Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A True Story

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Religious Funny Business

 Heaven? It is to laugh!

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God and Love

 

I recently attended a “Life in the Spirit” seminar; a program given by the Catholic Church to deepen one’s faith. These were almost the first words of the introductory video:

“Do you know the most fulfilled people in life are not those who have everything, are not those who are successful, not even those who have purpose. But the most fulfilled people in life, the most fulfilled you could ever be, is if you're able to stop and let God love you. It is the hardest thing for us to do as human beings, to let God love us, for several reasons. Why? Because we're so used to giving to others, we're so used to serving others, we're so used to pointing towards others, that we don't stop and realize that first we need to be loved.”

My immediate reaction is, no, Hell no. This is the disease that is killing us. This is Satan speaking.

Most of us think too much of ourselves. Most of us are too sure we are going to heaven. Most of us are fully aware of our need to be loved. Most of us need to learn humility. 

God loves us; but he expects things from us. We are not his pampered pets. The Gospels do not tell us to lie back and accept God’s love: they tall us to “work out our salvation in fear and trembling.” They tell us we have a purpose, and we are here to do God’s work. We are to put on a yoke. "My yoke is light." 

Jesus did not go around telling people to accept God’s love. He spoke instead of our duty to love God: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” And after that to love and to help your neighbour. This is the opposite of what the video was saying.

Imagine someone about to marry. Would your advice be, “the hardest thing in marriage is to accept your wife’s love. Don’t do anything for her. Just be still and enjoy the love.”

No. Hell no. This video is preaching narcissism, not Christianity.

Did Rob Reiner Deserve it?

There is a highly discreditable human tendency, whenever evil occurs, to blame the victim. This makes us feel safer from evil ourselves, and gives us an alibi for doing nothing to help. Moreover, opining about another’s family situation is gossip. We cannot really know.

Nevertheless, I think it is important to comment on the issue of Nick Reiner, accused of having murdered his parents Rob and Michele Reiner.

Most relevant, I think, is a comment from an extra on the movie they made—that Nick came across as spoiled and privileged. But really, all you need to know is that he was a drug addict. Then it all immediately makes sense.

I believe Rob Reiner was indeed responsible for his own death. But not because he treated his son badly. He spoiled his child. This is tragically common, so not really to his great discredit. And it is on the advice of experts: we are, they tell us, supposed to “love unconditionally,” and avoid punishments. Children need “self-esteem.” If they behave badly, you need to treat them better. The problem must be a “lack of self-esteem.”

This is clearly the path the Reiners followed. They were “progressive.” They respected the experts. They did all the latest and right things. None of this old-fashioned Biblical or Victorian nonsense about “spare the rod and spoil the child,” or "Whoever spares the rod hates their children." Indeed, in their minds, the experts did not go far enough.

The most likely result will be a hopeless narcissist. As the Bible warns, they will not have any clear guidance as to right and wrong. They will be without any self-discipline. And they will likely have a godlike conception of their own self-worth and desserts: a narcissist.

A child so raised will rarely appreciate having been pampered. Like the girl in the parable “The Princess and the Pea,” they will assume they deserve it, will have no tolerance for suffering of any kind, and so their demands will grow and grow. They will inevitably grow to the point where you cannot satisfy them, and then they will blame and condemn you for not providing. And maybe slit your throat in your sleep. 

It will also make them wholly dependent—on you, or on someone else, or on alcohol or drugs. A snowflake. If not these, then on any or all of the vices, for these are addictions in the same way: pride, envy, greed, sloth, gluttony, wrath, lust. See Hunter Biden.

Disturbingly, we have always raised girls this way. Perhaps this is because it is always easier and more pleasant to spoil a child. And the parents can traditionally assume that, in the end, the girl will be someone else’s problem. Perhaps too because spoiling will make her dependent, so more likely to marry.

Spoiling a child is of course more common in wealthy families, because it is easier for them to thoroughly spoil a child. But do not assume this. The British upper class traditionally sent their scions to spartan boarding schools to avoid this; or handed them over to a stern nanny. It is probably even more common in fatherless families, because mothers are more likely to pamper and spoil a child. Which explains a lot about crime in poor neighbourhoods. It is also common in families where the father is highly successful. Because his attention to his career can mean less time to attend to the children—this is left more completely in the hands of the mother, who is again liable to spoil. And he may compensate by throwing gifts at them.

This is a dramatic example of our current civilization seeming determined to run off a cliff. Perhaps the Reiner case, tragic as it is, will lead to some awakening.

Furry Children

Returning from abroad, it is striking how much Canadians seem to care about their pets. There seems to be an animal hospital, grooming salon, or pet store on every commercial block. A good portion of each WalMart flyer features products for pets. And people pamper their pets to what seems an absurd degree; walking them about in winter in little boots and coats.

You would almost think they were filling some unmet need...

Why such care for pets, at the same time there are so few children—and so many aborted?

It seems morally wrong to spend so much money and attention on an animal, when there are tents of homeless I the street—not to mention the conditions in poorer countries. It seems a perfect example of the principle of privatum bonum: evil consists in valuing the lesser over the greater good.

Consider walking your cosseted dog by a homeless encampment. You are making a statement: in your opinion, those people are worth less than a dog.

Excessive love for animals is not an indication of good character. Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian who apparently loved his dogs. Caligula made his horse a consul.

Narcissists love pets, and hate children. A pet can be fully owned; a child cannot. Perhaps for a time, but if they survive, they will grow up and leave your control. And come to criticize your deeds. Worse still, they are liable to outlive you. Better a pet: a pet is entirely dependent on you, and entirely in your power.

This is the dream of the narcissist: complete dominance over another being.

And if a narcissist does have children, they will treat their children the same way, or some of them. They will take the weakest, least impressive child as their pet, spoil them, and elevate them over other children largely in order to demean the strong ones. The strongest one, they will scapegoat. Either expresses their godlike power.

I say all this as myself a vegetarian and a pet lover. I do not mean to imply that all pet owners are narcissists. Often a pet fills a legitimate need for a lonely person, or one who missed the chance to have a child. Not to mention service catching mice, or guarding the home.

But when an individual starts to treat an animal like a human, and when a whole society starts to do so—alarm bells should ring.

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 Narcissists Speak

 

The audio conversation between the killer of Iryna Zarutska and his sister is available online. And it is striking that the killer shows no remorse. If he really did it in a fit of insanity, he should now be deeply remorseful for the poor innocent woman. Instead, he is concerned that the government must figure out what alien material is in his body that made him do this. The death of another human being just does not matter.

The killer of Charlie Kirk too showed no remorse in messages sent after the assassination. He was joking about it with his friends. No concern, even if he really thought Kirk’s views were dangerous, that innocent children had been left without a father. No sense of what the loss of Charlie Kirk might mean to the many who followed him.

And the same is alarmingly true for many people who have been openly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. Somebody is compiling a growing list of 50,000 who did so online. You have probably seen this yourself.

Can you imagine people celebrating openly when JFK was shot? Did anyone celebrate openly when MLK was shot? When John Lennon was shot? Even when Mussolini died, Churchill condemned the killing.

Something has changed.

What has changed is an epidemic of narcissism. There are a lot of them; now we see this plainly. They see other people as no more than objects. Only their own feelings matter. They have no empathy for anyone else.

The good news is, these events, the killings of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, are revealing them to us, and the general public sees what they are. And, even better, in many cases there has been instant pushback: people are losing their jobs and being ostracized for this.

Yes, this is “cancel culture”; but turnabout is fair play. It is reminiscent of the turning against Robespierre and the Jacobins in Revolutionary France.

The Motive Behind the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

I had been puzzled over the motive behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination. There was no sign of mental illness. There was no prior criminal record. The assassin was not some desperate loser like Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan whose only hope of fame was to kill someone famous. This guy had been an A student. Why did he kill Charlie Kirk?

Now it makes sense.

It turns out he had been living with a trans lover. Now it makes sense. He was necessarily part of the “LGBTQ community; although he was probably not sure himself which letter properly referred to himself. His “trans” “partner” initiated him into the trans ideology, and he had to embrace it to be in that relationship. And the trans ideology is in effect extreme narcissism: the idea that one’s personal will must override biology, mut override physical reality itself. This is in effect an assumption of godlike powers, the right to control reality. 

God naturally also has the right to kill; God kills all of us, after all, sooner or later. As God, the assassin could kill or destroy anyone who stood in his way.

Charlie Kirk denied he had the right or ability to control the world. So Charlie Kirk had to die.

Transgenderism is endemic in the culture now because he conviction that you are God is endemic in the culture now. A recent Facebook post--from a close acquaintance and in a sense a friend!-- expressed the common New Age sentiment. I encounter it at least monthly, it not daily, in Canada. I quote:

“We are divinity itself…we are here to take FULL responsibility for Ourselves, we are the ones we've been waiting for, we are here to save Ourselves…We are the manifestations of Source expressing and experiencing itself in the form of Infinite Many-ness. We are already ‘That.’ … There is no God outside of you. It is nonsense to worship that with you are a literal living, breathing expression of... It's a mind control program propagated to keep the masses feeling less then, keeping them disempowered and continuously beLIEving that ‘God’ or ‘the power’ is ‘out there’ - It's all nonsense, tools of control.”

Here is a whiff here of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism: “tat tvam asi,” “Brahman-atman.” But Vedantic Hinduism has been mostly superseded in India itself by devotional Hinduism: it has over the centuries lost the competition of ideas even there. It is of course incompatible with Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; and with Buddhism. 

And with Western paganism.

This is the sin the ancient Greeks called “hubris”: thinking you are a god. Bad news: it leads inevitably to madness and disaster on a social scale. It was also a crime in Athenian law; it was understood to lead automatically to the abuse of others. 

It is moreover the original sin with which Satan tempts Eve: “when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And it is Lucifer’s own original sin. From this sin all other sin emerges.

It is also an untenable claim. As Descartes pointed out in his Meditations, it is immediately obvious to us that it is false.

“If I were independent of every other existence, and were myself the author of my being, I should doubt of nothing, I should desire nothing, and, in fine, no perfection would be wanting to me; for I should have bestowed upon myself every perfection of which I possess the idea, and I should thus be God.”

And this, however much the narcissist might wish it, is transparently not so. We know we do not know everything; we know we make mistakes. We know we cannot fly. We know things happen to us that are unexpected, even against our will. 

Hence the inevitable retreat into bitterness, anger, depression, and hostility towards the universe. And to violence towards others.

There is another emotional issue with the belief that we are God: it leaves us alone in the universe. I recall Ramakrishna’s emotional objection to monism: “I want to taste sugar. I don’t want to BE sugar.” There is no possibility of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which is the entire point of existence. God is love, and now there is no one to love, and so no love, and no God.

We must pull out of this tailspin. 

The Tell-Tale Heart

 

I am not a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. To me, his writing is over the top—fear-jerking, cheap thrills.

But I just went through “The Tell-Tale Heart” with a student, and I think Poe may have a lead here on the true nature and cause of what modern psychiatry calls “paranoid schizophrenia.” 

In the story, the narrator is driven to psychosis by a guilty conscience. And not only guilt over murdering an old; he murders the old man in the first place out of guilt. A bad conscience made him imagine the old man saw into his soul and was judging him.

Poe does not tell us what he feels guilty about in the first place; but the clue is his insistence throughout the tale that he is not mad. He is more concerned about this than about being convicted of murder—he is resisting the obvious insanity defense. Why?

Out of pride. It is literally vitally important to him to convince the reader that his version of reality is the correct one. He must have the ability to impose his will on reality, and not concede to it.

In other words, a schizophrenic is a narcissist overwhelmed by his guilty conscience.

This is consistent with a mystery I read of a long time ago, in a book about Florida’s “death row.” It claimed that virtually everyone on death row seemed fully insane, delusional. Even though they were all judged sane and able to stand trial when they were convicted. And this included contract killers, mob killers—people who did it professionally, as a job. It seems implausible that such people were psychotic at the time they committed their crimes; a psychotic cannot plan well enough for a mob hit. 

Possibly the fear of death drove them mad; but most of us see death coming at the end of our lives, and do not go mad expecting it. It seems more likely the psychosis was provoked by having the chance to meditate over their former deeds.

M. Scott Peck, and Robert Fleiss, have both observed that narcissists when challenged can become psychotic. After all, their everyday assumptions, if examined closely, are already delusional. They all secretly think they are better than everyone, a Napoleon, or the god Siva, or the virgin Mary, or the promised Messiah. They will delude themselves with ideas of their own exceptional talents: like Poe’s narrator boasting of his extremely sensitive hearing, and of how clever he was in how he committed the murder and hid the body. This is how narcissists talk.

Shake them up enough, and the mask they wear to hide these assumptions from others slips. They openly declare themselves Napoleon, or Siva, or the Virgin Mary.

Paranoia comes with schizophrenia. Paranoia is itself a clear expression of egotism. It is the belief that everything is about you. Someone on the television is speaking directly to you. The CIA is trying to control you—obviously, they consider you that important. Everything is a message for you personally.

This is all the opposite of depression, which is caused by a sense of inferiority.

But in either case, the obvious and necessary cure is the same: to bring God and submission to God into the mix. 

The Minneapolis Church Shootings

You have no doubt heard, read, and seen, about another mass shooting; at a church in Minneapolis. The shooter was “trans.”

There is some dispute, as there always is with statistics. Some are saying transvestites are disproportionately likely to engage in such mass shootings. Others insist this is a myth. I submit that they are, and it is predictable that they will be.

Let me explain why.

First, anyone declaring themselves “trans” is a narcissist. It is an ego claiming the right and the ability to overrule the physical world: to decide its own sex in defiance of biology. This is equivalent to declaring yourself God—extreme hubris. Acting as the other sex also attracts attention, which the narcissist craves.

This is why there are suddenly so many transgenders, when the tendency was almost unheard of in North America or Europe a hundred years ago. It is because our childrearing has shifted to “unconditional love” and building “self-esteem,” encouraging narcissism.

Inevitably, this narcissism involves a desire to dominate those around you. You will insist on others submitting to your imposed reality; they are not to be left alone, but must be made to assent publicly to your claimed reality. They must not, for example, “dead-name” you. They must use your preferred pronouns, even when you are not present. This also establishes your command over the English language.

This is necessarily a spiritual or psychic dead end. In the end, reality around you will not bend to your will. This causes built up anger, frustration, despair: the symptoms classified by current psychiatry as “depression.” 

Unfortunately, psychiatry and any therapist you go to will not recognize the problem, will not give any advice, but just prescribe you pills for the reported symptoms: SSRIs to dull the despair and anxiety.

SSRIs, like alcohol, deaden emotions, and this includes empathy. They reduce anxiety by silencing the voice of conscience. So, while arguably helpful for true depressives, they exacerbate narcissism.

So you are more likely to act out your anger and frustration on those around you. You will want to punish the world for not submitting to you. You will especially want to influence and to harm children, because they seem most innocent and vulnerable—the domination is most complete. But you will also want to lash out at God, as he is your obvious rival for complete dominance.

It is all perfectly predictable, and we are seeing it again and again.

It is a criminal misdirection to call for a ban on guns. And it is a well-meaning but disastrous error to call instead for more funding for “mental health.” The mental-health complex is causing the problem. The problem is not transgenderism, as such, but narcissism, which may or may not be expressed in transgenderism; and the problem is prescribing SSRIs for narcissists.

A more religious society is the ultimate solution.

The Princess and the Pea

 Nobody gets the point of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Princess and the Pea.” When I Grok for the moral of the story, its search of the consensus on the Internet brings up “don’t judge by appearances.” 

That is, the princess does not look like a real princess, but she is.

This misses everything. In what sense is she a “real princess”?

Follow the text. The hero’s conflict is the inability to find a real princess. “He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted.”

Now, how hard is it to identify a real princess? A king will be the most prominent and well-known person in the country. His daughters will be princesses. Merriam-Webster: “princess: a female member of a royal family.” 

Finding a real princess is about as hard as asking one question to anyone in the next country over. If somehow you don’t already know.

Andersen is plainly telling us that “princess” here is meant metaphorically.

“Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.”

Would a king go out personally to open the city gate? No king would, for reasons of national security and his own safety from assassins, even before any other considerations. Let alone an elderly king, on a stormy night.

Andersen is telling us that “king” here is also metaphorical.

“It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.”

Obviously, no princess in the dictionary meaning of the word would be out wandering in a foreign country alone with no place to go in a rainstorm.

Let alone “down at heel.” The rain is running into the toes of her shoes and out the heel. In other words, her shoes are worn out so that the heel is lower than the toe, and both have holes. She is literally not “well-heeled,” “down at the heel.” She is not someone accustomed to luxury.

So by what authority is she a princess? By her own. She says so.

Next, the elderly queen then puts a pea on her bed, and covers it with twenty mattresses and twenty coverlets. This odd old queen clearly has no maids nor ladies in waiting.

Were this not yet enough to make matters clear, how plausible is it for anyone, however sensitive and accustomed to luxury, to feel a pea under twenty mattresses?

“Princess” here means someone who demands to be treated like a princess; someone who will complain no matter what is done for her or given to her. A narcissist.

The next question is why on earth would any man want to marry such a woman? Yet the prince does exactly that, indeed searches far and wide for such a woman; with his mother assisting in the hunt.

And the clue is that his father is a “king,” and his mother a “queen.” They are both also narcissists. Andersen is showing to us why abused children come to be magnets for abusive partners. The “prince” has grown up with the experience of those he loves being constantly self-important and demanding. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, the family is the “school of love.” Seeking for love, the poor man will seek the same thing he knows in a mate. It will look like affection to him. He will feel unworthy of anything else.

And so he is trapped in a lifetime of abuse.

There, that is a true story.

Why the Canadian Government Seems to Hate Canada

There is an old saying, “never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by simple incompetence.” And Justin Trudeau was certainly unqualified for his job as Canadian Prime Minister. Nevertheless, some pundit recently said that the destruction Justin Trudeau has wrought on Canada over the past ten years cannot be accounted for by mere incompetence. It must have been out of malice.

And Carney, boasted of being particularly well-qualified, seems to be continuing many of the same destructive policies. Notably the “elbows up” approach to negotiating with the US and Donald Trump: sheer suicide.

It sounds mad, of course: why would someone want to be Prime Minister in the first place, if they hate the country? Isn’t patriotism, love of country, the natural emotion? 

Yet we can see it is true, not only of Trudeau, or Carnet, but of the left generally. Not only in Canada, but across the developed world. The Canadian “woke” left show open contempt of Canada: its history, its customs, its values. It is the despised patriarchy, a “settler colonial state,” guilty of imagined genocide against First Nations, and of an imagined history of slavery. Statues of its founders must be pulled down, their names erased from public places. Trudeau asserts, “there is no Canadian mainstream.” If not evil, Canada is nothing at all.

Trudeau’s policies are the natural expression of this. Canada must be beaten down and suppressed. And the fact is, this is a sentiment shared by enough Canadians to keep him in power for ten years, then vote in his chosen successor. With similar leaders and electoral successes in other nations.

Where does this weird hatred for established institutions come from? Commentators commonly cite guilt over the past; but I dissent. There is actually little in our collective past to feel guilty about; the guilt is mostly falsified and manufactured. It cannot be the cause.

It is often also described as “self-hate.” I almost used the term myself, and balked. That is not so. Nobody can plausibly accuse Justin Trudeau of having too little ego. It is not a matter of hating oneself, but of scapegoating others, either whitey or men or one’s own ancestors, in order to make oneself seem more important, significant, and virtuous. 

 I think narcissism is again, as so often, the answer. Across the developed world, thanks to modern pop psychology, “building self-esteem,” “self-assertion,” and the doctrine of “unconditional love” in childrearing, we have deliberately bred several generations of narcissists.

If you put a narcissist in charge of anything he has not built himself, he or she will try to destroy it. Why? Because he did not build it. Destroying it makes it fully his, uniquely his possession, and ensures no one else can own it. 

This simple explanation can account for nearly everything that has gone wrong in the culture. It explains the seemingly self-destructive “woke” ad campaigns we have seen in recent years: executives and ad agencies seeming to deliberately alienate their consumers. Like Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney ads, or Jaguar’s bizarrely sexually ambiguous ads. It explains Hollywood movies going “woke” and alienating their audiences by deliberately tinkering with and altering the characters that built their “franchises.” It explains the many “legacy” comedy TV shows that seem to have stopped telling actual jokes and trying to be funny. It explains the outrageous media bias of recent years, grand old newspapers and news organizations destroying their credibility with the public. As David Burge put it, “The Left doesn’t create institutions. It infiltrates them, captures them, and then wears them like a skinsuit, demanding respect.”

If a narcissist has not created something--and narcissists are never creative--they will do their best to infiltrate, capture, destroy, and demand respect for themselves. Trudeau is a classic example. 

Not incidentally, this is also true of the family. If a narcissist has children, he or she will do their best, openly or secretly, to destroy them. Abortion is the most obvious example. It expresses their complete possession and dominance. They will also tend to destroy the legacy of their parents, as Justin has marred the memory of his father Pierre. Like the mobs pulling down statues of the founders. Like Kronos in Greek myth, to the extent they can, they first castrate their own fathers, then devour each of their children as they are born.

Can Canada escape collapse? Perhaps. There are signs of redemption south of the border, at least. Canada always wants to do whatever big brother is doing, with a lag of about seven years.

But it will take several generations to repair the damage.

Narcissism Is Not Depression

 

Psychiatry generally—and a friend of mine—tend to classify narcissistic traits as “compensation” for low self-esteem, and so classify them as “depressed.” And the preferred therapy is to flatter them and boost their ego.

Einstein is supposed to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting to get different results. This is the same delusion: expecting the same thing to get opposite results.

Someone with low self-esteem is ashamed of their self. They think they are not up to par. The last thing they will want to do is to draw attention; people will see their inadequacy. These are the wallflowers; the ones who will not readily talk about themselves. They will indeed compensate for their low self-esteem, but they will compensate by working hard at whatever they are asked to do, to prove themselves. They will be scrupulously moral, and always want the structure of rules. Rules will reassure them they are doing all right.

Conversely, someone who wants to draw attention to themself is suffering from too much self-esteem, not too little self-esteem. They are proud of themselves. They are suffering from low “other-esteem,” in two senses. That is, in their perception, others are not giving them the admiration they deserve. And they never thought much of others in comparison to themselves. So they are annoyed with the world around them, which had better learn to shape up. The world is not measuring up to their standards.

They will dislike moral standards and rules. They might, after all, be used against them.

You will hear much complaining from those with high self-esteem. You will hear much less from those with low self-esteem. They will not want to show their head above the parapets, for fear of being shot at.

Someone with low self esteem, feeling disappointed, will blame themselves and want to harm or kill themselves. Someone with high self-esteem, feeling disappointed, will want to harm or kill everyone else.

Most narcissists will not go that far, but watch out. They naturally want to destroy anything around them that is good or true or beautiful, that they cannot claim as their own.

And this is where the school shooters and assassins come from.

Carney the Dime Store Pychiatrist

 

Canadian PM Mark Carney has decided, it seems, that the way to handle Donald Trump is to praise him lavishly in public.

This is presumably based on the sophomoric assumption that Trump is a narcissist. Narcissists are notoriously susceptible to flattery.

Trump is not. Both Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott tried this in the VP stakes. Not only did they not get picked— but a few brief weeks for Ramaswamy, neither even made it into the administration.

Trump is just as immune from flattery as he is from insult. Showing, if it were not already obvious, that he is not a narcissist.

The last thing a narcissist would do is surround himself with subordinates who might steal the limelight. Instead, Trump picked a strong cabinet including charismatic people with their own followings: RFK Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rudio, Christie Noem, Tom Homan, Kash Patel. He is happy to give VP Vance prominence and camera time, for example in the public negotiations with Zelensky.

Narcissists are never creative thinkers; they fear the spontaneity that creativity requires. It means a loss of control. Trump is creative in government, full of new policy ideas, and able to speak for hours entertainingly without notes.

Narcissists also lack stamina. As soon as something seems hard, and they get a whiff of failure, they will quit. Trump is just the reverse of that, seemingly not even slowed down by political attacks, personal insults, legal attacks, deplatforming, attempted assassination, and electoral defeat.

Trump is the anti-narcissist. He seems to have absolutely no ego.

And Carney is showing himself to be painfully stupid.

Religion vs. Spirituality

 

These days, many people claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” What do they mean by that? It is an inherently vague claim, as though they are hiding something. However, this list of distinctions recently popped up in my Facebook feed:

Religion vs Spirituality 

• Religion: worships God. • Spirituality: encourages oneness with God. 

• Religion: God is outside of you. • Spirituality: God is within you. 

• Religion: separates people who have different beliefs. • Spirituality: unites people regardless of their beliefs. 

• Religion: teaches people to be afraid of hell. • Spirituality: teaches people to create heaven on Earth. 

• Religion: based on fear and restriction. • Spirituality: based on love and freedom. 

• Religion: feels like being a single drop in the ocean. • Spirituality: feels like being the entire ocean in a single drop. 

• Religion: based on others' experience. • Spirituality: based on your personal experience. 

This makes clear how sinister “spirituality” is. 

Taking the points in turn:

 “Oneness with God” can mean either of two things: dissolving selfhood in the divine oneness, as Buddhists hope to do; or deciding one is God. A later item on this list makes clear which is meant here: the Buddhist concept is of being a single drop lost in the ocean. The “spirituality” concept is that you are the ocean. This is the sin of hubris, which we sometimes today less properly call narcissism. “I am the entire ocean of being. No one else exists.”

Hubris leads to bad things.

The second point in our list is about the same. Christianity stresses that God is present within your soul or consciousness: Jesus knocks at the door of your heart. “The kingdom of heaven is within.” The distinction must be that to the spiritual, God is encompassed by your ego and your will, “within” in this more complete sense. God is you.

The third point is correct that religion “separates people who have different beliefs.” It unites people around common beliefs; but necessarily, so long as there is not one world religion, it excludes from this unity others who do not share those beliefs, to the extent that they do not. But spirituality not more unifying. It is everyone having their own unique beliefs. It is all alienation, lacking any unifying function. What happens when two people both believe they are God, and disagree? One must eliminate the other.

The fourth point claims that religion ‘teaches people to be afraid of hell.” According to religion, this is conceptually false. Everyone has a conscience; which is to say, everyone fears hell. Religion does not instill that. Every culture assumes the cosmos is ultimately just, and there is payback for immoral actions. The eastern faiths speak of karma; the pagan Greeks said even the gods are subject to Dike, cosmic justice, and the Erinyes will pursue an evildoer. Hell is universal, and pre-exists religion.

Religion emerges to offer escape from it. 

To blame religion for hell is like blaming your doctor for illness, and supposing you can avoid it by not seeing him.

Spirituality, point four goes on to say, seeks to “create heaven on earth.” Trying to do this has led historically to unimaginable atrocities. This is the Holodimir; this is the Great Leap Forward; this is the Nazi quest for the superman; this is the Killing Fields. In Biblical terms, this is the Tower of Babel and this is the antichrist. 

It sounds like a worthy goal. Why does it always go wrong?

Karl Marx’s favourite aphorism, according to intimates, was Mephistopheles’s line from Faust: “everything that exists deserves to be destroyed.” This is where millenarianism seems to lead. One looks at what exists, sees its imperfections, sees it does not fulfill one’s deepest desires, and so one must destroy it.

Point five: it is not entirely false to say that religion is based on “fear and restrictions.” The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the Bible says, and the word “religion” means restriction, “binding.” Admitting that God exists and is not us indeed imposes obligations: to seek and honour truth, to treat others with respect, to be humble and to admit our own limitations. Religions also generally impose ritual obligations. Where’s the fun in that?

The “freedom” spirituality offers is freedom from this: freedom from the need to honour truth, to treat others with respect, or to admit our limitations. Which is to say, it offers narcissism.

This is not real freedom. One quickly becomes a slave to one’s desires, all of which are incipent addictions. More alcohol, each time less satisfying. More sex, each time less satisfying. More power, each time less satisfying. True freedom is the freedom to follow one’s conscience. This is what religion offers.

To say spirituality is based on love is a lie. “I am the ocean; nobody else exists” is the opposite of love. Christianity, on the other hand, is explicitly based on love, and on the proposition that “God is love.” 

Love is not a transitory feeling, and not sex. Love is not what one feels towards a well-cooked piece of meat. True love is seeking the best for the other, which means a set of obligations towards the other. “If you love me, keep my commandments.” This is what spirituality rejects.

I am not sure what to make of the final claim, that religion is based on others’ experience. This denies the central tenet of Judaism, Christianity, and devotional Hinduism that we must each have a personal relationship with God. And it denies the central tenet of Buddhism, that theory is irrelevant, it is all about the personal experience of enlightenment. So what is meant here?

That religion builds on the experience of others. It offers tested techniques for achieving and sustaining that personal experience of the sacred, spiritual world. To reject that is equivalent to rejecting science or education, in favour of working it all out for yourself. What is the benefit?

Unless, of course, you are God. And can simply decree reality to be whatever you want. Gravity exists only at your sufferance.

My advice: if anyone tells you they are “spiritual, but not religious,” back away slowly, and stay away.

Angry Pierre

 

Andrew Lawton has just published a bio of Pierre Poilievre. Discussing it, he and Brian Lilley puzzled over the common claim by Trudeau and the Liberals, and by some commentators, that Poilievre is angry and mean. Even that this makes him ultimately unelectable. They feel the opposite. They find him friendly and cheerful.

So do I. And not just his supposed private persona. His public persona.  It is striking to me that Poilievre never shows anger, never loses his cool when attacked, however outrageously. He always responds with a smile, and, as often as not, with a joke. The self-control is astounding. 

Trudeau, by contrast, always seems angry. He mocks up anger even when I suspect he does not feel it. He calls opponents Nazis, “unacceptable,” foreign agents, and on and on.

How to account for this odd inversion of what seem to be plain, visible facts?

I think Harry Tuman said it best. 

When he was giving a speech, some listener shouted at him, “Give ‘em hell, Harry.” 

And Truman responded, “I never give them hell. I just tell the truth, and to them it sounds like hell.”

Poilievre is an extremely good communicator. By simply clearly stating the matter, and asking precise questions, he makes the other side look bad. It feels like hell to them. A narcissist will never blame themselves for an error or misdeed: instead, they blame the person who points it out. You blame the police; you blame the judge; you blame the jury; you blame the church; you blame conventional morality; you blame society as a whole.

It’s a childish response, but common. Especially, these days, on the left.

For Poilievre, it is a Catch-22; he is obliged to pretend to be wrong.

Roughly the same narcissistic impulse perhaps accounts for much Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

Trump too is a great communicator. That sounds like hell to the other side.

Trump is not usually blamed, like Poilievre, for seeming angry. That is because he really does indulge in anger at times. Trump does, unlike Poilievre, trade in insults and make extreme charges against his opponents. He can be brutal to an opponent. Therefore, they do not accuse him of anger.

But he does speak truth; he is always saying out loud what everyone is thinking. This is what the left fears about him; and so they accuse him of lying.

Poilievre’s words are more calculated than Trump’s, more like those of a conventional politician. He hedges and dodges: will not take a stand on the proposed new capital gains tax, because there is no political gain in it, and so forth. He speaks the truth, but more selectively. But unlike Trump, he does not show anger; is always gentlemanly about it. And so they accuse him not of lying or prevaricating, but of always being angry.

This is how gaslighting works. 

Whatever the narcissist says will be the opposite of the truth. 

One reason they do this is because they fear truth, and want to get as far away from it as possible. Another reason is that they recognize good traits in others, and immediately envy them. They must appropriate them to themselves instead, and insist they are not found in the other. 

The takeaway is that we are currently governed by petulant children with weapons.

Speak No Evil

 

“Denny went to Catholic school; Denny had tattoos. Even though the Catholics frowned on tattoos, Denny did not seem to resent this.”

This paraphrased from an unpublished manuscript I have been asked to look at.

Something is wrong here. Not just that the Catholic Church does not consider tattoos sinful. Suppose they did. Isn’t the rational response, for Denny, to wonder whether his tattoos were a good idea, and seek to justify them to himself; rather than trying to decide whether he can still tolerate in silence his teachers, his colleagues, presumably his parents who sent him to a Catholic school. and the accumulated wisdom of his ancestors for the past two thousand years?

Noting that nothing in religion is compulsory: nobody is making him do anything. His personal freedom is not at issue.

This seems to illustrate the narcissism and intolerance of our current postmodern milieu. 

You can see how this attitude might lead to violence; might lead to assuming the right to shoot up the school for not conforming to your wishes.

We see it spreading to matters other than morals. Now you can condemn your doctor for suggesting that you are morbidly obese, and your health is in danger if you don’t take steps. That’s “fat shaming.” How dare he?

How soon before doctors dare not diagnose cancer, for fear of prosecution?

The Laugh Test

 

In a recent Club Random interview, John Cleese and Bill Maher make the important observation that psychopaths have no sense of humour. Nor do sociopaths or narcissists—I suspect it is all the same ball of wax. This is not exactly true; a psychopath will laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel. But they are utterly literal-minded, and so cannot get irony, satire, or even puns.

Then Bill Maher ruins it by citing Donald Trump as an example of this.

It is true that I have never seen Trump laugh in public. But then, try to think of any other prominent politician you have seen laughing. I can’t, with one exception. Kamala Harris.

And she gets raked over the coals for it. People cite it as unlikeable. This may be a perfectly adequate explanation why politicians do not laugh in public. I guess people see it as frivolous, when there are important issues on the table; and perhaps as being out of control of oneself; not wanted in a leader.

Even aside from this, it is reasonably possible to fake a laugh or titter when one really does not get the joke. Accordingly, we cannot use laughing as a measure.

 But there is another, better measure: can they tell a joke, especially extemporaneously? This is a surer test. Even a canned joke, to work, has to have the right timing; being able to judge that shows a sense of humour. And, confounding the original laugh test, the best comedians often do not laugh on stage. It generally spoils the joke, by pointing out the irony and telegraphing it.

By this measure, Trump scores especially high. He can do a two-hour standup routine without notes. Pierre Poilievre seems pretty funny off the cuff.

Those who hate Trump, on the other hand, inevitably do not get his jokes. They always take him absurdly literally. They are the narcissists.

Who is conspicuously not funny, especially off script? I say Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden. Biden’s idea of a joke seems to be a mere insult: “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” And he prefaces every lie with the phrase “not a joke”—implying that he does not understand what a joke is. He thinks it is the same as a lie. 

I cannot picture Trudeau ever attempting a joke. I don’t think he could do it even scripted.

QED.

Narcissists and psychopaths are literal-minded, Cleese and Maher go one to agree, because they are nervous; nervous people are afraid of anything unexpected. They jump at shadows. They will therefore fear, resist, and deny the reversal of expectations that is every joke’s premise and punch line. 

“What an elephant was doing in my pyjamas, I’ll never know.”

That they fear the unexpected disproves the claim of current psychology that a psychopath has no conscience. What else do they fear? Truth being told and being exposed is what they fear; they would not fear it if they did not know they were lying and doing wrong. 

This is a life lesson worth remembering: beware people who do not laugh, except at slapstick, and are not witty.

And definitely do not elect them to high office.

The Emperor's New Clothes

 

In teaching “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” as a way to introduce Western thought to an Asian student, pulled some materials from the web. They identify two themes: “pride can make you do foolish things,” and “children always tell the truth.”

An example of how putting truths in parable form means only “those who have ears to hear, hear.”

Whoever extracted these lessons from the story obviously saw it from the point of view of the emperor. I suspect this identifies them as a narcissist. And this first moral is indeed the lesson they needed to learn: pride is their chief fault.

But as for the second supposed moral, “children always tell the truth,” this suggest someone incapable of seeing children as human beings.

This would indeed be consistent with narcissism. Narcissists see their children as pets, as toys, and will either decide they are perfect, little lapdogs to be pampered, or make them scapegoats, vermin, bad no matter what they do.

In Andersen’s story, only the emperor is clearly driven by pride. Those in the crowd are more plausibly  driven by humility—of course they cannot see the fine clothes, they are not worthy, but they are not going to contradict their betters who can.

That this commentator cannot imagine from their point of view again suggests narcissism.

The moral of the story is to think for yourself, and not be easily influenced by those around you. To avoid what Francis Bacon called “the idols of the tribe.” 

Narrow is the gate that leads to salvation.

Fairy Tale Princesses are a Fairy Tale

 

When the average person thinks of fairy tales, they think of “Disney princesses.” And until the recent woke remakes, the basic plot was always to find true love, to link up with Prince Charming. Isn’t this what “fairy tale” is supposed to mean?

However, real fairy tales, as collected by the Grimms or Charles Perrault, rarely feature either princes or princesses.

They do usually have a king’s daughter as their protagonist, and probably feature a king’s son. But that is invariably how they are referred to, “king’s daughter” and “king’s son.” Never “princess.”

The point being made is that royal identity is a metaphor. It refers to narcissism: people who think of themselves as better than others, as kings.

In “Little Thumbkin,” all the tiny ogres sleep in crowns.

The clearest example is Hans Cristian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.” The entire point of the tale is to define “real princess.” Those who were literal royalty were commonly not. Instead, an obviously poor homeless girl appears at the palace gate during a thunderstorm, water pouring out of her heels. “Down at heel.”

What made her a princess is her ability to be irritated and complain about a night spent on twenty soft mattresses.

A king’s daughter is the child of a narcissist. Suffering a narcissistic parent, who cares only for themselves, the children are anything but princesses. They struggle just to survive, like Cinderella, Snow White, Belle, or Rapunzel. The wealth or status of the parent is no help to them.

The original point of fairy tales is to give children an education in morals and life. This is what they had in preliterate times and places, when children did not read nor go to school; this, and the Sunday sermon. They are told by fairy godmothers—a godmother being a person deputed at baptism to raise a child in morals and truth, in the faith, and to protect them should the parents fail to do so.

Accordingly, many are about bad parenting, and seek to rescue the heroine from it. Usually bowdlerized delicately by making the villains step-parents.

According to Ursula Le Guin, who is wise in the ways of story, fairy tales must always be in the past tense—as they are—because present tense in narrative evokes discontinuity: nobody can know what happens next. Fairy tales are meant to restore a sense of security and the ultimate rightness of things in a child torn by the everyday madness of a dysfunctional family. They are written in “third person omniscient”: from God’s point of view.

Not the Disney versions, woke or pre-woke, which miss the point entirely. The Grimm or Perrault versions, as collected from the wild.

They are healing at any age.