if we could be absolutely independent. "Certainly that which has never passed outside its own orbit, unbendingly what it is, its own unchangeably, is that which most strictly be said to possess its own being." Humans on the other hand are stuck in interdependence with the environment and a feeling of separation with individual consciousness. We can't "possess our own being."

Like you see in Freud and Psychoanalysis, when we're born, the Ego is underdeveloped and has to use comparison and contrast with the environment to slowly build up a sense of this self alienation from an environment that could be rewarding or hostile. "The first form of the existence of Mind is awareness that is still not self-awareness. It goes through a phase of sensual certainty, in which consciousness is distinguished from the object, so that for consciousness there is such a thing as being-in-itself. What was an object has become knowledge of an object, so that Being has become being-in-itself-for-consciousness. At the same time consciousness changes in character and gradually frees itself from the illusion that it is burdened by something alien. Then, when consciousness grasps things in their specific character and understands their unity, it becomes a perceiving consciousness, or simply perception. In perception consciousness attains to a new phase, that of apprehending generality in the individual phenomenon. Every actual perception contains a general element: in order to grasp that a present phenomenon is present, we must apprehend the now as something distinct from the perception itself, thus deriving an abstract element from the concrete datum. In the same way, when we apprehend the individuality of things we can do so only by means of an abstract conception of individuality, and we are on the level of generalized knowledge when we become aware of individuality as such. The actual 'thing out there' is inexpressible: language belongs to the realm of generality, and so therefore does every perception as soon as we express it. Perception, by imparting generality to the world of sense, surpasses the concreteness of the given object yet at the same time preserves it. Again, the object is distinguished by its particular qualities from other objects, and this opposition gives it its independence; yet at the same time it deprives it of independence, for the independence that consists in being different from other things is not absolute independence but a negative dependence on something else. The object dissolves into a set of relationships to other objects, so that it is a being-in-itself only in so far as it is a being-for-something-else, and vice versa."

We are also agents in the environment but we come from the environment. In meditation, tracing our interdependence tends to momentarily heal the sense of alienation, but it returns as soon as we direct our attention to differences in the environment that are more or less pleasing to our consciousness. All oneness leads to a sense of infinity when one reminds oneself that all experiences have an interdependence with something else with no known starting point, including oneself as a starting point. Yet as soon as this knowledge is available, the goal orientation to satisfy a myriad of cravings, while picking out details to transcend, we return to a sense of oneself as objectified, and there's a desire to transcend circumstance once again. We look at objects not as just "there" but as objects of utility. Objects appear to us as subjectively useful or useless, not an agenda-less objective scientific project. "...When the conception of infinity becomes an object of consciousness, the latter becomes self-awareness or self-reflection. Self-knowledge is aware that the object’s being-in-itself is its manner of existing for another; it endeavours to possess itself of the object and cancel its objectivity." For a Buddhist, you are already in alienation when chasing goals and "stop doing that!" The problem with this is Buddhist economics which relies on a religious caste that lives off of donations. The rest of the population has to manage with Ego in order to create goods that can be distributed to one religious group or another, a form of exploitation. The argument for religious types is that those goods are minimal and a true religious group has to be in self-denial while demonstrating a confident happiness for the laity to imitate in part, and in limitation with the work world as it is. In the world of work and the market, there is always attraction and rejection, including rejecting objects based on important data that could lead to damaging products and services, and there is a concomitant sense of self undergoing repeated humiliations, or as Freud put it, "castrations," that feel like mini-deaths. Each loss of a job, each divorce, and each banishment from an arena of society has the distinct feeling of death, even if one's body is still completely intact. The Ego wants to expand but when it gains some territory it doesn't like contracting, or letting go. This includes all our labour contracts and imaginations of an enjoyable sunset retirement with as little limitation as possible.

Alienation is a feeling of being contingent in time, which can't be eliminated completely, only accepted at deeper and deeper levels of meditation on our interdependence and the good choices we can make while we're conscious. Those good choices, and why we call them GOOD, has to do with a myriad of pleasures that follow those choices. As an individual consciousness competes with others, because of scarcity, a conflict within the means of production begins. As the marketplace unshackled from feudalism, Marxism viewed this more advanced state of being as having its own kind of shackles. You feel a sense of alienation, which is a loss of choice and opportunity, which is also a loss of ownership of what you produce. Your skill development is for someone else and at any time you can be rejected. In that view, the tendency is towards monopoly, since the owners want to avoid being in the position of workers, and the goal is to pay workers as little as possible in order to amass enough profit so as to live with higher consumption on tap. Profit to Marx was considered surplus-value and a signal of exploitation. The capitalist argument against that is if you are able save money as a worker, you can be a partial owner and earn dividends and interest. Profit is also necessary because a small business owner is taking a big risk by investing their capital, saved from individual renunciation, and they wouldn't do that unless there was a reward in the form of profit. Profits also help to absorb losses over time in order to make the business activity a going concern. All this falls apart when workers can't earn enough to save and can only bridge the gap with debt, which is limited as well. This also means that property owners, especially the very big ones, and as I showed in my review of Right Livelihood, those with power look at those without with an eye of objectification and utility, or disutility. When people feel objectified they feel that the more money they get from the organization, the more beholden. As workers become poorer and mistreated, because part of the consequence of leverage is that those without power can't escape mistreatment and if there are no consequences for abuse, then the owner, master, or the one with the power to make choices for others, can unleash their basest desires with no consequence. This happens in slavery situations where workers are only paid enough to work and produce more workers, and sometimes not even that. With a fractured consciousness that compares ego with other egos, the master is in the best position and is resistant to relinquish it.

The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Livelihood: https://rumble.com/v1grhrh-the-noble-eightfold-path-right-livelihood.html

American Workers Are Working At A Record “63 Hours A Week” To Afford Median-Priced Apartments - Steve Cortes - War Room: https://rumble.com/v1whktq-american-workers-are-working-at-a-record-63-hours-a-week-to-afford-median-p.html

When capitalism is working well, the competition can wipe out monopolies, but monopolies can sneak in via technological advancements and manipulation of the labour market to displace workers to reduce their value on the income statement. Each labour addition to an industry displaces another worker to force them to renegotiate their wages at a lower level or not at all. They have to seek a different occupation and try to displace someone else, or find a position that has been vacated. Each technological advance can displace many workers at one time and they have the pressure to create new skills to reenter the workforce. Again, the worker who wants to avoid exploitation needs to find work that allows for rest and recreation from burnout and injury, and enough money to save when one is old and invalid. Systems rise and fall depending on whether they can create a large middle class where a great majority can find themselves there. This means they have more time in their lifespans where they can make decisions towards the kind of work they want to do, and crucially like to do, and their choice for recreation, and choices for relationships. The more one can choose for oneself, the more one feels like an integrated self with reduced alienation, and the more one feels an ongoing sense of wellbeing. The slave scenario is having no pleasure to look forward to, only daily drudgery, if they can't find a way to enjoy their work. The worst scenario is one where one cannot handle the challenges of work, or finds work impossibly boring, like in Csikszentmihalyi's Flow system, where there is rampant abuse from the master, especially if sadism is the only enjoyment for a pathological master, and where there is also no rest or recreation that allows one to heal the nervous system and there ends up being a mixture of physical and psychological breakdowns where work ends either with injury or simple flight. The worker simply leaves work and has to look for sustenance in the form of a donation or a social program via taxation.

Van Diemen's Land U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oji9TlprRk

How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

This is partially why an interest in politics and economics is necessary to understand alienation for the individual worker and the owner. The pain tends to occur when one singles out a section of reality and ties a difficult goal to it, leading to frustration. Many workers actually delay consumption by investing all their time in risk taking and creating new products and services to add something new to the world of interconnection. To not lose the social connection of endeavor, one can remind oneself how it connects to the propagation of a new generation, and also how it helps to protect against future violence and revolution when you instead have a grateful populace. There's a reciprocity that competes with individual survival. If I'm contingent, because I will exist finitely, there's a time trade. For example, if I'm a good nurse today, maybe when I'm older and sick, I'll get good nursing care in return. Like a Karma, or a reaping of what we sow. Our individual goals have to be seen interconnectedly. It's a complex balance between individual batteries, individual regeneration, and connecting that with a market where people can discharge pent up craving by making consumption choices. Unsatisfied cravings turn to social systems outside of the market. Most businesses accept that a certain amount of taxes have to be paid or else they would have to create the social services themselves. Since many corporations aren't big enough to do that, the state took up that mantle throughout the 20th century until now. Successes in creating a basic welfare state, public education, and various forms of public health care, have a cost, but one that many are willing to pay. This allowed people with varying pay rates to get basic help without them requiring a certain level of salary to pay for expensive things, you know, like dying slowly. The cost of taxes and regulation shifts back and forth based on ironically the same problem of feeling exploited. Workers in government require good pay and benefits and those in the private sector have to pay taxes and follow regulations. As those taxes and regulations get too onerous on the progressive side, the conservative side has to beat back power grabs, oppression and the same feelings of alienation. Again, seeing interconnection is important in politics because of the danger of splitting and creating false enemies. Workers in the private sector require social services when they can't find a private solution. Workers in government need to invest pension funds in the market. People who work in government are afraid of conservatives limiting their spending. Those in business, who finally managed to find enough zest and enjoyment in their work, they are afraid of over-regulation, taxes, and corrupt governments that literally plant government agents from a 1-party state political party into those business activities. The goal of course is to graft kickbacks with the threat of persecution on one side, to motivate payment, or the promise of protection on the other. Like gangsters charging for protection. Maybe one gangster doesn't take as much as another does. Private gangsterism or a Public police state. In the latter, the police can simply be seen as a glorified protection racket for a political party. Like all systems with too much leverage and power for a few, there is corruption, and workers feel a desire to limit their production because of a fear that a tax collector will simply take it way, so "why bother?," or having wealth simply means your a target for a gangster. Reducing corruption and reinstating fair rewards, so that one is more interested in production, means a thriving society. A failed state cannot thrive for the majority. People aren't just poor. They feel slighted. Even worse, one can feel slighted even if one is not poor.

Marxist efforts to change society had some successes, but power grabs where 40% of the GDP is not enough for a progressive movement, and only 100% will do, a certain acceptance of free will for the population has to be allowed again. Even a gangster or a tax collector knows that if you take too much you can proverbially "kill the goose that lays the golden egg." The person producing may not be able to produce anymore and joins the ranks of the needy. Rationality prevails a little and the exploitation has to pull back a bit because there is now less to pillage. You can also depopulate your country if slaves can't afford to have kids and produce another generation of slaves. If you displace workers enough, they may not have skills to find replacement work. It's like having a permanent buyers market for labor, and the sellers market of the labor themselves experience alienation. What's left is to join a gang or to join the government, or a massive business, which sometimes there's not much distinction between the two, depending on how much corruption there is and collusion. Like Saul Alinsky quoted in the last episode, that feeling of being slighted and frowned upon, it can lead to desires for revenge, and corruption is tempting. Another example is the Johnny Friendly character from On The Waterfront, the corrupt labor boss who has a fear of being at the bottom of society. "But my old lady raised us ten kids on a stinkin' watchman's pension. When I was sixteen I had to beg for work in the hold. I didn't work my way up out of there for nuthin.'" There's a priority to develop one's ego in contrast with others and there's resistance to lowering your position, even just a little. "First he crosses me in public and gets away with it and then the next joker, and pretty soon I'm just another fellow down here."

Johnny Friendly - On The Waterfront: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YFonHjiCec

Losing status, even if it doesn't mean starvation, but just a lack of regard can be enough to make one fear more mistreatment, and I'm sure many people who pursue power to make choices, if they were honest, secretly harbor the motivation to escape castration and abuse. The successful influence on the West from Marxism lay in the necessities of life being provided so that actual starvation would be eradicated. Much of that has been alleviated by most Western countries adopting some form of a taxpayer funded cushion, with some cracks in systems to haggle over here and there. As self-esteem shifts over a life as it measures against different generations, different office holders, and senses that other people are having more savouring than oneself, albeit temporarily, this envy decouples the connection between necessities and self-esteem. Going from a billionaire to a millionaire can have a similar threat impulse as someone living paycheque to paycheque. It's an emotional feeding or famine, not always an actual threat of famine. When people are negotiating with those in power, they are negotiating their self-esteem, which Otto Fenichel accurately connected with money in his The Drive To Amass Wealth.

The Drive To Amass Wealth - Otto Fenichel: http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Fenichel-The-Drive-to-Amass-Wealth.pdf

Narcissistic Supply - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

The irony was that Marxist attempts in the 20th century involved self-created famines because of politics. Oppression and murder. Not universal brotherhood. The problem of decoupling self-esteem from necessities is how a cloud of depression can project over the populace, even when people aren't necessarily dying from extreme poverty. Media can also mass-produce that kind of projection by focusing on dysfunctions in society as an emphasis and ignore actual successes. If you take in those toxic emotions you might be more uneasy than you should be. "Marx took over the romantic ideal of social unity, and Communism realized it in the only way feasible in an industrial society, namely, by a despotic system of government...Marx seems to have imagined that once capitalists were done away with the whole world could become a kind of Athenian agora: one had only to forbid private ownership of machines or land and, as if by magic, human beings would cease to be selfish and their interests would coincide in perfect harmony. Marxism affords no explanation of how this prophecy is founded or what reason there is to think that human interests will cease to conflict as soon as the means of production are nationalized." Who watches the watchers? It doesn't matter what political labels you put on something "fascist," "communist," "capitalist," "gangster," etc. This person has power and leverage, and this person doesn't. Any system can be corrupted because people aren't like an inert changeless constitution. As soon as they gain power, they want to use it to gratify their personal dreams. In fact their Ego daydreams are limited and as power increases, those dreams gobble up more of the environment and the people in it. Taxation, property abolishment, or regulation can strangle and oppress just the same as any capitalist monopoly. One of the accounting tricks for a supposed non-profit government entity is to include personal expenses into organizational expenses. "Surplus-value" or profit can creep in if people so desire. In the end all corporations are creating work that benefits individuals and the corporate legal entity is just to spread risk to increase creative risk taking activity. When it goes awry, it's when the general public has to work multiple jobs 7 days a week to make ends meet, and this includes the arena of needs plus wants in modern Western countries.

"Marx moreover combined his romantic dreams with the socialist expectation that all needs would be fully satisfied in the earthly paradise. The early socialists seem to have understood the slogan 'To each according to his needs’ in a limited sense: they meant that people should not have to suffer cold and hunger or spend their lives staving off destitution. Marx, however, and many Marxists after him imagined that under socialism all scarcity would come to an end. It was possible to entertain this hope in the ultra-sanguine form that all wants would be satisfied, as though every human being had a magic ring or obedient jinn at his disposal. But since this could hardly be taken seriously, Marxists who considered the question decided, with a fair degree of support from Marx’s works, that Communism would ensure the satisfaction of ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ needs consonant with human nature, but not whims or desires of all kinds. This, however, gave rise to a problem which no one answered clearly: who is to decide what needs are genuine, and by what criteria? If every man is to judge this for himself then all needs are equally genuine provided they are actually, subjectively felt, and there is no room for any distinction. If, on the other hand, it is the state which decides; then the greatest emancipation in history consists in a system of universal rationing."

A system of universal rationing with people cheating rules here and there would fail as kleptocracies of all kinds have historically shown. "...For perfect equality can only be imagined under a system of extreme despotism, but despotism itself presupposes inequality at least in such basic advantages as participation in power and access to information." The way to understand why it is despotism that is needed is because of the clinging described above. People don't relinquish property voluntarily so you need to take by force, or gain by the threat of force. Once people gain that much power, they learn aggressive power tactics to preserve their power, like with Johnny Friendly, it includes others who work for them and have to obey orders to preserve their source of income from him. "You're a walkin' dead man! You're dead on this waterfront and every other waterfront from Boston to New Orleans. You won't go anywhere, drive a truck or a cab or push a baggage rack without one of my guys have the eye on you. You just dug your own grave, dead man, go fall in it!" Because of the complexity of human power and how it evolves over a lifespan and transfers to new generations, it's going to be impossible to plan out a perfectly just society. "Technical progress cannot coexist with absolute security of living conditions for everyone. Conflicts inevitably arise between freedom and equality, planning and the autonomy of small groups, economic democracy and efficient management, and these conflicts can only be mitigated by compromise and partial solutions." For progressives, solutions from their end have to be small, targeted, and accrue over time. This way, any large encroachments on freedom, which is what Marxism was supposed to protect against, can be beaten back without having to rebuild a destroyed system from the ground up. Any signs of success have to come from signs in reality, not propaganda to protect entrenched interests.

Waterfront Labour Corruption - On The Waterfront: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4thvTkvbZjU&t=143s

Oligarchy

Now that we've reviewed a past attempt at utopia and have come down to reality, the fear of success can also been seen as the fear of having to fight corruption that is in the way. Most whistleblowers of every stipe have to go through some kind of crucifixion. The "new kid on the block" at a workplace is a threat to the office clique, which include many of those patients we talked about in Parts 2 and 3 of Fear Of Success. The tragedy of not succeeding with this social problem is that extreme political movements in history were always connected with these very ontological sicknesses, and the common feeling of being slighted. The way to get out of being confused on who the predators are comes from Kohut's understanding of the gradient with which people are more or less connected to reality. Any political prescriptions have to be compared to their real results, regardless if the truth hurts, or narcissistically wounds certain propagandists who protect their pet theories from reality, like they protect their wounded selves. Predators change their spots with every flavor of revolution you can think of, but their psychological damage appears the same, especially when they ignore the real failure of their social projects. They resort to lies and go as far as they can get away with. For example, Walter C. Langer profiled Adolph Hitler and the rules he used to brainwash the population. "Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Now as a disclaimer, I'm definitely in the conservative camp, and think they are closer to reality, not perfect by all means, than the current globalist left, but I will explore left-wing politics as it shows up in the usual places, like the Frankfurt School, Alfred Adler, and so on. Certainly pro-business people can't stay in business if there's no connection to reality, and many business people don't like competition and would prefer a monopoly and act like their stereotypical criticisms of government power. Power is power is power is power.

Because power allows you access to more consumption, making it more addictive, there's less need to follow values and principles. You don't care if it's government or business that provides you that power. People with money and power will intermarry and create revolving doors of employment cronyism between public and private partnerships to maintain their power, which is synonymous with Oligarchy. Each person that is afraid of success is partially afraid of being on the wrong end of power. Jeffrey Winters makes his own definition of Oligarchy as a specific type. "An oligarchy is different in that the scope of oligarchic minority power extends so widely across the space or community that exit is nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive. Thus to be worthy of the name, oligarchic power must be based on a form of power that is unusually resistant to dispersion, and its scope must be systemic...Extreme material inequality produces extreme political inequality...Oligarchs alone are able to use wealth for wealth’s defense...Oligarchy refers to the politics of wealth defense by materially endowed actors." Examples of wealth defense are found in terms like "lawfare" and such. If a victim can't afford adequate legal representation, they are less able to punish transgressions. How things slip away is when a large section of the population can't save very much money compared to others who have large streams of income due to their platforms. Minority power stems from leverage with important platforms, which include ownership of as many areas that individuals purchase from and find difficult to do without. This Winters calls Income Defense. "Oligarchs and oligarchy arise because some actors succeed in stockpiling massive material power resources and then use a portion of them for wealth defense – with important implications for the rest of the social formation. It follows that oligarchs and oligarchy will cease to exist not through democratic procedures, but rather when extremely unequal distributions of material resources are undone, and thus no longer confer exaggerated political power to a minority of actors." Of course if an oligarchy is aware of people wanting to come after them they can get an active head start in co-opting any dissent and opposition through influence of politicians. They might even use the same tactics used against them by revolutionaries or buy their skills as mercenaries.

Living In A Ghost Town - Rolling Stones: https://youtu.be/LNNPNweSbp8

A Message from Michael Stipe: https://youtu.be/awX5lGiqrl4

Gal Gadot and Stars singing Imagine: https://youtu.be/bQK32bwvRuI

Let Your Love Be Known - U2: https://youtu.be/ZRjaUjJb3Z8

In modern politics there are the Alinsky tactics that have a similar noise and fog as the Langer quote on Hitler and have been increasingly used as an affective method to attack self-esteem in political candidates. These practices are so effective that his influence has gone beyond progressive politics. You have to manipulate perception with these tactics but the weakness is that a connection with reality is lost, because it's just about scoring points. If these tactics actually work, then political opposition will copy it, like sports teams copying championship teams. The discourse goes into character assassination and policy prescriptions lose attention. It helps to look at Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, to recognize what you've been seeing for a long time. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have." In keeping with a disconnection from reality and no room for learning, "never go outside the experience of your people." Conversely for the conservatives cut from different swathes, they often have a similar problem but they learn painfully when progressives "go outside of the experience of the [them]." Of course, those who read everyone's playbook is less surprised and can keep a better grip on reality when assaulted with these tactics. An important rule for Saul is to "make the enemy live up to their own book of rules," which has the correct understanding that Conservative Christians sin all the time and don't live up to their standards, but this has the problem of splitting where you can fall into the trap of "two wrongs make a right," and the standards that are abandoned means there's more disconnection from reality and no ability to learn from mistakes. To be a Christian, the goal is not to be perfect but to learn from mistakes and show personal progress.

One area that is a favorite of all politicians from every political stripe is "ridicule is mans most potent weapon." "I do the unforgivable. You can attack the establishment and get away with it. You can insult them but still survive, but I laugh at them and this is one thing they will not tolerate." Also throughout all politics is seeing that "a good tactic is one that your people enjoy," which means that entertainment can creep in and separate one from reality again, because reality can boring. Even a policy prescription that works gets taken for granted and becomes boring. As realistic boredom continues in politics with too much repetition, "a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag," because people ultimately want to see real results at the end of a bout of effort and protesting, and it's also nice if an evil doer is brought down in humiliation. Reality can in fact be fun, just like an engineer coming up with an airplane design that actually works, and some fun ideas are only fun as entertainment but yield no results. It's all how one looks at it. Similar to all political movements, there's the rule to "keep the pressure on," though the danger with this is pushing ideas that don't work. More pressure is thinking harder instead of smarter. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself," which is a sign that people aren't looking at policies, just the attainment of power. When there's an abandonment of policy and cause and effect, the rationale for constant pressure is self-justified by personal interest and comradery. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." Certainly not very radical and similar to all political debates is that "if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside," but what is missing is replacement policies, and if those policies don't connect with reality it becomes just negative politics with a sense of futility, like choosing a lesser of two evils. Alinsky saw this so the next rule is "the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative." Anyone who follows politics long enough knows that the most rare achievement is a constructive alternative. Decades go by without meaningful change, which is why the populace becomes jaded and tunes out. Politics then resorts to the politics of character assassination out of that sense of emptiness of having shallow alternatives.

A great past example was John King from CNN zeroing in on Newt Gingrich's divorce and making the opening debate topic to be about open marriages. "As you know, your ex-wife gave an interview to ABC News, and another interview with the Washington Post, and this story has now gone viral on the internet. In it she says that you came to her in 1999 at a time when you were having an affair. She says she asked you sir to enter into an open marriage. Would you like to take some time to respond to that?"

"No, but I will. I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office, and I'm appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that."

Gingrich slams CNN for asking about ex-wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygtFc3eR6So

Pressure needs a focal point and politics can sidestep debates on economics and regulations through personal attacks. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." The danger is the narcissistic tactic of goading people into reactions that aren't well thought out that lead to violence, martyrdom, which is then used as an excuse to eliminate political opposition through a conflation of targets and incrimination of dissent. The relief is that you don't have to debate people who are in jail. "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength." If you downplay in the media a provocation that you make, and heighten the reaction caused by that provocation in the same media, it will appear in the general public that you're not the instigator but the victim. Narcissists chuckle at that one because it's their favorite tactic in divorce proceedings. Of course the weakness of this tactic is if the target appears the victim from the get go and there are enough witnesses or a large audience for the initial provocation. This is why it's important for big social changes to control political violence and aim for peaceful transfers of power. Political assassinations and violent riots just lead to escalation, desires for revenge, and the political theories and remedies again are put in the backseat.

Politicians know that most in the audience don't put the effort into finding evidence or a lack thereof in political assertions, because of the time required for research, or a lack of interest, so their opinions are based on the trust they have for media representatives and their platforms. Whether these are boring, but realistic citizen journalists, or propagandists, you have to look at any political party and focus on real results from policies, not on the promises. Left-wing, Right-wing, Capitalist, Communist, Religious, Atheist, or any labels you can conjure, these questions about which systems are good or evil can be confusing to sift through. Both sides make accusations of a similar kind at each other but the actions are what matter most. No matter the government in power, the duty of real journalists is to compare real data and actions with propaganda and write about the variance. In this psychoanalysis modality, the higher connection to reality and cause and effect, the healthier you are. It's also healthy because people bandy around the term Extremist to avoid debate, but it can't be extremism if it's cause and effect and reality that you're looking at, and the goal is non-violent. A political system that works well for more people, though not perfect because of individual choices and mistakes, can't be extreme.

The term extreme is used as a way to police dissent and leads to governments creating censorship bodies like in Orwell's 1984. The problem is again: Who watches the Watchers? The self-interested censors naturally load their fake fact checking and aim at political opponents. To have political success when there's popular dissent, everything has to be reversed. "War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." I would add that the word Democracy is abused when it's used to defend authoritarianism. Recently Barack Obama supported this kind of censorship. His Stanford speech sounded really pro free speech at one point and he criticized the CCP model, but then quickly this derailed when he talked about tech platforms. Even his use of the term "toxic information," which is reserved for political opponents, you can see a line has been crossed into authoritarianism. "The good news is that almost all the big tech platforms now acknowledge some responsibility for content on their platforms and they are investing in large teams to monitor it." Obama continues to talk about the value of stopping hate speech and what incites violence, including what would be shared values for people across the political spectrum, but he then says "it doesn't go far enough. Users who want to spread disinformation want to become experts of pushing right up to the line what published company policies allow." Then he blamed the platforms for weakening against pressure from the predictable accusations of censorship, but also the motivation for profit to have as many engaged users as possible. He then applauded the use of algorithms and purposeful slowing of information dissemination against political opponents, but he wants more oversight than this. "Decisions like this shouldn't be left solely to private businesses." Leaving aside that one could pick apart his speech for contradictions on a myriad of topics, and Obama admitted that he's very aware that many people don't agree with him, a few days after this speech, Homeland Security introduced the infamous Disinformation Governance Board headed by Nina Jankowicz, which one could ascribe as Obama's real intent.

[Scary Poppins Propaganda Video]

Nina Jankowicz 'Scary Poppins': https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1519871245856112640?s=20&t=JWM--Tc_YJoJOGZ4F8J__g

"Talking about the Deep State, and things like that, is a thread among conspiracy communities here in the United States, that there is this secret cabal here working to undermine the American people. It couldn't be farther from the truth, as someone who works in and around public servants everyday."

Democrat Steny Hoyer: "They want to eliminate what they call 'The Deep State.' The Deep State is a cadre of professionals dedicated to honoring the Constitution, the laws of this country, and carrying out the policies of the Congress and The President."

Sen. Kennedy: "Who at the department picked her?" DHS Mayorkas: "Senator we don't discuss our internal hiring processes, but I am the Secretary of Homeland Security, and ultimately I am responsible." "When the department picked her, did it know that she had said that Mr. Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian Disinformation?" "I was not aware of that. We do not discuss the internal hiring process. Ultimate as the Secretary I am responsible for the decisions of the department of Homeland Security." "When the department picked Ms. Jankowicz, did it know that she had vouched for the veracity of the Steele Dossier?" "I was not aware of that fact." Eventually Mayorkas only paused the Disinformation Governance Board, and as of working on this post, August 24th, it got terminated. Of course if power changes hands again, it could spring up again.

Typical of recent power grabs related to the COVID19 lockdowns, The Great Reset intrusions on farmers, the clamp down on trucker protests, and the CCP's method of conditioning tactics being used to intimidate the public into compliance, you know that warning you feel in your gut that asks "hey isn't this authoritarianism? Doesn't this feel like a school bully? Is this gaslighting?," the last 2 years since COVID19 has been endlessly surreal. Jordan Peterson described this intimidation process from Ordinary Men by Robert Browning about NAZI tactics. "Things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time. If I encroach on you and I'm sophisticated about it, I'm going to encroach 2mm. I'm going to encroach right to the point where you start to protest. Then I'm going to stop and wait. Then you're going to calm down. Then I'm going to encroach again, right to the point where you'll protest. Then I'm going to stop. Then I'm going to wait. I'm just going to do that forever."

All these topics I'm talking about could expand into huge detours for investigation, and that includes charges of voter fraud that both sides level at each other. Hillary Clinton famously accused Trump of stealing the election from her and even goes into pre-emptive election denial while also calling conservatives election deniers, who don't believe Biden got 81 million legal votes in the last presidential election. "Right Wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next Presidential Election." The debate moves between paper fraud accusations down to vote machine manipulation. There's a deep fear of voting machines with limited to no audits allowed in many American jurisdictions. In lawfare, the dollars are big and trials move slowly. One of the accused was Eric Coomer from Dominion voting machines, which is in a lawsuit with an accuser Joe Oltmann, who said he allegedly overheard Coomer on an ANTIFA group call say "Don't worry about the election. Trump's not going to win. I made fucking sure of that!" This is an ongoing legal warfare that includes others like Mike Lindell. Mike Lindell feels China was more involved more than Joe Oltmann who focuses more on Dominion. These are the typical lawsuits that nobody can pay for and losers go into bankruptcy because they need income the size of a GDP of a country to handle it. Eric Coomer is accused of being an unreliable addict, and Joe Oltmann is accused of being an unreliable used car salesman turned Conservative podcaster. You end up with weird depositions like this one.

"In the Facebook posts you use the word fuck quite often don't you?" "Actually I'm not sure I can answer that." "You don't know whether you use that word often?" "Can you define often?" "You know what often means?" "No I don't, not in your terms. Are we talking 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%? What's often, sir?" "You can define it anyway you like." "Then I would say no." "You're testimony sitting here under oath today is that you don't use the word fuck often?" "In a Facebook post?" "No, generally." "Again I won't answer that until you define the terms." "You understand what the English word often means?" "Tell me as you understand the word often, you use that word fuck a lot?" "I would say I use it less than a lot of people I know. I would characterize it as not often." In the deposition Eric said that if a person believed that Dominion Machines could steal elections it would be a "deficient" understanding. He also said that his posts on ANTIFA were all satire and not to be taken literally, and he wasn't on a group call with ANTIFA.

Certainly, there were charges of conspiracy theories when conservatives said the machines could be connected to the internet, but a recent AP news story said that "Electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking if unaddressed," but not to worry because "there is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results." The Arizona Audit found illegal data access after the election, which is data that needs to be held for 22 months. A more recent review of election data by Verity Vote found that 740,000 ballots "do not have the required chain of custody..." This is just Maricopa County and an unfinished audit at that when it comes to the electronics to test for outside connectivity. It also didn't help to secure trust in elections when a dementia ridden President before the 2020 Presidential Election made a Freudian slip that was very particular and exacting. "We have put together, and you guys did it for President Obama's administration before this, we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." It was all brushed off as unimportant and an assertion that this voter fraud organization was to watch Republicans and their supposed voter suppression like Democrats are election hawks protecting integrity.

Voting Machines and Election Fraud - Barack Obama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFyMJTRaf5c

Conservatives in Arizona were also disappointed when the AG Mark Brnovich was given the information from the audit to investigate and make arrests. Very little was done in 1 year. Mark got lots of phone calls from residents to take action and here was his response. "It's Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. We've gotten a lot of calls and a lot of emails, but there is one thing people definitely want to see. They want to see more chucks. So people? You want more chucks? We got more chucks." His latest report was a small investigation of dead voters but they found there were only 282 dead voters. In regards to other irregularities and the lack of chain of custody "the work of the Attorney General's election integrity unit remains ongoing." State Senator Sonny Borelli had to dive in and work with his team to sample votes and he found 20% uncertifiable votes from a 100,000 sample. He remained guarded as to why the AG didn't do their job and attributed it to laziness or corruption.

"We did it! We did it Joe. You're going to be the next President of the United States."

From then on, any criticism of election integrity was treated as if the people who want full transparent audits are trying to suppress votes and guilty of election stealing. Biden treated the Republicans like they were Joseph Stalin. "The struggle is not who gets to vote, or to make it easy for eligible people to vote, it's about who gets to count the votes, and whether your vote counts at all." Yet the irony is that the Center for American Progress, a Democratic party think tank, provided suggestions in 2018 for protecting elections, back when it was alleged that Trump stole the 2016 election, they advised to "Conduct robust postelection audits to confirm election outcomes." This of course would solve all problems because the transparency would eliminate any concerns which would help the losers gather data about why they lost so they could try new policies to gather momentum for the next election. When people believe in elections and politicians respond to constituents, there's a healthy back and forth between the public and politicians, and usually small adjustments and changes done towards progressivism and conservatism.

In the political spectrum, conservatives have a problem of "what are we trying to conserve? Is it worth it?" The strength they have is that there's a history of what has worked well in the past more or less. The problem with progressives is the question "are we actually progressing?" Their strength is when they create policies that have popular support and the populace doesn't want to relinquish those changes, because they provide protections and also enhance some freedoms. When conservatives conserve things that don't need to be conserved, that's their weakness, and progressive experiments often have little to no real world data so unintended consequences, which are signs of reality, can derail policies. Even worse, there can be new fallible policies that fail to fix past policies that already failed. You can have failure after failure. There are also repeated temptations to centralize power and then decentralize in response to overreach. Elitists from elite schools, and so called professionals or experts have trouble in competition with the rule that "more heads are better than one," but they do try. The populace goes through cycles of dependency when very young or very old and independence in middle adulthood where the need for independence or dependence can switch places depending on circumstances. Can experts really help you more than you can help yourself? Sometimes that's true, like when going into surgery or asking for a prescription, etc., but it isn't always the case. Politics is not like hard science. Politicians prefer to save face and spin excuses, rather than change course into another theory. You try to double-down and triple-down until you get away with a failure. You rarely hear politicians say "oops. We made a mistake, but we figured out a much better path. Please trust us again!" You also don't hear "actually our opposition was more correct than we are. I will now resign and promote the opposition leader." Like in British Commonwealth Parliaments, the government needs a vote of non-confidence and a new election. New movements have to arise and replace old political dynasties in order for new ideas to be acted on. This can even be seen in hard science when science gets politicized because of the need for funding and if results from studies have political consequences. Nobody wants to see real world data that threatens their job, and everyone wants to entertain theories that they can exploit to increase their wealth.

How Nietzsche Explains Woke Madness: https://youtu.be/iVY9Ljhtxnc

The reality is that many people are disengaged from politics when their lives are going according to plan. They forget that a lot of really complex systems are allowing that smoothness to happen. When something goes wrong, that's the only time when there's an alarm and a desire to change things and "throw the bums out!" The ugliness of politics tunes them out as well when they return to more interesting personal goals. Who wants to read about problems with supply chains when one can watch a comedy show and have a beer? Like René Girard pointed out, we only notice institutions when they stop running smoothly or are totally corrupt. Maybe beer becomes too expensive and now something has to be done!

A more difficult part of social change is the sense of individual helplessness in a giant machine. People can be daunted or intimidated by reality even if they want that connection. It takes a certain amount of courage to take what you see and act on it without deferring to authority figures. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was fighting the unreality of progressives in the Soviet Union where lies were treated as common sense and what "good" people should support, and truth was always considered "extreme" and "dangerous," which is a projection of people in power who are only truthfully expressing the danger to their ongoing interests. Aleksandr had the same difficulty in convincing people to make some sacrifice in order to get involved and preserve freedom of speech and freedom of association. "But really, there is nothing to be done! Our mouths are gagged, no one listens to us, no one asks us. How can we make them listen to us?...The natural thing would be simply not to reelect them, but there are no re-elections in our country."

Alexandr's micro-prescription is to maintain a grip on reality, individual by individual, and how each person subjectively sees truth, which Alexandr was adept at including, because people do not agree on what reality is even if they feel it strongly. "...A personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!...For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person...Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world...Let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?"

In the old Soviet Union, people like the composer Shostakovich, had to make dog whistles and involve cryptic messaging in his music when there was a threat of persecution, repression, threats of imprisonment, threats of political audits and raids, threats of lost jobs and bankruptcy, but the desire to say what you think can only be bottled up for a certain amount of time. Eventually people lose their fear and speak up anyways. Alexandr listed out repeated behaviors of sheepish yes-people that scaffold inauthentic systems, and how to live differently.

· Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;

· Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;

· Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;

· Will not cite in writing or in speech a single 'guiding' quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;

· Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe;

· Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;

· Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;

· Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;

· Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

Alexandr knew that many people will not follow these precepts, which are very connected to Western Enlightenment and revolutions in those centuries. "And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill...Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered."

When people are able to let go of the body and lean on conscience it's "not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul." Fear of success can also include the fear of speaking the truth and the consequences for doing so.

Main Currents of Marxism - Leszek Kolakowski: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393329438/

Oligarchy - Jeffrey Winters: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781107005280/

Live Not By Lies - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies

Rules for Radicals - Saul Alinsky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679721130/

A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf

Group Psychology - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html

1984 - George Orwell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781788282369/

Barack Obama Warns Social Media Misinformation Is A Threat To Democracy - Newsweek: https://youtu.be/l-QuQc_E2rI

'Ministry of Truth' - Tulsi Gabbard: https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1520713806086696960?s=20&t=ZmCyy0d-Dg3MGGag10Q1og

"There is no Deep State" - Nina Jankowicz: https://rumble.com/v13qfz5-nina-jankowicz-says-there-is-no-deep-state.html

Adding Context to Tweets about Voter Fraud Accusations: https://rumble.com/v147uhl-clown-nina-jankowicz-wants-trustworthy-people-like-herself-to-add-context-t.html

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claims Nina Jankowicz is eminently qualified to lead Biden’s disinformation board: https://rumble.com/v139x27-dhs-secretary-alejandro-mayorkas-claims-nina-jankowicz-is-qualified.html

Mayorkas admits that he didn't know that the head of Biden's "Ministry of Truth" Nina Jankowicz called the Hunter Biden laptop "Russian disinformation": https://rumble.com/v13i65p-may-4-2022.html

NYT finally admits Hunter's Laptop was real - Maria Bartiromo: https://rumble.com/vy2g9p-new-york-times-finally-admitted-that-hunter-bidens-laptop-was-real.html

'We made a total mistake': Jack Dorsey questioned over Hunter Biden censorship - Sky News Australia: https://youtu.be/7vJZdEk53xo

Tyranny, One Tiny Step at a Time - Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16uBwZxtzi0

Interview with Joe Oltmann: https://rumble.com/v1fhg97-interview-with-joe-oltmann-in-response-to-recent-media-smears.html

Cyber agency: Voting software vulnerable in some states: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-technology-georgia-election-2020-a746b253f3404dbf794349df498c9542

Arizona Audit Results: https://youtu.be/sAAu6O33rNE

Maricopa Dropbox Chain of Custody - Verity Vote: https://verityvote.us/maricopa-dropbox-chain-of-custody/

Mark Brnovich "They want to see more chucks!": https://youtu.be/JO-wZykVHDY

Arizona Letter to Karen Fann: https://www.azag.gov/sites/default/files/2022-08/Letter%20to%20Fann%20-%20EIU%20Update%20080122.pdf

Sonny Borrelli Shows Receipts For 2020 Stolen Election In Arizona: https://rumble.com/v1rdmdo-sonny-borelli-shows-receipts-for-2020-stolen-election-in-arizona.html

CAP: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/9-solutions-secure-americas-elections/

2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud Compilation: https://rumble.com/vb2j7b-2020-presidential-election-voter-fraud-compilation.html

Rules for Radicals - David Horowitz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRUP5yEm1WE

Joe Biden Breaks Down Donald Trump, Climate Change and The Election | Pod Save America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6u1uKznCYw

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

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Narcissistic Supply - Freud & Beyond

Family Myths

After reviewing Sigmund Freud's analysis of Group Psychology, and Prestige, I wanted to explore further some of the power dynamics that remained confusing. Once people gain power and start to satisfy their deep seated cravings, those in power often feel a strange dissatisfaction that can't be easily dealt with by increasing consumption. Systems such as capitalism produce an enormous quantity of goods, which can cover the necessities of all people, and it can also be taxed and distributed through democratic socialism for those who can't find a place in the economy. Technology today looks like magic compared to Freud's time 100 years ago, and our form of happiness was heavily influenced by him. Freud felt that an advanced society would be one that supplied satisfaction without too much delay. Yet Freud noticed patients who had wealth but were still emotionally suffering. There seems to be something more that people want outside of what business and government sets out to provide. What is this indefinable target that people are looking for beyond money, beyond sex, and beyond possessions?

Freud's analysis of childhood development went some way toward answering my question. Much of what happens in adulthood was already prepared many years before with parents as role models. "For a small child his parents are at first the only authority and the source of all belief. The child’s most intense and most momentous wish during these early years is to be like his parents. But as intellectual growth increases, the child cannot help discovering by degrees the category to which his parents belong. He gets to know other parents and compares them with his own, and so acquires the right to doubt the incomparable and unique quality which he had attributed to them. Small events in the child’s life which make him feel dissatisfied afford him provocation for beginning to criticize his parents, and for using, in order to support his critical attitude, the knowledge which he has acquired that other parents are in some respects preferable to them."

As time went on, the opinions of authoritative others gained in importance for the child. Children begin measuring themselves based on how well their parents appeared in comparison to others in the community. If the comparisons turn out painful there can be a desire to falsify facts in order to recover that past feeling of superiority. "A feeling of being slighted is obviously what constitutes the subject-matter of such provocations. There are only too many occasions on which a child is slighted, or at least feels he has been slighted, on which he feels he is not receiving the whole of his parents’ love, and, most of all, of which he feels regrets at having to share it with brothers and sisters. His sense that his own affection is not being fully reciprocated then finds a vent in the idea, often consciously recollected later from early childhood, of being a step-child or an adopted child."

Taking stories and examples from the community, the children that Freud studied would challenge their own parentage as a way to distance themselves from their parents. Those examples included stories of fathers being uncertain about whether they were the true father of some of their children. It left an opening for fantasies to replace the father for someone of a better pedigree. "If these day-dreams are carefully examined, they are found to serve as the fulfilment of wishes and as a correction of actual life. They have two principal aims, an erotic and an ambitious one - though an erotic aim is usually concealed behind the latter too. At about the period I have mentioned, then, the child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of higher social standing. He will make use in this connection of any opportune coincidences from his actual experience, such as his becoming acquainted with the Lord of the Manor or some landed proprietor if he lives in the country or with some member of the aristocracy if he lives in town. Chance occurrences of this kind arouse the child’s envy, which finds expression in a phantasy in which both his parents are replaced by others of better birth. The technique used in developing phantasies like this depends upon the ingenuity and the material which the child has at his disposal. There is also the question of whether the phantasies are worked out with greater or less effort to obtain verisimilitude."

Beyond money, sex and possessions, what people are looking for is recognition. The peak of recognition for most people's lives, outside of rare examples, was in infancy. Freud often calls an infant, "his majesty, the baby." The only thing remotely close to that experience in adulthood is to be an heir to a throne in reality. The newborn baby is the most important thing in most parent's lives, and the attention and recognition given to the child is unsurpassed. For Freud a deep memory of these times was imprinted in the unconscious and it motivated all future desires for recognition. Recognition is often so rare for most people that when it happens, they can get very emotional. "Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone. Thus in these phantasies the overvaluation that characterizes a child’s earliest years comes into its own again. An interesting contribution to this subject is afforded by the study of dreams. We learn from their interpretation that even in later years, if the Emperor and Empress appear in dreams, those exalted personages stand for the dreamer’s father and mother. So that the child’s overvaluation of his parents survives as well in the dreams of normal adults."

Case Studies: 'Little Hans' - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu93b-case-studies-little-hans-sigmund-freud.html

Narcissistic Supply

Influenced by Nietzsche, as so many are, Otto Fenichel associated one of Friedrich's more popular ideas to explain why people strive so much to increase their social status. "Why is this feeling of being powerful, of enjoying respect or honors, in itself a goal aspired to? As is well known, what is called ego psychology has only in relatively recent times become a subject of psychoanalytic research. We are beginning now to understand...the need to maintain a 'high level of self-regard' which is evidently identical with the so-called 'will to power'. This striving owes its origin to the fact that young children all feel themselves omnipotent, and that throughout their lives a certain memory of this omnipotence remains with a longing to attain it again." Omnipotence is defined in psychoanalysis as a magical belief that one can do anything one wishes.

After Freud's impact, when he introduced the concepts for the Ego, Id and Super-ego/Ego ideal, Fenichel found Sigmund's work useful when describing this need for a high self-regard. The Ego responds to the world's demands, but also has demands coming from the instincts in the Id. The instincts are looking for discharge in the world, but obstacles in the world have to be navigated by the ego. The ego directs itself with a list of ideals originating from the Super-ego. Each time the Ego achieves these ideals, a delicious sense of parental recognition in the mind appears, but like with anything in the mind, it can become too much of a priority at the expense of the rest of the psyche. Depending on how unrealistic these ideals are, stress increases with failure. One of the strange rewards for achieving difficult goals is the relief of pressure when the goal is put to rest. For many people, you can get that relief by skipping the draconian effort in the first place, and instead preserve rest. The main reason for going along with these onerous feats is the social recognition of being useful to others in society. With enough social rewards they can turn into an addiction and crowd out love altogether. Even intimate relationships can turn into just another social reward, like a gold star.

Being able to give and receive love provides that reciprocity that is required in good relationships. The problem with narcissism is with the giving. In an increasingly narcissistic society, giving love may mean giving away your time and some of the social rewards promised by authority figures. Narcissists can punish people for giving love to others, and it can motivate empathic people to begin to withhold love out of self-protection. The hope in the narcissistic mind is to be endlessly in the good graces of powerful people. But the search is doomed to frustration. For many people, it's a struggle to gain any recognition, let alone unending supplies of it. Narcissism is then prioritized and conditioned to be stronger, and love begins to weaken from a lack of development. Eventually the only thing that makes the mind feel at peace is the deranging of human emotion to pursue narcissistic supplies exclusively. This addiction is what Fenichel calls a "narcissistic requirement...As a motive for the actions of some individuals, the need of the ego to maintain its level of self-regard has a position of importance equal to that of the instinctual requirements of the id."

How this gets conditioned in childhood, can be seen in my Group Psychology review. People with Prestige have what we want and can remove their resources and presence from us, causing panic. Parents held an aura of supreme Prestige because they could withdraw their supplies of positive attention to control our behaviour. If the parents were narcissistic as well, they would be looking for supplies even from their children. "You have to make me look good." They became an early model to fear and imitate. The habit to seek those attention supplies makes such a huge impression on a child's life. The lesson of life is learned that all social exchanges are about making authority figures look good, and in turn we should seek power positions so we can demand others make us look good. "Now it's my turn! Make me look good!" When one finally attains a position of power, the desire to return to the position of "His Majesty the baby" takes over.

Like with anything that has scarcity, a lot of conflict is over that recognition, and it helps to explain the bizarre behaviours of narcissists who pay attention to only those cues of Prestige, and ignore or attack everything else. "After the original infantile feeling of omnipotence is lost, there is a persistent desire to recover it. This desire we call 'narcissistic need', and self-regard, is highest when this desire is fulfilled and lowest when fulfilment is remote...Whenever there is a discrepancy between superego and ego, that is, a sense of guilt, self-regard is diminished, while each fulfilment of an ideal elevates it." This addictive up and down helped Otto understand why people amassed wealth beyond rationality. Certainly wealth is useful, but it can lead to a feeling of emptiness if it's used ONLY to gain recognition from others. Because purchasing regard cannot guarantee results, there's an insecurity there. A need to control people's attention. In the modern world, people really do feel a pressure to buy recognition. "In so far as the drive to amass wealth appears to be a means of the ego for increasing self-regard, or for preventing a lowering of its level, this desire can be looked upon first as a derivative of that primitive form of regulation of self-regard in which the individual requires a 'narcissistic supply' from the environment in the same way as the infant requires an external supply of food. Money is just such a supply. Then, to be sure, in the present day economic system, the idea of being wealthy becomes an ego-ideal. The attainment of wealth is fantasized and striven for as something bound up with an enormous increase of self-regard."

The Hobbit - Thorin comes to his senses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLUSuwInLnw

This helps to explain why a lot of revolutionaries appear hypocritical when they gain wealth and power. They were not prepared for the temptation. The hypocrisy is caused by their need to preserve the ecstasy of narcissistic supply, and they get caught up in the same emotions as those they once criticized. In many cases the revolutionaries are even worse, because their desperation is larger due to their lack of experience with power. Those who were kicked out of power, may have been corrupt, but they had a certain boredom that controlled their greed. Then any calls from the revolution's followers to step down are seen as personal threats. Followers are also ambitious and want their turn at power. What is unconscious is the desperation people have for self-regard. The sense of survival is strangely connected with it. How this connection is explained psychoanalytically is through the concept of the body, and how this conceptualization can then expand, even beyond the sensation of the body, to appropriate objects and people in the environment. "'The ego is first and foremost a body-ego', says Freud in The Ego and the Id, and he means by this that the distinction between ego and non-ego is first learned by the infant in the discovery of its body in such a way that in its world of ideas its own body begins to be set off from the rest of the environment. The idea of its own ego arises in the conception of its own body, in the so-called 'body [concept]'. What has been termed 'psychic feeling of self' is only a derivative of this 'bodily ego-feeling'. Now the body [concept], as is well known, is not identical with the objective body. Parts of the body that are not present, such as amputated limbs, can still belong to the body [concept]; articles of clothing and the like belong to the body [concept]. Articles of property are thus objects which are possessed in the same way as one's own body, and they have a portion of the quality through which one's own ego is [conceptually] set off from the rest of the world. Possessions are an expanded portion of the ego...The inclination to possession is a derivative of bodily narcissism and is frequently an overcompensation for fear of loss of parts of the body. The drive to amass wealth seems to be a special form of the instinct of possession, made possible by the social function of money. The possessive instinct is a special form of bodily narcissism and an expression of the fear of bodily injury, made possible because of the...social function of possessions. The fear of bodily injury must also be investigated with respect to the social conditions of its origin, with respect to the questions when and why, that is, under what social circumstances the older generation begins to cultivate in the succeeding generation a fear of bodily injury." Of course, here, like I described above, parents control the access to resources and attention required for survival. The brain can then associate the survival necessity of feeding, and social recognition.

El Presidente - Bananas - Woody Allen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkYfmRwryQo

When a person becomes more wealthy, the sense of threat can still remain and decouple from basic survival needs. Rich people can feel a threat when their billions could transform only to millions. Even the general public can feel this sense of panic when the mind fantasizes about an enticing object or person, and the mere thought of denial creates a stress, emptiness, clinging, resistance, or entitlement. You can play around with this uncomfortable feeling by really thinking about something you would like to do, that you have access to right now, and then deny yourself. Right there you can feel the stress, emptiness, clinging, resistance, or entitlement, if you want to call it. Now add a powerful person, an avatar, who has control over whether you get those objects or people. The pressure is now to give them something in order to gain favour from them so they can allow you access. Their Prestige hits you with a sense of fear, and a desperation to give them what they want. The person in the position of Prestige knows they have power, and won't give unless they get. These social exchanges are usually just fine, when what is traded is of a value acceptable to both parties, but very narcissistic people prefer to take more than what they give back. The powerless person envies that position, and if they already have narcissistic habits from childhood, they will pursue power positions and exploit in the same way.

On Narcissism - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtgdl-on-narcissism-sigmund-freud-narcissism-1-of-4.html

Underneath all these worries about controlling narcissistic supplies, is narcissistic wounding. The loss of that attention and respect triggers the self-concept the same as any survival fear, "and names will never hurt me," be damned. "The fear of bodily injuries, which forces on bodily narcissism the character of continually striving for the insurance of its integrity, we are accustomed to call 'castration anxiety.'"

There were some great examples of this phenomenon I found in an interview I watched from the Hollywood Reporter Comedy Roundtable. Henry Winkler talked about how disconnected the mind can get when it achieves the addictive highs of Prestige. "People come to you thinking you are other than you are, and you just have to remember, because it's like a drug. You want to believe them. You want to believe you can walk on water, and you have to just hold on and realize that you are not any taller, you don't know math any better, you are not smarter, because people think you are wonderful on television or in the movies." But when narcissistic supply inevitably runs into painful dry patches there's an opening for addictions to fill in as a replacement supply. Don Cheadle said "I know people that were, when I started, I'm not going to say who and the show, they were getting their per diem in coke."

Comedy Actors Roundtable: Sacha Baron Cohen, Jim Carrey, Don Cheadle & More | Close Up (7:55/37:15): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz0bjLk9rUo

Narrative boundary violations

The Other is he who essentially steals my own enjoyment.

--Jacques-Alain Miller

What is most interesting to me is how quickly the conceptual ego becomes hostile as it expands to include objects, but also people, to control. We want their cooperation, and dislike their competitiveness. Wanting cooperation can very easily turn into an unconscious need to push ourselves into a leadership position over others. "Hey, why aren't you doing what I want?" Anxiety for the ego can be caused by a boundary violation where people make goals for Others and when those Others show independence, thwarting the ego's goals, it can feel like it wasn't independence, but betrayal. We have to watch our preferences for what we want from other people. Preferences can fly through boundaries because they are so imaginary. That feeling of being slighted betrays our need for a subtle despotism, and it's our fault if we feel bad that someone else exercised their legal independence. The freedom for all of us from this form of pain, is to concede freedom for others, and to focus on our own responsibilities. Whoever interferes with another person's goal, even if that person wasn't aware they were being secretly employed by a voyeur, will start looking like a dehumanized Other to them. A pest! The origin of dehumanization, which makes it easier for people to attack others, is conflicted goals. This is how a person can easily victimize someone who is innocent, and not even recognize their innocence. Our desire for how we want people to behave, can create again that sense of stress, emptiness, clinging, resistance, or entitlement. You can feel it tug in your chest, or there's a headache of some kind. That conceptual desire is omnipotent and can move anywhere, even through people's legal boundaries, like wanting something through a shop window. As people inevitably bump into each other, conflict escalates, and eventually everyone involved sees nothing but dehumanized Others. It's very easy to fall into these habits. Most of us feel from time to time that people should be this way or that way, but normal people stop at a certain point before action.

The Anapanasati Sutta - Gil Fronsdal & Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://rumble.com/v1gon6r-the-anapanasati-sutta-4-stages-of-meditation.html

Where conflict can converge more intensely is when an ego-ideal is imitated by many people. Because it's so conceptual, this ideal can be shared only in the mind, but not in actuality. That means that each person is emotionally investing in the same goal, but are obstacles to each other in reality. The more applicants there are compared to positions, the more stress and conflict there is. People are either in that envied position solely, or not at all. Most normal people give up and look for different goals, but not everyone is that way. That all or nothing feeling about these status positions can make some competitors emotionally desperate. But it's difficult to understand how people can body-snatch another person's identity when explaining mimetics in this unemotional way. Yet if we look closer at the emotions, we can see that we do it all the time. In War Pt.2, I talked about Vittorio Gallese's studies of mirror neurons and how the brain maps out the goals and intentions of others before imitating them. It's not just narcissists who do this. Most people, without some rare brain damage, do this automatically. The way it's done is that the ego is constantly scanning perception for benefits to satisfy wishes, but there usually is some compass pointing for us. Most of our early wishes were modeled by parents, who were the only ones we could look to for suggestions for how to maneuver the environment to gain rewards. This habit to look to authority figures for reward-suggestions influences us throughout life, and even sets us up for conflicts later when suggestions are pointing to things that cannot be shared. We condition ourselves based on these suggestions, which are essentially pleasure procedures. If what the model has is readily available, it's not really a problem to follow the procedure. But when we get stuck in entitlement-stress-mode, we may not notice that what we want is only available to the model. We bump into them by accident and they turn from a model to a rival. Then a lot of our moods and actions are dictated by these conflicts.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

Even when these imitated suggestions point to things that aren't scarce, they can still be hollow due to how imaginary this mind-intention-mapping process is. These promises of happiness that we map out don't always match reality. Like in my review of Group Psychology, they can be hazy, abstract and misleading. Then we can be agitated when reality doesn't match our imitated hopes. And of course, this happens over and over again. Added to the confusion between reality and fantasy, this vicarious mapping releases similar rewards for imaginary goal attainments like in the real world. This can be so much so that we are satisfied only with imagined rewards because we released enough chemical reward simply by following an enjoyable narrative to its imaginary satisfaction. Even more seductively, these imagined narratives provide less risk than in real life goals, making them a vice. Therefore, after the narrative finishes in our minds, the motivation usually ends, including the motivation to do something about our wishes in reality. We can become disconnected from reality, prefer fantasy, and lose belief in our own actions.

Will Wright's Secret to game design: Narcissism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFtt25k873U

Minority Report: VR room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tjOVOSqdQ0

Ready Player One Ending - Steven Spielberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYEnSsbuVMQ

Group Psychology - Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html

The conceptual ego can create an alternate life of it's own in these narratives, including a complete selection of emotional reactions to choose from. The emotions are stronger when actual goals are achieved, but high quality forms of art can also tease our emotions powerfully. As we follow these artful narratives, we can be reactive to imaginary success and also imaginary failure. A pseudo life. When celebrities are the imaginary life we are choosing, it can turn into an obsession, like a bodysnatching in the imagination. It's like they are inside of us when we imitate them. Our desire to control their narrative, to satisfy our wishes, can dangerously take over. A narrative boundary violation. If we don't like their real life narrative, there's a desire to manipulate it to what we want and there can be an aggression towards the role model when they inevitably act independent in real life.

Sublimation - Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html

An obvious manifestation of this kind of bodysnatching is in spectator sports. People watching their favourite sport can imitate with their fantasies, identify, and expand their narcissistic cravings vicariously to a sports athlete and then criticize their poor performance because of their emotional investment in them. We feel emotionally tied to their wins and losses. The emotional investment comes from wishing for an ego-ideal to be achieved, except we expect it to be achieved by somebody else. When we wish for our team to win, we lock in our emotional investment on the athletes' actions. It's like they are performing a service for our self-esteem, and it's why we can bizarrely get so emotional over people who we may never meet. A lot of our lives are about gaining pleasure in watching others in sports and movies, as a time killer, but we may fail to notice the negative side of identification. To bask in the glory of others, disguises a dangerous impulse to want to punish those who begin to behave differently than what we wanted. We feel slighted because we were day-dreaming about being them for such a long time that what they do badly looks like they betrayed us! We feel again the stress, emptiness, clinging, resistance, or entitlement. The spectator then feels a desire to punish the player for their failed performance, as if they made the fan look bad on purpose. The sports jersey that was valued so highly, can, during a bad season, become worthless. We can collect symbols of Prestige, and those symbols can oscillate in value wildly along with our emotions and enslave ourselves with these symbols. When this kind of obsession moves into Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it can escalate to a dangerous level. The danger is when we identify with real people, and feel an enormous desire to punish them for their independence. All desires create a tension in the Freudian sense that needs discharge. If there's frustration, it triggers the aggressive parts of our brain to move into sadism to destroy the obstacles of our happiness. Except this time, the obstacle is the person we wanted to imitate. Disappointing role models can bizarrely make us feel self-hatred and we can blame them for their negative influence. In extreme cases of identification, we can try to live vicariously through our role models in our imagination, feel irritated and entitled, when their real behaviours don't conform to our omnipotent commands, and move to punish them, threatening their lives, and breaking the law. This supports a lot of the reason why stalking behaviour exists at all, how intimate partners, employers, government officials can be territorial over people as much as inanimate objects like money and real property. We can be addicted to people.

Stalking - John Lennon and Mark David Chapman: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html

Misery - HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCKADOODIE CAR!!!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO20qU-VwgA

Django Unchained - "Broomhilda here, is my property!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifh6xJQyufc

The Invisible Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO_FJdiY9dA&t=2s

This addiction can start a cycle, often called the cycle of abuse. For example, Freud noticed that satisfied libido or craving becomes bored, and then partners, or other people that used to be valued, can now only be perceived with a sense of emptiness, disgust, contempt and a feeling of taking someone for granted. Abusers can then punish victims for not being stimulating enough, causing a breakdown in the relationship. This is until the craving for them redevelops with time. With separation, or the threat of it, the narcissistic ego fears a loss of supply, like a loss of a limb as described above, and has to redouble efforts at intimidation or flattery to regain that hit of intensity, comfort, and security. It's what is called in modern lingo as Hoovering. Narcissists feel empty and want to vacuum you back into their games. Then when their libido becomes satisfied again, and boredom returns, the victim is taken for granted once more. The victim's desires for leaving the relationship trigger more abuse, but also intensity for the narcissist. The independent behaviours to escape can be enjoyable for predators, if those escape attempts are not too difficult to thwart, because it increases the intensity of the relationship and reduces boredom once more. If the victim succeeds in escaping, attempts to hoover may return again, restarting the vicious cycle.

Sadism and Masochism

This dance that involves Narcissistic Supply has to do with the pain that happens when it's unavailable, that pain we feel we need to numb is self-attacking. Freud kept sadism and masochism the same in one area, that of the action of attacking, but what we choose to attack is what defines them. "Masochism is actually sadism turned round upon the subject's own ego." A big motivation of the instincts is control, including control over our self-conception, to gain pleasure in certain ways, and to avoid pain. What Freud found in the instincts was how if one form of pleasure was obstructed, the mind would try to find replacements, and often in role reversals. The most common ones he encountered in people was Sadism-masochism and voyeurism-exhibitionism. "The reversal here concerns only the aims of the instincts. The passive aim (to be tortured, or looked at [for pleasure]) has been substituted for the active aim (to torture, to look at [for pleasure]). Reversal of content is found in the single instance of the change of love into hate." The way the instincts move for Freud is to go for pleasure, master obstacles with sadism when they arise, or to give up in masochism to relieve stress, and watch someone else do the mastering instead. Each subject can look from the point of view of the subject attacking the object with sadistic control. In turn the subject can imagine themselves as the subject dominating, even when being masochistically ruled. "Sadism consists in the exercise of violence or power upon some other person as its object. This object is abandoned and replaced by the subject's self. Together with the turning round upon the self the change from an active to a passive aim in the instinct is also brought about. Again another person is sought as an object; this person, in consequence of the alteration which has taken place in the aim of the instinct, has to take over the original role of the subject. Satisfaction follows in this case also by way of the original sadism, the passive ego placing itself in phantasy back in its former situation, which, however, has now been given up to another subject outside the self." A lot of thoughts of revenge could fit into those fantasies. This theory can also explain what it's like to lose power to someone else, and why it's so important for people to maintain it, to avoid the abuse they remembered from the past when they didn't have power.

If we focus on power more than violence, it can be something we see in the workplace where the sadist has power, but has to do a lot of the work. The masochist is powerless, but benefits from less responsibility, and only dreams of gaining power. The sadist envies the easier position, and the masochist envies the ability to master. Each can switch places when there is a desire to see what it's like on the other side. I would also imagine that the younger generation starts in the masochistic position and aims to gain and keep the sadistic one by middle age. Those in power demand more for themselves, and require masochists to exploit. It's hard for the sadist to completely destroy the masochist, though, because he is needed. But the sadist remembers being in the masochistic position, and loathes to go back there. It's much better to give beatings than to take them. Those who prefer a masochistic position have little experience with power, and hence only fantasize about it, and learn to be good subordinates to garner recognition that way.

The psychological reward that power hungry people are looking for has been described in my past reviews as enjoying "duping delight" or Kernberg's "triumph against!" In Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout defined this pleasure as "emotional eating." She describes sociopaths as having an "intense desire to witness their control over us by inciting our confusion, anger and fear." This mastering desire, coming from the instincts, can learn from others and especially role-models. A masochist can learn to be a sadist.

Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door - Martha Stout: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780307589088/

Doctor Sleep murder scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJuNhKopnYc

René Girard expanded this further and how this can come about in his description that smacks of modernity in workplaces today, like a court intrigue. "[When rivals are closer together] the subject despises himself so much that he has no confidence in his own judgment. He believes he is infinitely far from the supreme Good he is pursuing; he cannot believe that the influence of that Good can reach as far as himself. He is thus not sure he can distinguish the [role-model] from ordinary men. There is only one thing whose value the masochist thinks himself capable of judging - himself, and his value is nil. The masochist will judge other men according to their perceptiveness with regard to himself: he will reject those who feel tenderness and affection for him, whereas he turns eagerly to those who show, by their contempt for him, real or apparent, that they do not belong, like him, to the race of the accursed. We are masochists when we no longer choose our [role-model] because of the admiration which he inspires in us but because of the disgust we seem to inspire in him. From the standpoint of a metaphysical hell the masochist's reasoning is irreproachable." This is one of the reasons why people sometimes stay in careers they hate, or relationships they hate, because their role-model still commands some kind of Prestige for others and themselves, through their criticizing behaviour. Masochism, without the Prestige behind the sadist makes no sense. The masochist hopes to be a sadist one day. How both masochist and sadist intertwine, as we can see in workplace bottlenecks, territorial behaviour, and any other fights for scarcity: both sides want to experience being-in-savouring situations that cannot be shared. Even more bizarre than that, is that this being is ephemeral and has more to do with the conflict.

For example, imagine the palace at Versailles and it's yours! There would be lots of excitement at first, especially if the upkeep of the palace is done by servants. Yet, as we look at our hands, age is creeping up. If you have a belly ache, will a chandelier cure it? Even if you have the best doctors, at some point, even they can't help you. A lot of the enjoyment is that controlling, emotional eating, triumphing against, and duping against submissive others. It's being gazed at with Prestige. For Girard, it's being gazed at as a deity. It harkens back to Freud's earlier description of the ego-ideal, when parents showered attention on us, and maybe even lived vicariously through our youth. It's such a high, and such a crash when that new sibling is born, or being passed over on a promotion, or being cheated on by a spouse. A castration. A narcissistic injury. "[The masochist] is more blind because, instead of following out the implications of this awareness to their necessary conclusion, instead of giving up misdirected transcendency, he tries paradoxically to satisfy his desire by rushing toward the obstacle, thus making his destiny one of misery and failure."

Deceit, Desire and the Novel - René Girard: Paperback: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801818301/

Love - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html

Sex in Japan: Dying for company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1jGZUbN06M

When Others are the only metrics for happiness, it's like a moth to a flame. The imitator goes right into the obstacle, the rival, because without experiences of being debased, devalued and scorned, there's no procedure on how to become a divinity. Nobody to learn from. Even politicians have to copy each other's dirty tactics to gain power, because their compass points towards power an prestige that Others have mastered. It's the same for The Master. He can then enjoy his position because of the fact that others signal desire for it. It's a constant confirmation and supply of gratification. Sadists become bored without these signals. The Master may enjoy many real advantages, but their value becomes distorted, like an overvalued stock, when a stampeding herd of imitators over-invest in their attempts to transcend their low self-esteem. The market correction afterwards is when many people finally realize that the pain is not worth it. There are many other creative places people can venture into, and the most stable societies are the ones that provide many SPOTS for people to dwell in. With modern technology and artificial intelligence overproducing, there is a need to expand the variety of positions where people can earn an income. Economic crashes, wars, and steep regulatory restrictions, narrow the options, and increase the chance of rivalry. The number of masochists increases and only the Sadists benefit from the Schadenfreude power grabs.

Essential worker - Schindler's List: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDo6eHyeI8E

Delusions of Grandeur

So another problem with over-valued narcissistic narratives, is the imaginary skills we pretend to have when we are daydreaming about being someone with Prestige. Justin Kruger and David Dunning, known for the Dunning-Kruger effect, talked about this disconnect between the imaginary self-narratives and the actual skills that we have. I have a suspicion that all the conditioning we get from entertainment doesn't help us with this problem. The perception of self can be distorted by a lack of experience. Often people who are not good at a target skill, who naturally don't know what development of the target skill looks like, can over-inflate their own beliefs of how good they are when they daydream. They don't really know any better until they attempt using the skills in reality. I would also add that this phenomenon distorts people's opinions of the responsibilities of the rich. A lot of hatred is based on this ignorance. There are idle rich, trust fund babies, etc., but many of the rich are talented beyond most of the population and also work harder. Because people often only see the final product, they don't realize the effort that went into it. They may assume that it's easier than it looks. Then when people chase after their role models they may burnout when they can't keep up. Then they may also go into resentment thinking that all the role model's success was a God given talent. Resentment includes a feeling of unfairness. Daniel Coyle in the The Talent Code, described what we don't see of the top performers. They seem to "live charmed, cushy lives. When you look closer, however, you'll find that they spend vast portions of their life intensively practicing their craft." Pushing the edge of skills is what they are aiming at because they know that's what really matters. A lot of relief of envy is realizing that you don't want some of these lives that people have, because if you had to do their work, you might hate it. Or if you are truly inspired by them, you then learn to accept the amount of work that is necessary. When people remain stuck in envy and resentment, the only pleasure left is a wide variety of defense mechanisms, that appear defensive in their own minds, but are actually predatory.

A bad emotional diet

How people can enjoy chaos and schadenfreude is based on the pleasure they get when their sense of status fluctuates from a lower position to a higher one. The cycle of abuse doesn't always have to be about intimate relationships. They can include wider acquaintances. As long as there are goals, there is a need for setups and payoffs. Sometimes losing a position is necessary in order to create the need to chase a lost position. Part of the fun of trying to maintain power, is dealing with minor threats to status. The up and down and back to up again, can be a rubbing point that is targeted on purpose to manufacture narcissistic highs. When sources of supply inevitably become scarce, narcissists have to find replacements, and sometimes they find them in very strange places. The examples below are not exhaustive but common enough for most people to recognize:

Victim envy - Narcissists are envious of the attention received by victims. This can lead to Baron Munchausen Syndrome where people seek victimhood to gain those social benefits. One of the main tactics for Narcissists is to bait others to victimize them so they can ask for sympathy afterwards. For example, a strange form of envy is Holocaust Envy, where narcissists wish they could get international sympathy. Never mind all the family and friends who were lost for the survivors and the horrible memories that haunt them. Narcissists have trouble seeing that far. It's almost like someone took a vise and squeezed the head of a person until their brain became limited with narcissism, and now that's all they can work with. It's sickening because there are real victims out there, but for narcissists, it's just about the supply. If they can't be included, they feel left out. This can be seen in facial expressions that are often conflated. Victims who have been wounded several times have a look on their face of hyper-vigilance and they are always on guard anticipating abuse. It's a horrifying reality for them, but narcissists have their own version of that. What people get confused about is that predators have an entitlement wound, and onlookers might reward the wrong motivation because they confuse it with the actual look of the victimized.

Holocaust Envy: the Libidinal Economy of the New Antisemitism,” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, Vol. 3, No. 2 (March 2012): 489-505.

Pleasure in disasters - Pleasure for narcissists can be attained when celebrities fall to misfortunes and scandals, real or imagined, as can be seen in tabloids, and news reports. Pleasure can also be achieved when there are natural disasters, wars, economic crashes and epidemics. Of course this is only when the person enjoying the schadenfreude is not affected.

Beware of the left's degrowth movement - Real Clear Politics: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/15/beware_the_lefts_degrowth_movement_142942.html

Leverage - When people feel needed, due to their leverage over others, there can be a sadistic pleasure in torturing people in lower power situations who need you and can't get away. Constant threats of firing employees, threats of dumping an intimate partner, essentially threats to withdraw resources, can be something that is relied upon for quick signals of superiority and narcissistic highs.

Exploiting weakness - One of the major ways that schadenfreude can motivate people to do the right thing is to hunt for weaknesses to criticize. Sometimes it can positively motivate workers to enhance their skills. It can motivate watchdogs. Unfortunately, if there are no weaknesses to be found, there's a temptation to sabotage, or to invent criticisms by spinning perspectives to create a critical atmosphere around a rival. This is quite easy to do when objectives are uncertain, abstract, hazy and open to dispute. Pointing out weakness is also a prime method for taking power. Most narcissists, and you'll notice their facial expressions of contempt and disgust, use criticism to gain leverage. When power is achieved, then they can dump on followers who can't get away, and eliminate other critics who threaten their position.

Dividing and conquering - Creating threats and chaos to make subordinates rival for your attention can give you signals of superiority and pleasure. "People are actually fighting for me. I must really be important." This also allows consolidation of power by distracting possible rivals. Rivals also learn these tactics themselves and have the potential to lose their moral compass to follow these types of rewards. Dividing and conquering can also support the scapegoating mechanism where leaders can distract the populace by aiming them at another target, creating a sense of security. People want to be on the comfortable other side of the accuser.

Return of the Jedi - Palpatine, Vader and Luke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1MnMA0TzGI

Posterity - Since the ego-body is a concept, it can move through time in unrealistic ways. Creating art, poetry, monuments, political legacies are all forms of pleasure that people can bask in while they are alive. One of the few good feelings a person can have before death is to know that they made a huge impact. Of course this can be healthy or unhealthy depending on how positive or negative those impacts were. Some pathological people get a high out of mass shootings, for example.

Vicarious narcissistic supply - Being associated with others who have Prestige, can also be fed on by the ego. People who work with the prestigious, or friends and intimate partners, tend to also gain collateral positive attention. For many people it can be an unconscious goal to associate with cool people. Minor forms of this would be selfies with a favourite artist or celebrity. Pathological forms would be complete idealization and identification with the person of Prestige leading to controlling behaviours.

Drowned world/Substitute for love - Madonna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rsdGjNWiIw

Being in a negative spotlight - Sometimes not achieving an ego-ideal, and failing in spectacular fashion can create a buzz that offers a form of pleasure. Being ignored and not talked about can often feel worse for a narcissist than being in the spotlight, even if it's negative. Many forms of reality TV can highlight stars in an negative light to make them seem more approachable and at the same time keep them in the minds of audiences. An inverse form of relevance.

Destroying another's self-esteem - Another area of pleasure for narcissists are areas where their abuse can be creative. A lot of the reason they ask so many personal questions is because they want to find out every scrap of information they can use to make fun of you. Because their sense of love and empathy is deranged and regressed, they don't care about your humanity. They know that people can get triggered by their sore inferiority complexes, so they often will provide creative reminders so that you will notice them and get triggered with stress. Anything in your life that you haven't developed, any failure, any addiction, any mistake will be constantly displayed in your environment, or brought up in casual conversation to impinge on your consciousness and make you doubt yourself. The second blow with that method is the stress and how it slows you down wasting your time ruminating. This can then trigger a further sense of inferiority, solidifying it in a loss of momentum. Many victims develop C-PTSD, and learned helplessness. Because narcissists envy and hate your skills, and potential, you are less likely now to use them.

Star woman wrestler bullied to death: https://knewz.com/wrestler-bullying-woman-death/

Leveling - Another motive for this behaviour of damaging the self-esteem of others is called Leveling by Kierkegaard as he wrote it in The Present Age. "Leveling at its maximum is like the stillness of death, where one can hear one's own heartbeat, a stillness like death, into which nothing can penetrate, in which everything sinks, powerless. One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this leveling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being leveled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this leveling, but it is an abstract process, and leveling is abstraction conquering individuality." This is like in Freud's description of group spirit in Group Psychology, if you have any skills or distinctive advantages, they cannot be allowed unless everyone else can have them. George Orwell said of these despotic environments that they were like a "a boot stamping on a human face –forever." If the body cannot be crushed then the spirit has to be. This is what individual group members that join the pile-on of leveling fail to notice, which is what is done to the scapegoat will eventually be done to them when they show any independence. They will be leveled.

Bullet with Butterfly Wings - Smashing Pumpkins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-r-V0uK4u0

Tempting you from your moral compass - Narcissists also hate your morality and especially any attempts you make to improve your ethics. They scour targets for compromising information to collect moral inventories to shame you with, even if they have their own sordid history. They will always tempt you, bait you to do the wrong thing, get in trouble, or even better, to guide you on a path that will lead you to your eventual suicide. Victims usually have to learn to forgive themselves if they are going to have any prospects at emotional healing.

Crazy-making - After all the damage above, narcissists behave without responsibility. They are full of entitlement based on their sense of omnipotence. After their abuse they will quickly move to deny it, and spread different narratives around as a form of reputation management. Similar to communist governments, they go into propaganda mode and attempt to erase history. It makes the victim have a nervous breakdown when nobody believes them and justice is denied. Getting away with abuse, fooling the public, and fooling the courts, is the biggest high for a narcissist or psychopath.

Stalin tried to erase people from history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2sjrGEbb5o

The 'Ratman' - Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html

NPD awareness day: https://wnaad.com/

The Present Age - Søren Kierkegaard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780062930859/

1984 - George Orwell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780791093009/

Reputation management and Impostor syndrome

Of course those who are regularly put down in the masochistic position, will have a lot of inhibitions. If they try to improve themselves, especially in ways that are visible to the public, there can be an anticipation of abuse, intimidation, learned-helplessness and impostor-syndrome. As soon as a skill, award, or some other success is achieved, it's as if the mind is primed to expect social punishment from others trying to keep you down. It can be difficult to break into a sense of Prestige. People who never enter these prestigious groups, or slip out of them have trouble getting back into the good graces of these lordships of reputation.

One of the Social Psychologists that covered the difficulty of moving out of stereotypes and stigma was Susan Fiske. It usually requires a lot of momentum of good works, and reciprocity with others to develop a positive reputation. It can easily dismantle. Susan created a quadrant, that categorized perceptions people commonly have of others. One area is a sweet spot where people who approach us appear competent and cooperative. We automatically feel pride and admiration. Celebrities often use these tactics to control their public image and use things like philanthropy to soften any edges related to their power and success. When cooperation is absent, but a person is still competent, they will now look competitive to others. The automatic response Susan found in this category was envy. Both of these quadrants are still in the area of power, where the person viewed has at least some competence, or appears to do so.

The other two quadrants are areas that all people want to avoid. People who are incompetent, but cooperative, don't inspire hatred, but instead pity. People like the elderly are put into this category and those seeking power will want to take their place and move them into a more powerless role out of self-interest and pity. Sometimes this happens with illness, but just the perception is enough to change the power dynamic, and those in that category can become inhibited from asserting their rights. They begin to lose belief in themselves. It's an area that as people age, becomes a topic of anxiety in a world of ageism. People don't want to be relegated to irrelevance.

The lowest category is that of people who appear incompetent and competitive. Here Susan uses an example of the homeless. Of course people in that category can incite pity if they appear cooperative and non-threatening, but if the person appears threatening, the mixture of the two characteristics stirs up a disgust or contempt that increases the chances that we will reject them for positions of power in our lives. Part of the fear of rejection is that people in the vicinity of those contemptible people, are worried about mimetic contagion, and don't want to be conflated with them, and also face rejection. One doesn't want to be seen as incompetent or appear associated with those who are. Prestige is something that has to be managed and worked on constantly. People have to appear avant-garde and on the forefront of the next wave of fashion and prestige to be considered relevant. Any scandals can move the powerful person into contempt, and any appearances of being out of date, old and irrelevant can pigeon-hole people in the category of pity.

Immediately after seeing these categories one can see strategies that have to be adopted for survival. Envied groups need boundaries and are targeted for schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is the glee that people get when an envied group or individual is brought down by circumstances. Susan Fiske sites studies that measure the brain's reward centers and found that "positive social comparison activates the ventral striatum (VS)." Beyond upward movements of social comparison, the VS responds to praise, and it even responds to philanthropic motives. I particularly like her paradigm because these rewards exist in most brains, so that we realize that all of us can be culpable for a certain degree of narcissism. It's not just personality disordered people who do this. Susan says that being "the narcissists that we are, elevating ourselves is rewarding." On the negative side of reactions, scorn and contempt closely match disgust in studies. "The insula's relation to disgust is among the most reliable neural indicators of any emotion. Both the insula and the amygdala respond to various scorned outcasts, including those who are obese, pierced, or transsexual. What is more, responding to other people's disgust expressions activates the observer's own insula, a sort of mimicked, shared disgust response. To scorn another person is to view that person as inferior and potentially disgusting, so the insula findings make sense." This matches really well with René Girard's scapegoating mechanism in that accusers can count on many others to just mimic the reactivity of the accuser and feel similar feelings of contempt towards the accused. It helps to gain allies for bullies to pile on the outcast. Then when they succeed in annihilating their targets, it's possible for the accusing group to gain a mutual psychological reward. Now these reactions aren't always bad, because some people are incompetent and threatening, but these stereotypes become pathological when they are inaccurate, and the actions taken against those people are excessive.

Violence and the Sacred - René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html

The message from all if this is that it's important for successful people to appear cooperative, because if they are in the envied competitive group, any missteps on their part activate the reward centers of others. Successful people either have to increase their boundaries, improve security, live in homes in difficult to access areas, and/or they have to maintain a public image of cooperation that is very warm and doesn't appear fake, even if it is fake. This is also a warning for the majority of us looking for success and haven't found it yet. One has to prepare for success to respond to any bullying or sabotage that may appear. Since many people have gone through bullying while growing up, for being excellent at one thing or another, or being an easy target, it makes sense why people are conditioned to expect punishment when they are about to receive rewards. It's a reliable outcome. It also matches most religions that view success with a sense of limitation. Getting success in highly competitive areas is difficult enough, but keeping it can be even harder. Having biological knowledge that people will gain pleasure at your misfortune helps to reduce stressful surprises, and one can flash a knowing smirk when a best friend or acquaintance turns cold and hostile when one gains success. The list of schadenfreude targets can be endless, but the simple way to predict it is to stick with Susan's connection between success and competitive encroachment. Any territorial disputes where you are taking a "spot" are open to this wish for vengeance, reward, and winning against those who imitated the same idea.

Us Versus Them - Mina Cikara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJgQQ_SXBm8

Cikara, M., Botvinick, M. M., & Fiske, S. T. (2011). Us versus them: Social identity shapes neural responses to intergroup competition and harm. Psychological Science, 22, 306-313.

Fiske, S.T., Cuddy, A.J.C., Glick, P. and Xu, J. (2002) A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878-902

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" - Pantene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jssGyRoC-3w

EXTRA featuring Catherine Zeta Jones - Rhonda B. Saunders, JD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwgMl-RVuyg

Rhonda B. Saunders, JD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QDzzXneRvE

Stalking: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html

The Man Who Murdered Versace - Real Crime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B21Hwy1ARmI

Now, this review shows a lot of the bad side of Narcissistic Supply, and it was quite difficult to find anything good about it. But there was one place where I found an example of Narcissistic Supply that was healthy, and it was described as Relatedness, the 3rd pillar of Intrinsic Motivation from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. "Relatedness pertains to a sense of being integral to social organizations beyond oneself. By feeling connected to close others and by being a significant member of social groups, people experience relatedness and belonging, for example through contributing to the group or showing benevolence." These three pillars also include autonomy (the ability to guide one's own decisions), and competence (being able to be good at something). We are social animals but in their paradigm the individual side has to be honored enough so that members of a social group can enjoy a sense of agency. When we realize that allowing as many people to use their agency increases their motivation, then their contributions to the group are much better. We can enjoy the success of others, when we realize that their freedom is available to us. It's so much more enjoyable to choose for ourselves something we want to get good at and then share it with the rest of the public.

The other great thing is that if you are in long-term relationships with people who have pathological habits of dragging everyone down, you can reject them with no feeling of guilt. Maybe you might have a new feeling of guilt in that you should have rejected these people sooner. Some people refuse to change.

The clarity coming from these discoveries of rules and laws of human behaviour, fans away the smoke of darkness and becomes healing. We know what to expect! Freud said "what we, call chance [upon further inspection, turns] into laws; also, what we call arbitrariness in [the mind] rests on laws only now dimly [guessed at]."

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World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day, June 1st: https://wnaad.com/

Family Romances - Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426622/

The Drive to Amass Wealth - Otto Fenichel: http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Fenichel-The-Drive-to-Amass-Wealth.pdf

On Metapsychology - Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780140138016/

Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77 (6): 1121–1134.

Envy Up, Scorn Down - Susan Fiske: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780871544896/

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva - Sigmund Freud: Paperback: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781892295897/

Self-determination Theory - Deci & Ryan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781462538966/

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#family romances #sigmund freud #narcissistic supply #narcissism #stalking #Susan fiske #Social psychology #BARON MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME #Otto Fenichel #psychoanalysis #WNAAD #Projective Identification

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