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Elections: Personality Cult or Ideological Tyranny?

Uploaded 10/16/2024, approx. 17 minute read

My name is Sam Vaknin and I am a columnist in Brussels, morning.

Today I would like to discuss the forthcoming elections in the United States of America, possibly the last ones.

It's a Hobson's choice between a personality cult versus an ideological tyranny.

In the forthcoming elections, the electorate faces a choice, which is stark.

Personality cults, such as Donald Trump's, come to an abrupt end with the demise or assassination of the adulated leader. The outcomes of personality counts and its impacts are usually easily reversible.

Ideological tyrannies, namely both the far left and the far right, these are far more insidious and all pervasive and way more difficult to eradicate.

In today's video, I will deal with both phenomena in depth.


Let's start with personality cults.

The narcissistic or psychopathic leader, the charismatic leader, is the culmination and reification of his period, his culture and civilization. Such a leader is likely to rise to prominence in narcissistic societies.

The leader's mental health pathologies resonate with the enemies of his society and culture, and I call it the psychopathological resonance.

The leader and the lead form a self-enhancing and self-reinforcing feedback loop, a diet of mirrored adoration and reflected love and adulation.

By elevating and idealizing their leader, the mob actually elevates and idealizes itself and the leader's narcissocracy.

This is a process of co-idealization.

If my leader is an ideal figure, if my leader is a perfect being, if my leader is Godlike, then so am I, obviously.

In the narcissist ascendancy, the masses find hope in his manifest mental illness, curative solace, and a legitimation of their own collective insanity.

The dictator himself equates being elected, however patently unfairly, with being chosen by the transcendental forces of the gods, of history, of his own nation.

His is a manifest destiny. His exceptionalism is the nation's own.

The malignant narcissist invents and then projects a false, fictitious self for the world to fear or to admire.

He maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with, and this is further exacerbated by the trappings of power.

The narcissist's grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are supported by real-life authority and a narcissist's predilection to surround himself with promiscuous psychophants.

By the way, when I say he, it's a she, half of all narcissists are women.

The leader's personal intimate life may be utterly different to his political public one.

And this is very unsettling. It's a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde effect.

In private, the narcissistic psychopathic leader may be avuncular, empathic, sentimental, helpful, dull, bourgeois, mediocre, middling, sickly, fussy, aloof, or even friendly.

But he is at great pains to conceal these attributes from the public.

The thing is that the narcissist personality is so precariously balanced, that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement.

Most narcissists are paranoid. They suffer from ideas of reference or referential ideation. The delusion that they are being mocked or discussed or gossiped or when they are not.

And so narcissists often regard them as victims of persecution, the center of attention, or on the positive side, the life of the party.

The narcissistic, charismatic, psychopathic leaders, they foster and encourage a personality cult.

Personality cult with all the hallmarks of an institutional religion, priesthood, rites, rituals, temples, worship, catechism, and a mythology, a personal mythology.

The leader is this religion's ascetic saint.

He monastically denies himself, earthly pleasures, or so he claims, he self-sacrifices, he is the victim of assassination attempts in order to be able to dedicate himself fully to his calling.

The narcissistic leader is a monstrously inverted Jesus. He sacrifices his life, he self crucifies himself, self-crucifies, and he denies himself, so that his people, humanity at large sometimes, should benefit.

It's a kind of absolution.

By surpassing and suppressing his humanity, the narcissistic leader becomes a distorted version of Nietzsche's Ubermensch or Superman.

Many narcissistic and psychopathic leaders are the hostages of self-imposed rigid ideologies.

They fancy themselves platonic philosopher kings.

Lacking an empathy, they regard their subjects as a manufacturer would regard his raw materials or as the abstracted collateral damage in vast historical processes.

You know the famous sayings, to prepare an omelet, one must break eggs, and when you chip wood and so on so forth. People are compared to objects.

But being a-human or superhuman also means being asexual and amoral.

In this restricted sense, narcissistic leaders are postmodernist. They are moral relativists.

They project to the masses an androgynous figure and enhance it by engendering the adoration of nudity and all things physical and natural, or by strongly repressing these feelings.

They could engage in reaction formation and become homophobic, for example.

But what they prefer, what they refer to as nature is usually not natural at all.

The narcissistic leader invariably prefers an aesthetic of decadence and evil, carefully orchestrated and artificial, though it is not perceived this way by him or by the followers.

Narcissistic leadership is about reproduced copies, not about originals. It is about the manipulation of symbols, not about veritable atavism or true conservatism.

In short, narcissistic leadership is about theatre, not about life.

To enjoy the spectacle and to be subsumed by it, the cultish leader demands the suspension of judgment and the attainment of depersonalization and de-realization.

Catharsis is tantamount in this narcissistic dramaturgy to self-annulment.

Narcissism is nihilistic, not only operationally or ideologically, its very language, narratives are nihilistic.

Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism, and the cult's leader says, as a role model, annihilating the men only to reappear as a preordained and irresistible force of nature. It's a messianic drive.

Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the old ways, against the hegemony culture, the upper classes, the elites, the established religions, the superpowers, the establishment, the corrupt order, you name it.

Narcissistic movements are puerile, adolescent. A reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon narcissistic and rather psychopathic, toddler masses, groups and collectives or upon the leader.

Minorities or others, the other, often arbitrarily selected, constitute a perfect, easily identifiable embodiment of all that is wrong.

They're accused of being something, being too old, being eerily disembodied, being cosmopolitan, being a part of the establishment, being decadent, being criminal, contaminating the blood.

They are hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, or because of their race, sexual orientation, origin, you name it.

Religion.

They are different, they are narcissistic, they feel and act as morally superior, they are everywhere, they are defenseless, they are credulous, they are adaptable and thus can be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction.

These minorities are the perfect hate figures, a foil.

Narcissists thrive on hatred and pathological envy. They leverage it.

This is precisely the source of the fascination with the likes of Hitler, diagnosed by Eric Fromm, together with Stalin, by the way, as a malignant narcissist.

Hitler was an inverted human. His unconscious was his conscious.

He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies, wishes and dark side.

Hitler provided us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates, and what it was like before we invented civilization.

Hitler forced us, all of us, through a time warp, and many did not emerge.

Hitler was not the devil, he was one of us. He was what Hannah Arendt aptly called the banality of evil.

Just an ordinary, mentally disturbed failure, a collapsed narcissist, a member of a mentally disturbed and failing nation who lived through disturbed and failing times.

Hitler was the perfect mirror, a channel, a chameleon, a voice, the very depth of our souls.

The narcissistic leader prefers the sparkle and glamour of well-orchestrated illusions, the society of the spectacle, to the tidium and method of real accomplishments.

It's about appearances, not about substance.

His reign is all smoke and mirrors devoid of substance, consisting of mere visage and grand must delusions.

In the aftermath of the narcissist regime, the narcissistic leader having died or been deposed or voted out of office rarely, it all unravels. There's no legacy.

The tireless and constant prestidigitation ceases and the entire edifice crumbles.

Alexander, the Macedonian, comes to mind.

What looks like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble.

Loosely held empires disintegrate, laboriously assembled business conglomerates, go to pieces. Earth-shattering and revolutionary scientific discoveries and theories are discredited, social experiments, end in mayhem, and massive institutions evaporate.

As the end draws near, narcissistic, psychopathic, charismatic leaders act out, lash out, erupt. They attack with equal virulence and vehemence and ferocity, compatriots, erstwhile allies, neighbors and foreigners.

It is important to understand that the use of violence must be egosyntonic. Narcissists must feel comfortable with being violent. It must accord with the self-image of the narcissist. It must abet and sustain the narcissist's grandiose fantasies and feed his sense of entitlement. It must conform with the narcissistic narrative.

All populist charismatic leaders believe that they have a special connection with the people, a relationship that is direct, almost mystical, and transcends the normal channels of communication, such as the legislature or the media, or the courts.

A narcissist who regards himself as a benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elites, the swamp is highly likely to abstain from using violence at first.

But that is only a temporary reprieve.

This specific mask crumbles when the narcissist has become convinced that the very people that he purported to speak for, his constituency, his base, his grassroots fans, the prime sources of his narcissistic supply, have turned against him.

It's paranoid ideation in most cases.

At first, in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction, underlying his chaotic personality, the narcissist tries to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment.

The people are being duped by the mainstream media, big industry, the military, the elites, you name it. They don't really know what they're doing.

Following a rude awakening, they will revert to form. Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.

When these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology fail, the narcissist is injured or even mortified.

Narcissistic injury and narcissistic mortification inevitably lead to narcissistic rage, then to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression against the very people the leader has claimed to love, either two.

The pent up frustration and hurt and disillusionment and disenchantment and hatred, they translate into devaluation.

That which was previously idealized is now discarded with contempt and hatred, namely the people.

And this primitive mechanism, defense mechanism is called splitting.

To the narcissist, things and people are either entirely bad, evil or entirely good. He projects onto others his own shortcomings and negative emotions, thus becoming a totally good object.

A narcissistic leader is likely to justify the butchering of his own people by claiming that they intended to assassinate him, or undo the revolution, or devastate the economy, or harm the nation or the country, betray someone, whatever.

The small people, the rank and file, the loyal soldiers of the narcissist, his flock, his nation, his employees, they pay the price.

The disillusionment and disenchantment of the leader are agonizing, but doubly so, when the people reciprocate.

The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated, is drawn out, sometimes, never completed.

It is difficult to trust again, to have faith in people and institutions, to love, to be led, to collaborate with others, feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the cult of the narcissist.

And this is the narcissist's sole legacy, a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.

This is the first choice the American people face in this election, Donald Trump.


The second choice may be equally virulent and problematic, ideological tyranny.

Communism, fascism, Nazism and religious fundamentalism as utopian is the classical idea of progress which is more strongly reified by Western science, capitalism, free marketry and liberal, so to speak, progressive, so to speak, democracy, so to speak.

All these are actually illiberal ideologies which firmly espouse a linear view of reality.

Man progresses by accumulating knowledge and wealth and by constructing ever improving polities.

Similarly, the classical, all-encompassing idea of progress is perceived to be a law of nature, with human jurisprudence and institutions as both its manifestations and its descriptors.

And so all ideas of progress are pseudo-scientific.

All these are totalitarian ideologies which regard individual tragedies and sacrifices as the inevitable lubricant of the inexorable march forward of the species.

And yes, this applies to so-called progressive, far-left, or liberal views.

These people redefined humanity, who is human, who qualifies, to exclude certain groups of people.

Communism embraces the working class, proletariat, but not the bourgeoisie.

Nazis promoted one folk but denigrated and annihilated others.

Fascism bows to the collective, but viciously persecutes and prosecutes dissidents.

Religious fundamentalism posits a cousin between believers and infidels.

Liberal democracy is victimhood-based. It involves virtue signaling, and it aggresses against countervailing speech. Walk movements, the cancel culture come to mind.

In these intolerant ideologies, the exclusion of certain reviled groups of people, is both a prerequisite for the operation of the natural law of progress and an integral part of its motion forward.

Progress is about excluding people or silencing them or even killing them.

The moral and spiritual obligation of real men, with a capital M, to future generations is to unburden the law, to make it possible for this law of progress, to operate smoothly and in optimal conditions with all obstacles and hindrances, in other words, all undesirables, removed.

Removed how?

Murdered. Or at the very least, silence or cancelled.

All these ideologies subvert modernity. In other words, they subvert progress itself.

By using the products of modernity, for example, technology, to exclude or to kill literally outsiders, all in the name of servicingreal humanityand bettering its lot.

Liberal democracy has been intermittently guilty of some additional sins.

The same deranged logic extends to the construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons by countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Israel.

They are intended to protect good humanity against bad people.

Bad people? Communists during the Cold War. Arabs. Failed states like North Korea and Iran.

Even climate change is a symptom of such exclusionary thinking.

The rich feel that they have the right to tax the lesser, inferior, poor people by polluting our common planet and by disproportionately exhausting its resources.

It's an act of contempt.

The fact is that at least since the 1920s, the very existence of mankind is being recurrently threatened by exclusionary ideas of progress.

Even colonialism, which predated modern ideologies, was inclusive. Colonialism sought to improve the natives and bring them to the white men's level by assimilating or incorporating them in the cultural society of the colonial power.

This was the celebrated and then decried white men's burden.

So even colonialism was inclusionary, inclusive, that we no longer accept a common fate for all humanity and the need to collaborate to improve our lot, is nothing short of suicidal.

And this is the second choice, second alternative, American voters face in this election, an ideological tyranny or a personality cult of a mentally ill person.

I don't envy them.

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