Facebook Exerpt - Comment on Narcissism - 4-15-2012

As with the realspace cocktail party, the surreal cyberspace one may bury a good thought or two in a flurry of inspired chatyping, so, and as I have stated in a related post, I'm inclined to snip and export some thoughts (out of context) whose expression had been inspired by the want of making a point in a thread continuing on Facebook.

This one comes loosely related to a snit between two members participating in people's diplomacy over the middle east conflict.  Enough said about that: my true target here remains a psychological component among conflict drivers, specifically narcissistic scripting:

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Probably, the discussion should take place where it seems to have been generated or in private. However, I would like to chime in with the suggestion to spend a little time getting our heads around a fascinating subject second only to my interest in myself: narcissism.

:)

I kid around with this but a little because there seem so many pointers to damage or the threat of it when discussing ad hominem attacks, the glorious and inglorious images held and projected by ourselves and others for ourselves and against some others, and the presence of a will to harm others and hide the same under cover of "honor", "faith", "loyalty", including "patriotism", and other self-concept-preserving devices that place innocents in the path of a destructive mentality.

 

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A few minutes before signing on the Facebook this afternoon, I had shared this (with a few changes made in this copy) in correspondence with a favorite associate:

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Have you ever asked X about his relationship with his father or mother?

Part of the theory of narcissism, as I care to know or add my invention to it, is that it functions as a corrective to a damaged ego.  

 

We get beaten up; we write ourselves a better script; and we go forward in quest of the fulfillment of that better image.  This perhaps healing and necessary strategy may be part of our "human condition" but as observed around the world, whether motivated by fear of or feelings about dishonor, poverty, or personal and political impotence, the mechanism needs its limits.

In the middle east conflicts, quests for power, so I feel from observation, involve not only the possession of autonomy through the possession of money and the acquisition of the obedience of loyal others but also the sadistic urge to dispossess others of their physical and inspiriting assets: the Jews must lose their businesses and homes; the pretty girl gets acid in the face; the victim of rape needs four witnesses to attest to it (something like that) before being further dispossed of self-esteeem, even the possibility of it, byt being charged with adultery.

Do you see the pattern?

For the worst, this is not a matter of knowing where their nose ends and mine begins.  

 

The desire, urge, and yearning to damage others -- too willfully, as you have put it, "oppress us and abridge our rights" -- is the whole  point.  They can dress up a two-legged-bomb or an IED in Islamic poetry and rhetorical psychology, but the real psychology is some are out to do mayhem and murder because, frankly, it makes them feel like they're doing something (perhaps "at last"), or have done something, and they are powerful for having gotten away with it.

 

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I take care always to say "some" because I really believe it is only "some" and not even the zealous count among them for carrying within their hearts malicious desire plus the ability to energize it in political form and play out the same with degrees of violence shaped by circumstance, social alliance, and opportunity.

 

Along similar lines, I had last night the privilege of watching Constantine's Sword, the film narrated by James Carroll as a questing figure, one with the book on which the documentary had been based -- Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History -- and otherwise co-written and documented by Oren Jacoby. 

 

Those familiar with the film know it works backwards from an imbroglio involving the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Spring, Colorado having to do with the pervasive on-campus prosyletizing of an evangelical church and efforts by both outside and inside forces to maintain the force as a cohesive Christian sword, a way not in keeping with " . . . that all men are created equal" or with the nation's commitment to the firmest divide between church and state, to the third-century's "miraculous" inspiration of a general inclined toward conquest beneath the sign of the cross, a symbol he himself is responsible for promoting (over images of fish and sheep) as the go-to icon of Christianity behind which his armies would go on to conduct their slaughter, create for him, Constantine, a new empire, and make Rome, sunk back into paganism, forever and irrevocably Christian.

 

Constantine also had built in his time a colossus of himself.

 

Nowhere in Judaism or Jewish culture and life will one find, say, a Colossus of Moses (don't bother -- I've already tried to find one online, but you might enjoy reading about Edwin Moses, a "Colossus of Sport" or Moses Solomon, the "rabbi of swat" . . . a "clouting colossus of the southwest"  . . .  "who couldn't catch a fly without flypaper").

 

Here is a comment most cogent from The New York Times ("When Love of Religion Leads to Hatred of Others" by Stephen Holden, April 18, 2008) on the book, the movie, and the matter:

 

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What must Middle Eastern Muslims feel, Mr. Carroll wonders, when George W. Bush throws around concepts like good and evil and uses the word crusade to describe the Iraq war? Mr. Carroll worries that we may be heading toward an all-out holy war between state-supported religious extremists.

 

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If you watch the documentary, you'll hear James Carroll note that "No war is holy."

 

We're learning -- well, at least I hope I'm not alone in this -- what makes for "religious extremist" leaders, and it's not very pretty if you call it "malignant narcissism" (and suggest the evident religious zeal inevitably turns out a cover for other urges) and go about the business of studying and comprehending what that is while also looking into the range of what it is in the needs of the followers (and perhaps of ourselves) that so frequently endorses the distinctly ignoble, inhuman, and outrageous beliefs, dreams, and pursuits of what become history's Caligulas, monsters who cannot contain themselves but handily spread their insanity to legions.

 

Additional Reference

Post, Jerrold M.  "Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality: Implications for Political Psychology."  Political Psychology (14:1) March 1993, pp. 99-121: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791395

Post, Jerrold M.  Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior.  Ithaca, New York and London, Cornell University Press, 2004.

Wikipedia.  "Malignant Narcissism": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malignant_narcissism

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