We should not let people become so rich that their personal issues become society’s problems.
The year 2024, with the re-election of odious Donald J. Trump back into the White House, represents peak narcissism. As a result, I’m ready to put this calendar year in the rearview mirror, except turning the page offers no real bright spots ahead. That one man could spell such oncoming disaster for America, and the world is flabbergasting; if only there were an SOS signal America could emit, that would be answered.
The anti-Trump mood in America is one of pensive apprehension, if not downright hand-wringing, for elite power consumers of media and, alternately, passivity, apathy, and resigned fatalism for most Democrats.
I’ve been in a fallow period, not quite numb or checked out, but in a somewhat stunned and deadened stoicism, fortifying and bracing myself for what life will look like under Trump after his inauguration on January 20th, 2025. At my worst, a visual representation of my psyche might look like a hollowed-out blighted ghost town with smashed windows, howling winds, and tumbleweeds of an America that is soon to be no more.
In other words, I’m doing what I’ve always done in the face of narcissistic headwinds, battening down the hatches for the endurance challenge that is the political marathon ahead. By and large, the news is pure speculation until the Orange Menace arrives. I write this statement knowing full well that likely all of his cabinet nominees will come to pass with an enabling Senate prepared to rubber stamp his most pressing atrocities in the making, namely to Make Polio Great Again, courtesy of the likely head of the Department of Health and Human Services, anti-vaxxer RFK, Jr. It doesn’t get more dystopian and Orwellian than “health” and “polio” in the same sentence, no different than Orwell’s Ministry of “Truth” being tasked with controlling the media and bastardizing language, itself.
America is in a liminal space with a lame-duck president, an interregnum or purgatory before its descent into hell, the realm in between Election Day on November 5th and Inauguration Day on January 20th.
When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture itself overvalues “image” and must be regarded as narcissistic.
Psychotherapist, Dr. Alexander Lowen
ICYMI, in the calm before the storm that is narcissist Trump’s redux regime replete with his oligarch sidekick “President” Musk, I’ve compiled a list below of my year’s best pieces. Six months ago, I became a columnist for Brussels Morning to help contextualize and legitimize narcissism as a pressing concern interspersed in our news and, thus, our lives.
Writing this year has been an intellectual odyssey from the Renaissance to economics to AI and beyond. It’s also been largely a Sisyphean effort in stemming the tide that is the narcissistic tsunami of Trumpism. With Trump’s re-election, the proverbial “ship” has sailed…now into uncharted waters. I did my part to make a dent in the ocean, and I console myself with an adage from my yoga days that for every contraction on the ocean of consciousness follows an expansion.
Sometimes, things have to get worse before they get better. As they say, “it takes a village” to grow a population up and make real change.
Join me in taking a tour through the fearscape that is my concerned mind this year as a filter for the numerous existential threats America faces in a perilous and daunting path ahead. Entrusting the keys of America to a narcissist is a dangerous proposition; a narcissist always ends badly.
Select Pieces from 2024:
Evangelicals Confuse Trump for Jesus Christ
Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to forgive what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.
The Origins of our Narcissistic Age
My latest piece, an evolution of my work with Prof. Sam Vaknin, traces the origins of our narcissistic age back to the individualism of the Renaissance and Protestantism. Prior to this groundbreaking work, I’ve only ever seen the origins of our narcissistic age traced back to the ’80s self-esteem movement.
The Renaissance merged individualism with the institutions of the state, giving rise to totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and Protestantism merged individualism with the institution of religion.
The Renaissance and Protestantism end up imposing on us totalitarian, authoritarian structures and denying our freedom of action in the name of our individuality, and the Enlightenment’s rationality demands of us too much, expecting us to be inhuman.
The Renaissance and Protestantism are the two pivots of modern-day pathological narcissism. If you put the Renaissance and Protestantism together, you get pathological narcissism.
The only way to solve this is to substantially reform or even get rid completely of current social structures and institutions and replace them with others that do not reflect the values of the Renaissance, Protestantism, and the unrealistic expectations of the Enlightenment.
Ideology is just another name for fantasy. When we adhere to such fantasies, it’s a rejection of reality. Reality and narcissism cannot go together; narcissism is a fantasy defense. If you are embedded in reality, if you are grounded, you will never be a narcissist.
It’s not easy to ask people to get rid of their narcissism. Reality hurts, and bruises and people might say, “I’m comfortable, cocooned, and ensconced in my fantasy. Why should I give it up?” You should give it up because otherwise, you will end up with another Hitler.
The Elites vs. the Masses
From the viewpoint of narcissism, it is the forced enmeshment or smothering perpetrated by the elites through manipulations intrinsic to narcissistic abuse that there is not enough oxygen for the masses to breathe and function with their own traditional values and as such, the masses are butting heads with liberal, progressive and cosmopolitan values of the elite.
A consequence of the masses’ cultural merging and fusing with the elite is that there remains no daylight between the two groups, and without this distinguishing gap, there ceases to be any meaningful distinction to warrant respect; after all, hierarchy, at the urging of the woke elite has collapsed and flattened at the behest and prerogative of progressive ideology. As a result, the masses enjoy an artificially inflated, albeit with insecure footing, narcissistic grandiosity of mass psychosis that they are “on the level” with the elite.
This elite positioning is another subterfuge to throw the masses off the scent of their political and social alienation. The elites have confused the masses by “progressively” restructuring and reordering, nay, dis-ordering and sowing chaos, a specialty of the narcissist, elites and narcissists being virtually one and the same.
Society is subject to the arbitrary and capricious whims of the ruling class elites who pretend as though the masses are on their level in a bad case of malignant egalitarianism, what with the spurious bones the elite have thrown the masses in the form of the nation-state, democracy, the vote, and the American dream.
Conversation with Ginger Coy on Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists in America
Without a functioning, shared collective sense of reality, we risk our democracy in America. As it is, Americans are at each other’s throats about their perception of events, whether it’s who won the 2020 election, determining if January 6th was an insurrection, a riot gone awry, or orchestrated by the deep state, etc. There’s also a question of government overreach when it came to Covid lockdowns and mandates, with the right falling squarely in this camp and the left erring on the side of caution, safety, and support of Fauci. When a populace does not share a sense of reality based on common narratives, tensions flare, and hardships ensue. Discord undermines the cohesion necessary for democracy. If a populace doesn’t enjoy baseline civility built on a common solid foundation of a shared sense of reality, something as fractious and tenuous as democracy is untenable for the duration. Instead, there is a splintering and divisiveness creating stalemates and intractable problems. As Americans have traditionally been solutions-oriented, this heightened narcissistic “my way or the highway” trajectory stings doubly and weighs down the populace into cycles of grievances, an engine of increasing victimhood and, thus, narcissism.
Extremism in America
Significance: This piece highlighted the concerns of Project 2025 and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) months before the mainstream media.
Below are six categories of extremism in America, all vehicles for autocratic will, which exact disastrous, illiberal effects on human rights and human dignity. These extremist, authoritarian, and thus narcissistic categories include 1) Project 2025, 2) Destroying the Separation of Church and State through Christian Nationalism and New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), 3) the GOP’s Affection for Putin, 4) Conspiracy Theories (2020 Election Denialism, Dr. Fauci), 5) Unitary Executive Theory and 6) (Trump’s) Fetishizing Hitler.
Extrapolated out, a culture of narcissism is a danger to society. A functional society depends on cohesiveness with some elbow room. A dysfunctional society is characterized by division and overcompensating control. It’s controlling to delusionally believe that other people are mere playthings and play actors in one’s mind with no real-life consequences.
Republicans purport to be the party of both freedom and Law and Order. None of the extremism outlined above suggests freedom, just the opposite, the straitjacket of narcissistic oppressive authoritarianism, where one autocratic dictator or church official decrees from on high that they know what’s best for you because of God-state fanaticism.
Maintaining a pluralistic democratic society in the face of narcissistic headwinds is a challenge to be sure, but it’s got nothing on autocracy and dictatorship. What a fool’s errand it has been and will be to entertain and tease out an authoritarian society that will only engender a boiling point of civil war to reset power dynamics, an outcome that could be entirely avoided were we to take seriously the lessons of history and psychology.
“Progressing” to Fascism
Significance: I coined the phrase “political narcissistic abuse.”
America’s continual insistence on fantastically progressing has “progressed” democracy to the end of its rope and nearly off the edge of a cliff. A greedy cultural imperative of incessant insistence on more and more progress has pushed America into the realm of entertaining a fantasy-based, grass-is-always-greener paradigmatic upset of authoritarian fascism over liberal democracy.
America is an addict, and the addiction is fantasy on the imaginary wings of “progress,” which threatens to unmoor our civilization from reality and set us off course in an irretrievable downward spiral, the endpoint of which is unmitigated subjugation and authoritarian control.
Narcissistic abuse is the subversion of the natural order of things and the very identity of the victim. The stages of governmental subversion of society: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization correlate with and map onto the stages of narcissistic abuse: idealization, devaluation, discard, and replacement.
I would like to propose a new phrase, political narcissistic abuse, to convey societal narcissistic abuse vis-à-vis politics and government. Political narcissistic abuse is narcissistic abuse that originates from pathological political leaders and their narcissistic collectives (polities/governments) who suffer from one or more personality disorders, namely narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial personality disorder (psychopathy), and/or paranoid personality disorder. These pathological political leaders can also colloquially be called narcopaths (narcissistic sociopaths) for shorthand.
It is through the mechanism of political narcissistic abuse that a democratic society can be subverted to a base-level organization of fascism. Fascism can be an indicator and diagnostic tool in the evaluation of the presence of narcissism in any given society.
A Rogue Supreme Court Turns America into a Dictatorship
With King-like maneuvering, the Supreme Court has done Trump’s bidding with an immunity ruling not so much for theoretical presidents going forward that they should be unrestrained in carrying out duties “boldly and fearlessly,” which no president but Trump has felt the need to employ, but to retroactively get Trump off the hook for his innumerable crimes while in concert effectively cutting their nose off to spite their face, undermining their own agency and power.
With a wide-sweeping claim of presidential immunity, a president such as Trump could and would act with unrestrained dictatorial, i.e., absolute powers such that the Supreme Court would be reduced to being a shill for the president’s agenda to rubber stamp whatever he has in mind as “democratically” legitimate, their mere presence being the legitimizer. The Supreme Court then effectively acts as a pencil-pushing, mentally masturbatory, feckless, and without teeth instrument of the state, who would be the all-encompassing Trump. And all their cynical dreams of the state and government being bloated bureaucracy come to pass in a self-realized, self-fulfilled prophecy of nihilism.
In the spirit of “deconstructing the administrative state,” the Supreme Court is acting suicidally by rendering itself empty robes of “Justice” — a spectacle, a ruse, all to subvert our democracy by demoralizing and destabilizing American society to a crisis point (could this be it? America’s Reichstag fire?) that will then become a normalization of a chain of events from autocracy to authoritarianism and then fascism.
It may be delusional to think that Americans are still living in the land of liberty, given that Republicans think that America is already living in a dictatorship, and with these courts, the Democrats are quickly beginning to agree. As Americans head into July 4th, Independence Day, I suppose we can thank our lucky stars that at least America has enjoyed 247 years of freedom.
The Oligarchs are Running the Asylum
Significance: This piece highlighted the concerns of broligarchs months before the mainstream media.
The world is shrinking due to a transnational network of male billionaire autocrats. Notably absent are any empresses or Queens. These autocrats effectively function as an international crime syndicate, though there is no conspiratorial cabal as conspiracy theorists are wont to implicate with the likes of Davos, the World Economic Forum, and the United Nations. Simply, while ideologically divergent, such as Communist China and “Democratic” Russia, these heads of state autocrats have aims or objectives that are aligned, and thus, an organic synergy or an informal alliance is formed.
euIn the pairing of Donald Trump with J.D. Vance for the Republican nomination for the 2024 U.S. election, MAGA is in bed with Big Tech. Vance is inextricably linked to Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, along with a veritable juggernaut of the who’s who in Silicon Valley (David Sacks, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen) and the New Right (Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, René Girard, Sohrab Ahmari, and Rod Dreher).
The narcissist-dictator’s psychology, in some sort of fit of backward logic, mandates conformity, e.g., to Christian nationalism, whereby his subjects would be “free” from the tyranny of choice. Citizens are compelled to be uniform and cookie-cutter as a relief from options-overwhelm and the dysregulation that can come from “adulting.”
Accounting for the tech industry’s newfound cozy relationship with Trump is an aversion to liberal democracy which from a Libertarian perspective, excludes minority interests and expressions with a sledgehammer of a majority-rule vote at the expense of freedom for all to act independently of consensus — what many would consider selfish and narcissistic behavior.
Instead of emotionally maturing, these socially inept, reality-impaired Tech-Titan Broligarchs want to dispense with relationships altogether in a nihilistic gutting of what it means to be human. If they have their way, we will not grow up but instead grow out beyond cyberspace to the final frontier.
AI’s Narcissistic Takeover and End of Reality
As government officials and AI thought leaders continue to hash out the regulatory particulars while the line between online activities and offline activities in real life (IRL) continues to blur, it’s critical to examine the role of narcissism in our technology.
Narcissists are a form of artificial intelligence, arguably a precursor and prototype for AI. Just as artificial intelligence today is based on large language models (LLMs) that draw upon a corpus of text, the narcissist is a human scanning machine.
Narcissists are poorly formed approximations of humans. Lacking a stable integrated core that comprises the ego in healthy humans, the narcissist is an assemblage of self-states or pseudo-identities. Narcissists suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which used to be called multiple personality disorder based on these self-states.
Because narcissists are poorly formed approximations of humans, they give off the uncanny valley effect, which leaves interlocutors feeling ill at ease as though they were talking to an animated machine.
Just as it’s dangerous to interface with a narcissist, it’s dangerous to put your trust in artificial intelligence. As with a narcissist, it’s good to take AI with a grain of salt or a whole shaker.
Techno-feudalism
Capitalism is a fantasy-based system, just like narcissism. A return to feudalism, or neo-feudalism, theoretically could offer an antidote to the hard-charging narcissistic imperative behind capitalism. However, a mutant technologically based feudalism, i.e., a rent-based capitalism on overdrive with extreme wealth inequality, in conjunction with AI, threatens to strip the people of their agency with none of the upside of individualism-based capitalism with its potential for self-esteem, self-worth, and social mobility. Additionally, feudalism and liberal democracies are mutually exclusive.
Crypto and AI: the Dangers of Building a Civilization on Fantasy
Cryptocurrencies reify Cluster B personality disorders (antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic) and Cluster A personality disorders (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal) in a compensatory craving for power and control through a parallel monetary system.
Narcissistic Plutocrats -Trump, Elon Musk- are the Enemies from Within
Recently identifying himself as part of “Dark MAGA,” at Trump’s campaign rally, Elon Musk is a trojan horse invading the US government. Crypto could very well facilitate the end of America as a country; the goal of anarcho-crypto has always been to subvert and override the dollar and, by extension, the United States government.
Teasing out the implications of a Musk-Trump partnership involves connecting the dots from the seemingly inevitable Big Crypto’s usurpation of the US dollar (USD) and, by extension, an end goal of terminating America as a nation-state in favor of sovereign network states. This radical uprising would represent a full bore expression of techno-feudalism, i.e., capitalism on overdrive with oligarch-lords on top (cloudalists) and cloud serfs on the bottom, the middle class, nowhere to be seen — vassalized.
JD Vance’s connection to Peter Thiel apparently did not signal Big Tech’s ingratiation to Trump’s campaign in blinking red lights — if we are to put a charitable take on the lack of mainstream reporting.
The mainstream media/corporate media has been radio silent on this consequential tech-signifying milestone of Theil-backed JD Vance joining Trump’s ticket as VP pick. More likely, if we follow the money, Big Crypto has put a muzzle on US politicians, namely Democrats, to press the panic button.
We find ourselves at the logical endpoint, extrapolated out from the devastating Citizens United decision in 2010, which laid the groundwork for this Gilded Age’s buying of American elections, and rendering America for sale by the highest bidder.
Trump is Re-Elected: A Narcissistic Reckoning
The outcome of the American presidential election has been a referendum on the Democrats’ hubristic and disingenuous kowtowing to the wealthy and corporations — most egregiously, Big Crypto — while still maintaining that they were the party for the working class. It’s also been a referendum on wokeism’s transgenderism and pronouns.
The stench of wokeism did not fade in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and the “defund the police” movement. It was etched indelibly into America’s consciousness, even though woke’s temperature has been dropping as the right has successfully mounted a ferocious defense against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), effectively nullifying the woke scourge to many but not all voters. The Democrats’ brand was forever tarnished.
Americans have been so butthurt over gender culture wars that the country voted to trade in long-fought for democratic human rights in exchange for Trump’s narcissistic authoritarianism — anything for a sense of order and control. Disorder at the border, inflation, and the chaotic withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan underscore the point.
In the re-election of narcissist Trump, who overthrew Roe vs. Wade by stacking the Supreme Court with far-right (in)justices, a growing cohort of women overlooked Kamala by prioritizing the feminist implications of the transgender movement encroaching on women’s sports and single-sex spaces such as prisons and locker rooms over the traditional stalwart backbone of feminism — abortion rights.
Exposing the degree of its naïveté and pathological hope, America has been pulled off its center — the effects of political narcissistic abuse — losing track of its values in an over-correcting pendulum swing against the left’s moralizing wokeism to the embrace of dark grievances in Trump. If the progressive woke left was on the offense, preaching and looking down on the masses, Trump played defense and America loves a comeback king, whether from cancel culture or out from under the strictures of the courthouse.
The reluctance to consider the psychological ramifications of malignant narcissism is laid bare with the re-election of Trump.
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