The Elites vs. the Masses

6 fev · Concerning Narcissism Podcast

Writers and public intellectuals Matt Goodwin and Rob Henderson rail at the new elite (Goodwin) and their luxury beliefs (Henderson) that are woefully out of step with the masses. Henderson defines luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

The elite class’ naval-gazing solipsism reflects their intrinsic narcissism, which is insistent on uprooting social norms as though norms are mere playthings, balls to be juggled in the air, with no consideration on how these balls will come crashing down for the masses. For example, the Defund the Police movement, a brainchild of the elite, was less than enthusiastically received on the ground in low-income and/or black neighborhoods.

The masses do not have the buffer of luxury to be able to withstand the minor and major earthquakes perpetuated by the ruling classes’ propensities and compulsions to distort, fabricate, and socially engineer crises. Kitchen table concerns like paying the rent and a stable, functioning society are more top of mind for the masses.

Meanwhile, the rich entitled elite use their status to dodge any unforeseen consequences for the implementation of norm-changing luxury beliefs. In 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) infamously headed to balmy Cancún, Mexico to flee frigid temperatures after a recently privatized Texas electric grid system failed to provide power and water. His elite cynicism was exposed for all the world to see when he was photographed hatching his escape at the airport, leaving the masses to fend for themselves. We only have to look to 2016's case of sexual assaulter Brock Turner's “affluenza” or the 2019 college admissions scandal where elites bribed college officials into enrolling their children, to be reminded of the elite’s entitlement run amok amongst countless scores of other examples.

Unfortunately, in this climate, parsing out the values of the masses from the elites is a tricky endeavor as the masses emulate the elite (think Kardashians) and are captured on many levels, as the masses utilize and are inculcated by the elite’s technology such as television and social media. There's no way to get out from underneath the elite’s thumb, no matter how antisocial one is. Antisocial impulses can be observed in anti-authoritarian social movements such as punk rock and/or hippie movements, yet never become mainstream as a function of the limiting principle of their raison d'être.

A central theme of Professor of Politics at Kent, England, Matt Goodwin's writing is that populist uprisings world-over, and in particular in Europe, are a result of a disconnect between the values and priorities of the masses and the elite. In other words, populist revolts are proportionate to the disconnect with the elites.

From the viewpoint of narcissism, it is the forced enmeshment or smothering perpetrated by the elites through manipulations intrinsic to narcissistic abuse that there is not enough oxygen for the masses to breathe and function with their own traditional values and as such, the masses are butting heads with liberal, progressive and cosmopolitan values of the elite.

Goodwin writes that we are in a “crisis of moral legitimacy and authority.” The old elite were part of an era of a strong, accountable, and responsive nation-state and/or unitary state (Britain), which was unified against a common threat of communism during the Cold War and into the 1970s.

After the 1970s, this perception of a competent, legitimate, and authoritative elite drained away as Western states grappled with an array of new disruptive forces —the rise and relentless spread of hyper-globalization, European integration, deregulation, devolution, and the onset of so-called ‘governance’, whereby power and influence were sent to a new expert class of unelected technocrats and supranational elites.

Power was increasingly pushed upwards or sideways, away from the masses. Elites actively participated in this, of course, because it chimed with their liberal universalist values, magnified their influence, and imbued them with a greater sense of social status, esteem, and moral righteousness. As Christopher Bickerton has written, increasingly elites derived their sense of social status, authority, and moral legitimacy not from their vertical relationship with the ordinary people below but rather from their horizontal relationship with other members of the new elite. -Goodwin

In the 21st century, we have entered into what Colin Crouch has called the era of ‘post-democracy’ — a distant, self-serving, technocratic, elite-led style of politics in which the expert class conspired to marginalize the masses, all of which hollowed out a genuine grassroots democracy.

Peter Mair has warned that elites in the West were increasingly ‘ruling the void’, congregating in institutions like the European Union that were insufficiently democratic, accountable, and transparent while losing touch with ordinary people. The age of party democracy, the age when elites were connected to the masses, argued Mair, was now over. The old parties had become so disconnected from the wider society that they no longer seemed capable of sustaining democracy. Instead, they had morphed into what Mair would later call ‘cartel parties’ —movements and leaders that no longer relied on the people for support but now relied on the state for money, resources, and an image of authority. This widening gap between the masses and the elites not only posed a crisis of moral legitimacy for the elite but now also began to drive growing support for national populist rebellions against the elite. -Goodwin

However, the plot thickens here as the elite’s home base of the left continues to merge and fuse the role of the individual to the collective to the state to the point where both the individual and the collective are bypassed and overlooked in favor of the agency of the state, most pointedly realized in state-sanctioned “gender-affirming care” for minors in California.

In an effort to globalize and homogenize the world and render threatening cultural, societal, and political differences anachronistic and obsolete, the narcissistic elite are vanishing distinctions in a consumptive envy-ridden greed tirade against “the other.” This manifestation is ironic, hence the confusion of whether the elite are disconnected or merged/fused with the masses, considering the narcissist’s ineptitude around seeing others as distinct, separate, and individuated.

Narcissistic abuse is known to be crazy-making. It is true that the elite are disconnected from the masses even as they endeavor futilely to hoist the masses up to their level, “if only they could evolve” so the elite thinking goes, to their pedigree. The narcissistic elite then cram their agenda down the traditionalist masses’ throats and resulting populism ensues after some degree of cultural adaptation and some degree of rebellion. From the masses’ perspective, there is no winning formula to appease their irascible and exacting elite masters.

And so, as is pro forma with narcissistic abuse, the inevitable people-pleasing codependency and ardent revolt eventuate, all fists and elbows. Typically, people will endeavor to please first and rebel later when pleasing becomes ineffective due to shifting goalposts. The underclass pleases the overclass through merger and fusion with the narcissist (as represented by the elite) and adopts narcissistic defenses to cope.

The masses’ merger and fusion with the narcissist, as embodied by the elite, is achieved through a manipulation called coercive snapshotting, whereby the masses are compelled to conform to the elite’s value system, which, owing to the impossibility and fantastic aspiration of such a sustained merger, lays the groundwork for a spectacular separation and individuation, i.e., a populist uprising, through the devalue and discard phases of narcissistic abuse when the masses fail to live up to the unrealistic and rigged expectations of the out to lunch and in this sense disconnected elite.

As a result of living in the void as Mair terms it, voters began to feel as though they were no longer in the conversation. As a result, academics began to talk about the emergence of an era of de-alignment, a volatile, chaotic, polarized, and unpredictable era in which voters were no longer tribally loyal to the main parties.

-Goodwin

Chafing at the oppressive mandates and strictures of a narcissistic elite, the masses with their native intrinsic values squirm and retaliate against the oppositional, antagonistic, extrinsic values of the elite (see chart below). As a function of their narcissism, the elite are unable to see the masses clearly and resort to denigrating them as racist, bigoted, and backward for adhering to traditional values. The reality is more nuanced, but the result is in keeping with narcissistic abuse, that the masses effectively have no voice, aren't seen and heard, and are marginalized, all of these dynamics leaving in its wake a polarized and fractious populace ripe for revolt.

The second point is the elite have been failing to deliver, which has been exacerbating this crisis largely because they sent power on authority away from the center to other institutions. -Goodwin

The chief story of the last 40 years in this country and many other Western democracies is a story of elite failure: the great financial crash, stagnant economies, inequality, spiraling national debt, the failure to see inflation coming, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the Middle East.

Prof. Matt Goodwin

Yet we're told again and again to return moral legitimacy in authenticity to that same elite. Yet the last 30 to 40 years have been a consistent story of elite failure. It doesn't matter who wins the next election, the story will be the same national governments that are constrained increasingly by forces that are beyond their control because they've given up so much power, authenticity, and legitimacy to other actors.

Point three, both of these things, the draining away of power and influence, the draining away of moral legitimacy has led the new elite to search for a new means of moral legitimacy. It's led them to increasingly embrace social and cultural power as a means of their moral legitimacy. They've embraced values increasingly to try and project their authenticity and authority to others, and so the new elite has been searching around now desperately for an ideology that validates the ruling class, but as we can now see through its embrace of social and cultural liberalism and increasingly radical progressivism that only represents 20% of Britain. -Goodwin

Goodwin asserts that this new ruling class is profoundly insecure, narcissistic, and politically intolerant of people who hold different political beliefs. These elites have turned to cultural power to try and give themselves a sense of solidarity with the masses.

Given the penchant for authoritarian narcissism, it's not surprising that the new elite are politically intolerant of dissent. Unless for self-serving goals, narcissists are not natural purveyors of magnanimity.

However, these new values are undermining their authority among ordinary voters. Culture has become the predominant means through which elites understand themselves and that is why it has increasingly lost the support and loyalty of the masses because the cultural values that the new elite are pushing are hardwired to push the masses apart and not pull them together.

The new elite increasingly use their values that inform their ideology as a source of status, their luxury beliefs — mass immigration/weaker national borders, the breakdown of the family, and the erosion of cultural guardrails that used to hold people together.

The new elite now derive their sense of status by projecting their luxury beliefs in order to distinguish themselves from everybody else in society, the low status masses, the gamins, the racists, the ignorant bigots, because it's the only way now they have of upholding and trying to restore their sense of moral legitimacy.

-Goodwin

Being “common” is the original sin of narcissism; the imperative is to be special and unique. This narcissistic imperative is ironic on the face of it considering narcissistic abuse squelches independence of mind and precludes others from being special. There is a sort of incongruence here, a bristling and chafing of competing philosophies, a cognitive dissonance, where the elite assert dominance yet codependently kowtow to the masses in an effort to achieve egalitarian solidarity and simultaneous dominion. It all amounts to strong-arming the masses into a grandiose paracosm or fantastic space.

This collapse in the authority and moral legitimacy of the elite has also been exacerbated by its failure to deliver, by its failure to project competence. Frank Furedi quotes Zaki Laïdi in his essay, who said: 'Power is nothing when it has lost meaning’. And for many voters today the power of the elite has lost its meaning.

-Goodwin

A consequence of the masses’ cultural merging and fusing with the elite is that there remains no daylight between the two groups and without this distinguishing gap, there ceases to be any meaningful distinction to warrant respect; after all, hierarchy, at the urging of the woke elite has collapsed and flattened at the behest and prerogative of progressive ideology. As a result, the masses enjoy an artificially inflated, albeit with insecure footing, narcissistic grandiosity of mass psychosis that they are “on the level” with the elite.

This elite positioning is another subterfuge to throw the masses off the scent of their political and social alienation. The elites have confused the masses by “progressively” restructuring and reordering, nay, dis-ordering and sowing chaos, a specialty of the narcissist, elites and narcissists being virtually one and the same.

There is no core self to the narcissist, no constellated self as Carl Jung would have put it, therefore society, is subject to the arbitrary and capricious whims of the ruling class elites who pretend as though the masses are on their level in a bad case of malignant egalitarianism what with the spurious bones the elite have thrown the masses in the forms of the nation-state, democracy, the vote, and the American dream.

On a visceral level, these bones, these scrap heaps, this chum are thrown to the masses to avoid a barbaric end to their reign such as the decapitations of noblemen that took place during the French Revolution that set the elites back on their heels.

When you change the way society works, values shift in response.

The elites engineer all kinds of social upheavals. Privatization, free markets, austerity —especially for the poor, inequality, and even reactions to pandemics. These situations shift baselines and normalize what used to be abnormal.

Prof. Sam Vaknin

Goodwin declares, “The lesson of the last 10 years in politics is that voters won't stand for it anymore. The populist rebellions of the last 20 years do not represent the end of the revolt. They represent the beginning. The era of the alignment is going to be with us, and it will accelerate over the next few years and decades as voters increasingly look at a self-serving, insular, narcissistic, politically intolerant elite who no longer represents the values of the wider majority, no longer gives them a voice, and no longer treats them as legitimate and acceptable members of the wider community.”

Lacking object relations, a narcissistic elite who is inclined to psychological merger and fusion would be incapable of seeing “the other” and as such make for ineffective leaders. As much of the elite are regressed and infantile themselves, yet authoritarian, much like petulant and demanding toddlers, the resultantly regressed masses, who have by and large outsourced their agency to the narcissistic elites at their urging, find themselves in a double-bind, contending with both their own psychological regression and regressive so-called leaders.

Goodwin contends, “Until we restore power to the people and popular sovereignty, the rebellions of the last 20 years are only going to get bigger and bigger.” What he fails to consider is the feedback loop from hell — a paradoxical hopelessness of no adults being left in the room in a haplessly narcissistic age.

For a historical backdrop that frames the current state of affairs of the elites vs. the masses, please see Prof. Sam Vaknin’s video here entitled Watch This to Make Sense of the World (174K views) and/or read the edited transcript below, followed by a chart I have put together that outlines how the values of the elite are different from the masses, at least traditionally. The narcissistic elites pave the way for a narcissistic populace, bequeathing their extrinsic values.

In the last 300 years, a middle class was created. It emerged from the masses and it reverted to the elites. It collaborated with the elites. It compromised itself by collaborating with the elites.

The elites were fine with this because the middle class had always been small and the elites threw them some crumbs to make them feel good and encourage fantasies of social mobility and riches, the American dream and the middle class was happy and the elites were happy.

Then in the last hundred years, the masses could take it no more. We started to see mass movements, which had all the hallmarks of religions, secular religions, and which were founded on ideology. Ideology is the poor man, the ignorant man's philosophy. It's basic; it's demagogic; it's not very sophisticated. You don't have to have too much brain to comprehend it. It's prescriptive. It tells you what to do. And it's dictatorial. It's black and white thinking. There's the enemy and there's you. There's us and them.

So ideologies are a poor, ignorant man's philosophy.

After 1918 and well into the end of the 1960s, empires fell apart and monarchies vanished. The masses started to make demands.

By now the masses were no longer homicidal. They no longer wanted to kill the elites. They tried this. It didn't work. The masses had discovered something about themselves. They are not good at governing.

The masses tried communism. The masses tried fascism. The masses tried Nazism. It didn't work well. The masses even tried labor governance and labor parties in various parts of the world from Italy to the United Kingdom. It didn't work well either.

Masses are not built to govern. They don't have the internal intellectual capital. They don't have a traditional governing and they don't have the necessary skills and knowledge, etc. They also are not well connected.

Governance is about networking. It's about leveraging social capital.

The elites tried desperately because they realized that things were going the wrong way for them. They looked to the West and they saw decapitated noblemen in France. They looked a bit to the East and they saw a royal family, bullet-riddled in Russia. They looked further and they saw the Labour Party taking over in the United Kingdom. The earth was shaking. The elites were terrified. The elites were absolutely terrified. There was a yellow scare (Yellow Peril). There was a red scare.

So the elites introduced a variety of pieces of fiction, narratives, stories, movies, movie scripts, and they tried to sell the masses on these movie scripts.

One of these movie scripts is liberal democracy. Every four years, you get to tell us who will be in the elite.

The elites told the masses you have power. You decide who will be a member of our club, which of course is utter nonsense. Democracy is a sham. It's also an exceedingly bad idea because democracy led to Adolf Hitler and not comparing, but democracy led to Donald Trump. Democracy is a horrible idea. The masses are not built to govern. They don't have the qualifications, the knowledge, the capacity, the mentality, nothing.

But the elites were so terrified, so panic-stricken that they introduced universal suffrage (universal voting) and they included minorities such as women and ethnic minorities and so on and so forth in this sweeping universal suffrage, in this sweeping universal democracy.

And the second idea that they introduced was the nation-state.

So the elites tried to subdue the masses, subjugate them, control them, manipulate them, and channel their energy to derive maximum benefit from the masses by, on the one hand, giving them illusory freedom, illusory mobility, illusory power, like democracy.

And the notion that if you study and if you work hard, you're going to become rich, the American dream and democracy. These were the great levelers.

The idea was to level the playing field, egalitarianism, in other words.

But it became malignant egalitarianism.

The elites introduced liberal democracy. And the second idea that elites introduced was the nation-state.

The nation-state is a very new invention, around 200 years old.

Nationalism and democracy: these were the tools of the elites to subjugate, manipulate, and control the masses.

Both ideas were ludicrous. They were shams. They were utter unmitigated nonsense. There's no such thing as race. There's no such thing as a nation. And there's no such thing as democracy. This is a total psychotic hallucination.

This sham was an effort to structure the surging mobs, to control them, to prevent the inevitable decapitation, dilution in the square, and riots in the capital.

On January 6, the elites didn't want this to happen. The elites didn't want Donald Trump to happen. The elites didn't want Hitler to happen, except a few industrialists.

So the elites introduced liberal democracy and introduced nationalism, very often put together. It backfired because, to the shock of the elites, the masses wholeheartedly adopted and embraced democracy, adopted and embraced nationalism. The elites became immersed in this augmented reality. The masses became immersed in this augmented reality. The masses adopted democracy lovingly. And they regarded democracy as a way to break into the citadel of the elites. The masses adopted nationalism lovingly. They saw it as a way to leverage the power of the masses, take over, and redirect the body politic.

The elite’s inventions — twin inventions, twin shams, twin deceptions, twin illusions of democracy and nationalism backfired on them. The great unwashed, the hoi polloi, and the masses leveraged democracy. They put in the White House their own men, Donald Trump, for example, the latest example. And the same in the Philippines, Duterte, and the same in Brazil, Bolsonaro.

The masses discovered the power of the vote. The power of the vote was supposed to be a piece of fiction. No one had voted. I mean, look at voting numbers. Look at voting rates throughout history. No one used it. No one until recently.

Recently, the masses fell in love with the voting process. This is why “Stop the Steal!” was such a potent hashtag, because the masses are emotionally invested in the vote. They regard the vote as their weapon. And they don't want anyone to take away this weapon from them, to steal it, as they see it.

The new technologies coupled with one man, one vote, gave the masses the first real chance at power, the first real chance at self-governance and control and self-enlightenment. They had this chance in the 1930s and 40s, but they botched it.

The masses had a first shot at power through communism, through fascism, through Nazism, and they failed. They failed miserably. For 60-70 years, the masses had retreated because they had this traumatic experience.

The masses said “When we get to power, we end up with Adolf Hitler. When we get to power, we end up with Joseph Stalin. When we get to power, we end up with Mao. So, better keep away from power. Because when we have power, we end up killing each other. Better keep away from power.”

For 70 years, the masses were in a post-traumatic condition following the mass ideologies and mass movements of the first half of the 20th century, but now they have recovered.

Plus, they had forgotten. The new generations know very little about Stalin and Hitler and the Great Depression and all these things. And the new generations don't read books.

So, now the masses are ready for a second attempt, a second attempt at taking power. And it’s unfolded in the last 20 years all over the world.

Putin is a man of the masses. Orbán is a man of the masses. Bolsonaro in Brazil. Duterte in the Philippines. Donald Trump in the United States. They're all people of the masses.

They're all representatives of the masses in the centers of power in the swamp, in the swamp of the elites.

How do the elites co-opt the middle class? How do they subjugate the masses? What are the secret tools, signaling, and messaging that they deploy when they succeed to regain and retake power?

Because the elites have been challenged thousands of times throughout history. And they never ever failed.

Numerous movements, rooted in the middle class, for example, in 1848, rooted in the masses, for example in the 1930s, there have been numerous challenges to the elites, to the power structures. Numerous challenges.

And the elites saw them off. The elites succeeded to suppress, eliminate, destroy and reverse every challenge ever thrown at them.

The elites are very creative. Sometimes they come up with sham concessions, such as democracy. Sometimes they come with a unifying narrative, such as nationalism.

“Maybe I'm elite, maybe you're a mass, but we belong to the same nation.” They have many ways.

And the elites are not a conspiracy. The elites are not a coordinated bunch. They don't pick up the phone every morning and coordinate actions.

The elites have common interests. And that's enough. Common interests dictate common courses of action, common behaviors, common cognitions, common emotions, common derision of the masses, common contempt, common hatred, common everything.

When you have common interests with someone, you don't need to talk to them. You're both likely to act the same way.

And so the elites are a diffuse mass. They're more like a cloud. And they're a diffuse mass that permeates every crevice and nook and cranny of society.

And they have common interests. Above all, the interests of stability and self-preservation so that they can increase, enhance their wealth and transfer it to the next generation.

That's the main interest of the elite, the selfish gene.

The built-in narcissism of fantasy underpins our government and with this shaky foundation, we are experiencing an earthquake. With its emphasis on extrinsic values, Western society, ruled by the elites, is descending into a pit of narcissism. -GC

Resources:

The chart above is based on the video below by Prof. Sam Vaknin:

Comedian, George Carlin's classic, “It's a Big Club and You Ain't in It!”-

Episódios

Crypto and AI: the Dangers of Building a Civilization on Fantasy
15 out· Concerning Narcissism Podcast
After uploading my four latest pieces on the narcissism of the technological revolution we are living through into Google NotebookLM, I asked it to generate a conversation (audio overview), which created two artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots having an impromptu ‘podcast’ discussion about what I've written. Please have a listen to the embedded ‘AI podcast’ above and here and here.
The artificial rendering of a conversation between these two nameless AI interlocutors initially referred to me as “they” based on uploading my first piece on broligarchs (one of Concerning Narcissism’s top six pieces). Then, the AI learned my name after generating a second podcast, embedded above, based on uploading three additional articles. This process of learning my name as the author exemplifies the mechanisms of action behind machine learning through a large language model (LLM), which draws upon vast data stores.
However problematic, these podcasts are unquestioningly an unprecedented and impressive technological feat. Of many problems, the podcast is dumbed down to an impersonal eighth-grade level and overly relies on an American cultural imperative to be hopeful and solutions-oriented.
This sunny imperative pushes my foreboding material into the outer limits of acceptable parsing by, for example, roping in standard tired tropes around the perniciousness of social media, which was scant mentioned in my pieces. Also included were mentions of ‘defund the police,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘move fast and break things,’ which I never covered. Further, the AI podcasters mangled the pronunciation of MAGA as MAN-Gia.
The AI could have corralled the conversation to the parameters and scope of my material without reaching for and pandering to these tangential popular conceits (‘defund the police,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘move fast and break things’) as though driving towards search engine optimization (SEO) based on search-word tags is all that matters, gussied up for “relatability,” all the while doubling down on network silos and echo chambers.
The quality of the conversation, bordering on hallucinating, stalls out and renders itself janky when it circles back to previously touched-on material with a breathless promise of going deeper than never materializes. Attempts to fill in the gaps of what is implied quickly miss the mark.
All this being said, it’s entertaining to see what AI groks. And to think that this podcast presentation is just the beginning of what we can expect going forward is fascinating. As it is, these podcasts can pass for real conversations between humans. At worst, these podcasts are an audio equivalent of a deepfake and, at best, a happy-go-lucky, basic 13-year-old who gets his facts and figures confused.
-GC
First published in Brussels Morning Newspaper.
Brussels Morning is a daily online newspaper based in Belgium. BM publishes unique and independent coverage on international and European affairs. With a Europe-wide perspective, BM covers policies and politics of the EU, significant Member State developments, and looks at the international agenda with a European perspective.
There’s only one way to make money in cryptocurrencies: convince people to pay real money in exchange for fake money.
Fiat currency, such as the dollar, is hypocritically derided in crypto spaces, with the charge that it’s fake because it’s not backed by gold (the gold standard), but neither is crypto. Stablecoins, like those produced by the company Tether, claim to back cryptocurrency 1-to-1 with the US dollar (USD), though the veracity of this contention is dubious. The company refuses to allow an independent audit to verify its claims of full backing.
The USD is still the world’s reserve currency and is prioritized in many countries over their own domestic currency, as the dollar has been historically stable and resistant to hyperinflation.
The last few years have been volatile for the cryptocurrency industry from its zenith in 2021. The launch of cryptocurrency as El Salvador’s legal tender in 2021 suffered a poor rollout and lack of enthusiastic adoption by the country’s citizens due to its monetary instability. Additionally, overhyped NFTs enjoyed a meteoric rise only to suffer a calamitous free fall in value.
And to put a finer point on crypto’s rocky recent years as an ostensible Ponzi scheme was the outsized downfall of crypto-bro Sam Bankman-Fried of the crypto exchange, FTX, at its peak with a market cap of $32 billion to Bernie Madoff’s $65-68 billion. In the end, FTX lost $8 billion in its customer’s money, whereas Madoff lost $18 billion of his customers’ money.
With all the crypto industry’s bluster about the blockchain being a quasi-transparent, pseudonymous ledger decoupled from “oppressive elitist” banking institutions and their government-backed instruments, FTX still managed to evaporate its customers’ funds into thin air, never to be accounted for, and most likely stolen.
James Bromley, a partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, the firm hired to help manage the FTX’s bankruptcy, called it “one of the most abrupt and difficult company collapses in the history of corporate America,” citing the “colossal ineptitude of the managing staff of the company, comprising of Bankman-Fried and his young, inexperienced roommates living together in a penthouse in the Bahamas.”
Bankman-Fried took pains to paint Alameda Research—the trading firm he founded before FTX and owned 90 percent of—as being entirely separate from the exchange, FTX. For Bankman-Fried to have owned both the trading firm and the exchange while contending that they are wholly independent of one another is sketchy and tantamount to a conflict of interest. Lawsuits filed in 2022 contested the two entity’s independence. Further, his “disgraced exchange collapsed in November 2022 after Bankman-Fried swiped user funds to plug an $8 billion debt at its sister company Alameda Research.”
The New York Post published on Nov. 2, 2023, that “The tech mogul was found guilty on all seven fraud and conspiracy charges for his scheme to swipe money from users of his FTX exchange to pay off debts at his failing hedge fund Alameda Research and purchase lavish real estate, leading to FTX’s implosion,” when customers were unable to withdraw their funds.
“Bankman-Fried chalked up the collapse to “oversights” in “risk management” and testified that he wasn’t aware that his hedge fund had “borrowed” billions from his exchange until days before the implosion.”
Bankman-Fried, a fallen giant in the field, represents the poster child for crypto’s financial malfeasance. On March 28th of this year, having shown little to no emotion during his trial, Bankman-Fried, 32, was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Adding insult to injury, Bankman-Fried maintained that he was an “effective altruist,” driven to harness his MIT mathematics bona fides to acquire vast wealth to be distributed philanthropically. Though he did donate substantially to the Democratic party, he has sociopathically since admitted that his philanthropic “effective altruism” schtick was only for PR purposes.
A number of high-profile celebrities and athletes (Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors, Shaquille O’Neal, Udonis Haslem, David Ortiz, William Trevor Lawrence, Shohei Ohtani, Naomi Osaka, Larry David, and Kevin O’Leary) who advertised on behalf of FTX are now taking a bath with an angry mob of 1 million customers in a class action lawsuit who want their money back.
In a substantial blow to the crypto industry’s reputation, on August 8th, 2024, A U.S. judge ordered FTX and Alameda Research to pay a whopping $12.7 billion to creditors.
Despite crypto’s checkered reputation, America’s politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike are all in if there is a financial and political upside to be realized.
As of this writing, according to the website Follow the Crypto, some $174 million has influenced US elections in this watershed crypto-backed political calendar year, a radical scaling up from some approximately $10M from crypto super PACs for the prior election cycle just four years ago.
Approximately half of all corporate donations for the US 2024 presidential election have come from the cryptocurrency industry, outspent only by the fossil fuel industry.
Long a bastion of the libertarian right, crypto is now strong-arming Democratic candidates to overnight sing crypto’s praises if their candidacy is to have any viability. By refusing to endorse crypto, Katie Porter lost her re-election bid for Senate in California. ~$10M of cryptocurrency-focused PACs defeated Porter.
Crypto, a brainchild of California, has more political donations in play than any other state, hardly surprising considering California is the birthplace and leading progenitor of narcissism through its conduits of Hollywood and Silicon Valley to furnish the world with fantastical thinking.
Of (tech bro) fantasies, Prof. Sam Vaknin, a foremost expert on narcissism, departs from traditional psychoanalysis by postulating that fantasies are reactive defenses against trauma, pain, hurt, abuse, and egregious protracted breach of boundaries. They also defend against an intolerable, burdensome, and unbearable reality:
The first role of the fantasy is a vehicle to revisit areas and realms in the narcissist’s history and existence that otherwise are inaccessible.
Number two, the fantasy provides a secure base. When the narcissist is immersed in the fantasy, when he is in the throes of the fantasy, he is oblivious to reality. He’s not aware of his surroundings, environment, other people, expectations, behaviors, wishes, and demands; he’s totally not there. He’s no longer with us when he’s in the fantasy. At that point, he feels very safe. He feels secure, and the world appears to be stable, predictable, and determinate. Fantasy, therefore, is a maternal substitute. The fantasy is the womb. When the narcissist enters the fantasy, he goes back to the womb. He reverts to the period of gestation before he was born, and in that womb, in that maternal reification, the narcissist feels utterly secure, safe — no danger, no risk, no predicament, no menace, no threats — a secure base, a maternal figure in a way.
Number three, the fantasy provides the narcissist with compensatory traits. Remember that pathological narcissism is a compensation for some deficiency. The narcissist internally has a bad object, a coalition of voices and introjects that inform the narcissist that he is inadequate, unworthy, a loser, stupid, ugly, good for nothing, and so on and so forth.
Narcissists are addicted to fantasy — incapable of relating to other people, to the world at large, and, even more importantly, to themselves. The narcissist is a slave to fantasy.
Why Narcissists Fantasize (How Trauma Shapes Fantasy) by Prof. Sam Vaknin
Fantasist former president Donald Trump once criticized Bitcoin as “not money” and “highly volatile and based on thin air.” He also cautioned that crypto assets helped facilitate illegal underground markets.
“We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever,” Trump wrote on Twitter in 2019. “It is called the United States Dollar!”
He has since changed his tune, raking in $25 million since May in crypto donations.
What a difference a few years makes — after cratering in 2022 in the aftermath of FTX’s implosion, the price of Bitcoin has recovered and reached an all-time high in June.
Now, all three of Trump’s sons, Don Jr., Eric, and Barron, are in on the action, having launched their own World Liberty Financial coin (WLFI) in September. WLFI will be available for trading to the public on October 15th.
Trump’s 18-year-old son Barron, a first-year student at New York University, is identified as the coin’s “DeFi visionary,” according to a white paper on the project obtained by cryptocurrency news site CoinDesk. “DeFi,” short for decentralized finance, as opposed to “TradFi” or traditional finance, is a term that refers to financial services offered through public blockchains.
World Liberty Financial’s website has a splash page entreating prospective customers that you, too, can be “cool” and “DeFiant,” a play on the DeFi vision, which happens to conjure up a characteristic of psychopathy — defiance.
Psychopathic fraudster Martin Shkreli, known as “Pharma Bro,” credits himself that he helped Barron Trump create the previously issued in June DJT token. Shkreli infamously jacked up the price of an antiparasitic drug, Daraprim, by >4000% overnight from $17.50 to $750 a pill. Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison and up to $7.4 million in fines. Shkreli is permanently banned from serving as an officer of any publicly traded company and from working in the pharmaceutical industry.
On August 6th, the DJT token plummeted 90% after a single wallet sold $2 million worth in one transaction, reducing its market cap to $3 million from $55 million. Shkreli denies that he’s behind the precipitous tanking.
Cryptocurrencies reify Cluster B personality disorders (antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic) and Cluster A personality disorders (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal) in a compensatory craving for power and control through a parallel monetary system.
Cryptocurrency as a freedom-chasing schema purports to obviate TradFi, while, in reality, duplicates many of the same power structures, especially as it colludes with establishment politics. It just so happens that these new power structures benefit the tech titans at the top of the food chain. For example, one study found that 0.01% of the richest Bitcoin accounts hold about 58% of all Bitcoins. Additionally, less than 100 participants control over 51% of the wealth in the ecosystem, potentially indicating a security threat.
The crypto industry regularly bankrolls super PACs that have overwhelmingly supported Republicans over Democrats. As noted, the Trump campaign has raised $25 million from the crypto industry since it began accepting cryptocurrency donations in May. “MAGA supporters, now with a new cryptocurrency option, will build a crypto army, moving the campaign to victory on November 5th!” the campaign has said.
In his prescient 2016 book warning about crypto’s plot to overturn America, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, the late David Golumbia (1963-1923) exposes the synergies between cyber-libertarianism and conservative ideology.
Golumbia wrote, “The whole point of the [crypto] enterprise, as with most of the efforts promoted by libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, is to enable a wide range of extractive and exploitative business practices, and thus to increase the power of corporations and capital outside the scope of any attempts by democratic polities to constrain them.”
Golumbia underscored the point by stating that even anti-government thinker Noam Chomsky “declared that libertarian theories, despite surface appearances, promote ‘corporate tyranny, meaning tyranny by unaccountable private concentrations of power, the worst kind of tyranny you can imagine,’”— ironic projection for an authoritarian movement that is obsessed with overcoming “tyranny” and “freedom” from central banks, namely the US Federal Reserve.
The idea that cryptocurrencies could usurp and overtake the USD is a practical non-starter in that the computational power required, both in speed and energy, is not unlike attempting to wholesale replace fossil fuels with solar and wind energy — both scenarios, equally out of reality.
Both crypto and AI are energy hogs with no easy energy solution in sight while the stakes of climate change continue to ascend at an alarming clip. Reinvigorating nuclear energy appears to be the only viable option for Big Tech’s energy demands. After a radioactive meltdown shuttered it in 1979, Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania, will be reopening to power Microsoft’s AI.
Relying on the fantastical ideology of AI and crypto with a dreamer’s mindset is not sufficient in the face of the time crunch and pressure cooker that is climate change. The lacuna between the dreamscape and reality reveals the impassable gulf between fantasy and reality with potentially deadly consequences. We could all fall into this fantastical ditch.
Crypto proselytizers push counterfactual notions of freedom — a claim that’s rich, emanating from a culture with authoritarian right-leaning roots in anti-government, crypto-anarchistic cypherpunks who create thin arguments about banking the unbanked around the globe as a value proposition, no matter crypto’s volatility and penchant for the facilitation of criminality.
Meanwhile, millions of customers have been routinely scammed and defrauded —sometimes robbed of their life savings. Long a hotbed for criminal activity, crypto cost Americans $5.6 billion last year alone in scams, up 45% from the year prior. Scams come with the territory, so the blasé crypto thinking goes; the crypto cult mindset considers being scammed a rite of passage to create thicker skin, though it doesn’t always work out that way. This fantasy-based macho culture is straight-up dangerous.
One crypto addict-gambler, Hal Henson, in his sixties, featured in Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman’s book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud bet the farm on crypto. Broke and having exhausted his other financial lifelines — friends and family — he reached out to the crypto “community” for emotional support, and the last word of so-called solace they offered him before he committed suicide was a one-word mandate: “Buy!”
The promise of societal control that jackbooted fascism offers and that America faces if and when Trump returns to the White House may be an emotional knee-jerk reaction to the onslaught of technological changes at hand, including AI, network states, and techno-feudalism.
The fascistic social imperative to clamp down when elements of civilization are spiraling suggests a rigidity that is a hallmark of mental illness; it’s possible to overdo social control such that control fails to mitigate the spiraling but instead encourages more social conflict and dysfunction, if not chaos. Fascism leads to war.
In his book The Network State, centi-millionaire polymath Balaji Srinivasan writes that he believes another American civil war will result from a cascade of American anarchy, Chinese control, and an international intermediate. He predicts a civil war would catalyze from America’s being broke and attempting Bitcoin seizures — a situation he calls “American Anarchy.”
It’s a dangerous game to have America’s two major political parties, Republicans and Democrats alike, cozy up to crypto’s deep pockets when it is the crypto industry that seeks to undermine the USD and the concept of America as a nation-state in favor of tech-driven network states. “Democracy” has increasingly revealed itself to be a plutocracy, eating out of the hand that feeds it.
As it is, America is no longer a Democratic Republic, according to Barbara F. Walter’s book, How Civil Wars Start: and How to Stop Them. It’s been downgraded to an anocracy, a combination of democracy and dictatorship. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a society “of the people, by the people, for the people” in the face of billionaire headwinds. What we are left with (on a good day) is the verisimilitude, the appearance of being true or real, of democracy.
Trump’s VP pick JD Vance is in the back pocket of crypto and justifies his allegiance in order to tear down Big Tech’s fidelity to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and — while he’s at it, covertly America as a nation-state. JD Vance also complains that attempts to regulate cryptocurrency would entertain a surveillance state and a backdoor ban on Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies.
Forty-three percent of American men ages 18 to 20 say they have invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrency, compared to 16% of the general population. While crypto bro’s fantasize that they can re-engineer their abusive childhoods out from under the thumb of Big Government who stands in for mommy issues, it is society at large who suffers as the newly abused.
Bonus content:
Shared Fantasy, Dual Mothership, Snapshotting YouTube playlist by Prof. Sam Vaknin
Venture Capital Extremism
Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster: From crypto to A.I., the tech sector is pouring millions into super PACS that intimidate politicians into supporting its agenda. by Charles Duhigg for The New Yorker
HBO’s Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery
Megalopolis (2024) Official Trailer - Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel
Megalopolis is a 2024 American epic science fiction drama film written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Megalopolis explores the tension between fantasy and reality. It offers a more positive vision of the future but absurdist and the height of spectacle and debauchery.
MEGALOPOLIS is a Roman Epic set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor's daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.
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The Lethal Pandemic of Trump Contagion
14 mai· Concerning Narcissism Podcast
Housekeeping/Check-In: I launched Concerning Narcissism a year ago this month and have published 41 pieces, an average of 3.4 posts a month. Many of these editorials have been magazine-length pieces.
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It may be that the most egregious and virtually unreported scandal of the Trump Administration is that the worldwide pandemic lay at Trump's feet, having irresponsibly and cynically dismantled the U.S. World Health Pandemic Response program, namely by defunding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite ample pandemic warnings leading up to the Covid-19 outbreak.
Americans were not protected by this ostensible paternal figure — just the opposite. Trump didn't have America’s back and most likely delighted in the ensuing chaos and melee, which centered the focus back on himself as “accountable” leader.
It is La-La Trump who suggested that by Easter, 2020, Covid-19 would be over and to drink bleach.
Trump insisted on holding daily briefings to control the narrative, promoting everything from injecting bleach into one’s veins and exposing the body to ultraviolet light, to antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and horse antiparasitic ivermectin. His suggestions caused accidental poisonings with disinfectants to double, and with one in twenty Americans trying hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, approximately 17,000 deaths have been linked to hydroxychloroquine alone (Eccles, 2024). He also packed his followers in crowded stadiums and made mask-wearing a “political statement,” while calling the pandemic a Democrats’ “hoax” and preventing widespread testing and isolating, so that the numbers would not look bad for him in an election year. —Psychiatrist/expert in violence, formerly with Yale and Harvard, Dr. Bandy X. Lee
Narcissists, such as Trump, are easily threatened by expertise, as their grandiosity (inflated sense of self-worth), which is a cognitive distortion, will not allow for the notion that someone else may have the answers. Delusional narcissists are, in their opinion, omnipotent (all-powerful) and omniscient (all-knowing). Delusions are defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence.
Donald Trump became the source of almost half the world’s disinformation on Covid-19, at a time when public education was the most critical health intervention, in the absence of vaccines or a cure. Yet, when Trump fell ill with Covid-19, he used none of the “cures” he touted but only the most expensive, state-of-the-art proven treatments that may have saved his life but is not available to the average citizen. And even after vaccines became available, he and his family quietly received the vaccine, even as he sowed distrust in them with the public—and despite hoarding nearly 500 million excess doses, placing low-income countries at disproportionate risk, the U.S. became the last among eleven high-income countries to fully vaccinate at least 60 percent of its population (Shah et al., 2021). We will never know what might have happened, had Trump not disregarded the highly-lauded “pandemic playbook” his predecessor, Barack Obama, left for him, out of pathological envy; had he not defunded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), out of his contempt for science; and had he not forced out, months before the outbreak in China, the CDC’s onsite expert team, whose job it was to detect, prevent, or at least keep potential pandemics at epidemic level, as it had done for numerous other respiratory infectious diseases through all its history. As the World Health Organization (WHO) depends greatly on collaborations with the CDC, the WHO’s global efforts were hampered as well. But for one man’s mental deficits, more than a million American lives might have been saved, and for the global population, several million.—Psychiatrist/expert in violence, formerly with Yale and Harvard, Dr. Bandy X. Lee
Post-Roe Implications for Abortion
The anti-science and anti-medicine delusionality of narcissist Trump precipitated the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 as well as the evangelical maneuvering that led to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. While it is difficult to pinpoint delusionality exclusively as he exhibits manifold psychopathic features, it is within the realm of possibility and even probability that his jaded and cynical “small government” ethos was the purported reasoning, if not justification, behind the dereliction of duty made manifest by lack of pandemic response readiness that resulted in over one million deaths in the United States.
Incongruently, invading women's uteruses in an anti-choice Crusade is the definition of big government overreach, revealing inconsistency in his capacity for faithfulness to small government ideology, which some strangely see as his strong suit, an every-man full of blunders and foibles, though in reality, this “stable genius” lacks an integrated core; nobody's home. The cruelty (and the chaos) is the point.
Apparently, according to the American Taliban of patriarchal evangelicals, the killing of a cluster of cells which may have a ~50% chance of becoming a man, takes precedence over protecting the life of a full-grown pregnant woman, never mind that each woman in America has made use of taxpayer-funded public infrastructure and institutions such as highways, roads, bridges, and public education, etc.
In effect, risking women's lives by overlooking modern medicine in favor of ideological anti-choice fervor, which reduces women's lives to objectified political footballs, wastes taxpayer dollars and is thus fiscally irresponsible, a hypocritical conflict of interest for quote-unquote fiscally responsible Republicans. The impact to America's bottom line GDP based on this harebrained, draconian and anachronistic scheme to turn the clock back with delusional ideology trumping medicine is bound to scale up with devastating economic consequences due to, in aggregate, mothers’ senseless loss of life.
Like domino's falling, the notion of “state’s rights” belies the ultimate intention for a national abortion ban and from there or concurrently, further fascistic infringements on women's rights including the rights to the abortion pill, IVF, contraception, same-sex marriage, and the right to pursue abortion across state lines free of bounty hunters and “papers, please” military checkpoints, characteristic of dictatorships. It's only been since 1974 that an American woman has had the right to hold a credit card in her name. The latest atrocious proposed bill, advocated by “Aunt Lydia” Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) is to collect data on pregnant women in a federal database. Can we say Handmaid's Tale??
Floating somewhere on a continuum between delusionality and outright antisocial lying to score political points, Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis have claimed that babies are executed upon birth under the banner of abortion, an assertion that is ludicrous, obscene, and frankly, insane.
Anti-Science Delusionality Around Covid-19
The charitable defense granted Trump of cost-cutting in terms of slashing the pandemic response program is laughable in the face of the outrageous and unprecedented debt to the tune of $8.4 trillion that Trump racked up during his four years in office. Trump had long decried that America is a debtors’ nation, while being hell-bent to make it determinedly so.
True to form for a narcissist, Trump silenced and denigrated a robust pandemic response program as part of the conspiratorial “deep state.” Trump's paranoid distrust of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was substantiated by his call for outsized budget cuts during the height of the pandemic. In 2020, the year the pandemic broke, Trump proposed a $693 million budget cut to the CDC.
The narcissist's childhood has gone so arrantly wrong, that the child mounts a fantasy defense to insulate himself from the trauma of his upbringing. By ignoring, denying and minimizing Covid-19, Trump encouraged his acolytes to also indulge the pernicious drug that is fantasy. However, just like with any drug addiction, the gravitational comedown to reality is ineluctable and in this case, straight-up deadly.
To my knowledge, only one public health professional, psychiatrist and expert in violence formerly with Yale University, Dr. Bandy X. Lee has routinely reminded Americans effectively that “Donald Trump did this” when it came to the pandemic. That this manifest “on the nose” symptom of the Trump Contagion, Dr. Lee's phrase for the Trump-induced psychic epidemic, is not entrenched and commonplace knowledge is a worrisome sign of the disconnect from reality that post-pandemic America has failed to acknowledge and integrate.
It may be that this shocking fact that if it weren't for Trump, the United States may have successfully contained the worldwide pandemic, is too much for the average citizen to bear. Trump's running for office again, especially with such rabid support is wildly unconscionable and alarming on the face of it, and indicates just how many Americans remain infected by his pervasive gross pathology. Trump amnesia encompasses Covid-19 amnesia.
A substantial swath of Trump supporters are in denial that the pandemic even existed or minimize its effects with a conspiracy theory — “it was the plandemic!” they cry out against the alleged shadowy cabal of elites using the virus and vaccine to profit and gain power — never mind for the fact that if it weren't for largely Democrats taking the vaccine, MAGA Republicans, many of whom are anti-vaxxers, would not be fraternizing openly, mask-free, the way that they are today. This noxious entitlement is grating.
Anti-vaxxers: Mentally Ill Victimhood Conspiracists— 54,321 views, Aug 29, 2021
The same entitled MAGA-ts are unable to ferret out chicken and egg scenarios to be able to discern when so-called government “overreach” is to their benefit as in mobilizing an effective pandemic response program or when lockdown measures are overreaching— a lockdown which wouldn't have been necessary if it weren't for “correcting” for a pandemic response of so-called deep state “overreach.”
MAGA are upset about lockdown when the focus for blame ought to be the lack of readiness. If the United States had been prepared, lockdown would not have been necessary, but preparation is predicated on mentally competent leadership.
First Trump blamed China — “the China virus,” then he blamed Obama, and then he blamed the states rather than taking any accountability himself. Alloplastic defenses, blaming others, rather than taking any accountability, is a signature of narcissism.
Arguably, grotesque pathological narcissism is the root cause for the mangling and mismanagement of Covid-19 not only in America but across the world.
From notably 2020 until the present day, America's current stint in mass psychosis includes all manner of delusionality: the Trump administration expounding in 2020 that the virus is “totally under control”; American exceptionalism, entitled and grandiose thinking that infectious respiratory diseases would never affect America necessitating masks, only Asian countries (think MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-1) or thinking that a dictatorship could never happen in America; Roe vs. Wade would never be overturned; current Trump amnesia, dissociating the daily traumatizing assaults on reality under Trump, while minimizing, denying, and rewriting history.
“This American Carnage stops right here and right now,” Trump infamously declared in his inauguration speech. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Spreading the Trump Contagion is a deadly proposition. Whether with Covid-19 or abortion, voting for Trump is a vote cast for a death spiral and a death cult.
Resources:
American Pathogen
Our Delusional Lives: Where Psychologists Fear to Tread
The Newsletter of Dr. Bandy X. Lee Substack by Dr. Bandy X. Lee, featuring periodic drops of chapters from her new book, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind.
Abortion, Every Day Substack by Jessica Valenti, a comprehensive daily newsletter dedicated to abortion rights.
Do You *Remember* How Badly Trump Handled COVID? by Jonathan V. Last, The Bulwark
Trump’s covid response was even worse than you remember: In a sane country, it would disqualify him from ever again holding office. by Stephen Robinson, Public Notice
Reclamation by Fugazi lyrics (legendary post hardcore punk band against authoritarianism. Fugazi means fake or damaged beyond repair, a false, inauthentic or hypocritical person, messed up/f*cked up)
These are our demands:
We want control of our bodies.
Decisions will now be ours.
You can carry out your noble actions,
We will carry our noble scars.
Reclamation.
No one here is asking,
No one here is asking,
But there is a question of trust.
You will do what looks good to you on paper,
We will do what we must.
Return, return, return.
Carry my body! (alt lyrics: You're in my body! You're in my body! You're in my body!)
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The Elites vs. the Masses
6 fev· Concerning Narcissism Podcast
Writers and public intellectuals Matt Goodwin and Rob Henderson rail at the new elite (Goodwin) and their luxury beliefs (Henderson) that are woefully out of step with the masses. Henderson defines luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.
The elite class’ naval-gazing solipsism reflects their intrinsic narcissism, which is insistent on uprooting social norms as though norms are mere playthings, balls to be juggled in the air, with no consideration on how these balls will come crashing down for the masses. For example, the Defund the Police movement, a brainchild of the elite, was less than enthusiastically received on the ground in low-income and/or black neighborhoods.
The masses do not have the buffer of luxury to be able to withstand the minor and major earthquakes perpetuated by the ruling classes’ propensities and compulsions to distort, fabricate, and socially engineer crises. Kitchen table concerns like paying the rent and a stable, functioning society are more top of mind for the masses.
Meanwhile, the rich entitled elite use their status to dodge any unforeseen consequences for the implementation of norm-changing luxury beliefs. In 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) infamously headed to balmy Cancún, Mexico to flee frigid temperatures after a recently privatized Texas electric grid system failed to provide power and water. His elite cynicism was exposed for all the world to see when he was photographed hatching his escape at the airport, leaving the masses to fend for themselves. We only have to look to 2016's case of sexual assaulter Brock Turner's “affluenza” or the 2019 college admissions scandal where elites bribed college officials into enrolling their children, to be reminded of the elite’s entitlement run amok amongst countless scores of other examples.
Unfortunately, in this climate, parsing out the values of the masses from the elites is a tricky endeavor as the masses emulate the elite (think Kardashians) and are captured on many levels, as the masses utilize and are inculcated by the elite’s technology such as television and social media. There's no way to get out from underneath the elite’s thumb, no matter how antisocial one is. Antisocial impulses can be observed in anti-authoritarian social movements such as punk rock and/or hippie movements, yet never become mainstream as a function of the limiting principle of their raison d'être.
A central theme of Professor of Politics at Kent, England, Matt Goodwin's writing is that populist uprisings world-over, and in particular in Europe, are a result of a disconnect between the values and priorities of the masses and the elite. In other words, populist revolts are proportionate to the disconnect with the elites.
From the viewpoint of narcissism, it is the forced enmeshment or smothering perpetrated by the elites through manipulations intrinsic to narcissistic abuse that there is not enough oxygen for the masses to breathe and function with their own traditional values and as such, the masses are butting heads with liberal, progressive and cosmopolitan values of the elite.
Goodwin writes that we are in a “crisis of moral legitimacy and authority.” The old elite were part of an era of a strong, accountable, and responsive nation-state and/or unitary state (Britain), which was unified against a common threat of communism during the Cold War and into the 1970s.
After the 1970s, this perception of a competent, legitimate, and authoritative elite drained away as Western states grappled with an array of new disruptive forces —the rise and relentless spread of hyper-globalization, European integration, deregulation, devolution, and the onset of so-called ‘governance’, whereby power and influence were sent to a new expert class of unelected technocrats and supranational elites.
Power was increasingly pushed upwards or sideways, away from the masses. Elites actively participated in this, of course, because it chimed with their liberal universalist values, magnified their influence, and imbued them with a greater sense of social status, esteem, and moral righteousness. As Christopher Bickerton has written, increasingly elites derived their sense of social status, authority, and moral legitimacy not from their vertical relationship with the ordinary people below but rather from their horizontal relationship with other members of the new elite. -Goodwin
In the 21st century, we have entered into what Colin Crouch has called the era of ‘post-democracy’ — a distant, self-serving, technocratic, elite-led style of politics in which the expert class conspired to marginalize the masses, all of which hollowed out a genuine grassroots democracy.
Peter Mair has warned that elites in the West were increasingly ‘ruling the void’, congregating in institutions like the European Union that were insufficiently democratic, accountable, and transparent while losing touch with ordinary people. The age of party democracy, the age when elites were connected to the masses, argued Mair, was now over. The old parties had become so disconnected from the wider society that they no longer seemed capable of sustaining democracy. Instead, they had morphed into what Mair would later call ‘cartel parties’ —movements and leaders that no longer relied on the people for support but now relied on the state for money, resources, and an image of authority. This widening gap between the masses and the elites not only posed a crisis of moral legitimacy for the elite but now also began to drive growing support for national populist rebellions against the elite. -Goodwin
However, the plot thickens here as the elite’s home base of the left continues to merge and fuse the role of the individual to the collective to the state to the point where both the individual and the collective are bypassed and overlooked in favor of the agency of the state, most pointedly realized in state-sanctioned “gender-affirming care” for minors in California.
In an effort to globalize and homogenize the world and render threatening cultural, societal, and political differences anachronistic and obsolete, the narcissistic elite are vanishing distinctions in a consumptive envy-ridden greed tirade against “the other.” This manifestation is ironic, hence the confusion of whether the elite are disconnected or merged/fused with the masses, considering the narcissist’s ineptitude around seeing others as distinct, separate, and individuated.
Narcissistic abuse is known to be crazy-making. It is true that the elite are disconnected from the masses even as they endeavor futilely to hoist the masses up to their level, “if only they could evolve” so the elite thinking goes, to their pedigree. The narcissistic elite then cram their agenda down the traditionalist masses’ throats and resulting populism ensues after some degree of cultural adaptation and some degree of rebellion. From the masses’ perspective, there is no winning formula to appease their irascible and exacting elite masters.
And so, as is pro forma with narcissistic abuse, the inevitable people-pleasing codependency and ardent revolt eventuate, all fists and elbows. Typically, people will endeavor to please first and rebel later when pleasing becomes ineffective due to shifting goalposts. The underclass pleases the overclass through merger and fusion with the narcissist (as represented by the elite) and adopts narcissistic defenses to cope.
The masses’ merger and fusion with the narcissist, as embodied by the elite, is achieved through a manipulation called coercive snapshotting, whereby the masses are compelled to conform to the elite’s value system, which, owing to the impossibility and fantastic aspiration of such a sustained merger, lays the groundwork for a spectacular separation and individuation, i.e., a populist uprising, through the devalue and discard phases of narcissistic abuse when the masses fail to live up to the unrealistic and rigged expectations of the out to lunch and in this sense disconnected elite.
As a result of living in the void as Mair terms it, voters began to feel as though they were no longer in the conversation. As a result, academics began to talk about the emergence of an era of de-alignment, a volatile, chaotic, polarized, and unpredictable era in which voters were no longer tribally loyal to the main parties.
-Goodwin
Chafing at the oppressive mandates and strictures of a narcissistic elite, the masses with their native intrinsic values squirm and retaliate against the oppositional, antagonistic, extrinsic values of the elite (see chart below). As a function of their narcissism, the elite are unable to see the masses clearly and resort to denigrating them as racist, bigoted, and backward for adhering to traditional values. The reality is more nuanced, but the result is in keeping with narcissistic abuse, that the masses effectively have no voice, aren't seen and heard, and are marginalized, all of these dynamics leaving in its wake a polarized and fractious populace ripe for revolt.
The second point is the elite have been failing to deliver, which has been exacerbating this crisis largely because they sent power on authority away from the center to other institutions. -Goodwin
The chief story of the last 40 years in this country and many other Western democracies is a story of elite failure: the great financial crash, stagnant economies, inequality, spiraling national debt, the failure to see inflation coming, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the Middle East.
Prof. Matt Goodwin
Yet we're told again and again to return moral legitimacy in authenticity to that same elite. Yet the last 30 to 40 years have been a consistent story of elite failure. It doesn't matter who wins the next election, the story will be the same national governments that are constrained increasingly by forces that are beyond their control because they've given up so much power, authenticity, and legitimacy to other actors.
Point three, both of these things, the draining away of power and influence, the draining away of moral legitimacy has led the new elite to search for a new means of moral legitimacy. It's led them to increasingly embrace social and cultural power as a means of their moral legitimacy. They've embraced values increasingly to try and project their authenticity and authority to others, and so the new elite has been searching around now desperately for an ideology that validates the ruling class, but as we can now see through its embrace of social and cultural liberalism and increasingly radical progressivism that only represents 20% of Britain. -Goodwin
Goodwin asserts that this new ruling class is profoundly insecure, narcissistic, and politically intolerant of people who hold different political beliefs. These elites have turned to cultural power to try and give themselves a sense of solidarity with the masses.
Given the penchant for authoritarian narcissism, it's not surprising that the new elite are politically intolerant of dissent. Unless for self-serving goals, narcissists are not natural purveyors of magnanimity.
However, these new values are undermining their authority among ordinary voters. Culture has become the predominant means through which elites understand themselves and that is why it has increasingly lost the support and loyalty of the masses because the cultural values that the new elite are pushing are hardwired to push the masses apart and not pull them together.
The new elite increasingly use their values that inform their ideology as a source of status, their luxury beliefs — mass immigration/weaker national borders, the breakdown of the family, and the erosion of cultural guardrails that used to hold people together.
The new elite now derive their sense of status by projecting their luxury beliefs in order to distinguish themselves from everybody else in society, the low status masses, the gamins, the racists, the ignorant bigots, because it's the only way now they have of upholding and trying to restore their sense of moral legitimacy.
-Goodwin
Being “common” is the original sin of narcissism; the imperative is to be special and unique. This narcissistic imperative is ironic on the face of it considering narcissistic abuse squelches independence of mind and precludes others from being special. There is a sort of incongruence here, a bristling and chafing of competing philosophies, a cognitive dissonance, where the elite assert dominance yet codependently kowtow to the masses in an effort to achieve egalitarian solidarity and simultaneous dominion. It all amounts to strong-arming the masses into a grandiose paracosm or fantastic space.
This collapse in the authority and moral legitimacy of the elite has also been exacerbated by its failure to deliver, by its failure to project competence. Frank Furedi quotes Zaki Laïdi in his essay, who said: 'Power is nothing when it has lost meaning’. And for many voters today the power of the elite has lost its meaning.
-Goodwin
A consequence of the masses’ cultural merging and fusing with the elite is that there remains no daylight between the two groups and without this distinguishing gap, there ceases to be any meaningful distinction to warrant respect; after all, hierarchy, at the urging of the woke elite has collapsed and flattened at the behest and prerogative of progressive ideology. As a result, the masses enjoy an artificially inflated, albeit with insecure footing, narcissistic grandiosity of mass psychosis that they are “on the level” with the elite.
This elite positioning is another subterfuge to throw the masses off the scent of their political and social alienation. The elites have confused the masses by “progressively” restructuring and reordering, nay, dis-ordering and sowing chaos, a specialty of the narcissist, elites and narcissists being virtually one and the same.
There is no core self to the narcissist, no constellated self as Carl Jung would have put it, therefore society, is subject to the arbitrary and capricious whims of the ruling class elites who pretend as though the masses are on their level in a bad case of malignant egalitarianism what with the spurious bones the elite have thrown the masses in the forms of the nation-state, democracy, the vote, and the American dream.
On a visceral level, these bones, these scrap heaps, this chum are thrown to the masses to avoid a barbaric end to their reign such as the decapitations of noblemen that took place during the French Revolution that set the elites back on their heels.
When you change the way society works, values shift in response.
The elites engineer all kinds of social upheavals. Privatization, free markets, austerity —especially for the poor, inequality, and even reactions to pandemics. These situations shift baselines and normalize what used to be abnormal.
Prof. Sam Vaknin
Goodwin declares, “The lesson of the last 10 years in politics is that voters won't stand for it anymore. The populist rebellions of the last 20 years do not represent the end of the revolt. They represent the beginning. The era of the alignment is going to be with us, and it will accelerate over the next few years and decades as voters increasingly look at a self-serving, insular, narcissistic, politically intolerant elite who no longer represents the values of the wider majority, no longer gives them a voice, and no longer treats them as legitimate and acceptable members of the wider community.”
Lacking object relations, a narcissistic elite who is inclined to psychological merger and fusion would be incapable of seeing “the other” and as such make for ineffective leaders. As much of the elite are regressed and infantile themselves, yet authoritarian, much like petulant and demanding toddlers, the resultantly regressed masses, who have by and large outsourced their agency to the narcissistic elites at their urging, find themselves in a double-bind, contending with both their own psychological regression and regressive so-called leaders.
Goodwin contends, “Until we restore power to the people and popular sovereignty, the rebellions of the last 20 years are only going to get bigger and bigger.” What he fails to consider is the feedback loop from hell — a paradoxical hopelessness of no adults being left in the room in a haplessly narcissistic age.
For a historical backdrop that frames the current state of affairs of the elites vs. the masses, please see Prof. Sam Vaknin’s video here entitled Watch This to Make Sense of the World (174K views) and/or read the edited transcript below, followed by a chart I have put together that outlines how the values of the elite are different from the masses, at least traditionally. The narcissistic elites pave the way for a narcissistic populace, bequeathing their extrinsic values.
In the last 300 years, a middle class was created. It emerged from the masses and it reverted to the elites. It collaborated with the elites. It compromised itself by collaborating with the elites.
The elites were fine with this because the middle class had always been small and the elites threw them some crumbs to make them feel good and encourage fantasies of social mobility and riches, the American dream and the middle class was happy and the elites were happy.
Then in the last hundred years, the masses could take it no more. We started to see mass movements, which had all the hallmarks of religions, secular religions, and which were founded on ideology. Ideology is the poor man, the ignorant man's philosophy. It's basic; it's demagogic; it's not very sophisticated. You don't have to have too much brain to comprehend it. It's prescriptive. It tells you what to do. And it's dictatorial. It's black and white thinking. There's the enemy and there's you. There's us and them.
So ideologies are a poor, ignorant man's philosophy.
After 1918 and well into the end of the 1960s, empires fell apart and monarchies vanished. The masses started to make demands.
By now the masses were no longer homicidal. They no longer wanted to kill the elites. They tried this. It didn't work. The masses had discovered something about themselves. They are not good at governing.
The masses tried communism. The masses tried fascism. The masses tried Nazism. It didn't work well. The masses even tried labor governance and labor parties in various parts of the world from Italy to the United Kingdom. It didn't work well either.
Masses are not built to govern. They don't have the internal intellectual capital. They don't have a traditional governing and they don't have the necessary skills and knowledge, etc. They also are not well connected.
Governance is about networking. It's about leveraging social capital.
The elites tried desperately because they realized that things were going the wrong way for them. They looked to the West and they saw decapitated noblemen in France. They looked a bit to the East and they saw a royal family, bullet-riddled in Russia. They looked further and they saw the Labour Party taking over in the United Kingdom. The earth was shaking. The elites were terrified. The elites were absolutely terrified. There was a yellow scare (Yellow Peril). There was a red scare.
So the elites introduced a variety of pieces of fiction, narratives, stories, movies, movie scripts, and they tried to sell the masses on these movie scripts.
One of these movie scripts is liberal democracy. Every four years, you get to tell us who will be in the elite.
The elites told the masses you have power. You decide who will be a member of our club, which of course is utter nonsense. Democracy is a sham. It's also an exceedingly bad idea because democracy led to Adolf Hitler and not comparing, but democracy led to Donald Trump. Democracy is a horrible idea. The masses are not built to govern. They don't have the qualifications, the knowledge, the capacity, the mentality, nothing.
But the elites were so terrified, so panic-stricken that they introduced universal suffrage (universal voting) and they included minorities such as women and ethnic minorities and so on and so forth in this sweeping universal suffrage, in this sweeping universal democracy.
And the second idea that they introduced was the nation-state.
So the elites tried to subdue the masses, subjugate them, control them, manipulate them, and channel their energy to derive maximum benefit from the masses by, on the one hand, giving them illusory freedom, illusory mobility, illusory power, like democracy.
And the notion that if you study and if you work hard, you're going to become rich, the American dream and democracy. These were the great levelers.
The idea was to level the playing field, egalitarianism, in other words.
But it became malignant egalitarianism.
The elites introduced liberal democracy. And the second idea that elites introduced was the nation-state.
The nation-state is a very new invention, around 200 years old.
Nationalism and democracy: these were the tools of the elites to subjugate, manipulate, and control the masses.
Both ideas were ludicrous. They were shams. They were utter unmitigated nonsense. There's no such thing as race. There's no such thing as a nation. And there's no such thing as democracy. This is a total psychotic hallucination.
This sham was an effort to structure the surging mobs, to control them, to prevent the inevitable decapitation, dilution in the square, and riots in the capital.
On January 6, the elites didn't want this to happen. The elites didn't want Donald Trump to happen. The elites didn't want Hitler to happen, except a few industrialists.
So the elites introduced liberal democracy and introduced nationalism, very often put together. It backfired because, to the shock of the elites, the masses wholeheartedly adopted and embraced democracy, adopted and embraced nationalism. The elites became immersed in this augmented reality. The masses became immersed in this augmented reality. The masses adopted democracy lovingly. And they regarded democracy as a way to break into the citadel of the elites. The masses adopted nationalism lovingly. They saw it as a way to leverage the power of the masses, take over, and redirect the body politic.
The elite’s inventions — twin inventions, twin shams, twin deceptions, twin illusions of democracy and nationalism backfired on them. The great unwashed, the hoi polloi, and the masses leveraged democracy. They put in the White House their own men, Donald Trump, for example, the latest example. And the same in the Philippines, Duterte, and the same in Brazil, Bolsonaro.
The masses discovered the power of the vote. The power of the vote was supposed to be a piece of fiction. No one had voted. I mean, look at voting numbers. Look at voting rates throughout history. No one used it. No one until recently.
Recently, the masses fell in love with the voting process. This is why “Stop the Steal!” was such a potent hashtag, because the masses are emotionally invested in the vote. They regard the vote as their weapon. And they don't want anyone to take away this weapon from them, to steal it, as they see it.
The new technologies coupled with one man, one vote, gave the masses the first real chance at power, the first real chance at self-governance and control and self-enlightenment. They had this chance in the 1930s and 40s, but they botched it.
The masses had a first shot at power through communism, through fascism, through Nazism, and they failed. They failed miserably. For 60-70 years, the masses had retreated because they had this traumatic experience.
The masses said “When we get to power, we end up with Adolf Hitler. When we get to power, we end up with Joseph Stalin. When we get to power, we end up with Mao. So, better keep away from power. Because when we have power, we end up killing each other. Better keep away from power.”
For 70 years, the masses were in a post-traumatic condition following the mass ideologies and mass movements of the first half of the 20th century, but now they have recovered.
Plus, they had forgotten. The new generations know very little about Stalin and Hitler and the Great Depression and all these things. And the new generations don't read books.
So, now the masses are ready for a second attempt, a second attempt at taking power. And it’s unfolded in the last 20 years all over the world.
Putin is a man of the masses. Orbán is a man of the masses. Bolsonaro in Brazil. Duterte in the Philippines. Donald Trump in the United States. They're all people of the masses.
They're all representatives of the masses in the centers of power in the swamp, in the swamp of the elites.
How do the elites co-opt the middle class? How do they subjugate the masses? What are the secret tools, signaling, and messaging that they deploy when they succeed to regain and retake power?
Because the elites have been challenged thousands of times throughout history. And they never ever failed.
Numerous movements, rooted in the middle class, for example, in 1848, rooted in the masses, for example in the 1930s, there have been numerous challenges to the elites, to the power structures. Numerous challenges.
And the elites saw them off. The elites succeeded to suppress, eliminate, destroy and reverse every challenge ever thrown at them.
The elites are very creative. Sometimes they come up with sham concessions, such as democracy. Sometimes they come with a unifying narrative, such as nationalism.
“Maybe I'm elite, maybe you're a mass, but we belong to the same nation.” They have many ways.
And the elites are not a conspiracy. The elites are not a coordinated bunch. They don't pick up the phone every morning and coordinate actions.
The elites have common interests. And that's enough. Common interests dictate common courses of action, common behaviors, common cognitions, common emotions, common derision of the masses, common contempt, common hatred, common everything.
When you have common interests with someone, you don't need to talk to them. You're both likely to act the same way.
And so the elites are a diffuse mass. They're more like a cloud. And they're a diffuse mass that permeates every crevice and nook and cranny of society.
And they have common interests. Above all, the interests of stability and self-preservation so that they can increase, enhance their wealth and transfer it to the next generation.
That's the main interest of the elite, the selfish gene.
The built-in narcissism of fantasy underpins our government and with this shaky foundation, we are experiencing an earthquake. With its emphasis on extrinsic values, Western society, ruled by the elites, is descending into a pit of narcissism. -GC
Resources:
The chart above is based on the video below by Prof. Sam Vaknin:
Comedian, George Carlin's classic, “It's a Big Club and You Ain't in It!”-
Further reading:
National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy by Roger Eatwell, Matthew Goodwin
Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics by Matthew Goodwin
Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy by Peter Mair
Concerning Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Please consider a paid subscription if you find value in my work, or feel free to buy me a coffee.

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A reading of The Demise of Free Speech and the Implications for Society: A Post-Enlightenment Perspective
23 dez 2023· Concerning Narcissism Podcast
Hello Concerning Narcissism Readers,
Please enjoy here my second Concerning Narcissism podcast, a reading of my most recent piece, produced by Neshma Friend (Sane Francisco Substack).
My latest piece tracks and accounts for why we are feeling at odds with one another these days to do with inputs from modernism, postmodernism, Realpolitik, the technological age, and of course, narcissism.
This piece is notable in its thesis that free speech is a relic of the Enlightenment, lost to us in the age of narcissism.
Pull-Quotes:
“Both the left and the right are increasingly jettisoning free speech in favor of pursuing more illiberal and narcissistic aims. The student bases at elite colleges are entitled and therefore narcissistic; with their narcissism comes illiberalism and authoritarianism inconducive to the “adulting” requisite for free speech. Faith in political goodwill and good faith argument is atrophying in an increasingly narcissistic culture. These self-focused societal changes come at the expense of free speech.”"Running parallel to a Realpolitik pragmatic philosophical makeover which is divorced from problematic notions of hoping for unifying morality or ideology as makeshift charters, is the advent of not just AI, but quantum computing, which may help us navigate tight quarters to truth. If technology advanced the end of the Enlightenment by revealing further social complexities, it's incumbent on it to chart our new path.""Notwithstanding cybersecurity concerns, quantum computing may be illuminating a path forward for how our modern (Enlightenment-based) and postmodern mash-ups/paradigms aren't serving us any longer. Religion has failed us; the Age of Reason has failed us. Neither morality nor ideology are stable enough for a civilization to be perennial. The information age and the democratization of the Internet have transmogrified the social and cultural milieu. We are breaking at the seams of increasingly antiquated notions of reality.""Our new societal reality involves an artificial component that is also real, whether it's narcissistic abuse (shared fantasy), artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and beyond. We are conditioning ourselves to be more comfortable with hybrid reality and fantastic spaces. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. These computers will do computations that are inconceivable to us now and in hindsight will make the Enlightenment look 1950s quaint. The age of narcissism, as a liminal stage, is helping us acclimate to pseudo-realities or artificial realities."
As a complement to the podcast, please read the written piece below and share it in your networks.
-GC
Concerning Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Please consider a paid subscription if you find value in my work, or feel free to buy me a coffee.

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A reading of The Interplay of Postmodernism and Narcissism: Threats to Individualism and the Rise of Authoritarianism
4 dez 2023· Concerning Narcissism Podcast
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Episódios

Crypto and AI: the Dangers of Building a Civilization on Fantasy

The Lethal Pandemic of Trump Contagion

The Elites vs. the Masses

A reading of The Demise of Free Speech and the Implications for Society: A Post-Enlightenment Perspective

A reading of The Interplay of Postmodernism and Narcissism: Threats to Individualism and the Rise of Authoritarianism