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.
The human potential movement California shit out in the 70s is absolutely the mother of abominations that inflicted Marxicissism on the world. If this little portmanteau can help these troglodytes crawl back into their cave in shame it will have done it's job.
In other news, wasn't exaggerating when I said you were a top commenter.
as for the pathetic exercise in inflating the self-esteem of emotional cripples aka "Human Potential", there just seems to be such a deep need for spiritual meaning and psychological grounding in our deracinated post-Christian market state, and that goes double or triple for the refugees, exiles, drop-outs, burnouts and castaways that wash up on our Left coast.
Esalen fits alongside Scientology, Jonestown, and all the other California cults, where the lost souls and wannabe gurus begin their mating rituals, where moth and flame come together to fulfill their eternal roles.
I think the biggest mistake made by the rather euphoric, hedonistic human potential cults was their strong tendency towards wishful thinking. They'd grab whatever seemed useful or pleasing from whatever traditions they liked, discard everything they didn't like, filled in the blanks with made-up nonsense, and then disappeared into their own assholes as a result. As a path for spiritual growth it was entirely sterile, since they made it so easy for themselves to avoid anything that didn't feel good or really challenge them. Rather than disciplining themselves to grow into the world as it is, they simply imagined it was they wished it was.
And that's all without even accounting for the possibility that there's something very real in the subtle realms, in which case they were like children playing with a fire in a dark forest stalked by hungry wolves.
"Rather than disciplining themselves to grow into the world as it is, they simply imagined it was they wished it was."
If it feels good and flatters my ego, it has to be true!
Though it was a movement mostly crafted and led by exiled European shrinks and "thinkers", the entire New Age movement is deeply painfully inescapably American.
These were con artists much like the televangelists or the Tony Robbins types, and what they were selling was prepackaged drive-thru spirituality, just another accessory to bangle the holy Self with, like clothes or cars.
It seems that just about the entire New Left/Social Justice movement delivered benefits to those residing at the top of the upscale urbanite class (profs, journalists, the NYT/NPR/PBS devotees, most esp the women), while those lower on the ol' Maslow pyramid learned that shit runs downhill: they didn't get monetized self-actualization but broken homes and families, drug addiction and the other pathologies of maximum personal autonomy, and an endless supply of anxiety, depression, and personality disorders.
If only our aspiring overlords and "activists" put down the Foucault and picked up some Chuang Tzu:
'There is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind.'
The emotional cripples of the 60s were supermen compared with the kids today. They were more colourful, wore better clothes and the music was incomparably better. Monterey and all that. A hippy picnic would have been healthier and more fun than any video game.
Ridiculous as it all was, people need to lighten up and someone as intellectually serious as you should recall Spinoza: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari sed intelligere.
Error has its rights...and its dignity. Honour both.
anything and everyone rooted in the Old World is vastly richer, deeper and more interesting than anything or anyone rooted in the New World...it's like the difference bw someone who fought in WW2 and someone who fought in "Call of Duty".
Agreed. The Old World can be erased in a generation or so. Jacob Burkhardt, Nietzsche's mentor, predicted the Americanisation of Europe and the process has pretty much been completed. Whatever remains is retained by literary and cultural traditions as delicate as a strand from a spider's web.
The polymath and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi once wrote that all traditions disappear within a generation or so of its personal transmission (he was very big on mentors, master/apprentice stuff and the problems of the transmission of knowledge by tradition and the evolution of knowledge when constrained by tradition). The fragmentation of inherited forms of social and cultural life has now reached the point where we can expect catastrophic effects over the next several generations. The disruptions within academia (DEI, decolonising the curriculum, feminising the culture, deprioritising white men for hiring) have destroyed the conditions for the personal transferal of knowledge. What we cannot save now will not be saved at all.
Devon "Blackpilled" Stack did a dive into the sewer that was Esalen and the Human Potential Movement in his "Portal to Hell" insomnia stream edition. Judged that they "literally opened a portal to hell"... https://odysee.com/@Blackpilled:b/jewhellhole:3
CP, you are quite the optimist if you think that holding a mirror to their faces would shame any of them. They are more likely to be charmed by what they see or flattered by your attention.
The only thing that has ever been known to work with collective delusion on any scale is catastrophe.
Exactly. These people can't be shamed or reasoned with. Happily, they are working hard to collapse our society so perhaps the mass delusion will collapse soon too. Our only concern should be becoming independent enough to weather the storm.
Gloomy? You never come across as gloomy. But is all subjective. We have been cheated and disappointed by the system and our good sense abused by all the rubbish, but they own the system and their comfort zone depends on the pantomime of competence going on forever. Chin up, whatever happens a few tentacles of Cthulhu are destined to end up as calamari.
...second only to the meme, as the most esteemed feline pundit on interwebz would prob argue. Not presactly literature, them’s memes though 🙂
🗨 memes are the resurgence of rationality and the revenge of the shape rotators. they combine the speed of appeal to emotion with the informational density of long logical strings. it's intellectual jazz as a medium for rational renaissance. and it's a language the irrational cannot master.
They are all that you say. The next step is that the creative element need to go for the jugular. Plato said that if you change the music, you change the city.
When a resistance song becomes popular or widely known, then you will know that the opposition is making real progress. If I was a campaign manager for Trump, I'd forget polls and consultants and hire a songwriter/composer....someone from Los Angeles or Nashville with long experience performing live in front of an audience and who understands how to wind people up.
Take an old song (vintage folk, classic rock it does not matter) with a great melody and prepare lyrics that are carefully metrical and synchronised with the rhythm. It does not have to be overtly party political, merely reactionary and obnoxiously anti-woke....perhaps something on the theme of the Great Replacement or a lament for babies killed in partial birth abortions or a snappy and mocking ballad of George Floyd. Then get it out there via podcast. Project Orpheus. War by sound.
Ever see the Chilean movie, No? Reminiscent of this idea, although not musical per se.
Not sure music will work though; no shared musical culture. However, changing the topic, directing the flow of conversation by injecting new memes that spread on their own - this is the way. Victory through joy; assume the sale, communicate the idea of how much fun victory will be.
thanks, i do like Kraus, I recently read his "Last Days of Mankind", which was a bit of a slog and filled with maybe too many time- and place-specific references to be enjoyable 100 yrs later, but it is also filled w gems.
Respect is due. Milton, Wyndham Lewis, Sciascia, Calasso and Kraus. This newsletter attracts very rare birds indeed. The lights are going out, but not here.
CP, further to your very insightful observations about California I'd suggest that we need to understand why it happened.
California was a laboratory for the development of lifestyles because the system was under pressure from the expectations of the generation that had fought the war and the even greater expectations of their children.
The legitimacy of the pre-war social order had been abraded by the Great Depression and the political class of the US was very conscious of the expectations off the masses for full-employment, mass prosperity and opportunities for upward social mobility. Consumerism was the response. And they were terrified of the USSR and the threat of the industrialised working class turning to the pro-Moscow Left.
Cultural changes were required to adapt the tastes and lifestyles of the newly prosperous masses, above all their children (the Baby Boomers) and to create a New Left that could not be controlled by Moscow or function as any kind of autonomous leadership for the workers.
The research into psychology that had been undertaken at that time was harnessed to help with the marketing, but also with a vast range of the of issues.
The Counter-Culture was developed to adapt capitalism to the times (by dissolving archaic bourgeois culture) and to adapt the young themselves to the needs of the system. The Counter-Culture was about adapting the culture to the needs of a post-bourgeois social order, one in which a mass middle-class were given opportunities for consumption in return for their loyalty and docility.
It all ended in tears in Vietnam and the stagnation of the 70s but by then the cultural forces had a life of their own and were yet again refitted to meet the needs of the system.
That's my take in a nutshell. IMHO it is pointless to focus on the craziness or the hypocrisies. We have to see the logic and the forces of necessity driving things.
lately i've been seeing the marriage of capitalism and progressivism in almost everything (unless it's not a marriage but more twins conjoined at birth)
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.
I know exactly what you mean. Maybe it's just trendy idk but I kinda feel like maybe there really are more actual narcissists around these days. At least on social media.
It's probably pointless for me to care about it at this point in history, like a time-travelling Templar screaming in anguish that the Elks are doing the rituals wrong these days, but I draw a clear line around "clinical" narcissism or psychopathy or any of the other fun words.
We've been having lots of fun using clinical words for social behavior we don't like or want to Munchausen up since the 90s or so.
I would be at least as likely to erase the publication Psychology Today from history as Hitler. Pop psychology is a fucking plague.
"I would be at least as likely to erase the publication Psychology Today from history as Hitler. Pop psychology is a fucking plague."
Here fucking here.
My sort of rough understanding is that narcissists are generally made, not born; psychopaths at least in some cases the opposite. Dunno if that's true but I'm not a psychologist. In any case, like you say below, narcissism is definitely more prevalent.
The spread of psychic illness is integral to the survival of the regime. In medicine it is called iatrogenic morbidity...illness caused by physicians. A very well understood phenomenon in psychiatry.
Regime supporters benefit from crippling their rivals and subordinates in the best 'Darwinian' fashion, while the subaltern element manipulate their masters by encouraging their proclivities towards delusional thinking.
There's a lot of genetic predisposition for psychopathy, but it's by no means the only route.
But clinical narcissism is very much its own thing. The prevailing research was that it seems to be early childhood social development, so nearly always from parent/caretaker (which of course, at least in the case of bio parents, introduces a potential genetic confound we just haven't seen yet).
As long as we are assigning medical terms, it has been my general finding that most of the boyfriends/husbands who are described by their blue cheka tormentors are really Munchausen by Proxy victims.
I'd guess that most of them probably are actually assholes, maybe even pieces of shit, but they're the latest in a string of such men that the cheka consistently seeks out and cultivates.
But probably not all or even most actually disordered.
I think it was earlier. The trend of pathologizing and armchair-diagnosing the normal range of human behavior to make mundane things darker (does your partner have DARK TRIAD TRAITS?!?) and more important and make oneself feel like an expert is long.
Definitely began earlier. And once the blue checka diagnosed Trump with the disease, awareness and usage spread. And social media cultivates narcissisms, allegedly.
Speaking of Trump Derangement, fuck every "behavioral expert" doing their nonsense fortune cookie Barnum analyses on "nonverbal behavior cues" of politicians in public that amazingly always lines up with the party-line take on their diabolical personality disorder.
Been digging that sphere for a lot due to personal reasons like the ones you stated, probably before it turned popular (I think it was after 2020). More recently I stumble with the commentary of a psychologist called Sam Vaknin and other man (I am unsure of his credentials) called Richard Grannon. They work with an interesting model of the phenomenon. The latter in particular says that narcissism prospers not because of them but because of its complementary, which is rooted in the inability of people to say No.
Well, Vaknin's theory is a reiterating of psychoanalytic theory of narcissism going all the way back to Freud: overly permissive mother worships son during the age range of ego formation equals narcissism.
That we have a parent-like state and culture treating emotionally immature or vulnerable people similarly would give it fertile ground to prosper.
But ultimately it IS on the narcissist. A healthy mind is able to exercise self-control and self-criticism, even if others aren't.
And, well, for the people who become narcissism "experts" because they've had lots of relationships with them, my favorite expression has always been, "the only thing all your failed relationships have in common is you."
And there is one interesting thing Grannon and Vaknin say. Narcissistic behavior is kind of contagious, like being bitten by a vampire. There are certain type of people who tend to approach ''narcissists'', due to ''repetition compulsion''. And the interaction fosters their own bad traits. ''It is not them, is us'', as Grannon says.
It is rooted or take ideas from that but it is not only that. He describes these behaviors as a response to trauma. But, as you said, explanation is not justification.
Since White Christians seem to be the most hated group on the planet these days, and one quoting The Bible (gasp) is even worse, I realize I'm taking my chances. Regardless, there's nothing new under the sun. Or would it help if I began with a few Shakespeare quotations?
"O' What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!"
"Few love to hear the sins they love to act."
"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another."
Matthew 6 NKJV
“Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them...
when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do..."
Like, don't post it on Twitter and Facebook to display how righteous you are, because you're only proving the opposite.
Or, to quote John Carter:
"the incentive structures of social media incentivize and manufacture narcissists."
"... it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption."
Matt 6 NKJV
“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.
Truth hurts. It's supposed to. It sure pissed off the Pharisees when Jesus spoke it.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness."
Carter: "... it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption."
Jesus exposed their hypocrisy and they crucified him. The truth (pearls) does tend to elicit extreme reactions, like being torn to pieces, as quoted above.
So there you have it. Shakespreare, Jesus and John Carter. Great minds thinking alike and all.
"In which case, they’re usually narcissistic anyhow, practically by comorbid definition. ‘Catty, emotionally insecure fairy’ is a stereotype for a reason."
"If homosexuals weren't such jerks, 'fag' wouldn't be an insult." -- Jack Donovan (by memory)
As a member in good standing of the Dark Triad Libertarians, narcissicist has it's own cachet. It has a devil may care coolness worthy of Joe Camel.
I prefer Whinocrats.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, noble or virtuous in being a whiner. A whiner is both selfish AND pathetic AND ineffective. Slaves and little kids whine. Getting a degree in Intersectionality is just getting new excuses to whine.
Teaching once-oppressed minorities to be narcissistic is to compensate them from the days where it was dangerous for a negro to say No to a white man. (It wasn't that long ago, BTW.) Teaching once-oppressed minorities to whine harder, on the other hand, is simply deepening the slave mentality.
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My other favored appellation is Puritanical satanist. This one is small beer for the young, but for older Leftists "puritanical" is poison. I'm old enough to remember diligent leftists who read John Stuart Mill and claimed to like it. These people mocked the Right for McCarthy and the Salem Witch Trials. Well, today's Left is just as bad as the witch hunters and commie hunters of old. (With the big difference that McCarthy was actually onto something...)
As for satanist, notice the small s. They aren't explicitly worshiping an anti Christian supernatural entity. They are merely reflexively anti all things Christian. Note how they overlook Moslems and others when they call out misogyny . St. Paul was a radical feminist compared to the pagans of his day or Islam today.
Finally, Marsicist is hard to pronouce.
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With all this written, feel free to test drive Marxicist and prove me wrong. I will humbly do an "I'm not worthy!" bow if ti works.
Not sure accusations of satanism would work...the popularity of the occult (itself a symptom of cultural and moral decline) suggests that this would be water off a duck's back.
Depends on the audience. The old mainline Protestant denominations have long prided themselves on being Open Minded and not too legalistic or confining. Puritan and satanist both have sting.
And, by the way, none of these kill shots should be aimed directly at your audience! The purpose of name calling is to get the Center Left to distance itself from the radicals who have taken over the Democratic Party, much as Republicans have to distance themselves from the Radical Right.
That is precisely the intent here. The cultists are not amenable to persuasion. They are, however, quite sensitive to social status. Descriptions that reveal them for what they are by making a new and, once seen, intuitively obvious connection in the audience's mind, are toxic to them - they go from being scary to vaguely pathetic.
One tip (and it is a good one). A friend who knew a vast amount about the behavioural sciences once told me that the one thing a clinician NEVER does is identify the underlying complex until the patient is becoming aware of it themselves. Do that and you get an explosive reaction.
I did the prac on that the hard way in a non-clinical setting when I straightforwardly told my boss at the time that I did not care what she thought about me or my work. That touched a nerve...she flew out of her chair in an absolute rage. Quite a nasty scene, but very funny in hindsight.
Find the right nerve and test it with a verbal bayonet.
Excellent point re aim: you cannot convince diehard believers with logic or evidence, the real target is those who remain capable of rethinking things.
The Democratic Party has become the Party of Charles Manson.
This one might be too old a reference for the young, but for aging Boomers it is dead on accurate. Charles Manson was a violent nutcase who believed that the path to Marxist revolution was to start a race war.
I have thought for a while that the Obama and Biden Administrations were applying a strategy out of Helter Skelter.
The scum in the Weather Underground adored Manson and said so publicly. This to be expected, they were probably a controlled opposition movement...you can see that from the leniency of the sentences given to the ringleaders and their post-prison careers. The contrast with the way the system deals with violent opposition that is not sponsored by the Deep State is telling.
Yes, I read Chaos a couple of years ago and was thoroughly engrossed in the connections drawn by the author. Definitely a tour de force on the subject of Manson and the Deep State. Helter Skelter is a reasonable definition of the strategy in play by the extreme left in charge of the democrat party.
O'Neill is at work on a follow up volume. I am thrilled at the prospect of that.
As for the current iteration of Helter Skelter, I would say that the Democrats are the preferred political agents of the Deep State. The extreme left within the party are simply useful to manage relationships with key constituencies and to enable various political projects to operate. The Squad and the Woke are not in charge at the top, though the Woke definitely run the party machine across the country and provide advice to the party leaders in Congress but these leaders still answer to donors as well as masters within the Deep State. The extreme left are a demanding constituency within the party but they are brought to heal when needed, as we can see over Ukraine.
The current real world Helter Skelter has been authorised by men at the top whose priority is control. Ideology is not a motivation for them, merely a tool. Unfortunately for them they are like the sorceror's apprentice...they have set forces in motion that are destabilising everything.
To put it another way, the extreme Left dance in ecstasy at the rites of Cthulhu, but Cthulhu focuses on the sacrificial offerings.
I'll keep an eye out for the follow up. Another book you may have read or would find interesting is "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream " by David McGowan.
I listened to the audio book. A turgid and gossipy look at the 60's-70's music scene. Good for when you want to engage in the somewhat tawdry act of reading People Magazine or some trash like that.
Description from Amazon:
Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, Captain Beefheart, CSN, Three Dog Night, Alice Cooper, the Doors, and Love with Arthur Lee, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judi Sill and David Blue, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills.
But there was a dark side to that scene as well.
Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would care to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians, and intelligence personnel - the same sort of people who just happened to give birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all of the canyon's colorful characters - rock stars, hippies, murderers, and politicos - happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is the very strange, but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a hippie utopia.
Yes. I have read McGowan. It did not live up to my expectations. I read it too late to verify details with an old friend and mentor, one of the first Baby Boomers and an exceptionally fine and decent man, who had worked behind the scenes in the music industry in Australia and the US very successfully. He knew everybody. As it happens my friend's father (a genuine war hero who piloted Lancaster bombers in the RAF and who died just over a year ago at truly advanced age) had once held a top-level intelligence position. My friend told me a few truly amazing anecdotes related to Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Nancy Sinatra etc. And he knew some very interesting stuff about Manson and his crew. I became interested in McGowan's book precisely because of my friend's many stories.
It is fascinating and disturbing...fascinating because of the impact of the popular music scene then and disturbing to think that there was anything as profoundly vile as the Manson Family caught up in any of it.
Further to my remarks, I am not saying that Obama or Biden are conscious Mansonites, merely that the dynamics have an extremely eery resonance. Not sure what is going on. Hyperstition?
💬 when you possess the True Name of a dark spirit, you own the fucker + 💬 The labels were then appropriated by dissidents, at which point the egregore started distancing itself from them + 💬 Pepperidge Farm remembers
Curtis Yarvin from (s)lightly different angle ↓↓
🗨 Power hates to be named. Power has to stay ahead of its enemies. These labels evolve as private, informal codewords among cool insiders; are discovered by their enemies; and are abandoned by the insiders, who change their codes—then start to insist that they never used those codes in the first place. Power does not exist. But its memory can be hard to delete.
I would agree that oligarchic power, Yarvin's cathedral, absolutely hates to be named. Such power relies on the illusion that it is not power, that there's no such thing as power. It's the mild mannered middle manager speaking in the third person passive of bland bureaucratese, who isn't doing anything himself you understand, merely following best practices, listening to the experts, acting according to the manual. Just don't ask who wrote the manual.
Describing the psychic effects of a rapidly evolving mental health crisis on a civilizational scale is ambitious. You definitely are on the right track. Political battle requires destabilising the enemy. Identifying their raw nerves for target practice is essential (and fun).
My only qualm about Marxcissist is that by incorporating Marx it affixes the problem to 19th c. ideology. What we are seeing draws on the experience of Leninism, Trotskyism and Maoism but mostly grows out of very indigenous, non-Marxist, sources, above all race and gender relations in a thoroughly capitalist context and the neurocognitive decline induced by social media addiction couple with drug abuse. I get the impression that the North American right is way more comfortable with discussing Marxism than it is with race or class. Since this involves people discussing books that they usually have not read the standard of ideation is inevitably dismal.
And, frankly, given the condition of the SJWs etc, I feel nostalgic for the Reds of the past, quite a few of whom deserved respect at a personal level regardless of the nature of their beliefs. The Young Pioneers (or Putin's Young Army movement now) look like gods compared to the blue-haired misfits and rejects of the West. To see what I mean check out this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWtLuZQn6_8
As for narcisism, my understanding (which may be wrong) is that the condition is not about ego inflation, but trouble making subject/object distinctions. Since the SJWs make everything about themselves this is perhaps me being grossly pedantic.
My guess is that the eventual takedown word will involve an association with status...nothing produces an adrenal effect faster than intimations of changing relativities of status. We are apes that live in groups. Zoön politikon (political animal or social animal). Status determines who eats and who mates. The woke are tormented by two things: the erasure of individuality in a homogenised world where identities are plastic (and transparently derived from the infotainment industry) resulting in chronic uncertainty and feelings of inauthenticity and the experience of material frustration/downward social mobility (or the fear of it) hence the desperation to claw a position in an uncertain world.
The attraction of woke for the BIPOCs is simply collecting the rent from whitey one way or another and the thrill of seeing rivals degraded and humiliated. With the white wokes it is status or perceptions of a delusionary status as a prop to the ego.
You're not wrong in any of this, but you might also be overthinking it a bit. The intent of the term isn't academic precision so much as linguistic ego damage, and the primary context I have in mind is American since, frankly, America is the heart of this beast. So it's not so much a matter of what political historians or clinical psychiatrists will make of the word - it's the impact it has on Jane Normie, whose relationship to Marxist and narcissist is much more connotative than it is denotative.
I've taken the term out for a test drive with normies out in the real world, and so far it seems to work. Last night I ran it by the friendly lesbian bartender at the local tavern, and she immediately laughed and said it instantly brought to mind a person she knows.
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!
The human potential movement California shit out in the 70s is absolutely the mother of abominations that inflicted Marxicissism on the world. If this little portmanteau can help these troglodytes crawl back into their cave in shame it will have done it's job.
In other news, wasn't exaggerating when I said you were a top commenter.
thanks is much appreciated...
as for the pathetic exercise in inflating the self-esteem of emotional cripples aka "Human Potential", there just seems to be such a deep need for spiritual meaning and psychological grounding in our deracinated post-Christian market state, and that goes double or triple for the refugees, exiles, drop-outs, burnouts and castaways that wash up on our Left coast.
Esalen fits alongside Scientology, Jonestown, and all the other California cults, where the lost souls and wannabe gurus begin their mating rituals, where moth and flame come together to fulfill their eternal roles.
I think the biggest mistake made by the rather euphoric, hedonistic human potential cults was their strong tendency towards wishful thinking. They'd grab whatever seemed useful or pleasing from whatever traditions they liked, discard everything they didn't like, filled in the blanks with made-up nonsense, and then disappeared into their own assholes as a result. As a path for spiritual growth it was entirely sterile, since they made it so easy for themselves to avoid anything that didn't feel good or really challenge them. Rather than disciplining themselves to grow into the world as it is, they simply imagined it was they wished it was.
And that's all without even accounting for the possibility that there's something very real in the subtle realms, in which case they were like children playing with a fire in a dark forest stalked by hungry wolves.
"Rather than disciplining themselves to grow into the world as it is, they simply imagined it was they wished it was."
If it feels good and flatters my ego, it has to be true!
Though it was a movement mostly crafted and led by exiled European shrinks and "thinkers", the entire New Age movement is deeply painfully inescapably American.
These were con artists much like the televangelists or the Tony Robbins types, and what they were selling was prepackaged drive-thru spirituality, just another accessory to bangle the holy Self with, like clothes or cars.
And in the process they ruined a lot of lives. Fast food poisons the body, and commercialized spirituality poisons the soul.
It seems that just about the entire New Left/Social Justice movement delivered benefits to those residing at the top of the upscale urbanite class (profs, journalists, the NYT/NPR/PBS devotees, most esp the women), while those lower on the ol' Maslow pyramid learned that shit runs downhill: they didn't get monetized self-actualization but broken homes and families, drug addiction and the other pathologies of maximum personal autonomy, and an endless supply of anxiety, depression, and personality disorders.
If only our aspiring overlords and "activists" put down the Foucault and picked up some Chuang Tzu:
'There is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind.'
The emotional cripples of the 60s were supermen compared with the kids today. They were more colourful, wore better clothes and the music was incomparably better. Monterey and all that. A hippy picnic would have been healthier and more fun than any video game.
Ridiculous as it all was, people need to lighten up and someone as intellectually serious as you should recall Spinoza: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari sed intelligere.
Error has its rights...and its dignity. Honour both.
anything and everyone rooted in the Old World is vastly richer, deeper and more interesting than anything or anyone rooted in the New World...it's like the difference bw someone who fought in WW2 and someone who fought in "Call of Duty".
Agreed. The Old World can be erased in a generation or so. Jacob Burkhardt, Nietzsche's mentor, predicted the Americanisation of Europe and the process has pretty much been completed. Whatever remains is retained by literary and cultural traditions as delicate as a strand from a spider's web.
The polymath and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi once wrote that all traditions disappear within a generation or so of its personal transmission (he was very big on mentors, master/apprentice stuff and the problems of the transmission of knowledge by tradition and the evolution of knowledge when constrained by tradition). The fragmentation of inherited forms of social and cultural life has now reached the point where we can expect catastrophic effects over the next several generations. The disruptions within academia (DEI, decolonising the curriculum, feminising the culture, deprioritising white men for hiring) have destroyed the conditions for the personal transferal of knowledge. What we cannot save now will not be saved at all.
...<pinned Clever's comment> 😂
A top commenter should, after all, be at the top.
Devon "Blackpilled" Stack did a dive into the sewer that was Esalen and the Human Potential Movement in his "Portal to Hell" insomnia stream edition. Judged that they "literally opened a portal to hell"... https://odysee.com/@Blackpilled:b/jewhellhole:3
CP, you are quite the optimist if you think that holding a mirror to their faces would shame any of them. They are more likely to be charmed by what they see or flattered by your attention.
The only thing that has ever been known to work with collective delusion on any scale is catastrophe.
Exactly. These people can't be shamed or reasoned with. Happily, they are working hard to collapse our society so perhaps the mass delusion will collapse soon too. Our only concern should be becoming independent enough to weather the storm.
i know, i was just trying not to be so gloomy for once!
Gloomy? You never come across as gloomy. But is all subjective. We have been cheated and disappointed by the system and our good sense abused by all the rubbish, but they own the system and their comfort zone depends on the pantomime of competence going on forever. Chin up, whatever happens a few tentacles of Cthulhu are destined to end up as calamari.
Karl Kraus (CP, you'd love his epigrams, https://www.amazon.com/Half-Truths-One-Half-Truths-Aphorisms/dp/0226452689) once wrote that Vienna was the laboratory of world-historical destruction. Truer words, as they say...
Someone who knows Karl Kraus, yay! He was something of a John Carter of his day, burning the zeitgeist and its minions alive in his prose.
The aphorism is the acme of literature: style, density of meaning and acuity of insight are displayed to best effect.
I'd say that we need K.K. more than ever but it would be torture for him to be alive in times like these. It certainly is for us.
💬 The aphorism is the acme of literature
...second only to the meme, as the most esteemed feline pundit on interwebz would prob argue. Not presactly literature, them’s memes though 🙂
🗨 memes are the resurgence of rationality and the revenge of the shape rotators. they combine the speed of appeal to emotion with the informational density of long logical strings. it's intellectual jazz as a medium for rational renaissance. and it's a language the irrational cannot master.
They are all that you say. The next step is that the creative element need to go for the jugular. Plato said that if you change the music, you change the city.
When a resistance song becomes popular or widely known, then you will know that the opposition is making real progress. If I was a campaign manager for Trump, I'd forget polls and consultants and hire a songwriter/composer....someone from Los Angeles or Nashville with long experience performing live in front of an audience and who understands how to wind people up.
Take an old song (vintage folk, classic rock it does not matter) with a great melody and prepare lyrics that are carefully metrical and synchronised with the rhythm. It does not have to be overtly party political, merely reactionary and obnoxiously anti-woke....perhaps something on the theme of the Great Replacement or a lament for babies killed in partial birth abortions or a snappy and mocking ballad of George Floyd. Then get it out there via podcast. Project Orpheus. War by sound.
Ever see the Chilean movie, No? Reminiscent of this idea, although not musical per se.
Not sure music will work though; no shared musical culture. However, changing the topic, directing the flow of conversation by injecting new memes that spread on their own - this is the way. Victory through joy; assume the sale, communicate the idea of how much fun victory will be.
thanks, i do like Kraus, I recently read his "Last Days of Mankind", which was a bit of a slog and filled with maybe too many time- and place-specific references to be enjoyable 100 yrs later, but it is also filled w gems.
the man had a very clear head.
Respect is due. Milton, Wyndham Lewis, Sciascia, Calasso and Kraus. This newsletter attracts very rare birds indeed. The lights are going out, but not here.
I salute you, from one bibliomaniac to another ;)
CP, further to your very insightful observations about California I'd suggest that we need to understand why it happened.
California was a laboratory for the development of lifestyles because the system was under pressure from the expectations of the generation that had fought the war and the even greater expectations of their children.
The legitimacy of the pre-war social order had been abraded by the Great Depression and the political class of the US was very conscious of the expectations off the masses for full-employment, mass prosperity and opportunities for upward social mobility. Consumerism was the response. And they were terrified of the USSR and the threat of the industrialised working class turning to the pro-Moscow Left.
Cultural changes were required to adapt the tastes and lifestyles of the newly prosperous masses, above all their children (the Baby Boomers) and to create a New Left that could not be controlled by Moscow or function as any kind of autonomous leadership for the workers.
The research into psychology that had been undertaken at that time was harnessed to help with the marketing, but also with a vast range of the of issues.
The Counter-Culture was developed to adapt capitalism to the times (by dissolving archaic bourgeois culture) and to adapt the young themselves to the needs of the system. The Counter-Culture was about adapting the culture to the needs of a post-bourgeois social order, one in which a mass middle-class were given opportunities for consumption in return for their loyalty and docility.
It all ended in tears in Vietnam and the stagnation of the 70s but by then the cultural forces had a life of their own and were yet again refitted to meet the needs of the system.
That's my take in a nutshell. IMHO it is pointless to focus on the craziness or the hypocrisies. We have to see the logic and the forces of necessity driving things.
lately i've been seeing the marriage of capitalism and progressivism in almost everything (unless it's not a marriage but more twins conjoined at birth)
Thomas Frank's THE CONQUEST OF COOL.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3618721.html
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.
Luckily, I am not an expert.
It was one of those things I just woke up to one day and noticed I started seeing a previously uncommon word over and over again.
I know exactly what you mean. Maybe it's just trendy idk but I kinda feel like maybe there really are more actual narcissists around these days. At least on social media.
It's probably pointless for me to care about it at this point in history, like a time-travelling Templar screaming in anguish that the Elks are doing the rituals wrong these days, but I draw a clear line around "clinical" narcissism or psychopathy or any of the other fun words.
We've been having lots of fun using clinical words for social behavior we don't like or want to Munchausen up since the 90s or so.
I would be at least as likely to erase the publication Psychology Today from history as Hitler. Pop psychology is a fucking plague.
"I would be at least as likely to erase the publication Psychology Today from history as Hitler. Pop psychology is a fucking plague."
Here fucking here.
My sort of rough understanding is that narcissists are generally made, not born; psychopaths at least in some cases the opposite. Dunno if that's true but I'm not a psychologist. In any case, like you say below, narcissism is definitely more prevalent.
The spread of psychic illness is integral to the survival of the regime. In medicine it is called iatrogenic morbidity...illness caused by physicians. A very well understood phenomenon in psychiatry.
Regime supporters benefit from crippling their rivals and subordinates in the best 'Darwinian' fashion, while the subaltern element manipulate their masters by encouraging their proclivities towards delusional thinking.
There's a lot of genetic predisposition for psychopathy, but it's by no means the only route.
But clinical narcissism is very much its own thing. The prevailing research was that it seems to be early childhood social development, so nearly always from parent/caretaker (which of course, at least in the case of bio parents, introduces a potential genetic confound we just haven't seen yet).
Anyway, there's certainly more narcissISM.
As long as we are assigning medical terms, it has been my general finding that most of the boyfriends/husbands who are described by their blue cheka tormentors are really Munchausen by Proxy victims.
I'd guess that most of them probably are actually assholes, maybe even pieces of shit, but they're the latest in a string of such men that the cheka consistently seeks out and cultivates.
But probably not all or even most actually disordered.
It really kicked off when Trump was around -- all about his "Narcissism." Maybe started with the Hillary people?
Seemed to coincide with the rise of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I think it was earlier. The trend of pathologizing and armchair-diagnosing the normal range of human behavior to make mundane things darker (does your partner have DARK TRIAD TRAITS?!?) and more important and make oneself feel like an expert is long.
Definitely began earlier. And once the blue checka diagnosed Trump with the disease, awareness and usage spread. And social media cultivates narcissisms, allegedly.
Speaking of Trump Derangement, fuck every "behavioral expert" doing their nonsense fortune cookie Barnum analyses on "nonverbal behavior cues" of politicians in public that amazingly always lines up with the party-line take on their diabolical personality disorder.
Been digging that sphere for a lot due to personal reasons like the ones you stated, probably before it turned popular (I think it was after 2020). More recently I stumble with the commentary of a psychologist called Sam Vaknin and other man (I am unsure of his credentials) called Richard Grannon. They work with an interesting model of the phenomenon. The latter in particular says that narcissism prospers not because of them but because of its complementary, which is rooted in the inability of people to say No.
Well, Vaknin's theory is a reiterating of psychoanalytic theory of narcissism going all the way back to Freud: overly permissive mother worships son during the age range of ego formation equals narcissism.
That we have a parent-like state and culture treating emotionally immature or vulnerable people similarly would give it fertile ground to prosper.
But ultimately it IS on the narcissist. A healthy mind is able to exercise self-control and self-criticism, even if others aren't.
And, well, for the people who become narcissism "experts" because they've had lots of relationships with them, my favorite expression has always been, "the only thing all your failed relationships have in common is you."
And there is one interesting thing Grannon and Vaknin say. Narcissistic behavior is kind of contagious, like being bitten by a vampire. There are certain type of people who tend to approach ''narcissists'', due to ''repetition compulsion''. And the interaction fosters their own bad traits. ''It is not them, is us'', as Grannon says.
It is rooted or take ideas from that but it is not only that. He describes these behaviors as a response to trauma. But, as you said, explanation is not justification.
Sam Vaknin is himself a narcissist, just something to know
Indeed
"Blue Cheka." LOL.
I can't take credit for that, that's pure frog Twitter.
Frog Twitter....Radio Free America broadcasting from a secret location.
Supported by the Rainbow Cheka, Glitter Cheka and the Nouveau Tonton Macoute (BLM). The zombie herd is proud of its diversity.
Since White Christians seem to be the most hated group on the planet these days, and one quoting The Bible (gasp) is even worse, I realize I'm taking my chances. Regardless, there's nothing new under the sun. Or would it help if I began with a few Shakespeare quotations?
"O' What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!"
"Few love to hear the sins they love to act."
"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another."
Matthew 6 NKJV
“Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them...
when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do..."
Like, don't post it on Twitter and Facebook to display how righteous you are, because you're only proving the opposite.
Or, to quote John Carter:
"the incentive structures of social media incentivize and manufacture narcissists."
"... it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption."
Matt 6 NKJV
“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.
Truth hurts. It's supposed to. It sure pissed off the Pharisees when Jesus spoke it.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness."
Carter: "... it's just a pose, a costume they put on for public consumption."
Jesus exposed their hypocrisy and they crucified him. The truth (pearls) does tend to elicit extreme reactions, like being torn to pieces, as quoted above.
So there you have it. Shakespreare, Jesus and John Carter. Great minds thinking alike and all.
Mark is great, don't ever apologize for Mark-posting, bro.
Mark is the BEST!!!
"In which case, they’re usually narcissistic anyhow, practically by comorbid definition. ‘Catty, emotionally insecure fairy’ is a stereotype for a reason."
"If homosexuals weren't such jerks, 'fag' wouldn't be an insult." -- Jack Donovan (by memory)
Great line. So true.
Not evil enough. Indeed, the Diet Coke of Evil.
As a member in good standing of the Dark Triad Libertarians, narcissicist has it's own cachet. It has a devil may care coolness worthy of Joe Camel.
I prefer Whinocrats.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, noble or virtuous in being a whiner. A whiner is both selfish AND pathetic AND ineffective. Slaves and little kids whine. Getting a degree in Intersectionality is just getting new excuses to whine.
Teaching once-oppressed minorities to be narcissistic is to compensate them from the days where it was dangerous for a negro to say No to a white man. (It wasn't that long ago, BTW.) Teaching once-oppressed minorities to whine harder, on the other hand, is simply deepening the slave mentality.
---
My other favored appellation is Puritanical satanist. This one is small beer for the young, but for older Leftists "puritanical" is poison. I'm old enough to remember diligent leftists who read John Stuart Mill and claimed to like it. These people mocked the Right for McCarthy and the Salem Witch Trials. Well, today's Left is just as bad as the witch hunters and commie hunters of old. (With the big difference that McCarthy was actually onto something...)
As for satanist, notice the small s. They aren't explicitly worshiping an anti Christian supernatural entity. They are merely reflexively anti all things Christian. Note how they overlook Moslems and others when they call out misogyny . St. Paul was a radical feminist compared to the pagans of his day or Islam today.
Finally, Marsicist is hard to pronouce.
---
With all this written, feel free to test drive Marxicist and prove me wrong. I will humbly do an "I'm not worthy!" bow if ti works.
Whinocrats! That is brilliant.
Not sure accusations of satanism would work...the popularity of the occult (itself a symptom of cultural and moral decline) suggests that this would be water off a duck's back.
I've met bluehairs who are pretty much open satanists, so yeah.
Depends on the audience. The old mainline Protestant denominations have long prided themselves on being Open Minded and not too legalistic or confining. Puritan and satanist both have sting.
And, by the way, none of these kill shots should be aimed directly at your audience! The purpose of name calling is to get the Center Left to distance itself from the radicals who have taken over the Democratic Party, much as Republicans have to distance themselves from the Radical Right.
That is precisely the intent here. The cultists are not amenable to persuasion. They are, however, quite sensitive to social status. Descriptions that reveal them for what they are by making a new and, once seen, intuitively obvious connection in the audience's mind, are toxic to them - they go from being scary to vaguely pathetic.
One tip (and it is a good one). A friend who knew a vast amount about the behavioural sciences once told me that the one thing a clinician NEVER does is identify the underlying complex until the patient is becoming aware of it themselves. Do that and you get an explosive reaction.
I did the prac on that the hard way in a non-clinical setting when I straightforwardly told my boss at the time that I did not care what she thought about me or my work. That touched a nerve...she flew out of her chair in an absolute rage. Quite a nasty scene, but very funny in hindsight.
Find the right nerve and test it with a verbal bayonet.
Excellent point re aim: you cannot convince diehard believers with logic or evidence, the real target is those who remain capable of rethinking things.
Oops! I forgot one! (I was getting tired):
MANSONITES!
The Democratic Party has become the Party of Charles Manson.
This one might be too old a reference for the young, but for aging Boomers it is dead on accurate. Charles Manson was a violent nutcase who believed that the path to Marxist revolution was to start a race war.
BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU GOT IT TOO.
I have thought for a while that the Obama and Biden Administrations were applying a strategy out of Helter Skelter.
The scum in the Weather Underground adored Manson and said so publicly. This to be expected, they were probably a controlled opposition movement...you can see that from the leniency of the sentences given to the ringleaders and their post-prison careers. The contrast with the way the system deals with violent opposition that is not sponsored by the Deep State is telling.
Are you aware that Charlie was quite possibly working for the Man? There is a great book on the Deep State and the killings. https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Charles-Manson-History-Sixties/dp/0316477559
I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Yes, I read Chaos a couple of years ago and was thoroughly engrossed in the connections drawn by the author. Definitely a tour de force on the subject of Manson and the Deep State. Helter Skelter is a reasonable definition of the strategy in play by the extreme left in charge of the democrat party.
O'Neill is at work on a follow up volume. I am thrilled at the prospect of that.
As for the current iteration of Helter Skelter, I would say that the Democrats are the preferred political agents of the Deep State. The extreme left within the party are simply useful to manage relationships with key constituencies and to enable various political projects to operate. The Squad and the Woke are not in charge at the top, though the Woke definitely run the party machine across the country and provide advice to the party leaders in Congress but these leaders still answer to donors as well as masters within the Deep State. The extreme left are a demanding constituency within the party but they are brought to heal when needed, as we can see over Ukraine.
The current real world Helter Skelter has been authorised by men at the top whose priority is control. Ideology is not a motivation for them, merely a tool. Unfortunately for them they are like the sorceror's apprentice...they have set forces in motion that are destabilising everything.
To put it another way, the extreme Left dance in ecstasy at the rites of Cthulhu, but Cthulhu focuses on the sacrificial offerings.
I'll keep an eye out for the follow up. Another book you may have read or would find interesting is "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream " by David McGowan.
I listened to the audio book. A turgid and gossipy look at the 60's-70's music scene. Good for when you want to engage in the somewhat tawdry act of reading People Magazine or some trash like that.
Description from Amazon:
Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, Captain Beefheart, CSN, Three Dog Night, Alice Cooper, the Doors, and Love with Arthur Lee, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judi Sill and David Blue, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills.
But there was a dark side to that scene as well.
Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would care to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians, and intelligence personnel - the same sort of people who just happened to give birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all of the canyon's colorful characters - rock stars, hippies, murderers, and politicos - happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is the very strange, but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a hippie utopia.
Yes. I have read McGowan. It did not live up to my expectations. I read it too late to verify details with an old friend and mentor, one of the first Baby Boomers and an exceptionally fine and decent man, who had worked behind the scenes in the music industry in Australia and the US very successfully. He knew everybody. As it happens my friend's father (a genuine war hero who piloted Lancaster bombers in the RAF and who died just over a year ago at truly advanced age) had once held a top-level intelligence position. My friend told me a few truly amazing anecdotes related to Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Nancy Sinatra etc. And he knew some very interesting stuff about Manson and his crew. I became interested in McGowan's book precisely because of my friend's many stories.
It is fascinating and disturbing...fascinating because of the impact of the popular music scene then and disturbing to think that there was anything as profoundly vile as the Manson Family caught up in any of it.
Further to my remarks, I am not saying that Obama or Biden are conscious Mansonites, merely that the dynamics have an extremely eery resonance. Not sure what is going on. Hyperstition?
They will take glee in the satanist label but whinocrats YES
💬 when you possess the True Name of a dark spirit, you own the fucker + 💬 The labels were then appropriated by dissidents, at which point the egregore started distancing itself from them + 💬 Pepperidge Farm remembers
Curtis Yarvin from (s)lightly different angle ↓↓
🗨 Power hates to be named. Power has to stay ahead of its enemies. These labels evolve as private, informal codewords among cool insiders; are discovered by their enemies; and are abandoned by the insiders, who change their codes—then start to insist that they never used those codes in the first place. Power does not exist. But its memory can be hard to delete.
I would agree that oligarchic power, Yarvin's cathedral, absolutely hates to be named. Such power relies on the illusion that it is not power, that there's no such thing as power. It's the mild mannered middle manager speaking in the third person passive of bland bureaucratese, who isn't doing anything himself you understand, merely following best practices, listening to the experts, acting according to the manual. Just don't ask who wrote the manual.
Theodore Dalrymple is the go-to expert of all things ‘mild mannered middle manager’ 😉
🗨 To treat all people with equal contempt and indifference is the bureaucrat’s idea of equity.
Describing the psychic effects of a rapidly evolving mental health crisis on a civilizational scale is ambitious. You definitely are on the right track. Political battle requires destabilising the enemy. Identifying their raw nerves for target practice is essential (and fun).
My only qualm about Marxcissist is that by incorporating Marx it affixes the problem to 19th c. ideology. What we are seeing draws on the experience of Leninism, Trotskyism and Maoism but mostly grows out of very indigenous, non-Marxist, sources, above all race and gender relations in a thoroughly capitalist context and the neurocognitive decline induced by social media addiction couple with drug abuse. I get the impression that the North American right is way more comfortable with discussing Marxism than it is with race or class. Since this involves people discussing books that they usually have not read the standard of ideation is inevitably dismal.
And, frankly, given the condition of the SJWs etc, I feel nostalgic for the Reds of the past, quite a few of whom deserved respect at a personal level regardless of the nature of their beliefs. The Young Pioneers (or Putin's Young Army movement now) look like gods compared to the blue-haired misfits and rejects of the West. To see what I mean check out this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWtLuZQn6_8
As for narcisism, my understanding (which may be wrong) is that the condition is not about ego inflation, but trouble making subject/object distinctions. Since the SJWs make everything about themselves this is perhaps me being grossly pedantic.
My guess is that the eventual takedown word will involve an association with status...nothing produces an adrenal effect faster than intimations of changing relativities of status. We are apes that live in groups. Zoön politikon (political animal or social animal). Status determines who eats and who mates. The woke are tormented by two things: the erasure of individuality in a homogenised world where identities are plastic (and transparently derived from the infotainment industry) resulting in chronic uncertainty and feelings of inauthenticity and the experience of material frustration/downward social mobility (or the fear of it) hence the desperation to claw a position in an uncertain world.
The attraction of woke for the BIPOCs is simply collecting the rent from whitey one way or another and the thrill of seeing rivals degraded and humiliated. With the white wokes it is status or perceptions of a delusionary status as a prop to the ego.
You're not wrong in any of this, but you might also be overthinking it a bit. The intent of the term isn't academic precision so much as linguistic ego damage, and the primary context I have in mind is American since, frankly, America is the heart of this beast. So it's not so much a matter of what political historians or clinical psychiatrists will make of the word - it's the impact it has on Jane Normie, whose relationship to Marxist and narcissist is much more connotative than it is denotative.
I've taken the term out for a test drive with normies out in the real world, and so far it seems to work. Last night I ran it by the friendly lesbian bartender at the local tavern, and she immediately laughed and said it instantly brought to mind a person she knows.