The Undermining Madness

 For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled,
and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.

- Luke 14:11

Whenever a person quotes a Bible verse as a maxim, there is a very natural tendency among those who hear him to regard his words as mere moralizing that have no immediate bearing on physical reality.  The effect is similar to the effect on people who hear exhortations to quit smoking or to start exercising because of the bad consequences that will come someday - someday... - if they don't.  But I have argued in several places on this blog (such as here) that the "someday" consequences of moral choices begin right now, the moment the choices are made, and that they can be observed and empirically measured just as physical phenomena in the natural world can be observed and measured.  Therefore it should be possible to observe objectively the outworkings of the Divine humiliation of a person the moment that person begins to exalt himself.  

I have also argued that these outworkings (known in this blog as the outworkings of damnation) are now being seen in the United States of America, and that these outworkings can be objectively traced.  The United States is a nation that made itself great by oppressing and/or dispossessing people who were poor and nonwhite.  But the United States has gone through periods of awakening of conscience in which many of its citizens sought to right the wrongs that were done by the dominant culture against other people.  The efforts of these awakened people were, however, opposed and often thwarted by those members of the dominant culture who wanted to remain dominant at all costs.  Thus the nation endured a civil war in which Southern plantation owners were economically wiped out because they had built their wealth on the backs of slaves.  These Southerners refused to learn the moral lesson of their suffering, and went on to try to recreate as much of their old supremacy as possible.  So the United States had to go through a second struggle of conscience, namely the 1960's Civil Rights struggle.  However, the gains won during that struggle were again seen by certain members of the dominant culture as an unacceptable threat to their dreams of domination at all costs.  For the Civil Rights struggle sought to create a nation (and eventually a world) in which everyone on earth shares the earth on a basis of equality.  Those members of the dominant culture who felt threatened by such a world therefore engineered a social movement designed to undo all the progress made by the Civil Rights struggle in order to create a world in which one group of people gets to Make Itself Great Again by trashing everyone else on earth.

And so we come to the present time in which Donald Trump has lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by almost five million votes and counting, yet both he and his supporters refuse to concede his loss.  The reactionary social movement which put Trump into office in 2016 has been over 40 years in the making.  Some of its heavyweight architects include people like Rupert Murdoch (media mogul and owner of News Corporation and the Fox TV network), Ralph Reed (chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and former president of the "Christian Coalition"), Ronald Reagan, and the Koch family.  Some of its most influential mouthpieces include Wally George (Blast from the past! Anyone remember him?), Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson.  Donald Trump, therefore, is not just a great big problem, but he is a symptom of a much larger problem.

Rupert Murdoch has famously called Donald Trump an idiot.  Note that Murdoch's exact words included an unprintable expletive before the word "idiot", thus signaling Murdoch's extreme distaste and disgust for Trump.  But Rupert Murdoch must realize that Trump is a creation of Murdoch and of his media empire.  Has Trump played fast and loose with reality and truth?  So has Murdoch, whose media outlets have lied about everything from anthropogenic climate change to the effect of bovine growth hormone on humans who drink milk to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and on and on.  And not only has Murdoch created a head of state whose relationship with the truth is "relaxed" (to quote one of Trump's fellow Republicans), but Murdoch's media empire has created an entire population whose relationship with the truth is similarly relaxed.  In fact, it is so relaxed that the sole basis on which these people choose what they will believe is whether or not a statement of fact makes them feel good or grants them their hearts' desire.  That desire is for supremacy at all costs.  Without these people, there would have been no President Trump.

But reality does not make concessions, which is why, according to the Associated Press, in the 376 U.S. counties with the highest number of new COVID-19 cases per capita, 93 percent of registered voters voted for Trump.  Also note that although Trump tried to use his recovery from COVID-19 to assert that the pandemic is no big deal, an analysis by Business Insider reveals that the treatment he received would have cost the average American $650,000 out of pocket.  That means that a lot of diehard true believers in Trump are going to die soon.  And the attitude of Trump supporters concerning the pandemic is a symptom of their self-destructive attitude toward reality itself.

For it can be argued that malignant narcissism is a progressive disease with an ultimately terminal outcome in 100 percent of cases.  The first stage begins with callous disregard of the rights of others and of our duty toward others.  The last stage begins with flagrant, self-destructive disregard of reality itself.  This is illustrated beautifully in a paper I read a few months ago titled, "Why Tyrants Go Too Far: Malignant Narcissism and Absolute Power."  The abstract to this paper begins thus: "This article explores the puzzling behavior of tyrants who undermine themselves once in power..."  The author, Betty Glad, outlines the following progression: 

Stage 1: A narcissism which aspires for greatness, yet which is held in check by the reality of the challenges of climbing a ladder of success.  

Stage 2: The diminishing of the narcissist's ability to test reality once he reaches his desired level of supremacy.  

Stage 3: The narcissist's acting out his fantasies of greatness instead of grounding his actions in a reasonable response to reality.  

Stage 4 (the final stage): The narcissist's crashing and burning against that cold, hard reality which he refused to acknowledge.  

I would argue that Trump and his supporters are now somewhere between stages 3 and 4.  I would like therefore to use an example from my own personal history to sketch how I think the Trump presidency might end.  

As I mentioned way back in the early days of my blogging, I used to be a member of a religious cult (or if you want to be euphemistic, an "abusive church") known as the Assemblies of George Geftakys.  George Geftakys was, of course, a classic malignant narcissist.  And as such a narcissist, he soon passed into stage 3 of the progression I outlined above.  That stage for him consisted of pretending that he and his family were the picture of perfection even though he was forcing young women in his assemblies to become his personal secretaries so that he could force himself on them sexually, and even though he knew that his oldest son was a wife-beater and child abuser.  His crash-and-burn phase came when the sins of his family became widely known to the members of the cult he had built.  What is interesting is what came afterward, when many members of the cult confronted George, and eventually forced his excommunication.

These members (many of whom became ex-members like me) thought that by confronting George and his henchmen we could get them to acknowledge their wrongdoing and repent.  THAT NEVER HAPPENED.  For it would have required George to admit that his whole life as he had presented it to us had been a fraud.  Instead, he and his wife moved to an upscale retirement community in the California Inland Empire, where he continued to advertise himself as a great missionary and pastor, adding to this that he was a native of Greece even though he had told us that he was born in the U.S.A.  To the very end of his life, George continued to live in a bubble of self-aggrandizing fantasy.  Given the parallels between the demise of George Geftakys and the current state of Donald Trump and his supporters, I expect something similar to happen now.  We should prepare ourselves to deal with it.

P.S. If you want to hear more about George's final crash-and-burn phase, click here.

Living Through National Decompensation

For the last three months, the main focus of the posts on this blog has been the psychological examination of the public American persona. That persona is characterized by a certain pathology, which I have identified as narcissistic personality disorder. According to the Fourth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association, the signs of this disorder are as follows:

“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

(3) believes that he or she is 'special' and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

(4) requires excessive admiration

(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others

(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.”

According to the site from which I copied this description, there should be added a tenth characteristic, namely, an exaggerated desire to mete out justice.

How does the behavior of the United States, both historical and recent, stack up against this diagnosis? Let's look at a few characteristics.

Grandiosity and Requiring Excessive Admiration: We would like to believe that we are and have always been the greatest nation on earth, and that we are the most exceptional people on earth. This, by the way, is not just a feature of American narcissism, but of Anglo-American narcissism. Therefore, in an odd irony, one of the greatest champions of American exceptionalism is Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who became an American citizen so that he could buy up most of American electronic and print media. This is also the myth that has been preached from the pulpits of mainstream white America's churches from the nation's founding until now.

Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love: I can't speak for the “ideal love” part, but this nation certainly seems to be preoccupied with the other fantasies, as seen in the movies we make and watch, the celebrities we exalt, and the supposed cleverness, genius and ingenuity of which we constantly boast. This preoccupation is also seen in the constant pushing of the Horatio Alger myth that anyone in this country can get rich, and that this is something we should all want.

Entitlement, Exploitation and a Lack of Empathy: In order to exalt ourselves in our own eyes, we have abased much of the rest of the world, to the point of dispossessing people of their lands, robbing them at gunpoint, murdering them and enslaving and oppressing them. Yet we have felt entitled to do so, and have been genuinely surprised by the resulting hostile “blowback.” We can't for the life of us figure out why our enemies are fighting us, except that in some vague way, “they hate our freedoms.” Unable (or actually unwilling) to comprehend our enemies, we ascribe their motivations to an inchoate and unnameable “savagery.”

Envy, Arrogance and an Exaggerated Desire to Mete Out Justice: This explains the peculiar American tendency to justify its aggression and oppression of the world by casting itself as the world's “policeman.” This is the motivation for a few lines of Francis Scott Key's “Star Spangled Banner”:

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation.
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

That Key's hymn is a direct contradiction of the New Testament is a fact that seems to have escaped a few American “Christian patriots,” but that is a subject for another time.

Certain writers have described the narcissistic personality as a “grandiose self” manufactured by a person who is actually very fragile on the inside. The grandiose self is the compensatory mechanism of such a person. However, when that grandiose self is effectively contradicted by outside events, the person who constructed that self is liable to suffer an episode of decompensation.

In a previous post, I began to describe what American national decompensation might look like. In future posts I will elaborate on that description, and will begin to describe the moral choices facing a person living in our decompensating society. My point of view will be Biblical as well as technical, and for every finger I point outward, there will be three pointing back at me – which is to say that the posts will be more of a personal diary than an analysis.

Meanwhile, the literature I have read indicates that two signs of decompensation are a worsening of narcissistic behaviors combined with a diminishing of sound judgment and cognitive function.  Here then are a few signs of American national decompensation for you to chew on: first, the U.S. is busy building the infrastructure needed to become a major oil and gas exporter, even though most independent analyses of U.S. oil and gas reserves and production show that shale and tight oil production is at peak or will peak by 2016. Why are we doing this? Because certain members of our ruling class want to continue to live in the fantasy that this is the greatest nation on earth, even though reality contradicts this fantasy. (See this also.)  Another sign of decompensation is our continual and escalating search for any nation we can start a fight with. Narcissists have a great deal of inward hostility, and they need a target on whom to dump it. This narcissistic nation, having long used the poor and the nonwhite within its own borders as its toilet bowl, is looking to build more outhouses in the Mideast and Eastern Europe (i.e., the Ukraine).

Pogo's Mirror

This past week, a co-worker and I were discussing the sorry state of world affairs. He had mentioned to me the fact that members of wealthy school districts in our town were attempting to forbid inter-district transfers of students, thus limiting the ability of poorer students to attend better-funded schools. That got me talking about clinical narcissism as a useful lens by which to examine the behavior of the wealthy in the United States – especially regarding the tendency of the wealthy elites, to project their own pathology onto the poor, and especially people of color among the poor.

His responses were agreeable for the most part, but one thing caught my notice, namely, the names he mentioned when he began to name who he thought these elites were. Names like the Bilderbergs and the Rothschilds were mentioned. As I listened to him, I thought (but did not say), “Why don't you also mention the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission?” As I thought about the names he mentioned, I thought about the tendency which is common among many Americans to blame their increasing miseries on some extremely secret cabal of anonymous elites who want to establish some sort of anti-capitalist, anti-free market, anti-“Christian”, anti-American “New World Order.”

A few days later, I found some studies published in 2014 by Oxfam (here and here) which describe the ongoing, drastic, and unrestrained concentration of the world's wealth into a rapidly shrinking number of hands. One of the most striking conclusions of these statements is that the world's 85 richest people now own the wealth of half of the world's population. And according to a 2014 Guardian article (, “the wealth of the 1% richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion, or 65 times as much as the poorest half of the world...” Indeed, the world's richest 1 percent will own more than all the rest of the world by next year, 2016. The Oxfam studies also state that “Wealthy elites have co-opted political power to rig the rules of the economic game, undermining democracy...”

What does “ownership” mean in this context? I believe it means possession of control of most of the economic flows of the global economy – possession which is backed up by a combination of private and government power. As an example, if you need software to enable a computer to perform certain tasks, and if that software can be had from only one vendor, and if that vendor allows you access to the software only under the terms of a legally enforceable rental agreement which prevents you from owning the software outright, then that vendor's claim on you counts as an element of the vendor's “wealth.” To put it another way, if the only way you can have food is by growing the food on land that is enforceably claimed by another, and if in order to grow your food, you must pay rent or become a slave to this other, then the claim this other person has on you counts as an element of his “wealth.” Now let's say that this “other” wants to own all the land on Earth, and you can get some idea of the predicament that the “non-owners” find themselves facing. Of course, you can decide that you are too poor to enjoy the luxury of computing, in which case the software vendor “loses money.” But it's kind of hard to voluntarily decide that you're too poor to eat.

Now, these uber-“owners” – are they some secret, secretive, anonymous, unidentifiable cabal? Not hardly. The researchers who produced the Oxfam studies I have cited used data from the Forbes Magazine's annual list of the world's richest 500 people. Here is the 2014 list, if anyone is interested.  Do you want to know who benefited from (and most likely paid for) the Citizens United verdict handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court? Do you want to know who bought and paid for the current crop of U.S. representatives and senators, along with state governors and legislators, judges (both Federal, State, county and municipal), news outlets and other media, school boards, and other instruments of power? Do you want to know who is responsible for the hard turn toward fascism now occurring in the United States and its English-speaking vassals, and in Europe?  Or who is now pushing the governments of the U.S. and Europe to ratify the TTIP?  According to Oxfam and Forbes Magazine, you don't have to look for secret handshakes, occult signs or mumbled passwords. The responsible parties are hiding in plain sight.

Why then can't most of us see them? Why do we go looking for secret cabals instead? As far as those of us in the English-speaking world, I think the answer is twofold. First, most of us are taught from birth to admire these people. Second, we are taught to emulate them. The teaching is oft subtle, oft blatant, and ever-present. And it has a definite effect. I am thinking just now of the book Every Man's Battle by Stephen Arterburn, et al., in which the authors spoke of how much American media are saturated by sexual content (because sex $ell$!), and how constant exposure to sexually saturated media destabilizes American morality. Arterburn is an author who writes for the American evangelical market. But Arterburn and company probably haven't thought too much about how much more American media are saturated with appeals to our lust for money and material possessions, nor has he thought about how much money-lust has penetrated the mainstream American evangelical church. Consider charlatans like Dave Ramsey and his “Financial Peace University” (“Live like nobody else now, so you can live like nobody else later!”), or the Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson, whose book is a case of one of the few times the American evangelical church started a fad that went secular instead of becoming swept up in fads that started secular and went religious.

But it gets even better, as we look beyond American evangelicalism to see how secular America teaches us to want to get rich. Think of the impact of game shows on the American psyche. Those who are old enough to remember will probably say that Let's Make A Deal was one of the finest examples of selling greed to hapless children parked in front of a TV screen. Consider all the rags-to-riches stories to which we are exposed in this country. Consider all the gossip magazines next to the checkout stands of most supermarkets. Consider the pervasiveness of state lotteries. The lotteries are especially interesting, in that they are the most blatant example of a zero-sum game (namely, if one person wins, everybody else loses). And the large numbers of people who buy lottery tickets show that many of us are not much better than drowning rats in a laboratory psychology experiment, who, when we see one rat being rescued out of a vat full of thousands of rats, will each struggle to make sure that we are the next rat to be rescued by the experimenters, rather than making other arrangements for our own rescue to the extent that we can.

In short, we are taught to be greedy, and to look at the world's richest people, not as the rotten people they actually are, but as people who have “made it” – people who inhabit a place we'd like to arrive at some day. They become for us the embodiment of the “fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love” which have been instilled in us. Rather than being revolted by these people or their methods, we have become like them – in kind, though not in degree. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The Locus of Instability

After I wrote my last post, it occurred to me that I had completely neglected three men who comprise what is quite possibly the strongest example in recent memory of provoking national narcissistic rage. I am thinking of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden. These three men were responsible for leaking (Manning and Snowden) and publishing (Assange) national secrets of the United States and Great Britain related to the efforts of those nations to rule the world. Manning blew the whistle on American war crimes committed in the name of the “War On Terror.” Assange had the temerity to publish the documents leaked by Manning. Snowden revealed the existence of the “Five Eyes” spy program by which the United States, in conjunction with the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, conducted electronic espionage and cyber-sabotage against almost every non-English-speaking government on earth.

These men did nothing worse than tell the truth about the aims, motives, and policies of the people in power in the United States and its “allies.” Yet the truth they told, combined with the response from those in power, reveals much about the pathology of those in power. In the aftermath of their revelations, these men became the targets of the sort of rage that narcissists express when they've been exposed, after their carefully constructed image of perfection and sainthood has been punctured. In this case, ad hominem attacks (“These men are traitors! Enemies of freedom! Sympathizers with terrorists!”) were combined with ad baculum attacks: “And as soon as we get our hands on these men, we will throw them IN JAIL!!! FOREVER!!!”

The truth they told also reveals the way the rest of the world is viewed by the holders of concentrated privilege in the United States and its English-speaking allies. It appears that in the eyes of the “Five Eyes,” there is a “hierarchy of whiteness and privilege.” It is thus not surprising that the “Five Eyes” should watch China, Latin America (where, for instance, the NSA spied on the Brazilian oil firm Petrobras), and the Arab nations. But the “Five Eyes” were also gazing on the citizens and governments of Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Germany. What was their motivation? I believe it was to gather intelligence in order to guide U.S. attempts to open the economies of these countries (and of the European Union as a whole) to capture by American and British-owned multinational corporations in the name of free-market neoliberalism. From a business standpoint, such a goal makes sense. But what kind of pathology makes a person want to own and control all the economies of the world? The revelations of NSA spying showed the non-English European nations in yet one more way that they were not the “golden children” of the pathological family headed by the United States.  The white privilege promulgated by the holders of concentrated privilege in the United States is therefore not even for all white nations. Rather, the holders of that privilege want the rest of us to regard it as the sole possession of the English-speaking white nations. 

And within the United States, the masters of white privilege are unwilling to share it even with all of the white citizens of the United States.

When one considers the expressions of the “white privilege” being pushed in this country, one can see clearly why that privilege is not intended even for all white people in this country. Consider the “patriarchy” movement now being pushed by many conservative, Republican-leaning, white male evangelical leaders. Or consider the violent underpinnings of the “men's rights movement.”  Or consider the “manosphere” which harbors such movements, and which provided inspiration to Eliot Rodger's shooting spree in 2014. (See this and this.)  The manosphere is also the source of death threats against women who have publicly objected to the portrayal of violence against women in online video games.   Consider also the effect of Republican support for gun rights on domestic violence in this country , or Republican obstructionism in drafting domestic violence legislation for the military, or the conservative talking heads and politicians who want to repeal female suffrage. I could go on and on.

In other words, it has become quite clear that the holders of white privilege in this country intend that the chief holders of that privilege be white, English-speaking men. Therefore, it is not surprising that they are very frightened and angry now at the emergence of a multipolar world in which one person or group will not be able to lord themselves over another, but in which people will have to rely on politeness in order to get on with their fellow human beings - even within their own homes. One recent expression of that anger is the Tea Party, “a reflection of enormous anger, primarily of white conservative men. They are older, better educated, and economically better off than most Americans...” Many of the outbursts of violent or threatening rage among white Americans are a reflection of “whites' fears that this country and the world are on the verge of losing its Anglo-Saxon domination.”  (Clio's Psyche, June 2011)  

The formal expressions of that rage and fear come from the wealthy and the politically connected, whereas the trashiest expressions come from people like the man whose picture adorns this week's post. Either way, the voices of that rage and fear are not only white, but overwhelmingly male. They long for the "return" of a world which never quite existed, a world in which they imagine they could act like kings without regard to the effect of that kingship on others.  Those who subscribe to the brand of white privilege I have described want the heavy costs of that privilege to be borne, not just by non-white people, or non-English speakers, but by their own women and children. This is hardly the way to construct an enduring society.  It is, however, a good way to construct a society that self-destructs.

When The Ferris Wheel Flies Apart

“Decompensation” is what happens when a narcissistic individual or entity is no longer able to maintain the grandiose self which is its chosen identity. The Anglo-American identity which the United States has constructed for itself is just such a “grandiose self”: a “chosen nation,” a “city on a hill,” “the greatest nation on earth” because it consists of a race “predestined” to supreme greatness by “Providence.” In the name of that “Providence” it has conquered the North American continent, nearly exterminating the original inhabitants in the process, and it has managed to subjugate most of the rest of the world. In that process, moreover, the privileged among the citizens of the United States have come to believe that they deserve the special privileges they enjoy, having been predestined to these privileges; and that the nations and peoples who have been subjugated “deserve” the treatment which this country has inflicted on them, being “predestined” to that treatment. Throughout its history, there have been spokesmen for this country who have boasted that the United States is a “Christian” nation, “one nation under God.” Yet U.S. treatment of other nations – especially non-European nations – has been anything but a model of the Golden Rule, embodying instead the slogan, “Do unto others before they do unto you.” Hence the need to invoke a Calvinist predestination to justify this country's treatment of other nations and peoples.

The identity which the U.S. has constructed is inherently unsustainable. It is now being threatened by forces beyond the control of this country and its privileged members. Some of those forces were identified in last week's post. The United States has become used to economic, political and military arrangements which allow four percent of the world's population to control almost all of the economic flows on this planet, and to enjoy over 40 percent of the world's resources. The rest of the world has for a long time regarded this a rather distasteful and burdensome arrangement, and has in the last few years begun to do something about it. Weekly – sometimes daily – new challenges to U.S. hegemony are now arising as nations seek to reassert control over their own affairs. The most recent contender is Greece, where the Syriza party, described as “far-left” by Western media, holds a lead over the ruling party days before the Greek general elections on the 25th of this month.  If the Syriza party gains a decisive number of seats in the Greek parliament, a Greek exit from the Eurozone would certainly be a possibility, as Syriza have made it clear that they want a drastic revision of economic austerity conditions imposed on them by the EU and the IMF. The beginning of a breakup of the EU would have serious implications for U.S. economic hegemony. Also, a number of European nations have been making noises within the last two weeks about breaking with the U.S. over the issue of sanctions against Russia.

But there is a more compelling reason than geopolitics for the unsustainability of the current American identity. This country has exhausted its base of many natural resources, just as the industrialized world has exhausted a critical mass of its natural resource base. The current and deepening depression in the price of oil, metals, and other commodities is a symptom of an anemic economy falling down after a period of overexertion. This fainting is a sign that the exertion was itself unsustainable. The German Energy Watch Group, which published supply outlook reports for oil, coal and uranium in 2007 and 2008, also published a comprehensive update to its forecasts in 2013. That update, titled, Fossil and Nuclear Fuels - The Supply Outlook, maintains that global production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2008, and that global extraction of all non-renewable energy sources will peak right around now. Concentrated energy sources are the lifeblood of an industrial economy, so the peak and decline in extraction means the inevitable decline of the global industrial economy. This means that a lot of people who were winners will now become losers; a lot of people who were used to being in control of things will lose control.

The various nations are being affected unevenly by this contraction, depending on whether they are producer nations who still have valuable concentrations of resources or importer nations who have largely used up their resources. The U.S. is an importer nation. A loss of hegemony by the U.S. at a time of energy and resource contraction means that U.S. consumers will increasingly find themselves cut off from access to remaining stocks of raw materials which exist in distant nations and are controlled by those nations. Those nations may be temporarily hurt by the current drop in demand for their materials, yet the fact that they can still produce things of value will enhance their long-term survival prospects compared to nations which import most of their resources and finished products. Thus the long-term standard of material wealth in a nation like the United States will inevitably and irreversibly decline.

What does this mean in plain language? This nation has built its identity as a “special and chosen people” on a foundation of having lots of stuff and being able to tell lots of people what to do. That identity is about to take a huge hit. When that happens, many of us will get to watch decompensation in action.

Of this decompensation, it has been written that “The stress of aging or illness and the attendant loss of beauty, strength, or cognitive function can undermine narcissistic fantasies of invulnerability and limitless power. It may lead to an empty, depleted collapse on the one hand or a frantic search for compensatory thrill-seeking on the other, both of which are described in the classic “midlife crisis”. Later-life crises, such as one experienced on the eve of retirement, also may reflect narcissistic pathology.” (See this and this.) In other words, the loss of ability to maintain a grandiose self provokes a crisis. What does that crisis look like? I am not a psychologist, and I don't usually make predictions, but I'd like to suggest a few possibilities.

I propose that there may be two phases to decompensation. Both phases are characterized by scapegoating and projection, but the nature of that scapegoating changes from the first phase to the next. In the first phase, scapegoating takes the form of “enemy creation” in order to justify not only the exploitation of groups or individuals targeted for exploitation, but also to distract from the dysfunctional dynamics experienced by those who are in long-term association with the narcissist. The scapegoating is an ever-present feature of the narcissist's interactions, but when his grandiosity is endangered, the scapegoating may kick into overdrive as the narcissist seeks a defense from the threat he perceives. This may well explain the evolution of the U.S. “War on Terror” from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the present day. The takeaway message of the “War on Terror” is that because the United States is a “special” nation, there are enemies out there who “hate our freedom” and want to attack us. This then becomes the primary focus of our attention, and we are trained to ignore our own dysfunctional treatment not only of others, but of the marginalized members of our own society. This also plays into two of the symptoms of narcissism described in the DSM-IV: “...believes that he or she is 'special' and unique...,” and “...believes that others are envious of him or her...”

In this first stage of decompensation, scapegoating then consists of “enemy creation” the purpose of which is to promote the cohesion of the dysfunctional group led by the narcissist, to mask the pain of the dysfunction experienced in the narcissist's pathological space, and to justify the exploitation of those who have things the narcissist wants to take, or who by their very existence threaten the narcissist's identity as the “fairest one of all.” I think this is what was behind the undeserved publicity surrounding the supposed North Korean hack of the computers of Sony Pictures over its release of “The Interview” – a movie about attempting to assassinate the leader of North Korea, a movie which was so technically and artistically bad that it earned a rating of only 52 percent from Rotten Tomatoes. Other examples include the inaccurate portrayal of people of color as largely criminal in the aftermath of the shootings of unarmed Black people in the U.S. last year, as well as the inaccuracies in media coverage of Libya and Syria prior to U.S. and NATO military action against these countries. And let's not forget the granddaddy of them all, the false case for “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq just before the 2003 invasion led by the United States.

The trouble with this kind of enemy creation is that over time, it stops working. Instead, an increasing number of people come to believe that each new “terror incident” or “threat incident” in the news is nothing more than a “false flag” attack designed to advance the ulterior interests of the nation which is supposedly warning us of the “threat.” (For instance, a surprising number of people believe that the recent Charlie Hebdo attack was a false flag operation designed to advance the “War on Terror” and the political prospects of far-right European nationalist political parties, as well as to dissuade member nations from leaving the EU. See this.) Think of the boy who cried “Wolf.” Nevertheless, it would not surprise me to find an increasing number of “enemies” being created by Anglo-American leaders and media in the years to come.

As the decline of our formerly grandiose nation continues, and we begin to enter the second stage of decompensation, we will begin obviously to lose the ability to affect events on the world stage. This will lead to a further decline in our material standard of wealth. At this stage I expect the scapegoating to turn to asking whom we can blame for our loss of prestige. This may take the form of infighting between powerful leaders of economic/political factions, with a little (or maybe a lot) of the old enemy creation added in the form of targeting foreign-born people and people of color within this country's borders. The point will be that someone, somewhere has to answer for the failure of this country's grandiose self, and the people who caused that failure will prove to be too brittle to take responsibility. Therefore they will project that responsibility on the most convenient target they can find. I think of a scene out of the Great Divorce where Napoleon Bonaparte is in Hell, in a well-lit mansion which can't keep out the rain, and he is endlessly pacing up and down, muttering, “It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English...” The second stage of decompensation may also take a suicidal turn, as the remaining leaders of the old order enact policies which they know to be self-destructive, as Hitler did during the waning days of the Third Reich, or as Jim Jones did on the day that he and his followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid.

The task, then – for marginalized peoples in this country and for all people of principle who seek to maintain a good conscience – will be to successfully navigate perilous days for a while. For while it may be tempting to run away to another country, the reality is that most of us don't have that option. Also, there are other countries which have been poisoned to the same extent as the United States. (I think particularly of Great Britain, Canada and Australia.) Yet I don't think all areas of the United States will be equally bad. There will be a surprising number of geographical and cultural nooks and crannies where a meaningful and healthy life can be led. Finding and thriving in these niches is part of the task before us.

P.S. Please do read in their entirety the articles on narcissism which I quoted and linked from the Web of Narcissism site.   Pay special attention to the stories of decompensating individuals.  Then take a look at the folks around you.

The Birth of a "Special" People

(Before you read this, you'd better take a bathroom break, then get yourself a cup of coffee. This post is long.)

Today it's time to delve the origins of American (specifically, Anglo-American) narcissism. To me, the most obvious place to start digging is Imperial Rome in the years from the birth of Christ through the reign of Constantine. Let's look first at the psychological construct of national exceptionalism, which has existed for as long as there have been nation-states. The pre-Christian, pre-Roman Greek state of Athens is an excellent example of this. (See this and this for examples). The Greek example shows one key characteristic of national exceptionalism: namely, that it is created, invoked and promulgated by the leaders of a nation-state when those leaders want to rouse their citizens to war and other inhumane acts against the members of differing nations and states.

The Roman empire was no exception in its claims to exceptional status, as described in a Huffington Post article on the concept of the "just war."  In the name of its exceptionalism, Rome conquered many peoples who had previously considered themselves to be exceptional. It was this empire which occupied Palestine in the days of the earthly life of Christ, and which sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD. Both the Romans and the people they conquered viewed exceptionalism as a means to lay claim to an exceptional share of all the things normally valued by people in this earthly life. Yet this empire was also the birthplace of the Christian faith – an otherworldly construct, a commonwealth of strangers and pilgrims on the earth (Hebrews 11:13; 1 Peter 1:1; 2:11), citizens of a Kingdom not of this world (John 18:36). The citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven were called to live by values which are radically different from the values of this earthly life. The modeling of these values, moreover, was guaranteed to bring the citizens of God's Kingdom into direct conflict with the citizens of all earthly kingdoms (Luke 6:20-28; John 15:18-16:3). Thus from the death and resurrection of Christ until the beginning of the reign of Constantine the Great, becoming a Christian was not the thing to do if you wanted a comfortable, wealthy life on earth.

Constantine's reign brought some rather drastic changes to the Christian church, which had become very popular among the Roman underclass because of its message of hope to the poor of this world. In fact, the Faith had begun to exert a considerable amount of temporal influence, both economic and political. Thus Constantine found it expedient to legalize Christianity and to extend imperial protection to the Faith. In exchange, the Church began to abandon certain otherworldly values and to embrace and support the earthly, secular values of the Roman state. At the Council of Arles in 314, a number of prominent members of the early church declared that “to deny the State the right to go to war was to condemn it to extinction.” (Source: Constantinian Christianity by Yuri Koszarycz.). The council also declared “Concerning those who lay down their weapons in peacetime, be it resolved that they be excluded from fellowship.” (Source: The Canons to Sylvester from the Council of Arles). The Church abandoned the pacifism of the New Testament and began to legitimize the concept of a “just war.” Through the acts of Constantine, the first State church was born.

This State church was not the sum total of Christianity in the Roman Empire. There were many Christians who for various reasons did not choose to align themselves with the State church. Some of those reasons had to do with conscience, others to do with ambitions of the sort of earthly political and economic power which was now being enjoyed by the heads of the Roman State church. The abandonment of New Testament pacifism and the pursuit of earthly values by the State church and by some of its dissenters led inevitably to armed conflict. The funny thing about all this is that the combatants on each side claimed that God was on their side. Each side claimed a special mission from God which not only excused but vindicated their newly adopted violence and which vindicated their claim to whatever it was they were fighting for.

This should be no surprise, because if a group of people claim that they hold as holy the words of a certain Book, yet they are always refusing to obey certain key teachings of that Book in order to achieve earthly ends, they need to have some insanely awesome excuses for their refusal to obey. So national exceptionalism was retooled to provide the excuse, which now read something like this: “We have a special mission from God in these difficult and dangerous days. Therefore God calls us to fight and die on behalf of that mission. May God bless us in carrying out that mission!” The flip side of that exceptionalism was the demonization of those who were considered enemies of the exceptional State. This silenced the conscience of combatants and legitimized the horrible things they did to the soldiers and civilians who were the target of their warfare.

State churches and ecclesiastically sanctioned violence marked each of the nations who fought in the religious wars which dot the landscape of European history, including the Crusades, the Eighty Years' War, and the Cromwellian conquest of England, to name a few. Each of the combatant nations believed in its own exceptionalism, and each had its clerics who told its citizens how exceptional their cause was, and how this was due to the mission which they had “received from God.” This exceptionalism naturally led the citizens of each belligerent nation to believe that it and its citizens were superior to other nations.

This exceptionalism and superiority got a turbocharge boost in the 16th century through the writings of John Calvin. Calvin was an influential French politician, preacher and theologian who devised a number of Church doctrines which had a profound influence on the culture of England and the United States. A key doctrine of Calvin is the doctrine of predestination. He believed that certain Bible passages taught that God has predestined some people to find salvation through faith in Christ, and that He has predestined others to eternal punishment. He also taught that this predestination has occurred independently of any man's choice in the matter. This was a special case of Calvin's doctrine concerning the sovereignty of God, where he wrote that all that happens in the world is the expression of Divinely permitted and approved Providence. Naturally, since most people in Calvin's audiences wanted to go to Heaven and not Hell, they became very curious about how they might know they were of the elect whom God had chosen for salvation.

A number of sources (including Max Weber) therefore state that Calvinists looked to “success in earthly calling” as a sign of God's election – i.e., material success in one's work. This was combined with the imposition of a duty on hearers to be as successful as possible (in contrast with 1 Timothy 6:9-10, in which St. Paul warns people against wanting to be rich). Naturally, those who were successful in business liked this doctrine, since it allowed them to look down on those whose lives were marked by material struggles, because such strugglers obviously did not have the blessing of God. (An interesting side note: the Church had also historically taught that usury – the lending of money at interest – was wrong and forbidden by Scripture. But Calvin stated that some Scriptures which had seemed to forbid usury had been misinterpreted, and other Scriptures no longer applied because times had changed. (Source: "Usury and Capitalism" from the Wikipedia article on John Calvin.)

This, then, was the flavor of the nationalist exceptionalism which pervaded many European societies just prior to the colonization of the United States: first, a belief that God had endowed certain nations with a mission that condoned armed conflict in support of that mission; secondly, a belief that God had predestined certain people to eternal salvation and others to eternal damnation independent of the choice of these people, and third, a belief that material success combined with hard work was a sign of God's blessing upon the elect, and that lack of material success was a sign of the opposite.

The American colonists therefore were already primed for exceptionalism when they arrived in the New World. They preached that theirs was an exceptional mission: to found a new Israel in the New World (for instance, see John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Thomas Thacher, and Thomas Prince). Later, they preached that it was the manifest destiny of the United States to conquer the entire North American continent (see John L. O'Sullivan). This they did – and along the way, nearly exterminated the Native American peoples who had been here previously, through both overt warfare, trickery and ecological warfare (namely, the near-extermination of the buffalo). In their efforts to expand White American wealth and power, they also involuntarily “recruited” millions of dark-skinned, formerly free Africans from their homelands to assist in the expansion of White American wealth. The wealthiest of these settlers just “knew” that they were exceptional because their Calvinism had told them so. The exceptionalism of the people of the United States also gave rise to an exceptional new religion, namely Mormonism, which, in addition to being occult and arcane, is one of the most racist elitist religions on earth.

The wealthy among the new settlers used the arguments of Calvinism to justify their treatment of the dark-skinned peoples they exploited and killed, claiming that the fact that Providence had allowed the conquest of the North American continent, that conquest must necessarily have been God's manifest will. In addition, these wealthy people compared their standard of material wealth to the stark material simplicity of many Native Americans and Africans and concluded that because God had not “blessed” them, these nonwhite people could not be of the elect; therefore, they could do whatever they wanted to them. The Golden Rule did not apply to the treatment of nonwhite people. (To use clinical language, dark-skinned peoples became “objects” to be exploited.)

In the later decades of the 19th century, the American religious community came into conflict with the spread of the writings of Charles Darwin. Yet in some circles there was a truce, and certain men discovered that it was advantageous to combine allegedly Darwinian concepts with the notion of Divine predestination of certain peoples to blessing and election of others to curses. Among these men were Josiah Strong, a Congregational preacher who in 1891 wrote, “Can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the survival of the fittest?”, and who lamented two years later that the superior Anglo-Saxon stock of the United States was deteriorating because of immigration. (Baynton, 2014) The late 1800's and early 1900's also saw the development of “muscular Christianity” in Anglo-Saxon society as a response to the perceived threat posed by non Anglo-Saxon peoples. (This “muscular Christianity” influenced the development of the YMCA and of American professional football, by the way.  For more information, see this.) These trains of thought also gave rise to the pseudoscience of eugenics, which argued that some people were endowed with specialness by nature in the same way that Calvinism had argued that some people were pre-selected by God for blessing – and which also argued that some people were cursed by nature in the same way that Calvinism claimed that these were also cursed by God. The rationalism of eugenics led to human attempts to improve the human breed, leading in turn to forced sterilizations of people deemed “unfit” by several states in the U.S. (Another side note: the British government is currently funding forced sterilizations of poor people in India, according to an article published in the Guardian in 2012, and other sources.)

The combination of religious superiority (Calvinism), the record of “Providence” (manifest destiny, social Calvinism, and a long string of seemingly unbroken successes), and botched science (social Darwinism, eugenics) has proven to be an intoxicating mix. This country has been drinking one version or another of that mix for over 200 years. This mixture is the myth taught to generations of American schoolchildren, advertised to generations of American consumers, and preached to generations of American ears in every context from movie theaters to books to political campaigns to church pulpits. (Read The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall, for an example of this.) This is the foundation of American narcissism, the belief that this nation is above all nations in that it has a special mission from God (a mission which conveniently lines up with American imperial ambitions), that Americans (specifically, white Americans) are a special, chosen people, and the belief that both Scripture, Providence and nature bear this out.

This belief in our “specialness” is so pervasive and has been taught for so long that it has become the unconscious foundation of the lives of most Americans, most of whom can no longer articulate the roots of their specialness. They are special just 'cause they are. I think of K. Anders Ericsson, who wrote that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in order to achieve expert performance in an endeavor. The average American has had many more than 10,000 hours of being schooled to think that he or she is “special” – a special member of a special people and a special nation. From this “specialness” has arisen a belief among many Americans that each one is more “special” than anyone else, including his or her fellow Americans. A recent paper titled, “The Cracked Mirror: Features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Children,” expounds the process of the formation of this belief. The author, Karen Kernberg Bardenstein, identified risk factors for the development of clinical narcissism in children. Among these are being the child of narcissistic parents, the child of successful parents, and the overindulged or wealthy child. Consider the vast disparity between what has become “the American way of life” and the standard of material wealth enjoyed by most of the world's population. Is it any wonder that this nation as a whole has the character of someone with a personality disorder? Other factors which contribute to the competing claims for specialness among Americans include the unhealthy glorification of competition – both economic, scholastic, and athletic. If you spend 10,000 hours in concentrated instruction, you can turn just about anyone into an entitled, selfish, first-class jerk.

We now openly compete for stages from which each of us can proclaim his or her own specialness. Think of reality TV, American Idol, and all the shows which were spawned by American Idol. I think of a recent example of “specialness,” the “balloon boy” Falcon Heene whose parents Richard and Mayumi Heene caused national panic in 2009 when they called 911 claiming that their son Falcon had been carried away by a weather balloon. It turned out that the claim was false; the boy had been hiding in the attic of his home all the time that rescuers were looking for him.  It was revealed that his parents had pulled a hoax in order to get their family on reality TV (they had already been on TV once before). His parents therefore did a bit of jail time for their trouble. A few years later, Mr. Heene was able to get himself back in the media spotlight as reporters followed up on the “balloon boy,” who is now an aspiring pre-adolescent metal rock guitarist and front man for the Heene Boyz band. Maybe the publicity has helped Falcon's career.

Later, the American evangelical world produced a religious “balloon boy”: Colton Burpo, whose parents claimed that when Colton was three years old, during an emergency appendectomy, he died and went to Heaven, then came back so he could tell his parents about the journey. Colton's story was “Providentially” discovered by Thomas Nelson Publishers who published Colton's story in the book Heaven is for Real, in 2010. Afterward, the book was “Providentially” discovered by Sony Pictures and made into a movie which was released this year, 2014. Now, I can't prove or disprove another person's religious experience. But I can't swallow Colton Burpo. Luke 16:27-31 is one big reason why. Another reason is that the whole affair smells like stage-managed narcissism to me. Colton's father pastors his own church, and he and his wife have also revealed that Colton is now a high school wrestling star and an accomplished musician who has toured with the band Read You And Me. (If you have the stomach for it, you can watch some YouTube videos of Colton singing and performing. I don't have the stomach for it.) What better opportunity for Todd Burpo to grow his own church and to start a career in Christian media for his son than a near-death experience?

And while we are talking about movies, let me mention the final frontier of hubris, namely, The Interview, a Sony Pictures semi-comedy about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate the head of the government of North Korea. The movie is the incarnation of the idea of America as a special nation with a special mission that can be carried out by ordinary Americans who will succeed just because they are Americans, and as we all know, Americans are all just so crazy awesome! The publicity surrounding the movie is the embodiment of American hubris, because when the plot of the movie was announced, many American politicians brushed aside North Korean objections, claiming that these objections were the attempts of a dictator regime to stifle American First Amendment freedoms. (Whoa, dude! You mean to tell me that you can make a movie about threatening to kill someone in another country and the person you threaten can't protest because it would infringe on your First Amendment rights? We are truly a “special” nation.) The movie and its publicity are also an example of what I call “desperate narcissism,” because in the days prior to the movie's release the Obama administration claimed that North Korea had hacked Sony's computer network, and Obama himself promised retaliation. Yet a number of prominent cyber security experts expressed public doubt that North Korea had done such a thing. Sony claimed that it was considering not releasing the Interview in order not to provoke international tensions, but Obama and other politicians pushed back, saying, “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” So this Christmas the movie opened in flag-draped theaters packed full of doofuses and raked in quite a bit of dough in the process. Can anybody say “publicity stunt” with me?

Desperate narcissism. To a narcissist, good attention is the best thing a body can have. But even negative attention is better than no attention. When narcissists are denied attention they get desperate. I'll talk more about the desperate phase of American narcissism in a future post.