It is the hallmark of a certain kind of person to see all conflict as zero sum, win/lose, an existential fight to the death. Most people, who experience conflict as just part of life, know that with sufficient goodwill conlict can almost always be resolved. Unless you see all conflict as a deadly threat to yourself.
If you know somebody who has no skill at resolving conflict, you can avoid tension with them as much as possible by remaining mild, but understand that one day, if conflict arises between you, there will be no solution outside of the end of the relationship.
This limited view of the world, seeing any kind of conflict, no matter how minor, as a deadly threat and compromise as fatal, pathetic, weakness, cannot be overcome by your understanding, your patience, your love, your friendship, your own willingness to compromise. This type sees compromise as surrender, cowardly capitulation, abject submission, humiliation.
When they do apologize to you (to end the conflict immediately, without further discussion) it will be with restrictions, caveats, qualifications and the need to make you understand that they are only apologizing because you are weak, not because they did anything that hurt you, something that wouldhave hurt them .
Once you see an inability to resolve conflict or compromise, know the score. You are dealing with somebody who has no idea how to work out conflicts with others. It may feel like your fault because you can’t fix something that should otherwise be relatively simple to work out, but after you’ve done everything possible to make amends, and the implacability remains, time to walk away.
That walk will be the best thing you can do for yourself, unbearably sad as it also feels when you take those first steps away from someone you have long cared about.
I read a fascinating book, at my sister’s recommendation, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. It is an exploration of the Mormon faith, framed by a grisly murder two devout, fringe Mormons committed after one of them got a revelation from God that the two victims (his wife and daughter) had to be “removed.” The book explores the hazy boundary between true religious inspiration and justicially cognizable insanity.
At one point the lawyers for the murderer are making an argument to keep him from the death penalty. The lawyer tells the court that someone who has suffered severe early life injury to their self-esteem sometimes compensates by becoming grandiose. When this happens the person has an overriding need to believe that they are superior, special, perfect, beautiful — on pain of feeling humiliatingly inferior, worthless, fatally flawed and ugly — and constructs a black and white world view accordingly. The condition the lawyer claimed had disabled his client is called Narcissism.
It was an illuminating insight to me, since I’d long struggled against my father’s black and white worldview (a severely limiting view he lamented greatly as he was dying) but never made the connection to what I knew about narcissism. In order to feel superior, you must subordinate others, blame them for your incapacities.
A person who has notsuffered enough shame to become a narcissist can admit a mistake, take blame for a thoughtless and hurtful thing they’ve done, sincerely apologize. For a narcissist, these things are almost impossible, since it makes them feel terrifyingly worthless, vulnerable and deserving of not being loved.
What I realized recently, having had an otherwise exemplary father (another recent realization that surprised me, how much valuable parenting my father also did, how much better he did than was done to him) who was narcissistic, is that many of my oldest friends were also narcissists.
I knew I’d been attracted to very smart, sardonic, darkly funny, damaged people (as I myself am), knew that they resembled my father in key ways, knew I was trying to work out problems with him through surrogates.
Having the frame “narcissist” suddenly made a lifetime of conflicts with this same type understandable to me. The end of each of these friendships was inevitable once conflict began to escalate, I see now.
The connection I had with my father was far deeper than with anyone I met and became longtime friends with, a final split with Irv was always unthinkable to me, and in the end, my painful work in therapy paid off in us being able to have an important, candid chat, finally, hours before he died. The mutually blessed talk that last night of hislife came about because I understood the awful hand he’d been dealt and realized he’d truly done the best he could, as I kept reassuring him as he whipped himself over having been “a horse’s ass” for his whole life.
We’re living in the Age of Narcissism, it seems to me. A zero-sum game composed of only absolute winners and contemptible losers, where one side plays for keeps and the moral qualms of the other side are easily weaponized for use against them. My new personal stake in it, how it shaped my life now that I seemy father was largely this way (though, of course, with a capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism missing from most narcissists, plus a great sense of humor) and being vilified by people who profess to love me, has made me grapple with the larger issue of autocracy/democracy on a visceral level.
It’s easy to recognize in someone like Donald Trump the malignant narcissist, someone so obviously and deeply damaged that their only survival mechanism is belief in an absurdly comical superiority. When this claimed superiority is treated as the grotesque comedy it truly is, these folks, seeing the world as zero-sum and kill or be killed, have no hesitation to do whatever they feel they need to do to prove they are not worthless, weak, pathetic victims.
They all want to be “strongmen.” A psychiatrist who worked with violent felons in prison wrote “every act of violence is an attempt to replace humiliation with self-esteem.” We all know what these types are capable of, and will do if given the chance (look at Putin, destroying the archive that commemorated WWII war crimes on all sidesand unleashing legions of raping mercenaries to execute civilians).
Anyway, not to go down the dark, apocalyptic fascism-on-the-global rise rabbit hole. Just to say that I feel my personal learnings, coming sharply into focusduring this last hellish year with my old friends, help shine a light for me on the larger forces, the narcissistic, arrogant, mediocre, insanely influential sons and grandsons of wealthy sociopaths: D. Trump, C. Koch, E. Musk, J. Kushner et al.
You finally understand the painful difficulty you are up against, from an unforgiving narcissistic parent to a global movement marching violently toward international authoritarianism. It’s a great step, to understand, at last, thenature of the actual monster you are up against.
You feel a certain relief mixed in with your horror, to know finally what you are actually at war with, and that you did the best you could have done against an unreasoning force that is pure will. It is important for your mental health, and future prospects, to confirm that it is not only your fevered imagination at work, these things are actually out there, acting against you with every stinking breath. They will not be fixed by even unlimited goodwill, compromise and extension of endless benefit of the doubt. That understanding is huge, though it is the first step on a much longer journey.
It’s hard to believe in the existence of evil until you see a willingness to actually kill you up close. It is easy enough to see disturbed, angry people as suffering from weakness, deformed by damage done to them by others that takes these nasty, deadly shapes in the world.
It is not important whether you see it as evil, it’s crucial to grasp how it works, why it works that way, how to get out of its clutches, how to neutralize the threat to others. Understanding the nature of a thing intent on subordinating you, even killing you, if necessary, is not an easy thing, since the force is constantly crushing you, attacking, vilifying, accusing you of cruelly victimizing them.
To take a recent political example — look how the Covid-deniers scream, they are the victims, US health officials, not corrupt and incompetent hacks working for a malignant narcissist, are responsible for the disproportionate US deaths from Covid, 1,099,866 souls, when the number was last updated by lying Deep State cucktards at the CDC. The supremely spineless Kevin McCarthy just appointed Trump’s former doctor, now in Congress, to head the investigation into how Anthony Fauci murdered more than a million Americans with his constant lies about the Chinese hoax that put Biden into office illegally. Justice won’t be served until the retired government doctor is publicly nailed to a cross and mocked by the survivors of his treachery.
A coherent, evidence-based case can be made that Fauci, at every step, followed the best evolving scientific understanding of a highly infectious, unpredictable deadly worldwide plague. Coherence and so-called evidence, of course, can go fuck themselves when Marjorie Taylor Green blows her hot opinions into a microphone, next to the compromised Speaker of the House, nodding grim agreement to anything she spouts. The incoherent message will be hammered home to believers a hundred times a day, until it makes sense that the antiChrist, Fauci, must meet the same gruesome fate as the Prince of Peace, but, obviously, for much different reasons.
In your personal life zero-sum battle lines may be even harder to see. Love, long history and faith in lifelong ties will blind you sometimes, to another’s willingness to shove things down your throat until you suffocate. “How did I not fucking see this before?” you will wonder, and raise the whip over yourself when you realize you’ve waded deep into an unsurvivable swamp. Understanding will come slowly, if you are fortunate and persistent in looking for it, and honest with yourself and everyone else.
Honesty and a willingness to discuss things, it turns out, is only one response to conflict. A more common reflex is to become incoherent, constantly change the subject, lie, attack, become defensive, blame the other for your defensiveness, admit nothing, fuck you, I’ll kill you, grrrr grrrr grrrrr! The contest, you understand too late, is zero-sum, only one will live, the other must die. I will do anything to be the last one standing, so fuck you!
Alien to your way of thinking? It is also alien to mine, but this mode of kill or be killed survival is in operation all over the place. Understanding it, seeing it clearly for what it actually is, is crucial, but, depressingly, only the beginning. How to counter the damage it has done and prevent repeats going forward is a much deeper, gnarlier question. It is also the most pressing question at this perilous moment in history.
As a teenager in anguish, with a rapidly growing vocabulary, I came up with a concept I called Deleterious Cognition [1]. It was a destructive thinking process, starting with a few verifiable facts, that led to dangerous inaction, or actions contrary to your best interests, all based on empirical knowledge that can’t be refuted.
I was hard pressed to define deleterious cognition, or even give any convincing examples of it, until the other day, a half century after I began to understand the role deleterious cognition has played in my life, and, increasingly, in millions of lives. I spoke it out loud to Sekhnet and realized: EUREKA! I’ve got my perfect example of deleterious cognition.
I’m a fairly old man now and I need various medical treatments, sooner rather than later. I have cataracts that are now clearly affecting my vision, a painful bone on bone severely bowed left knee joint that needs to be replaced, several other things I need to see to. Procrastination is natural in the face of scary things, particularly when they come in bunches, but here’s where deleterious cognition comes in.
As I try to navigate Medicare (the poison pill-laden gold standard for health care here in the truly exceptional US of A) I am stopped in my tracks, over and over, by lack of basic information, by ambiguities in the written guide book they send Medicare recipients, contradictions that, if not caught, can cost the unwary their life savings.
You’d think they’d have a warning in bold for all the codgers fearfully poring over the new terms every year, in a country where most people don’t have $400 on hand in the event of an emergency:
WATCH THIS SHIT HERE, YOU HAVE A SHORT WINDOW OF TIME TO DO THIS OR IT MAY COST YOU, OUT OF POCKET, $50,000 or more FOR YOUR MEDICARE COVERED CANCER TREATMENT. CALL THIS 24/7 HELPLINE IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, YOU QUERULOUS COOTS. ALSO, BEWARE OF CONSTANTLY ADVERTISED LOW COST “MEDICARE ADVANTAGE PLANS” THAT APPEAR TO OFFER GREAT BENEFITS BUT CAN LEAVE YOU HOLDING ENORMOUS HOSPITAL BILLS.
Instead we have only the normal guardrail of the “Free Market” — caveat emptor, buyer beware, you fucking chump.
Here’s where deleterious cognition comes in. Frustrated by the poor design, and grotesque porousness of America’s health care “safety net” for senior citizens, I become too angry to read on, make notes, call various numbers over and over to try to solve an immediate and pressing problem. So an actual objective set of facts, something I know, along with millions of others on a program booby trapped in favor of for-profit companies that live on the blood of anyone with any disease or health condition, becomes deleterious cognition when knowledge of the aggravating pitfalls stops you in your tracks.
Your mind will tell you, as you are caught in this deleterious thought cycle, that you are perfectly within your rights to be angry about a program designed to preserve mercenary corporate profits, at the expense of some of our most vulnerable citizens. If an answer to a basic question cannot be found in the booklet they send out to “help” you, or by a visit to a website or a quick phone call … you know, fuck it and the fucking fucks who designed the goddamned program. Deleterious cognition is a breakdown of rationality that the sufferer can present a perfectly rational argument for.
In a cooler moment you will freely concede that, once you find someone to explain what can’t be found in the guide book they send you, the program does allow you to protect yourself against tsunami-sized medical bills. It’s very far from perfect, true, but, in fairness to Medicare, 80% of a million dollar hospital bill paid by public insurance leaves you only a $200,000 share to pay, which you can avoid by choosing the right “supplemental” plan from the alphabet soup of randomly lettered government mandated but privately administered programs, and pay the extra premium every month, to a private insurance company, to protect your life savings from health care predation once you pay $4,000-$5,000 every year out of pocket.
Deleterious cognition is the stream of aggravating thoughts that prevents you from avoiding danger you can also see coming.
If someone blames you for all conflict, insists you never talk about how the conflict hurts you, gets angry when you try to make peace, you can brood for a long time about what more you can do until you recognize a pattern and stumble on a sensible real-world explanation. Inability to accept any responsibility, inability to empathize, inability to compromise, apologize, recognize another person’s right to their feelings are the hallmarks of a common, and very intractable, emotional frailty know as narcissism. The need to be right, to feel just and perfect, in this type, outweighs all other considerations, because the agony of utter humiliation is their only alternative to feeling right, and just, and perfect at all times.
If a dear friend demonstrates these things to you, and your best efforts to show friendship are brushed away as they gaslight you, blame you and assault your reputation among common acquaintances, you can confirm this diagnosis for yourself.
The question remains: is seeing the insoluble stalemate clearly for what it is — your friends suffer a difficult to cure and debilitating emotional condition and will never meet you halfway about anything — deleterious cognition, or salubrious cognition?
It is not really a question. If people who claim to love you also insist you shut up about anything that makes them feel less than perfect … well, is there really a question there?
[1]
Deleterious: 1] Having a harmful effect; injurious. 2] Hurtful; noxious; destructive; pernicious 3] harmful often in a subtle or unexpected way (as for example deleterious effects, deleterious to health).
Cognition refers to “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”.Wikipedia
It’s almost funny, if it wasn’t so tragic, the amount of anger my 66 year-old friend still has toward his mother who is making her way toward ninety.
When his mother walks into a room he begins to seethe. Afterwards he would ask me if I noticed how she stood, with that look on her face, the little cutting comment she immediatelymade. He will do his duty to make sure she is not publicly humiliated or wanting for medical care, but as for love, fuck her.
Fair enough, those are his strong feelings from early childhood through the time he finally left his unhappy family home. The problem is that fifty years later he is just as angry as he was back then. So he can’t forgive his mother, and worse, he can’t forgive himself for his anger and the beat goes on.
He winds up married to a woman who’s in some key ways very much like his mother. He punishes her regularly with his harshly judgmental attitude and the strict demands he places on her in order for her to receive his love. His wife, rightfully angry about this mistreatment, gives it back to him from time to time with both barrels. They live in a balance of terror, while to the outside world they appear to be fine, upstanding, admirable citizens, neighbors and friends.Periodically they have to replenish their pool of closest friends, but they’re socially adept and charming, so it’s no problem.
If you don’t forgive yourself, you are a masochist. I never knew that masochists could also be sadists, but of course they can.
Duing a protracted, insoluble conflict with these two my old friend would frequently become indignant, stand up and announce that he wasn’t going to take this. He wasn’t going to talk about things like making amends, talking about hurt during the ten days of repentance. He wasn’t going to be lectured about the moral values of his religion, values he knew very well being a religious man. How dare I presume to tell him that he had acted badly!
Each time this happened, and it was not just once or twice, it was fairly regular in our conversations trying to make peace, I spoke to him calmly, the way I’d like to be addressed when I’m upset. I patiently told him that I was his friend, that I was not trying to attack him or make him feel bad but that they were things I needed to talk about. We walked away each time with our friendship intact, but it came at a great price and, though I couldn’t acknowledge it for a painfully long time, it was a stinking zombie friendship at thatpoint.
A friend who knew him well laughed when I described this constant need to patiently calm him whenever he got upset. “You gave him exactly what he’s been looking for his entire life, why would he stop doing it when every time you gave him exactly what he has never had from anybody?” So goddamn true that I had to laugh also.
And my long refusal to understand that these two were in a fight to the death, that I had to accept all fault or be killed after what I witnessed of their mutually sadistic, mutually masochistic, relationship, struck me finally as masochism on my part. I don’t consider myself a sadist, I never recall taking pleasure at twisting the knife into somebody else’s suffering, outside of the ordinaryschadenfreude that most people feel when somebody gets what’s coming to them, but these repeated hopeless attempts to placate someone who can’t be placated finally did appear to me as masochism on my part.
And at that point I realized it was a matter of my health, and Sekhnet’s health, which I value more highly than anything else I can think of, to stop inflicting pain on myself (and her) by fretting over and hoping for something that can never be. I also immediately forgave myself for this bit of masochism, seeing as I did what I did in the service of saving a long, precious friendship.Some things can’t be saved, unbearable as that truth may also be, and when you see you can’t save them it is time to save yourself.
Isn’t that right, you masochistic little sadistyou?
My father, I learned late in his life, was whipped in the face by his mother, regularly, from the time he could stand. The last night he was alive he told me that his life was basically over by the time he was two. Grow up whipped by your mother, who also whips your father, in dire poverty, with undiagnosed 20/400 vision that makes you appear moronic, unteachable, once you get to school — unable to speak English when you start kindergarten — it leaves a humiliating mark. Best to hide all that shit as best you can, collapsing it all into “grinding poverty,” spoken like a seething Clint Eastwood.
Grow up in a comfortable middle class home, never knowing want of any kind, raised by a mother and father who are both smart, funny and well-educated, and emerge with lifelong disabilities and, you know… kind of pathetic, no?
Unlike physical beatings, which are easily understood as violent and scarring, psychological beatings can be devilishly subtle, and just as destructive.
How do you describe the pain inflicted by silence, maintained eternally, starting at the exact moment you ask for an answer? An implacable glare can have the force of a hard punch in the solar plexus. Sarcasm, arguably innocent humor, can be used to great effect, if deployed at just the right moment, and in front of the right people. These techniques have the virtue of perfect deniability, turning any objection to them into the viciously unfair whine of a sniveler.
“Now you say I hurt you by keeping my mouth shut? I can’t win, can I? I held my tongue, but that’s not enough for you. You can say whatever you want, make any accusations you like against me, but I can’t even remain quiet without being attacked? You have a real problem there, you know that? The whole world is against you, even silence hurts your delicate feelings. You need help.”
The worst of this kind of untender treatment is that you begin to blame yourself, question your right to feel hurt at all. Maybe I was being kind of unfair, asking a question that was so difficult to answer. Maybe my timing was thoughtless, I put them on the spot at the worst possible moment. Why do I keep making people feel so defensive, so angry? What is wrong with me that I keep upsetting people like this?
You can sometimes cross a barrier, deep into the unseen private wounds of people you have known and loved for years. There is no coming back from this, as far as I know. Mutuality can be destroyed in a moment, though it can take much longer to understand that mutuality has been destroyed. “I hurt you? You fucking hurt me, you merciless fucking fuck!” An argument like that cannot be won. How did friendship suddenly turn into war? “You humiliated me by making me feel like a terrible person… you are a terrible person.”
The wife was only trying to make everything perfect for her quietly angry, stressed out husband. He may be impossible to please in certain ways, but that only makes her try harder. Then she’s faulted for micromanaging a vacation, as if everything being out of control is better than methodically organizing everything. Her husband likes order. How is that her fault? Then you overreacted to her frustration, which was caused 100% by you resisting her perfectly understandable, laudable desire to please her husband. You insist her sudden “anger” hurt you, but you’re not looking at the full picture, just focusing on what you absurdly claim was a glare of rage and an angry refusal to discuss options or compromise in any way. How can you not see that you are the angry asshole who caused all of the bad feelings, the one who unilaterally ended our long friendship?
You understand too late the depths of your old friends’ damage. See how tricky well-covered up psychological wounds can be?
In these situations I often think of the four temperaments from Pirkey Avot. Quick to anger, quick to be placated — loss offset by gain. Slow to anger, slow to be placated — gain offset by loss. Slow to anger, quick to be placated — a righteous soul. Quick to anger, slow to be placated — evil.
Sounds a bit judgmental, perhaps, to frame the ability to forgive as good or evil, but, truly, once you have apologized to the best of your ability, expressed understanding of why what you did hurt the other person, vowed to do better going forward — the reason a dear friend would not forgive you is a deep need to feel superior, to hold the weapon of unforgiveness against your head. Or, evil. The pain they experienced is so deep and abiding, and the current hurt brings on the unbearable sting of former abuse so acutely, that the jury will be out forever on whether you deserve to be forgiven. You will live on probation, with strict rules governing what may be mentioned again. If you want forgiveness you must earn it, by long penitence. Even then, the jury will remain out, because you’ve already shown you are the hurting type, the kind who deserves punishment.
We are drawn, perhaps, to people who have suffered similar things to what we have suffered. It gives us an instant unconscious basis for understanding each other’s vulnerabilities, and fosters a feeling of comradeship, having survived similar mistreatment. At the same time, it puts us close to an explosive force, one that can easily go off when the stress is turned up.
“What stress? You claim there was stress, there was no goddamned stress, until you caused it. Everything was fine until you reverted to despicable form and started resisting every reasonable thing I proposed. How dare you blame us for your uncontrollable stress?! The world is endlessly unfair to you, poor little misunderstood genius. You feel superior to everybody while demonstrating your inferiority every day. That’s the real problem. You think you’re great, and you’re angry all the time, and we did nothing to you — you are the one who caused all the bad feelings.”
In an unguarded moment she will tell you that you made her feel like her daughter, an actual genius, often made her feel. Challenged and overmatched. “So good with words, and such command of memory, you both are, that I have to fight to defeat you by any means necessary. You make me fight you to the death, how does it feel to try to kill me, you murderous black hearted bastard?”
It is impossible to measure the depth and breadth of these wounds. And futile.
When I was a boy my father’s colleague at the NYC Board of Education’s Human Relations Unit, Evelyn, became a regular visitor to our family. My mother, also named Evelyn, was fond of her. My sister and I loved her. She was funny, irreverent, a good athlete, a folk guitar player with a beautiful voice, had a “retarded” dog, a black cocker spaniel named Twosie, and she seemed to love hanging out with us. My sister had prominent, slightly bucked teeth (as they called it in those days) and so did Evelyn (picture a young Joni Mitchell). Evelyn taught my sister to stick out her teeth and hold her hands up like paws whenever she called “Beaver Patrol Report!” The two of them would do the Beaver Patrol salute and we’d all laugh.
It turns out Evelyn had survived a horrific childhood. In hanging out with her smart, irreverent, darkly funny colleague and his family she got to experience what seemed to her (before her eternal falling out with her friend and colleague) a healthier version of family life and childhood. She was as much an older sister to my sister and me as an adult.
After my own troubling childhood I often found myself in the position Evelyn was in, hanging out with the children of my friends. I was paid a great compliment by one of my friend’s children when he was about five: Eliot’s not agrownup, he’s more like us. I was. I am. I am never far from the most life-affirming feelings of my early life, when it comes to imagination, creativity, having fun, drawing, playing music. I love to play, and why should I not?
Because, the adult will say, work is far more important than play. Work is what gives meaning and value to life, a sense of self-worth, productivity, respectability. Play is for vacation, maybe. I honestly pity the average workaday motherfucker, too tired out bygrim responsibility to be playful.
There is a certain point to the adult view, of course. If I had ever tried to sell any of my writing, had any literary success, had sold several books, I’d be a published author and that would be my career, turning my daily practice into a monetizable, recognizable job. When people asked me what I do I’d just say “I’m a writer” and it would be true, since I made a living by my words. Instead, I play at writing, which is more fun, but far less lucrative and practical. In the eyes of the world I’m just one of a hundred million would-be writers, “publishing” my work, gratuitously, in cyberspace.
I think of my father, hours before he died, telling me his life had been basically over by the time he was two. A very sad thing to hear your father say the last night of his life. It explained why he acted like an inconsolable two year-old so often, but, damn, it was hard to hear.
I have the two haunted photo portraits of his maternal grandparents. I can hardly look at them, in their beautiful convex oval frames. One or both of these long dead ancestors created of their youngest daughter a savagely angry religious fanatic who whipped her first born across the face from the time he could stand. No doubt, it had happened to one or both of them, with their parents. And before that, the parents of their parents and so on down the endless tragedy of history.
I think of this whenever I think of parents and children. It is easy enough to blame the parent, or the child, but that’s a game for suckers. To me, the real action is getting some goddamned insight and making some positive changes in your life, before you sorrowfully confess to your oldest son, right before you die, that your life was basically over before your great-grandfather was two.
An old friend suddenly shows you an implacable face, as hurt turns into disagreement, which turns into a conflict, a standoff and finally an all out war.
No compromise, no more of your fucking feelings, I won’t even hear what you’re upset about, how dare you challenge me, I’m the one who’s been wronged here!
You protest, call to mind past compromises, a long mutual friendship, a history of two way empathy, honest conversation.
“No!” you will hear, the jaw set, eyes boring into you to chill your blood, to cow you.
“When did my old friend become a terrible two year-old?” you wonder to yourself, as you reel yourself back from telling the enraged person to go fuck off. What is clear is that someone you cared deeply about is now treating you with cold contempt.
This has happened to me a few times over the years, and I am somehow never prepared for it. It was always a mystery that I knew wassomehow related to my troubled father, but I had little grasp of what the connection was exactly. I had no concept to understand where this sudden implacable anger comes from, this need to blame you for making them feel bad, no matter what actually took place between you.
The riddle of this confounding rigidity, this angry refusal to bend, has been mindfucking to me for many years. It was only very recently that I grasped a concept that explained this bad behavior and made the unfortunate pattern sensible to me.
The context of the era we are living in offered me a giant clue I was slow to put to good use in my personal life. The recent hostile attitude of dear friends was sickeningly familiar, and horrifically Trumpian. The incoherent story constantly changed, all in a mighty effort to avoid talking about any feelings but their’s and whythey were so brutally hurt by me! My longtime closest friend, someone whose friendship and integrity I never had reason to doubt, seconded every aspect of the shifting story, no matter how implausible the blame narrative became. The runaround, the noise and fury in response to an expressed need, was familiar as any headline I’d doom scrolled recently.
We Americans have endured years, seemingly a century, of a malignant, compulsively lying narcissist whipping up hatred and division. Right or wrong, he’s always right. Facts are bullshit! What does he do when confronted with his wrongdoing? Double down, in that now despicably common phrase. Blame his enemies, attack investigators, judges, diplomats, his intelligence agencies, his military leadership, the sick and dangerous child blood drinking cannibal fucks who traffic and molest children — while running the deep state — the celebrity who insulted him twenty years earlier. He does this, of course, because he’s a narcissist.
We are living in the age of narcissism. I just didn’t understand it until very recently, though the number of celebrated current day public narcissists, admired by millions, is huge. You see them literally everywhere, our greatest, most important citizen influencers.
What is the narcissist’s drivingdilemma? How to preserve the all-important feeling of being in the right when confronted by someone important to them they’ve hurt, or by any mistake they’ve made. It can’t be their fault, it’s obviously the fault of the thin-skinned, needy prick who’s making them feel bad — on purpose!
I was reading a book by Jon Krakauer a couple of months back and came across this, which was like a light going on, in terms of explaining something I was at a loss to comprehend.
That is exactly what happens with anyone who has survived deep childhood injuries by becoming a narcissist. They live in a world of agitated semi-recovery where they‘re either perfect, beautiful, and admired, better than almost anybody else, or they’re plunged into the unbearable pain of feeling utterly worthless, humiliated, contemptible.
There is no middle ground for a narcissist, no grasp of the human condition — we all fuck up sometimes, it’s perfectly human to be imperfect. One of the things the non-narcissistic learn to do is accept responsibility, make amends, do their best to set things right when misunderstanding or conflict arises.
The world, to narcissists, is an instrument to protect them from feeling the agony that bears down whenever they feel vulnerable. The world is full of souls of infinite worth, each unique, exotic, with a mischievous expiration date. The narcissist doesn’t buy this pie in the sky bullshit, the world is about never being hurt. If you don’t make yourself vulnerable, it’s harder to be hurt, though a narcissist’s invulnerability comes at a high price. If you‘re hurt, hurt back twice as hard to make them back the fuck down.
This zero-sum worldview is the essence of narcissism. The narcissist’s world is a demented see-saw. There is only victory and defeat, nothing else. I win, you lose. If you win, somehow, I must lose, and that is intolerable to me. So no matter what, you must lose. If I have to assassinate your good name, and throw aside ourlong, close friendship, it’s a very small price to pay to defeat somebody who will not capitulate to my need to be perfect and beyond criticism of any kind.
Though they seem strong, nobody is weaker than the narcissist. The tension they live under is tremendous, the pressure they put on everyone around them is relentless.
All you need to do is admit that I’m right and you’re wrong, no matter what. How hard is that to do?
Mary Trump said that her uncle Donald is the weakest man she’s ever met. His genius, she notes, is finding people even weaker than him, to do his bidding, to take the fall whenever needed.
Narcissism is a zero-sum game. My father was a narcissist, it’s painfully obvious to me now. He saw the world as black and white and, I realize now, from his point of view, he actually couldnotchange, which was the tragedy of his life as he lamented at the end. My little sister followed in dad’s footsteps. He was her role model for strength in the face of terrible pain. I’m sad to say, but like with her father, cross her and you’re fucking dead, though she might not tell you that for a few decades.
The willingness to kill does not make you tough, or strong, it just showsa desperation never to feel like an utterly worthless piece of shit. No amount of belated love can save you from that terrible fate, if you can’t somehow see your own way out of there.
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