Push Narcissist’s 4 Secret Buttons: Gamma Man or Agent of Chaos, Madness?

Let's talk about the next button.

The next button is the conquering hero. These are all stereotypes or even archetypes. The conquering hero, Superman, Batman, Spider-Man.

What do we know about these comic Marvel heroes? They transform. They are one thing during the day and another thing during the night. They are fully human in private and fully inhuman or partly human in public. They are in private. They are people, just persons with foibles, with fallacies, with shortcomings, with limitations when they're in private, when they're in public, they're heroes, they're saviors, they're rescuers, they're infallible, they're mighty, they're invincible, they're omniscient, they're omnipotent.

So you see the narcissist is a public face and a private face. When the narcissist is alone with himself, he experiences this inferiority complex. He experiences his lacks and deficiencies and shortcomings. He needs input from the outside known as narcissistic supply in order to restore himself.

Because when he's alone with himself, he's alone with his worst enemy.

We now think, the new thinking is that all narcissists are compensatory. So all narcissists have covert faces. Even classic and overt narcissists have covert faces. This is the new, the newest thinking about narcissism.

It's reflected a distant echo in the alternative model of narcissism, of narcissistic personality disorder in the DSM-5, page 767.

Applause.

Now, conquering hero is Janus, the God with two faces. This is the narcissist.

So he wants to be considered Superman. He wants to be considered by everyone as a good person who is out to save and rescue, as someone whose powers are infinite and communal and pro-social. All narcissists want that, by the way.

But when they're alone, they're insecure. They feel unsafe because they never had a safe base as children. They are re-traumatized. All the old early childhood conflicts, the ancient traumas are provoked when the narcissist is alone, are triggered, and he needs other people to soothe him, to restore a reality testing that is actually grandiose and fantastic.

He needs other people to reaffirm his grandiose fantasies about himself. He needs other people to tell him, yes, you are a genius. You are amazing. You are a hero.

And so this is a button. This is one of the narcissist buttons.

And there are two ways of pushing it.

One way of pushing it is to go along for the ride, to convey, communicate, to the narcissist that he is indeed a savior, a rescuer, all-powerful, amazing, of unique potentialities and capacities. X-Men, this is one way.

By massaging his ego, by catering to his infantile needs for reassurance and reaffirmation and narcissistic supply, you can, of course, manipulate the narcissist or, at the very least, preserve the peace in the relationship, reach a kind of modus operandi within the relationship, which is essentially calm and peaceful and tranquil and long-term. A homeostasis and equilibrium.

The other way of pushing the button is narcissistic injury or, in extreme cases, narcissistic mortification. It's by challenging the narcissist self-perception as a conquering hero by not allowing him to conquer, for example, the somatic narcissist.

Somatic narcissist needs, desperately needs, subsists on sexual conquests, deny him his sexual conquests, and he disintegrates like a vampire exposed to sunlight.

Same with the cerebral narcissist. The cerebral narcissist needs adulation and admiration and affirmation and applause when he displays like a peacock. His intellectual tale is pyrotechnics, intellectual pyrotechnics.

Denying this supply and he disintegrates as well.

So the second way of using this button is gray rock, the famous technique which I had not invented, regrettably. It's a great technique, possibly the strongest technique, most powerful technique after no contact.

So gray rock is this pushing the conquering hero button by ignoring or by rendering yourself an interesting, dull, boring, anxious, stupid, pseudo stupid.

So when you gray rock the narcissist, you're pushing his conquering hero button in all the wrong ways. Here he is, a spectacle, displaying himself, trying to amaze you into submission, to shock you and fascinate you into addiction, and you are ignoring him and ignoring all his spectacular feats and manifestations and exploits.

And the narcissist cannot survive this, he's likely to dump you.

Okay, the next button, the father guru.

Again, we see two elements here.

As a father, paternal figure, the narcissist would tend to gravitate towards women who have daddy issues, of course, thereby create a kind of compatibility. He would be a father to their missing father. He would be the father they never had. He would be a father who is not as abusive as the original father they've had.

So this is the father element, but he still dispenses tough love, discipline, strict discipline, rules, boundaries, regulations, rigid expectations. That's the father part.

Now with most narcissists, the father part is actually rare.

In cerebral narcissist, it is triggered when the cerebral narcissist is asked for advice. When you solicit the cerebral narcissist's advice, he becomes a father guru.

Similarly with the somatic, he is likely to present himself as far more experienced than you sexually. He's going to teach you what is real sex. He's going to introduce you to new worlds and universes of sexuality that you had only seen in the movies or heard of. I don't know, BDSM or whatever.

So the father guru is intermixed. The paternal figure, the avantilla figure, paternal figure that the narcissist cuts in his relationship with you has elements of superiority, sexual superiority, intellectual superiority, superiority of knowledge, superiority of experience. He has something over you and that's the guru element.

He also has the right, which any father has, to discipline you, to tell you how to behave, to instruct you as to what constitutes misbehavior, a displeasing misbehavior. He assumes this role and it's very disconcerting and disorienting because he can switch very speedily with alacrity between the child and the father, the engineer, the naive and the guru.

And these pendulations, these oscillations and vicissitudes are such that you're thrown off balance. It's extremely disorienting and dislocating and it is of course the core technique in gaslighting. It underlies gaslighting.

As the narcissist changes his reality, who he is, his identity, because he has no core identity, he shapeshifts, he's chameleon and he shapeshifts and sometimes his shapeshifting is a reaction to internal processes. As he shapeshifts, everything around him shapeshifts as well. Reality itself is warped and distorted and this process is what we call gaslighting.

It may drive you to the point of madness or at least to the point of believing that you are crazy, that you're mad.

Again, there are two ways of pushing this button, the father-guru button.

One way of pushing the father-guru button is to seek advice, to cater to the guru and paternal side.

In other words, to infantilize yourself, to agree for stretches of time, periods or events, where you are the one who becomes the child in the relationship. You switch roles in effect. It's a role-switching game.

First, he's the child, you're the mother. Now, you are the child, he's the father.

So, you play along. You pretend that everything he says is the 11th commandment, that he is the new reincarnation of Jesus and Moses combined. That he is the reification of the principle of wisdom, that he is truly a unique unprecedented guru and you're lucky to be in his presence and breathe the same air that he does. You're at his feet sometimes, literally, if he's a foot fetishist, you're at his feet.

So, this is one way of pushing the button. It guarantees bliss, marital or relationship bliss.

Let me tell you, the other way of pushing the button is, of course, if you want to exit the relationship, destroy the shared fantasy, challenge and undermine this shared psychotic space.

So, the other way is to challenge both roles.

When he tries to be a guru, you dispute what he says, you disagree, you criticize, you provide alternative sources of information which don't sit well with what he's saying. You mock him, you doubt his credentials, you ask him openly to prove what he's saying and to prove that he has the authority to say it, etc.

So, this undermines the narcissist's grandiosity and nothing is more precious to the narcissist than his grandiosity. He's going to dump and sacrifice you just in order to preserve his grandiosity.

Similarly, when he's trying to act the father, the second way of pushing the button is to refuse to act the child, to remain an adult, to maintain your adulthood.

So, he's trying to be the father, you're the adult in the room, you disagree, you contest, you push back, you insist on your boundaries, on your personal autonomy, your agency, you become self efficacious so you don't need him, you don't ask for his advice and if he tries to push it on you, you inform him that you don't appreciate unsolicited advice and tips and help, etc.

So, this pushes the specific button the wrong way and this is one of the possibly the crucial button, the father guru button.

The last button is divinity but it's not divinity of the Olympian sort, it's not divinity of like the Greek gods because the Greek gods were essentially anthropomorphized. The Greek gods were human, they copulated with beautiful human females, they had offspring with these women Hercules for example. So, the Greek gods were around a bunch, there were drunkards, there were alcoholics, actually many of them were alcoholics, they were somatic narcissists, they were I mean they were narcissistic grandiose, the Greek gods were mental illness writ large.

No, the narcissist divinity is not like the Olympian Greek gods, the narcissist divinity is old testament divinity or new testament divinity.

All narcissists regard themselves as god-like. Remember that narcissism is a religion, there's a god-head, the false self, it's the Moloch, the false self, the child makes a human sacrifice, the child sacrifices his true self to the false self, the idol, and the false self then takes over and there's a religion of one god and one worshiper, a cult where the narcissist fulfills all the roles. He is god, he is the worshiper, and he is the cult.

So, this is the structure of narcissism and some narcissists fashion and mold the false self to be like the old testament god. It's an aggressive god, a vindictive god, petty, pretty petty, it's a micromanaging god, it's a control freak god, it's a god who is sometimes absolutely sadistic, it's a grandiose god, highly narcissistic, and so on. So, that's the old testament god, not someone you would like to spend a few hours in the pub with, trust me.

The new testament god is the exact opposite, it's a loving god, compassionate god, caring god, an empathic god, but still psychotic and grandiose.

So, the narcissists can choose to enact or reenact the old testament god, the god of thunder and brimstone, or the new testament god, the victim, the martyr, the saint.

In either capacity, he self-imputes, he attributes to himself divine powers, divine attributes.

You can push this button in two ways.

As usual, one way of pushing the button is worshipping the narcissist. He's a god, you're a worshiper, you have a two-man cult, a two-man sect, or a two-man religion, two people, religion, I'm sorry, you're not a man.

So, one way is to worship the narcissist. Simply conform to his religious rituals, use his theological language, regard the false self as unassailable, infallible, the epitome and reification of perfection, perfection, brilliance, and rightness, moral righteousness.

So, this is one way of pushing the button.

If the narcissist chooses the new testament god, you push the button by catering to his need to feel victimized, martyred, and so on and so forth.

Ironically, by mistreating him, the more you mistreat him, the more attached he will be to you, because the more you mistreat and abuse him, the more you cheat on him, the more you betray him, well, up to a point, and that point is the mortification, the singularity point.

Up to that point, the longer your torment and torture this kind of narcissist, the new testament narcissist, the more gratified he is, he is in his Jesus comfort zone, he feels crucified for a good cause.

So, this is one way of pushing the button.

The other way of pushing the button is, of course, challenging the self-imputed alleged self-proclaimed divinity of the narcissist, pointing out to him mistakes that he had made, inconsistencies, discrepancies, sheer nonsense, stupidities, wrong decisions, failures, defeats, etc., and doing so repeatedly, like, you know, the Chinese water drop torture, I mean, drop by drop, until finally he would walk away.

His divinity, the father guru, and the divinity buttons are the two important ones, because they are at the core of the grandiosity.

These are the four buttons, and these are the ways to push him.

Now, why do we feel so uncomfortable with narcissists and so on? Why, when we come across narcissists, there is this dis-ease, ill-ease somehow. It's like something's missing, something ambient, something is in the air, as though the atmosphere had been instantaneously polluted or poisoned, even when you're in love with the narcissist, even when you're irrevocably inexorably attracted to the narcissist, even when you find him amazing, and humorous, and funny, and witty, and stunning, and super intelligent, and drop dead gorgeous, there's still a tiny voice whispering in your ear, your intuition, actually, your gut instinct, your survival instinct, whispering in your ear, beware, be careful, either it's too good to be true, so it's probably not true, or some of the behaviors of the narcissist don't sit well with the way he represents himself. The mask sometimes slips, and you get a glimpse of the alien beneath.

So, one of the things that narcissists force you to do, which healthy normal people don't, is this constant self-scrutiny.

When you're with a healthy normal person, you don't keep asking yourself, is everything okay? What am I doing here? Why am I here? What's going to happen? Then what is this behavior? Why is he not behaving in a way that I predicted? What's wrong with me? What's wrong with him? What's wrong with us?

And so, this constant background dialogue, monologue, trying to make sense of your experience, essentially a senseless, nonsensical experience, as Cleckley had observed in his masterpiece, Mask of Sanity, this is what psychopaths do, and many of the psychopaths that he described were later renamed borderlines and narcissists.

So, that's what psychopaths do. They discombobulate, they introduce chaos and madness and uncertainty and discomfort and wariness and hypervigilance and sensitivity into the situation.

And you don't have this with normal and healthy people.

On the one hand, it is precisely this, the fact that you have to be on your toes, you walk on actions, it's precisely this that heightens, amplifies, emphasizes the experience.

The experience is like nothing else. It's like being 10 times more alive than normal. Everything falls into sharp relief.

You know, when you're in an accident or when you suddenly get sick and taken to a hospital, everything falls into sharp relief. When there's a global calamity, like assassination of JFK or 9-11, you remember every moment and every second. You remember erroneously, by the way, but it doesn't matter. The memory is imprinted.

The narcissist heightens your experience, colors it, brings you into a permanent, excitatory state. You can't relax on the one hand, but on the other hand, you feel more alive than ever.

And the reason the narcissist does this is because he's an agent of chaos. And he's an agent of chaos because he forces you to think.

This is the book Escapism by Yifutuan. He was a cultural geographer. This is an excellent book called Escapism. And I would like to read to you an extended excerpt from the book about chaos and order.

Remember, the narcissist forces you to think, where healthy and normal people do not.

So he starts with a, because he's a cultural geographer, essentially a kind of anthropologist.

And a Wachau father instructs his children in the use of a string game, showing how it connects human life to the constellations as prelude for telling the coyote tale.

The game and the tale may be entertaining in themselves, but they have a deeper purpose, which the father explains thus.

He tells his children, we need to have ways of thinking, of keeping things stable, healthy, beautiful. We try for a long life, but lots of things can happen to us.

So we keep our thinking in order by these figures. And we keep our lives in order with these stories. We have to relate our lives to stars and to the sun and the animals and all the nature, or else we will go crazy and get sick.

Essentially what the father is telling his children, don't overthink. And if you do think, think in a rigid, structured, dictated, predefined manner. Don't think independently.

The narcissist forces you to think outside the box. The narcissist takes you out of your comfort zone, introduces you to unsettling, sometimes harrowing and always discomforting and frightening and threatening, menacious experiences. He forces you to think independently. And so, to innovate, I continue quoting.

So the Navajo father commends thinking for its power to produce temporary stays against disorder.

Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate practical end in mind can cause unhappiness and that indeed it is in itself evidence of unhappiness.

Happy people, happy people have no reason to think. They live rather than question living.

To Inuit, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored.

One Inuit woman was overheard to say in a righteous tone, I never think. Another woman complained of a third woman because she was trying to make her thing and this way shorten her life.

Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people. It is subversive of established values. It undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism.

There is an element of truth in all these accusations, says the author.

In an Updike novel, a working class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. The father says he doesn't know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read, like he's plotting something. They say you should encourage reading, but they never tell you why.

The author, again, to remind you, I'm reading from Escapism, a book by Yi Fu Tuan.

So Yi Fu Tuan says, I have chosen the words isolation and indifference to capture a fundamental human experience. Other people may choose other words or concepts.

One of the most common is chaos, which invokes the ultimate in disconnectedness, isolation and indifference.

Even as the Navajo father uses a string game to show his children how human faith is tied to the constellations, he feels and fears the undertow of chaos.

Likewise, Hawa, an Iglulik Eskimo, says the same. When the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen tried to get Hawa, this Iglulik Eskimo, to articulate a coherent philosophy, Hawa replied that it cannot be done.

Moreover, it is presumptuous to do so, presumptuous and futile as to build elaborate material shelters and camps.

Whatever people may say, whatever they would like to believe, they know through the shocks of experience that nature is indifferent and can be chaotic.

To hunt well and to live happily says Hawa, men must have calm weather.

Why this constant succession of blizzards?

In other words, why think? Thinking is a blizzard. You need calm weather to hunt well and live happily.

And he says, why must people be ill and suffer pain by thinking?

Personal misfortune seems to be quite unrelated to good or bad behavior.

Here is this old sister of mine, says Hawa. As far as anyone can see, she has done no evil. She has lived through a long life and given birth to healthy children. And now she must suffer before her days end. Why? Why?

You see, says Hawa to Wasmusen, you are equally unable to give any reason when we ask you why life is as it is.

And so it must be.

In a world so full of uncertainty, the Iglulik seek comfort in the rules they have inherited.

To quote Hawa again, and what he says is remarkably similar to the Navaho father, we do not know how. We cannot say why, but we keep those rules in order that we may live untroubled.

Reflective individuals may be defined as those who suspect that the order and meaning they discern and strive hard to maintain are little more than a measure of their desperation. Hawa was such an individual.

Another also in Iglulik was Okutagu. Okutagu inspired to become a shaman, but changed his mind during the period of training.

To his kinsmen, he said, that he was not good enough. To the friendly outsider, Knud Wasmusen, he explained that the real reason was that he had come to doubt his master's claims to reading the signs of nature and to establish contact with helpful spirits.

He saw such claims as lies and humbug, well-meaning perhaps, but manufactured to provide reassurance to timid people.

The anthropologist Monica Wilson asked the women of an African village why they set such a store by their ceremonies, where the ceremonies are so important. And she asked them, was it because they exerted real power over the external world, these ceremonies?

Their answer was always the same. Such ceremonies were conducted for inward rather than outward effect. They served to stop people from going mad.

I'm reminded of, says the author, I'm reminded of W.H. Auden's gloomy poem, Death's Echo, in which he says, echoing the ancient Greeks, that not to be born may well be the best, but there is always a second best, which is formal order, the dance, the dancer's pattern, to make some sense of life, to prevent ourselves from going mad.

We have one ready means of escape, and that is to dance while we can.

An ironed handkerchief could lead to madness, writes Iris Murdoch. People must opt for order somewhere down the line.

A touching confession of helplessness before the world's bewildering complexity comes from the distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He has been accused of reductionism, of suggesting that structural analysis has the power to illuminate human experience and social reality.

Lévi-Strauss denies this as outrageous. The possibility, he says, has never occurred to me.

On the contrary, it seems to me that social life and the empirical reality surrounding it unfold mostly at random.

As Lévi-Strauss expressly puts it, disorder reigns in social life's vast empirical sea.

He, for his part, chooses to study only its scattered small islands of organization. Moreover, these islands refer not to what people do, but to what they believe or say must be done.

This is an extended excerpt from Escapism by Yifatuan. And this is what the narcissist does.

He introduces chaos. He introduces madness by forcing you to think, by forcing you to reflect, by forcing you to doubt and question, by introducing the unpredictable, the incomprehensible, the senseless, and the cruel into your lives.

And this leads me to the last segment, and that is the gamma male.

Gamma male is borrowed from a typology known as the social sexual hierarchy produced by the far-right activist Vox Dei. Vox Dei was his pseudonym. I think his real name was Beale.

According to him, gamma males are intellectual, highly romantic, ideologically driven men who hold a low status position in the social dominance hierarchy, though they desire to be leaders and are envious of the rank and privilege that comes naturally to alphas and betas.

This is one definition, and there is a list of attributes or traits of the gamma male.

They are highly intelligent. They are kind and empathetic. They are hopeless romantics. They believe that the depth of their love should hold value to the women they pedestalize. They struggle to succeed on the dating marketplace. They adopt secret king delusions of grandeur. They are conflict avoidant. They are failure avoidant. They lie to themselves. They fail to understand women.

It's a good description of the cerebral narcissist, actually.

Here is another definition from the urban dictionary of the gamma male.

The gamma male is a person who rejects status and authority, believing that thinking for oneself is possible and desirable, and valuing for freedom the most.

The orientation puts gamma males at odds with most people in society, so gammas tend to be perceived as outsiders. But outsider status may or may not be important to their identity.

Gammas tend to be comfortable alone, but they have material, sexual and social needs like everybody else. Their attitudes towards society tend to alternate between disdain for the herd, the betas, and their cattle ranches, the alphas, and a struggle to just accept people as they are and give up bitterness.

Often they find a small group of other gammas and proud betas to hang out with.

In relations with strong alphas, the outcome is usually mutual dislike that sometimes develops into grudging respect. In sexual relationships, they can be clingy towards the few people they can relate to, use those they don't respect, or be very detached if they have found happiness in their personal pursuits.

Socially, gammas are usually nice, but they can turn vicious if their personal space is threatened. They reject prevailing morality and can be extremely cynical and manipulative, or else find their own way, often drifting towards quasi-bootistic worldview.

Gammas tend to derive satisfaction from their private sense of all beauty and mystery rather than social acceptance of material things. The ability to find satisfaction in these things is often what keeps them going while being misfits in society, and there's a good description of the schizoid narcissists.

Schizoid cerebral narcissists are probably what these people call gamma males.

Gamma males is not a clinical entity, nor is it accepted in academia, but it's an interesting classificatory system, and gamma males correspond very closely to schizoid cerebral narcissists.

I hope you enjoyed the tour and the Wagnerian Horror Show, and I invite you to the next episode if you're still alive.