The Lunatic and the Narcissist

Commentary of 18 February 2014

The Western world has gone mad. We find this madness in our political parties. We see it in the worker, in the CEO, in the teacher and the student. Madness has usurped the Constitution, submerged the U.S. federal budget, taken over the media and the corporations. This madness is reflected in a thing called “socialism,” and there is no easy cure, no pill or special therapy.  The disease must work its way through the body politic, which will either perish or recover its health.  

Those not infected with socialism – those who have noticed the raging epidemic around them – are bewildered. Should they believe their eyes? Has the country become a madhouse? Year after year, new grievances are invented and new laws are passed. The conservative politicians resist, but resistance appears futile; for if socialist measures do not slip through at the beginning, they will slip through in the end. If they cannot bankrupt the government now, they will bankrupt it tomorrow. If they cannot strangle industry and choke of productivity during the current legislative session, they will scheme toward the next. The conservative politician (if any yet exists) cannot prevent these people from making headway; for they are busy making mischief at all times – as champions of world peace, homosexual rights, abortion on demand, undocumented workers, feminism and diversity. Here the strategic method may be translated as follows: (1) in order to sabotage American military power, agitate for peace; (2) to demoralize society, sanctify abnormality; (3) to collapse the birthrate, promote infanticide; (4) to submerge national identity, flood the country with illegal aliens; (5) to destroy the family, degrade motherhood; (6) to divide and conquer, promote minority grievances.

Has any of this been understood? Has one columnist, one analyst, one social scientist listed these items while asking the decisive question – cui bono? That is to say, who benefits from these policies? And also, which side of the political spectrum originated all this? Could it be the Left, whose partisans once favored the Viet Cong and who opposed the Vietnam War not because they were pacifists, but because they wanted the Communists to win? I ask, again, cui bono? 

Let it suffice to say that America does not benefit from the six policies listed above. In plain truth, a rival foreign power benefits. And here is an objective truth which the strategist must affirm. Here is the decisive point of departure for national inquiry. Here is the main thing: Today’s social policy has become a strategic battlefield upon which our enemy plays at sabotage. Yet we allow it. We grow fat and watch it unfold.We have allowed ourselves to be intimidated by errant nonsense. The “conservative” of today resists amnesty for illegal aliens, but knows that he is on the losing side of the proposition. To enforce the borders of the United States is said to be racism. From listening to the political discourse of the day, it is clearly untenable to suggest that a visa should be required to enter the United States. Anyone who thinks in this way is a reactionary bigot. If the State of Arizona wants to enforce its border with Mexico, the socialist elite of the United States will decry the Nazism of the Arizona citizenry who complain that their hospital emergency rooms are clogged with indigent foreigners.

The madness of socialism must prevail. Equality means equality for all men, regardless of citizenship; regardless of whether they pay taxes or swear allegiance to the United States. Every foreigner is entitled to medical attention at the taxpayer’s expense. It does not matter that other countries do not perform this charity. We must now perform it until bankruptcy swallows us. The United States is (or was) the richest country in the world and must be punished accordingly. But again, I must ask the reader – cui bono?

It is no accident that the socialist wants to amnesty the illegal aliens. He is sure they will vote for socialism, for the eradication of the U.S. Constitution, and for the redistribution of wealth. For the same reason it is no accident that the socialist prefers American nuclear disarmament, for he prefers Russian nuclear dominance to U.S. dominance.  In all of this, as Le Bon said, socialism is indeed a mental state; but it is much more than a mental state, and much more than an ideology. As many thinkers have attested, socialism is a religion which imbues the soul with convictions about man and society. It everywhere uproots Christianity, establishing its supremacy either gradually or suddenly, by violent revolution or by subtle legislation, by education or entertainment. The socialist does not see any danger stemming from his beliefs. He does not recognize his ideology as the sociological malware of a hostile foreign empire. He does not see that socialism is slowly but surely destroying society. He only sees the tragic circumstances of human life down through the centuries, and believes he can do better.

How does the socialist presume to eliminate sorrow and make heaven on earth? In the last analysis he believes this can be achieved through the power of the state. He does not see that socialism is a “frightful system” tending toward “servitude, misery, and Caesarism….” By harping on the tragedies in our midst, and the injustices, and the environmental calamities about to befall, the socialist empowers government at every level to break free from checks and balances. To save the planet we cannot afford liberty. To save the planet we must have a government powerful enough to trample down the rich. And if this government can trample the rich, it will trample all who disagree with its dictates – especially (when their turn comes) the poor.

Worse than all of this, however, is socialism’s claim of being a scientific movement based on materialist philosophy. As Wikipedia tells us, “the theory of materialism holds that all things are composed of material, and that all emergent phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material properties and interactions.” We should not be surprised, therefore, if Marxian socialism denies life after death and the existence of God. As a materialist philosophy, socialism does not merely seek to impose economic controls on the free market, or to save the planet from global warming. Socialism seeks to eradicate “superstition.” The socialists should not be considered as faithful partners of Islam or Buddhism, Christianity or Judaism. All religions are destined for the socialist chopping block, despite the religious noises currently heard from the socialist camp and from Russia. The materialism of the socialist may be seen in the raw cynicism of Vladimir Putin, who when asked whether he believed in God made the following reply: “I believe in the power of man.” Those who think Russia is promoting Christianity or a new and enlightened spirituality, have yet to reckon with the true motives of the socialist camp. Materialism signifies the negation of man’s spirit, free will and responsibility. Socialism sees man’s appearance on earth as evolutionary happenstance. There is no Providence, no divine plan, no built-in meaning for the socialist. Reality is a ferocious chaos which the socialist state mirrors. More than half a century ago Carl Jung wrote the following passage about socialism in his book Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of Self,

…the present tendency to destroy all [spiritual] tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism. Wherever the Marxist utopia prevails, this has already happened. But a predominantly scientific and technological education, such as is the usual thing nowadays, can also bring about a spiritual regression and a considerable increase of psychic dissociation. With hygiene and prosperity alone a man is still far from health, otherwise the most enlightened and most comfortable off among us would be the healthiest. But in regard to neuroses that is not the case at all, quite the contrary. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in [the] abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums. (Page 181)

Being part of the socialist revolutionary matrix, materialism promotes a mass break with reality which can be readily observed. From the hysterical belief that man-made global warming has resulted in record-cold winters to the bizarre insistence that homosexuality is “normal,” the latter-day “progressive” stands convicted of lunacy. Yet the socialist is able to impose his delusions on the whole country, and to depress the economy. Yet the more significant depression is spiritual, deriving from de-spiritualization. As Jung explained, “The early Christian prophecy concerning Antichrist … omits to mention the corollary, the sinister reality of which is now being demonstrated before our eyes by the splitting of our world: the destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality.” (Page 109) Here lurks the cause of that malignant self-love which plagues us today. According to Sam Vaknin and Lidija Rangelovska,

…when the personality is rigid to the point of being unable to change in reaction to shifting circumstances we say that it is disordered. One has a personality disorder when one’s habits substitute for one’s identity. Such a person identifies with his environment, taking behavioral, emotional, and cognitive cues exclusively from it. His inner world is, in a manner of speaking, vacated, his True Self merely an apparition. (The Malignant Self, Kindle edition, Loc 818)

Such a person, say Vaknin and Rangelovska, “is incapable of loving and of living.” He is also incapable of deep insight into people and events. Dependent on cues from the environment which feed into his fragile persona, the narcissist is vulnerable to manipulation by a psychologically sophisticated enemy.  A neurotic of this type is obsessed with a false idea of life, being determined to follow a false path. If only superficial outward appearances conform to the accepted error, the narcissist will be unshakable in following this path to self-destruction. Here is a partial explanation as to why our leaders are unable to come to grips with the strategic realities of today.

The question next occurs: Might socialism be a direct result of narcissistic personality disorder, along with feminism and the “blessed” transgendered condition? A powerful argument can be made in the case of feminism. The feminist – as a woman trapped in a woman’s body – is at war with the authentically feminine. Grasping the mantle of masculinity, the indoctrinated feminist would make every heterosexual marriage into a homosexual coupling. Here the misconstrued feminine compels the masculine to surrender its dominant role, and social calamity must be the result.

Under the spell of a narcissist delusion the feminist denies the true self and adopts an impressive though false self-image which insulates the subject from the possibility of love or close relationships. (The narcissist, by the way, demands the surrender of the more flexible personalities around her. As they are flexible, as she is crazy, they would seem to have little choice.) In short, the feminist is disoreinted. To disorient an instinctive being with regard to its true nature is to make derangement the foundation of all. For what purpose is this derangement accomplished? It is to advance the cause of socialist revolution; but even more, it advances the cause of an external enemy that uses socialist revolutionaries as a Fifth Column.

The socialist conception of liberation requires a war against motherhood even more than it requires a war against the patriarchy; for the woman is more instinctual than the man. To break woman must be the first priority of the socialist revolution. The great advance of socialism in our society has therefore occurred by trampling down mom. Revolutionary feminism conceives woman as something disconnected from mother. Here the lesbian assumes the same role in the culture war as the panzer division assumed in the last world war. The sexual narcissist acquires an elevated status as embodying the denial and perversion of feminine nature as a force with which to overthrow manhood.

The masculinization of woman simultaneously effects the denigration of man and the disintegration of human personality. This process advances steadily, feeding upon itself. “The revolutionary finds that man and woman possess no nature,” wrote Thomas Molnar. Such is the dogma taught at every university. It is crucial to every socialist policy. Human nature does not exist, and must not be affirmed. The counter-revolutionary, however, awakens to the truth of the opposite proposition. As Molnar pointed out, “the counter-revolutionary finds a basically unchanging human nature because it is shaped once and for all by God, himself not an evolving force … but eternally the same.”

This leads us back to a central point: The revolutionary creed denies God and metaphysics. It denies the soul, the afterlife, and spirituality. It denies what is eternal – what Russell Kirk referred to as “the permanent things.” The revolutionary, on his side, is a believer in change, death, dissolution, impermanence. He seeks salvation in an imagined paradise on earth, with man transfigured into God. The vague and blurred horizon of the promised utopia lends grandeur and self-importance to the small-minded malevolence of a thwarted egotist who also happens to be a nihilist. (The latter condition accounting for the frustration of the former.) As Vaknin explains:

Pathological narcissism is a life-long pattern of traits and behaviors which signify infatuation and obsession with one’s self to the exclusion of all others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one’s gratification, dominance, and ambition. As distinct from healthy narcissism, which we all possess, pathological narcissism is maladaptive, rigid, persisting, and causes significant distress and functional impairment. (The Malignant Self, Loc 894)

One might say that we live in the Age of the Narcissist under the Regime of the Lunatic, where the narcissist (through the exercise of power) becomes the lunatic.