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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

Hey, John, thanks for the citation/shout-out, I really appreciate it and really appreciate that we can all educate, inspire and entertain each other here and elsewhere, in our little samizdat corner of the world.

I personally root the Marxcissists in 1960s California, more specifically a very swank place called the Esalen Institute, where various aspiring gurus (political and spiritual) helped create the New Left. This is where the delicate operation was made that excised the proletariat from their Messiah status and transformed "the redistribution of wealth" into the "redistribution of self-esteem". Once the proles had proved immune to the charms of the Vanguard class, Leftism became a luxury good designed to meet the spiritual, psychological and personal needs of the young, bourgeois and disaffected. I think this is where "The Personal is Political" went from slogan to cult to belief system for upscale liberals (especially women) and also where the state of California got the inspiration to create the world's first official Dept. of Self-Esteem (it may have also hosted the world's first "Diversity" seminar).

If so much of the 20th century's destruction was rooted in 19th-century German thought, so much of our 21st-century stupidity, self-absorption, and Personality Disorder Politics are rooted in 20th-century California.

Hopefully the Marxcissists can be tamed by granting their wish and holding up a mirror to their faces, and hopefully somehow they can see how ugly and hateful they've become.

Cheers!

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Guttermouth's avatar

Has anyone else noticed there's a LOT of people that spend most of their time on the internet talking about narcissists? It's a REALLY popular topic to play armchair clinician and exchange stories of unpleasant interactions out in the world and dissect what aspects of narcissism were manifesting in the obvious narcissist that was the source of the unpleasant interaction.

There's even an informal credentialism in this where people describe themselves as "experts" or deeply experienced with narcissists; invariably this seems to be because one has had a long stream of usually boyfriends or husbands that were all, mysteriously, pathological narcissists.

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