We are living in an age when weak, needy, ruthless, vengeful, endlessly covetous men (and a few women) are seen as geniuses, visionaries and strongmen. Acquiring everything possible for themselves while promising horrific retribution for offenses real and imagined is seen as strength and cheered by admiring crowds. We are living, boys and girls, in an Age of Idiocy, more specifically, the Age of Narcissism. It appears to be dawning on us all slowly.

The most searched for word in 2022 was “gaslighting”. This form of psychological manipulation gets its name from a creepy old film, Gaslight, where the wealthy female protagonist is wooed and married by a man who convinces her she is insane, to cover his own criminal activities. He pretends to go out every evening and secretly searches for stolen treasure hidden in the attic of the mansion, under gas light. Because he’s using lights in the attic, the lights in the rest of the house dim. The husband convinces the wife she is going insane when she tells him about the lights, and for a time she believes him. Hence, gaslighting – lying to make you doubt the reality of your own perceptions, feeding you a diet of deliberate falsehoods to make you fear you’re going mad. Any wonder it was Word of the Year in 2022?

In 2023 the Word of the Year was “authenticity”. It means 1: not false or imitation; real, actual 2: true to one’s own personality, spirit or character 3: worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact, conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features, made or done the same way as an original.

This is the essential quality a gaslighting narcissist forces his victims to abandon. They will tell you what is true, what is false, what you should believe, why you are wrong to believe otherwise, how you should act, look, feel. Your feelings and ideas are wrong, they will tell you authoritatively. They demand that others to be as inauthentic as they are.

It is impossible for a “perfect” person to be authentic, to act according to their true character. They never were allowed as children to develop a true character and be loved for it. Their only choices after that damaging deprivation are a grandiose veneer of perfection or utter, humiliating worthlessness. In order to foster a created, performative persona of strength and perfection, very fragile when held up against reality, it is necessary to keep all those around them in a state of inauthenticity. Everybody in their orbit must be true not to their own spirit and character, to what they need in order to feel comfortable, but to the narcissist’s need for unconditional admiration and obedience.

These kinds of sick fucks have always ruled others, it is easily observed turning the pages of any history book. The rule of the select few is always explained and justified by the mores of the time, slavery was for centuries the norm, for example, but over time the same privileges of a tiny, all-powerful minority are maintained the same way, using the leverage of great wealth, intimidation, fear and violence to hoard the wealth of the majoritarian masses.

Parents who can never be wrong teach their children that they’re wrong even when the kid is right. Narcissism is a zero sum game, meaning there is only winning and losing, controlling and being controlled, the image of perfection or terrifying annihilation. This black and white worldview afflicts people who have been crushed in their soul at a very tender age. The abuse and emotional neglect they suffered renders them unable to compromise or even to listen to anything that contradicts their brittle sense of their special wonderfulness. They are the furthest thing from authentic, since they rigidly cling to an unrealistic view of themselves as perfect, the only alternative to feeling hideously, unlovably flawed, none of it having anything to do with authenticity.

It is a terrible constant in human affairs, the outsized influence these inhuman bastards tend to play on the world stage. Scroll from window to window, you will see these very important pricks pontificating on every platform. They simply cannot shut up. The appetite for their brilliant opinions is seemingly endless. We are fascinated by men who acquire 100,000 times more than any wealthy person needs. Accumulating billions in wealth appears to be proof of their indomitable will to have everything, which many reckon the mark of someone to be admired, even idolized.

As for me, I’ll take someone who can look at herself and the world honestly, in all its color, nuance, light and shade, and speak authentically, with humility and openness, about the hellish odds we are all up against, just trying to be authentic, empathetic and offer each other shared things we all value here in this threatened miracle of a world.