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.
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.
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
hildren. It left an opening for fantasies to replace the father for
someone of a better pedigree.
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
xperience 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.
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.
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...
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
conflict is over that recognition and it
helps to explain the bizarre behaviors
of narcissists who pay attention to only those cues of Prestige, and ignore or
attack everything else.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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...
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.
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. 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. 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. 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
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
This mastering desire, coming from the
instincts, can learn from others and especially role-models. A masochist can
learn to be a sadist. 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.
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
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.
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 becomes 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.
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
in the The Talent Code, described what we don't see of the top performers. They seem to...
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.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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...
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...
On the negative side of reactions, scorn and contempt closely match disgust in studies.
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
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
access areas and/or they have to
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.
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.
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...
