On Pride

 

Thomas Merton wrote, “Pride makes us artificial. Humility makes us genuine.” 

A sort of robotic artificiality indeed seems characteristic of narcissists. Their smile is mechanical, as if pasted on; or it is a smirk, a sort of half-smile. Scott Adams says there is something about the eyes not smiling with the mouth that gives away insincerity.

They cannot be spontaneous, because they do not dare lose control. For this reason, they cannot have a sense of humour. Humour requires letting go. They do not understand it, and so will laugh inappropriately. They are just mimicking what they see and hear others do, without feeling it. The one thing they might find funny is watching other people in pain, mental or physical. Someone slipping on a banana peel.

Can narcissism be cured? Psychiatry says no. I have always been loath to believe this: can anyone be beyond redemption? I compared it with alcoholism: breaking an addiction is hard, but not impossible. People do. Surely one can also break an addiction to pride?

But there is indeed a point at which one is, in Christian teaching, beyond redemption: Hell is forever. If you die in mortal sin, and descend, there is no possibility of redemption beyond that point. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Like it or not, that is the clear Biblical teaching.

Doesn’t this match our experiences with narcissism? At a certain point, to wit, the point of confirmed narcissism, it would not matter if one had an infinite stretch of time, one is never going to pull out of this. Like Lucifer’s choice of self over God: Satan is not one day going to be redeemed.

An addiction to self is after all far more encompassing than an addiction to some single pleasure or vice. To invest your very identity in your vice means breaking the addiction looks impossible. There is no one there, outside of the vice itself, to break it. You have no other identity. Your soul has been devoured.

That is why the narcissist seems zombie-like, an NPC.

It may be going too far, however, to say ambulatory narcissism is yet incurable. Why would God allow the narcissist to stay alive, and doing harm to others, past this point? It makes more sense to assume that the point at which the narcissism is absolutely incurable is the moment God will step in and send to Hell. So long as there is the slightest chance for the narc to turn, God will give them that chance. 

But well before this point, the change might require a miracle. It may be beyond human agency, and so of course the psychiatrists cannot do it. Neither can any well-meaning relative.

The Democrats' Box

 

John Fetterman, second from the right. Kamala Harris, third from the left.

The Democrats in the US are in a quandary. They fixed the nomination last time to give it to Joe Biden. This was already a desperate choice; they knew he was old and unsteady. An op ed at the time said “just stay alive until election day, Joe.” But Bernie Sanders was even older, and not even a Democrat: he was, officially, an Independent Socialist. He looked like he was about to take the nomination. Pete Buttigieg, the next possible option, was only the mayor of a small midwestern city. Michael Bloomberg, only recently a Republican, had fizzled with the voters, despite a huge cash outlay. And nobody else was in striking distance in the party’s primaries.

So the idea was to push Biden as at least a safe pair of hands, who would be a one-term president and then pass it off to the anointed. Kamala Harris was the one they really wanted, primarily on racial and gender grounds: a black woman. But she had fizzled in the campaign. Now they would have time to coach her and to build some buzz.

Three years later, things have not worked out for them. Harris has not jelled; she does not seem capable of it. Biden is obviously failing. 

Which puts them in a box. They can’t safely run Harris; and Biden is failing in the polls. Any other candidate amounts to a rejection of Harris, and charges of racism and sexism. Nor is there another plausible candidate of sufficient stature. People speak of Michelle Obama; but she has no real qualifications for the job, reputedly has no interest in it, and her popularity would probably nosedive as soon as she started taking positions on issues and being seen as a politician. 

The essential problem here is a lack of quality candidates on the left, both in 2020 and now. Two words: John Fetterman.

The Canadian Liberals face a similar problem. Justin Trudeau is now an albatross around their collective necks; but there is no plausible replacement waiting in the wings, as there always had been in the past: no Paul Martin, no Jean Chretien, no John Turner, not even a Michael Ignatieff. No figure of independent stature around whom there is some real buzz. Mark Carney, perhaps; but he seems a faceless bureaucrat. Trudeau himself, as leader, was something of a Hail Mary pass, obviously underqualified, and there is no one else behind him. 

Why there are no leaders available on the left?

Because they seem to suppress and force out those of any leadership potential: RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Jodi Wilson Raybould. In the wider culture, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Warren Kinsella, Stephen LeDrew. Which is to say, they cannot tolerate and force out anyone with principles and independent thoughts. This is what leadership is about, and what it requires.

This is the mark of a cult, which has some guilty secret to conceal. You cannot trust someone with principles who thinks independently; they are bound to see and mention it.

This is death to any human progress. It is death to any democracy.

Why do people still vote for the Democrats, or the Liberals, despite the lack of any real leadership?

Because they are complicit. The shared guilty secret turns them into NPCs, zombies. And they react violently to any independent thought.

The guilty secret: a foetus is a human life.

Why the Suit? Why the Hair?

 

My daughter asks yesterday, “Why is Trump always wearing a suit?”

Because he understands branding. He is in character.

Trump the brandable character wears a distinctive costume, just as Santa Claus might, or Spiderman. This is memorable, and marketable. You can and people will pay now to put the name “Trump” on their hotel. Just as Santa sells snow globes, and Spiderman sells action figures.

The Trump costume is a blue business suit, usually a red tie, an orange complexion, and an improbable blonde combover. Paint those features on an Easter egg, or a stick man, and anyone will recognize  Trump.

Trump does not need the combover to hide baldness, as he demonstrated once to Jimmy Fallon. It is a costume, a put-on. He certainly does not need to paint his face orange.

It is, specifically, the costume of a clown: the face paint, the shocking hair. It is deliberately comic and absurd.

Taking on the character of a clown, a parody of the rich capitalist, allows Trump to speak as bluntly as he does: by common consent, clowns and jesters are permitted to speak truths that others cannot. This on the flimsy pretext that they are crazy or stupid, and so need not—in a phrase—be taken seriously. It gives those who need to pigeonhole a pigeonhole. This gives Trump his celebrated Teflon coating, of which he is well aware.

And Trump is a brilliant comedian. His rallies go on for hours, extempore, and people throng to them.

This also explains why he is hated.

Narcissists do not get humour. You might have noticed. Humour is offensive to them. Everything is life and death to them, and whatever you said is “not funny.” Or, in Biden’s favourite phrase, “not a joke.”

To them, a clown is simply a loose cannon, liable to spill the beans on them at any moment.

Narcissists are always aware, at some level, that they are living a lie and manipulating people. They are proud of it. They accordingly fear anything beyond their control, anything unpredictable. Like humour, which always depends on a reversal of expectations. 

Those who live with a narcissist know the experience of “walking on eggshells.” Conversation must keep to a narrow band of acceptable discourse or they become agitated; this is the essence and origin of the current “cancel culture.”

The very life of a narcissist tends to narrow down to familiar routine. They dislike moving. They dislike changing jobs. They fear anything unfamiliar: unfamiliar foods, unfamiliar music, new ideas, unfamiliar routines. They have a hard time breaking habits, and are prone to addictions. 

This narcissistic tendency produces the phenomenon, increasingly remarked upon, of the “NPC”—people who seem robotic and predictable in all their opinions and responses, as if programmed by computer. 

Trump, the loose cannon, the clown, is the opposite of that. His views have never been orthodox for a conservative. They are unpredictable issue by issue.

That is why they fear him.

And why to the rest of us, listening to him feels liberating.

The Know Nothings

 

It is interesting to scan the comments on the latest column by Xerxes, my leftist columnist friend. They are a window into the leftward mind.

The first reader writes, most revealingly, “I cannot see any MAGA Republicans subscribing to your columns.”

This shows us that leftists only read opinions and columns with which they agree.

This means they can be easily led about by the nose. They do not want the truth, they want whatever comforts them. They risk being easily blindsided.

I am not a “MAGA Republican”: I do not live in the USA. But I read Xerxes’s columns precisely because I disagree. This is typical of those on the right; you need to know both sides of an argument.

Next comment:

“I think Biden will go down in history as one of the most successful Presidents ever. …. He brought in policies that people liked, like increases in health care and forgiveness of student loans. He got things done.”

It does not occur to this commentator that these policies could have been disliked by anyone. Another artifact of selective reading. After all, it’s free money. Right?

Instead, of course, it has to be taken in taxes. The government takes it from one pocket, deducts some of it as operating expenses, and returns the remainder to the other pocket.

Apparently the left does not grasp or want to grasp this simple dynamic. “Free money” is more comforting.

            “I think that most Americans were tired of the drama and divisiveness of Politics.  They voted for quiet efficiency and national unity instead. I think they’re telling their politicians to scrap the divisive rhetoric and get on with the job they were elected to do.”

The shambolic evacuation of Afghanistan does not look like quiet efficiency. Neither does a government that boosts spending to unprecedented levels during a supply chain crisis, and denies that inflation is possible. Wars, fuel shortages, and recessions do not seem quiet or efficient.

As for national unity, it is not much helped along by pitting ethnic group against ethnic group, gender against gender, class against class; or by declaring those who support your chief opponent a “threat to democracy.”

Spending endless time and resources on impeachments and collusion investigations against your opponent, all of which turn out to be based on false accounts and trivialities, instead of spending that time on legislation, does not look like getting on with the job they were elected to do.

Another reader writes: “I don’t understand why so many on this planet continue in awe of a nation that is so destructive, that pretends to have other nations’ well-being at heart when it is the exact opposite.  We need to realize that, even without the U.S., the world continues to rotate.”

This is akin to the leftist drive to “Defund the police.” For the sake of world peace and prosperity, it is a good thing for one power to be dominant, for the same reason it is better to have any government than anarchy. A dominant power enforces peace: Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana.

Given one dominant power, there is no luckier choice than the USA: a nation uniquely founded on the principles of human rights and human equality. With no modern territorial ambitions.

As Leonard Cohen observed, “You’re not going to like what comes after America.”

Another respondent wrote of Trump’s making another run, “Trump isn't interested in anything except himself. Any political operative would seek other's opinions before announcing a run for office.”

This assumes that Trump asked no one for their opinion before declaring. Why?

Another artifact of the leftist refusal to read anything they disagree with. This writer presumes that “everybody” was saying Trump should not run. Those blinders never come off.

The Zombie Apocalypse Is Real

I suddenly understand why zombies of the cinematic sort have now become such a popular theme in various forms of entertainment, in graphic novels and on screens large and small; why the simple plot line of a zombie apocalypse has become so compelling.

It is because we are all living through it.

The strange deep sense of satisfaction that the zombie stories produce is the serenity that comes from at last confronting some unspoken truth. It is catharsis, in Aristotle’s sense; it is like lancing a boil.

I am not referring to the coronavirus; even though, eerily, in most iterations of the zombie apocalypse, it is a virus that zombifies.

It seems more as though the Wuhan pandemic has thrown the other, more serious infection into stark relief: like a bolt of lightning lighting up the night sky. The “zombie apocalypse” that dates back to Night of the Living Dead in 1968, has been growing within our imaginations like a vivid premonition, a bit disjointed, as in dreams.

There’s been a virus going round since about then.

Many press voices, as the coronavirus hit North America, were most concerned that it not be called the “Chinese virus,” and with the “racism” of people who suddenly were not eating in the restaurants of Chinatown. Those were the lead stories.

Many journalists, commentators, tweeters and social media memes are blaming Trump for the virus and saying that he murdered everyone who has died from it. Others are blaming the virus on Christian evangelicals. Others blame it on the lack of tax-funded public health care in the US.

Objectively, of course, these are perfect non sequiturs; and show a dangerous lack of focus.

For more traces of some strange zombification, witness the mainstream Democrats who have locked down in line behind Joe Biden, continuing to insist that he is the one man America needs as president; despite obvious indications of a narcissistic personality, and now clear symptoms of dementia. Also a dangerous disconnect from either reality or ethics: objectively, aside from policies, electing such a man would be perilous for the republic. A recent editorial in the Atlantic headlined something like “Just Don’t Die, Joe Biden.” It looks like the selection by zombies of a zombie president. I’d say intentional, if zombies had intent.

Or witness the congresshumans and US senators who insist on imposing carbon emissions reductions on airlines getting relief aid in an emergency bill; or they will not support the bill. Let everyone die, then. Or demanding additional minority hiring quotas for businesses getting relief; or they would not support the bill.

These people seem to be operating without a functioning brain. Or rather, more properly, without a soul, without real awareness. The brain, as a mechanism, still functions, driving the legs forward one after the other. Zombies; the same sense is expressed by the currently popular gamer phrase, “NPCs.” “Non-player characters”: people who seem to be only simulating consciousness, like the algorithm-generated opponents in a computer game. Their reactions are mechanical, predictable, and over time reveal that there is no thought behind them.

The coronavirus, with such other uncanny events as Biden’s abrupt dementia, or the locust swarms in Africa, simply reveal to us where the zombies are. Hand of God, perhaps.

What is the real virus? Something that infects brains. That much our premonitions told us. “Postmodernism” and its intellectual littermates have stripped modern thought, beginning with the academics and spreading out through the professional elites, of its moorings, the essential guiding principles of the soul: the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Sat, Cit, Ananada. You can say “God,” to combine the principles, but even outside of monotheism, these three navigational goals remain the meaning of life.

Contemporary thought has turned away from all of them. This amounts to zombification at the mass level. To remove all spiritual moorings is to remove the soul. One simply lurches around responding to simple instincts, like hunger. Eat. Brains.

A real crisis, calling for a serious response, reveals the problem.

If this meaninglessness virus corresponds to postmodernism on the intellectual place, on the psychological plane it corresponds to narcissism. Narcissists have pulled out all their moorings. They seem to live to a limited script, unable to see what is really around them. Fliess described them as “ambulatory psychotics.”

Unfortunately, it is further the case that narcissists, postmodernists, zombies are programmed to destroy. It is Pope St. John Paul II called “the culture of death.” Like a virus, the prime directive is to spread, by eating the next brain.

Perhaps the current crisis is a godsend. Perhaps we can now rally and fight.