Rule number 4: subjugation, oppression and humiliation.
I live in Toronto. In Toronto bike lanes are being installed, for Instance on Bloor Street. A two-lane inner city road is reduced to one lane in order to put in a bike lane.
As you sit in traffic with hundreds of cars, for an hour, when it used to take half the time, it might occur to you that you’ve seen only two bicyclists. Hundreds of cars and two morally superior people on bicycles.
This is the humiliation. Toronto, a winter nation, half the year freezing weather, bicycle lanes, why, because we deserve it: climate change, you know, the environment.
Fucking it all up is part of their strategy, their enjoyment, at least so says this author and I for one am inclined to believe him.
As The Bad Cat says: “ reality is refusing to conform to policies and prescriptions”
I live in Italy, in Padua, and I used the bike all my life without problems and with great pleasure, without bike paths. But then they started to build them, and the effect on the traffic Is the same as in Toronto. Worsened by the fact that the neoliberal policies of saving on social spending closed many hospitals and public services in the province to concentrate them in the town, forcing people to use the car to reach the centre (public transportation? Where?). But things are not improved for bikers, like me. I can ride in the street with danger now, and the bike paths are like handicap races, up and down from pavements, with or without pedestrians in front of you, from one side of the Road to the other, and with a lot of obstacles at the sides and sometimes along the parh (maybe to block scooters). In short, It Is a hell both for car riders and for people who always used the bike. But It Is paradise for the few that now can parade with their sense of superiority because they will "save the planet".
I live in Sussex, UK and like you have used a bicycle for much of my life since I was 17. Bike lanes can be ok, but many are poorly designed like you say and worse than useless.
In Slovakia, in the city of Bratislava, the same situation ... we have a mayor from the political party Progressive Slovakia with LGBT and Green ideology
You sound like the narcissist in this situation. Move with the times. Your fossil fuel consumption causes global warming. Think about the children of the world who will grow up in a living hell unless we come together for their sake. Stop being so selfish and petty. Start making every day a win-win. Your children's future rests on it.
Sociopaths put their well being considerably ahead of everyone else's. Not all are self-aware that their emotions don't tick like those of the people they meet. Their lack of empathy is replaced by boredom, greed, frustration and rage. Sometimes there are no emotions all. They lie without guilt. They never say sorry and mean it.
For those who realise what they are, their manipulation of others will be greater, as will the accompanying impression management. They'll look after their appearance and gain a respectful job or position in the community. They'll give their attractive attention to the nicest, most trusting people. Their awareness and where they are on that scale of mental disorder will decide how much and how regularly they harm others. Sometimes it'll only be about how much they can get away with it.
Self-awareness is a double-edged sword, the struggle between desire and not wanting to get caught. Whilst it's easier to be themselves behind closed doors, they need to maintain a mask at work and play. They can live seemingly different lives; the good job, wife, kids and charity donation part masking their nastiness and crime.
Like everyone else in life, some are more successful than others, others have less impulse control. Prisons have more sociopaths, on average, than free society does. But it isn't comforting to think that those who got a good education are more likely to be better social parasites.
Banger of the year candidate. Sent shivers down my spine because I know many of these narcissist commissar types. They would attack you instead of reading this article and looking in the mirror.
Dear Dr. Baltar, I am writing from Spain and I can assure you that a photo of the president of the Spanish government would perfectly illustrate this excellent article. Even I would bet the president would be proud that the photo was posted here.
Dr Gaius Baltar is a character from the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Presumably that's the source of this pseudonym. Baltar (in both versions of Galactica) is the chief traitor amongst the humans who betrays humanity to the Cyclons. In the reboot of Galactica, Gaius is a lot more subtle and you can see the argument that humanity is degenerate and the Cyclons represent the ethical future. I don't know exactly what the author is suggesting by taking this pseudonym. Perhaps "conscientious traitor to an immoral system"?
When speaking of the "elites", you occasionally give examples of politicians. Granted, these are elite politicians, but what about the people behind these people? The real power holders, that is. I vaguely recall from your previous articles that narcissists make good employees, which is why the real power holders promote them. But these real power holders, are they narcissists themselves? Were they narcissists 50 years ago? Why the incompetence now?
The managerial/administrative class are predominantly people who have been selected into those positions because they do what they are told. They stay in their lane and keep any thoughts about the overall picture under guard. If the people telling them what to do are instructing them to carry out doomed plans or irrational policies they will execute them (and often very capably). Being able to demonstrate high compliance by, for example, wielding charts that demonstrate high take-up of MRNA gene therapy, will win brownie points and secure promotion. I really think it's about that simple.
KE , above I posted Curtis Yarvin’s brief explanation of the cathedral, it is the best explication of what you are correctly explaining in this post, I highly recommend it
Thanks Diamond, I'll follow that up. I recall that the late Mark Fisher preferred to refer to the 'Vampire Castle' but basically meant much the same thing. Appreciate the feedback.
Glad to see you're continuing this series and diving deeper into it. I do have one quibble though. You persistently use (in)competence as if it is a general intrinsic personal quality, an absolute, if you will. But it is a relative, and always aimed at something outside yourself, even if that something is typically left out. The statement: "You are incompetent", is meaningless without context. Incompetent at what? Being human? Doing the dishes? Parking the car? Existing?
From a practical point of view, as these narcissistic rulers now are everywhere in the West, they must be structurally competent at something, for how else did they all get there? Or are you suggesting that the rest of us who let them get there are even more incompetent? (and if so, at what exactly?)
I would be interested to see you go down that particular avenue, dissecting the balance between the specific competences of the elite, that got them where they are, and their specific incompetences, which are leading us down a cliff, rather than simply dismissing them as generally incompetent without specification.
Personally, I feel that what we may have here is an extension of the 'Peter Principle'. Normal and healthy organisations make allowances to prevent and mitigate this as much as possible, although this is mostly cleaning up afterwards, as the principle itself is unavoidable. To me, it seems that what we face here is the opposite, that our western governing systems are persistently ignoring people having reached their level of incompetence, and are instead continuously failing them upward, to ever greater levels of incompetency.
One reason may be that governing systems are very hierarchical, but also very factious. Allegiance to the right inner faction and/or higher placed individual will often trump actual competence at the task at hand. Note that I'm not strictly talking about politicians here, but about the civil service in general, although the two are becoming harder to distinguish as the decades go by. The civil service in any country is also rife with internal power struggles, empire building and all sorts of reckonings.
And the civil service has always had a much harder time dealing with the 'Peter Principle' and its consequences than the private sector has. I think that what we are seeing now may well be the result of 50+ years of accumulated incompetence throughout the civil services of the west (and through it politics itself), due to a lack of 'organisational maintenance' in the public sector. The rise of the narcissists may well the logical (and unavoidable?) outcome.
Simple: we gave women the vote and removed constrainst on their morality. That ensures more or less half the population will vote towards "feel-good" policies (always left). It's not about how is fit for the job, it's about who tickets the right boxes with highly emotional voters.
You're talking about (elected) politicians. I'm talking about the civil service. Not the same thing at all. And, as I pointed out in an earlier reply, it isn't new either, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the example I used, can't blame that on the women's vote. Finally , the contents of the policies do not matter here. The mechanism remains the same (can't get much more conservative than the Austro-Hungarian Empire!). It is not a partisan effect. It is a pretty much inescapable mid to long term consequence of how human societies organise themselves. It is not political. It is human.
This is worth a read. It’s very funny and captures what you talk about, perverse logic within organizations. Curtis is fantastic and I think his argument must be reckoned with: the cathedral affect is very real. “The selective advantage of dominant ideas and then inability of Recessive ideas to compete” is present in all organizations from the family unit up to the nation state.
Perhaps the "lack of 'organisational maintenance' in the public sector" is due to decades of financial sector "private sector" pressure e.g. debt ballooning over last ~50 years? And perhaps that dynamic enabled the " rise of the narcissists"? And perhaps all these factors feed off each other, rather than being unidirectionally causative?
No, it isn't due to the private sector I'm afraid. It's nothing new. The byzantine bureaucracy of the civil service of the Austro-Hungarian empire in its final days for example was similarly cursed. Franz Kafka was a low level employee in that bureaucracy, and the circumstances of his employ were the main inspiration for his literary work, and consequently for our current concept of 'Kafkaesque'.
Of course lots of factors feed into each other and external circumstances can quicken or slow the effects of this 'curse', or steer it into specific manifestations that would otherwise have been much less pronounced. But they are not the cause of the civil service's structural problems. I would argue it is more likely the other way around. The gradually growing incompetency of western civil services as a whole, which goes hand in hand with various forms of corruption, allowed the more parasitical elements of society to gradually grow too. And not just in the private sector either. Public servants for example, be they presidents, prime ministers or regular cabinet ministers, and all those other cronies in and around governments, tend do very, very well financially both during and after their tenures. As long as they 'play ball' of course. We may not officially call it corruption, but that's just semantics.
And the private sector has some advantages the public sector lacks. As I mentioned for example above, the public sector really has no proper answer for dealing with the 'Peter Principle', whereas the private sector does, out of necessity. In most of the private sector, there are still grave repercussions for serious incompetency, and certainly for persistent and endemic incompetency. The public sector largely lacks these automatic corrective measures, making it far easier for incompetency to thrive within it.
This is not a new issue for me. I did my masters in what, in English, would be called something like 'Organisational Sciences', several decades ago. It was quite clear back then already, that in regards to how to (re)organise in the face of new challenges, the private sector was responding to them and evolving, whereas the public sector seemed to stagnate and even regress in the face of those same challenges. There are very serious, deep-rooted, structural and fundamental problems with how we organise our public sectors. And what may well be inescapable issues. What I termed 'lack of organisational maintenance' is a rather simplistic label for a very complex and wide ranging set of systemic problems.
In the private sector incompetence leads to financial loss. You simply have to listen to your lower instincts like wanting to make money to punish incompetence.
In the public sector this is not the case. Here you would need higher moral principles, the will to pursue righteous goals just for the sake of it. Exactly those principles will impede your career.
Depends on how we define "incompetency". For example does running a 'successful' mainstream media, or social media organisation, or advertising, or financial services (which are all private) mean they provide a "competent" input into any given culture / economy / society?
I'd argue none of those functions are "competent" because propaganda in support of a narcissistic minority or 'ruling elites', and the corruption and harming of general mental and physical health, and enabling / allowing "private" banks to create money via asset price inflation (i.e. according to people like Michael Hudson / Steve Keen etc ~3/4 of 'western' debt is on mortgages for land and property) is "incompetency".
The narrow internal focus of organisational competency you suggest as a comparison perspective / metric seems too wedded to the conventional mainstream left/right political paradigm to help us understand the full impacts of all the 'sectors' that seem to me equally culpable.
Now you're just engaging in the 'newspeak', reinventing the meaning of well-established words and concepts to fit a preconceived notion. I know it's a common feature today, especially among the political left, but despite what you may want to believe, it doesn't actually change reality.
There's no left/right paradigm in the scientific understanding (not 'mine', as you claim) of how organisations work (or don't work). It's neutral science. Of course you can choose which science you want to believe and which you don't. That too is very fashionable nowadays. But let's be real here, it takes years and years of dedicated study to fathom this particular field of science. You're not even scratching the surface, and some back and forth on a comment thread on a substack isn't going to change that.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
When you aggregate up all of the self serving corruption, ideological notions divorced from reality, and self assured echo chambers it looks like cartoon supervilliany.
There have been 'technical issues' preventing me from activating the subscription function so far but I think they may have been solved. I'll look into this soon.
Such an important essay. Pervasive clinical Narcissism explains so much about the Western political classes and about our current situation and it is discussed rarely if at all.
Fun read. One thing: Rome’s legal virtue of honor was covocal with Christian principles. Perhaps that is how they worked together. Also, Christianity saved Rome from its decline and extended its lease.
There is a perfect sports metaphor in the Broncos releasing Russell Wilson. The coach can’t be a genius if he wins with the last coach’s QB. Similarly, our elites can’t see themselves as the anointed if they simply continue the policies already in place, no matter how successful. “I don’t care if everyone is rich, good-looking, and smart. They’d be doing better if I made the rules.”
Very interesting, and so much of it rings true. And meanwhile I thought it was simpler – – that they had sold out to China, which has had an explicit plan to destroy the west for a very long time. Follow the money.
And bear in mind they only appear act with their own group. When they run out of people and isms to blame they will turn all these tactics against each other. That will not be a pretty time for our civilisation but at least we may then finally be rid of most of them.
Rule number 4: subjugation, oppression and humiliation.
I live in Toronto. In Toronto bike lanes are being installed, for Instance on Bloor Street. A two-lane inner city road is reduced to one lane in order to put in a bike lane.
As you sit in traffic with hundreds of cars, for an hour, when it used to take half the time, it might occur to you that you’ve seen only two bicyclists. Hundreds of cars and two morally superior people on bicycles.
This is the humiliation. Toronto, a winter nation, half the year freezing weather, bicycle lanes, why, because we deserve it: climate change, you know, the environment.
Fucking it all up is part of their strategy, their enjoyment, at least so says this author and I for one am inclined to believe him.
As The Bad Cat says: “ reality is refusing to conform to policies and prescriptions”
They do hate us .
Brilliant article .
I live in Italy, in Padua, and I used the bike all my life without problems and with great pleasure, without bike paths. But then they started to build them, and the effect on the traffic Is the same as in Toronto. Worsened by the fact that the neoliberal policies of saving on social spending closed many hospitals and public services in the province to concentrate them in the town, forcing people to use the car to reach the centre (public transportation? Where?). But things are not improved for bikers, like me. I can ride in the street with danger now, and the bike paths are like handicap races, up and down from pavements, with or without pedestrians in front of you, from one side of the Road to the other, and with a lot of obstacles at the sides and sometimes along the parh (maybe to block scooters). In short, It Is a hell both for car riders and for people who always used the bike. But It Is paradise for the few that now can parade with their sense of superiority because they will "save the planet".
Cheers
I live in Sussex, UK and like you have used a bicycle for much of my life since I was 17. Bike lanes can be ok, but many are poorly designed like you say and worse than useless.
In Washington DC, the so-called “bikers lobby” is in fact financed by developers – – with who knows what underlying agenda.
Reminds me of the street level bike paths in Stockholm, and other parts of Sweden, heavily promoted by the Green Party.
In Slovakia, in the city of Bratislava, the same situation ... we have a mayor from the political party Progressive Slovakia with LGBT and Green ideology
You sound like the narcissist in this situation. Move with the times. Your fossil fuel consumption causes global warming. Think about the children of the world who will grow up in a living hell unless we come together for their sake. Stop being so selfish and petty. Start making every day a win-win. Your children's future rests on it.
Fantasy
They do seem to have gone off the rails in recent years
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/usa-medical-union-speaks-the-ama
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/ding-dong-nuland-witch-is-dead-we
Trump rubbing the 'ball' was a big tell
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/does-anybody-here-remember-trump
Sociopaths put their well being considerably ahead of everyone else's. Not all are self-aware that their emotions don't tick like those of the people they meet. Their lack of empathy is replaced by boredom, greed, frustration and rage. Sometimes there are no emotions all. They lie without guilt. They never say sorry and mean it.
For those who realise what they are, their manipulation of others will be greater, as will the accompanying impression management. They'll look after their appearance and gain a respectful job or position in the community. They'll give their attractive attention to the nicest, most trusting people. Their awareness and where they are on that scale of mental disorder will decide how much and how regularly they harm others. Sometimes it'll only be about how much they can get away with it.
Self-awareness is a double-edged sword, the struggle between desire and not wanting to get caught. Whilst it's easier to be themselves behind closed doors, they need to maintain a mask at work and play. They can live seemingly different lives; the good job, wife, kids and charity donation part masking their nastiness and crime.
Like everyone else in life, some are more successful than others, others have less impulse control. Prisons have more sociopaths, on average, than free society does. But it isn't comforting to think that those who got a good education are more likely to be better social parasites.
Banger of the year candidate. Sent shivers down my spine because I know many of these narcissist commissar types. They would attack you instead of reading this article and looking in the mirror.
Dear Dr. Baltar, I am writing from Spain and I can assure you that a photo of the president of the Spanish government would perfectly illustrate this excellent article. Even I would bet the president would be proud that the photo was posted here.
Why do you call him Dr?
Dr Gaius Baltar is a character from the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Presumably that's the source of this pseudonym. Baltar (in both versions of Galactica) is the chief traitor amongst the humans who betrays humanity to the Cyclons. In the reboot of Galactica, Gaius is a lot more subtle and you can see the argument that humanity is degenerate and the Cyclons represent the ethical future. I don't know exactly what the author is suggesting by taking this pseudonym. Perhaps "conscientious traitor to an immoral system"?
Thank you Gilgamesh. You’ve chosen a name based on the earliest book in western history, is that true?
Correct - with the name slightly updated for the modern era!
In some Western languages, educated people are called doctors without a doctoral or medical degree. Italian is one of them.
Cool, thanks
When speaking of the "elites", you occasionally give examples of politicians. Granted, these are elite politicians, but what about the people behind these people? The real power holders, that is. I vaguely recall from your previous articles that narcissists make good employees, which is why the real power holders promote them. But these real power holders, are they narcissists themselves? Were they narcissists 50 years ago? Why the incompetence now?
Your question is really the big question. I hope to address it in a later article.
The managerial/administrative class are predominantly people who have been selected into those positions because they do what they are told. They stay in their lane and keep any thoughts about the overall picture under guard. If the people telling them what to do are instructing them to carry out doomed plans or irrational policies they will execute them (and often very capably). Being able to demonstrate high compliance by, for example, wielding charts that demonstrate high take-up of MRNA gene therapy, will win brownie points and secure promotion. I really think it's about that simple.
KE , above I posted Curtis Yarvin’s brief explanation of the cathedral, it is the best explication of what you are correctly explaining in this post, I highly recommend it
Thanks Diamond, I'll follow that up. I recall that the late Mark Fisher preferred to refer to the 'Vampire Castle' but basically meant much the same thing. Appreciate the feedback.
Glad to see you're continuing this series and diving deeper into it. I do have one quibble though. You persistently use (in)competence as if it is a general intrinsic personal quality, an absolute, if you will. But it is a relative, and always aimed at something outside yourself, even if that something is typically left out. The statement: "You are incompetent", is meaningless without context. Incompetent at what? Being human? Doing the dishes? Parking the car? Existing?
From a practical point of view, as these narcissistic rulers now are everywhere in the West, they must be structurally competent at something, for how else did they all get there? Or are you suggesting that the rest of us who let them get there are even more incompetent? (and if so, at what exactly?)
I would be interested to see you go down that particular avenue, dissecting the balance between the specific competences of the elite, that got them where they are, and their specific incompetences, which are leading us down a cliff, rather than simply dismissing them as generally incompetent without specification.
Personally, I feel that what we may have here is an extension of the 'Peter Principle'. Normal and healthy organisations make allowances to prevent and mitigate this as much as possible, although this is mostly cleaning up afterwards, as the principle itself is unavoidable. To me, it seems that what we face here is the opposite, that our western governing systems are persistently ignoring people having reached their level of incompetence, and are instead continuously failing them upward, to ever greater levels of incompetency.
One reason may be that governing systems are very hierarchical, but also very factious. Allegiance to the right inner faction and/or higher placed individual will often trump actual competence at the task at hand. Note that I'm not strictly talking about politicians here, but about the civil service in general, although the two are becoming harder to distinguish as the decades go by. The civil service in any country is also rife with internal power struggles, empire building and all sorts of reckonings.
And the civil service has always had a much harder time dealing with the 'Peter Principle' and its consequences than the private sector has. I think that what we are seeing now may well be the result of 50+ years of accumulated incompetence throughout the civil services of the west (and through it politics itself), due to a lack of 'organisational maintenance' in the public sector. The rise of the narcissists may well the logical (and unavoidable?) outcome.
Simple: we gave women the vote and removed constrainst on their morality. That ensures more or less half the population will vote towards "feel-good" policies (always left). It's not about how is fit for the job, it's about who tickets the right boxes with highly emotional voters.
You're talking about (elected) politicians. I'm talking about the civil service. Not the same thing at all. And, as I pointed out in an earlier reply, it isn't new either, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the example I used, can't blame that on the women's vote. Finally , the contents of the policies do not matter here. The mechanism remains the same (can't get much more conservative than the Austro-Hungarian Empire!). It is not a partisan effect. It is a pretty much inescapable mid to long term consequence of how human societies organise themselves. It is not political. It is human.
https://open.substack.com/pub/graymirror/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral?r=j0s6f&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
This is worth a read. It’s very funny and captures what you talk about, perverse logic within organizations. Curtis is fantastic and I think his argument must be reckoned with: the cathedral affect is very real. “The selective advantage of dominant ideas and then inability of Recessive ideas to compete” is present in all organizations from the family unit up to the nation state.
Perhaps the "lack of 'organisational maintenance' in the public sector" is due to decades of financial sector "private sector" pressure e.g. debt ballooning over last ~50 years? And perhaps that dynamic enabled the " rise of the narcissists"? And perhaps all these factors feed off each other, rather than being unidirectionally causative?
No, it isn't due to the private sector I'm afraid. It's nothing new. The byzantine bureaucracy of the civil service of the Austro-Hungarian empire in its final days for example was similarly cursed. Franz Kafka was a low level employee in that bureaucracy, and the circumstances of his employ were the main inspiration for his literary work, and consequently for our current concept of 'Kafkaesque'.
Of course lots of factors feed into each other and external circumstances can quicken or slow the effects of this 'curse', or steer it into specific manifestations that would otherwise have been much less pronounced. But they are not the cause of the civil service's structural problems. I would argue it is more likely the other way around. The gradually growing incompetency of western civil services as a whole, which goes hand in hand with various forms of corruption, allowed the more parasitical elements of society to gradually grow too. And not just in the private sector either. Public servants for example, be they presidents, prime ministers or regular cabinet ministers, and all those other cronies in and around governments, tend do very, very well financially both during and after their tenures. As long as they 'play ball' of course. We may not officially call it corruption, but that's just semantics.
And the private sector has some advantages the public sector lacks. As I mentioned for example above, the public sector really has no proper answer for dealing with the 'Peter Principle', whereas the private sector does, out of necessity. In most of the private sector, there are still grave repercussions for serious incompetency, and certainly for persistent and endemic incompetency. The public sector largely lacks these automatic corrective measures, making it far easier for incompetency to thrive within it.
This is not a new issue for me. I did my masters in what, in English, would be called something like 'Organisational Sciences', several decades ago. It was quite clear back then already, that in regards to how to (re)organise in the face of new challenges, the private sector was responding to them and evolving, whereas the public sector seemed to stagnate and even regress in the face of those same challenges. There are very serious, deep-rooted, structural and fundamental problems with how we organise our public sectors. And what may well be inescapable issues. What I termed 'lack of organisational maintenance' is a rather simplistic label for a very complex and wide ranging set of systemic problems.
Might be as simple as the following:
In the private sector incompetence leads to financial loss. You simply have to listen to your lower instincts like wanting to make money to punish incompetence.
In the public sector this is not the case. Here you would need higher moral principles, the will to pursue righteous goals just for the sake of it. Exactly those principles will impede your career.
Depends on how we define "incompetency". For example does running a 'successful' mainstream media, or social media organisation, or advertising, or financial services (which are all private) mean they provide a "competent" input into any given culture / economy / society?
I'd argue none of those functions are "competent" because propaganda in support of a narcissistic minority or 'ruling elites', and the corruption and harming of general mental and physical health, and enabling / allowing "private" banks to create money via asset price inflation (i.e. according to people like Michael Hudson / Steve Keen etc ~3/4 of 'western' debt is on mortgages for land and property) is "incompetency".
The narrow internal focus of organisational competency you suggest as a comparison perspective / metric seems too wedded to the conventional mainstream left/right political paradigm to help us understand the full impacts of all the 'sectors' that seem to me equally culpable.
Now you're just engaging in the 'newspeak', reinventing the meaning of well-established words and concepts to fit a preconceived notion. I know it's a common feature today, especially among the political left, but despite what you may want to believe, it doesn't actually change reality.
There's no left/right paradigm in the scientific understanding (not 'mine', as you claim) of how organisations work (or don't work). It's neutral science. Of course you can choose which science you want to believe and which you don't. That too is very fashionable nowadays. But let's be real here, it takes years and years of dedicated study to fathom this particular field of science. You're not even scratching the surface, and some back and forth on a comment thread on a substack isn't going to change that.
If you think that scientific research that gets private funding is "neutral science" then yes I too will give up on this conversation.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
When you aggregate up all of the self serving corruption, ideological notions divorced from reality, and self assured echo chambers it looks like cartoon supervilliany.
Could you elaborate in a future article on when and how/why the western political sphere became narcissist-dominated?
Why in the west but not in other cultures?
To what degree did the Soviet union suffer from the same phenomenon? Some of their approaches seem related to current western ones.
Thanks! Keep up the good work!
This is an amazing article.
Dear author, I tried to manage my subscription, but there’s no option to become a paying subscriber. Is that on purpose?
There have been 'technical issues' preventing me from activating the subscription function so far but I think they may have been solved. I'll look into this soon.
Thank you all who have pledged subscription!
I just went to “manage subscription” , and there is no option to become a paying subscriber. Just now.
Are you a Toronto boy?
Such an important essay. Pervasive clinical Narcissism explains so much about the Western political classes and about our current situation and it is discussed rarely if at all.
Fun read. One thing: Rome’s legal virtue of honor was covocal with Christian principles. Perhaps that is how they worked together. Also, Christianity saved Rome from its decline and extended its lease.
They do seem to have gone off the rails in recent years
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/usa-medical-union-speaks-the-ama
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/ding-dong-nuland-witch-is-dead-we
Trump rubbing the 'ball' was a big tell
https://bilbobitch.substack.com/p/does-anybody-here-remember-trump
There is a perfect sports metaphor in the Broncos releasing Russell Wilson. The coach can’t be a genius if he wins with the last coach’s QB. Similarly, our elites can’t see themselves as the anointed if they simply continue the policies already in place, no matter how successful. “I don’t care if everyone is rich, good-looking, and smart. They’d be doing better if I made the rules.”
Very interesting, and so much of it rings true. And meanwhile I thought it was simpler – – that they had sold out to China, which has had an explicit plan to destroy the west for a very long time. Follow the money.
And bear in mind they only appear act with their own group. When they run out of people and isms to blame they will turn all these tactics against each other. That will not be a pretty time for our civilisation but at least we may then finally be rid of most of them.