The Apotheosis Problem
Patching the exploits that narcissists use
If you ask people whether we can end war, most say
no. However, what if you ask people a
different question: is it possible to reach
a level of social maturity such that malignant narcissists can no longer con
the public? Can we, possibly, create a
culture resistant to narcissistic takeover, such that ‘strongmen’ no longer become heads
of state?
Note that “malignant narcissist” is professional
terminology from the discipline of psychology.
More on this below …
In this essay, I argue that by creating a culture resistant
to the power of charismatic narcissists, we take a powerful first step toward
saving ourselves from doom, that is, we greatly reduce the risk of war.
Can we create such a culture? Absolutely.
Are narcissists really that big of a deal
If World War 3 occurs--and we are very close to it right
now--it will because we human beings, once more, let narcissists take over our
governments. Egomaniacal individuals like
Putin, Trump and Netanyahu have no ethical core, no conscience. They are unable to back down at a fundamental
level of psyche.
A sad, tragic and pivotal case occurred on 11/5. On this date in 2024, Donald Trump won the US
Presidency. Since then, he has proceeded
to dismantle the republic the Founders tried so hard to protect. “A republic, if you can keep it,” said
Benjamim Franklin, walking out of the Constitutional Convention in September.,
1787.
We kept it for 238 years.
But when Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, it signaled a grim moment
not just for the United States but the entire geopolitical world. Harris got 48% of the vote, so democracy
almost won. But when you fall off a
cliff, “almost” isn’t enough.
If civilization is destroyed in war, 11/5 could be seen
as the decisive moment. Armageddon will
have occurred because we failed to advance our ethics tech to match the power
of our weapons tech. As Omar Bradley
said, we will be “ethical infants” with doom-capable weapons.
Our failure to advance ethically manifests plainly in
this way: our continued acquiescence to mentally
disordered men who fit the same psycho-criminal profile and who use the same
old exploits in the human brain to seize the throne.
Over and over and over again.
Analogy: the
human brain is like a quantum computer
If we advance our ethics tech, we patch our brains and
thereby make ourselves far less vulnerable to narcissistic mind-control
techniques. These techniques are, in
effect, viruses for the quantum computers in our heads. They cripple us mentally, starting in
infancy.
These techniques are part of a
larger phenomenon of acculturation, a kind of social virus for our brains, which has been transmitting from one generation to the next, evolving and ramifying,
for over ten thousand years, since the Agricultural Revolution.
The Ignorance Vortex
I refer to this larger phenomenon as the Ignorance Vortex. The basic scheme:
The invention of farming leads to the invention of war,
slavery and patriarchy. People
concentrate around silos of food, leading to larger populations controlled by warlords
and despots, who adopt a mode of social programming in which they are godkings. They enforce an
ignorance-based system of governance, one based on loyalty tests that require the acceptance of so-called ‘big
lies’. Once in place, this god-king culture
transmits from generation to generation, adapting to circumstance, all the way to the present
(1).
We are still stuck in the Ignorance Vortex to this day,
though we’ve begun to challenge some of its essential elements. Slavery
and misogyny, for instance, have been seriously challenged in the last few hundred years.
The Principle of Stability
The above considerations suggest a basic rule, the
Principle of Stability: if ethics tech
is not equal to the level of power tech active in society, unstable
and violent situations are likely to occur. "Power tech" here is generic and refers to weapons, energy, life sciences, world-shaping, and so on.
If space colonists from a good world landed on a new planet
and initiated farming, they would not descend into war, slavery and
patriarchy. They’d know how to properly handle the benefits.
Today, our level of ethics tech is too low to sanely manage the power tech we have, such as nuclear weapons, AI, robotics, mind-machine interface and so on.
Never back down:
the motto of lemmings
Egomaniacal leaders would rather commit genocide than
back down. The USA and Israel are doing just that, right now, in Gaza. Egomaniacal leaders
launch wanton invasions, replete with war crimes, cruel and chaotic power
grabs, based on grandiose visions of themselves. This is what Putin is doing right now in the
ongoing lawless Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On the day I type these words, 9/10/25, Poland shot down
Russian drones that invaded Polish air space, and invoked NATO section 4. This means that the collective of countries
that form NATO might soon be at war with Russia. Humanity is sliding in the direction of World
War 3.
What is the response of narcissist Putin to Poland’s
action? He proclaims that he will not back down. He has already threatened NATO with the
spectre of using nuclear weapons.
Never back down.
Up the ante. Push the pedal
faster. Right now, narcissists-in-power have
taken us to the edge of the end. To be
clear, “the end” refers to the end of human civilization.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be
fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. -- Albert
Einstein
Historical examples
Thankfully Napoleon did not have nuclear weapons. But he serves as another example of a narcissist
wreaking havoc--destruction, death and woe--across a large swath of the
globe. Caesar
declared himself emperor and catalyzed the decline of the Roman republic. At the center of World War II and the
Holocaust is Hitler, the “Fuhrer.” Also
at the center is Stalin, who also committed genocide. Stalinism and Nazism are two forms of an authoritarian
state.
An important point, courtesy of Erich Fromm:
[The] masochistic and submissive individual, who fears
freedom and escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the authoritarian
systems — Nazism and Stalinism — rest. (“The
Authoritarian Personality”)
Notice how Fromm, a psychologist, employs psychology to
analyze authoritarianism and thereby provide grounds for helping us move past
it as a civilization.
The way forward is to follow the path of therapeutic science and truth, and
escape ignorance-based loyalty tests.
Louis XIV was another ruler who established an absolute rule
and brought constant violence. He waged
five wars, inflicting vast amounts of destruction, death, misery, suffering and
upheaval. France was bankrupt after
Louis’s constant war-making, which was linked to his incredible vanity, according
to Voltaire:
It is certain that he [Louis XIV] passionately wanted glory,
rather than the conquests themselves. In the acquisition of Alsace and half of
Flanders, and of all of Franche-Comté, what he really liked was the name he
made for himself. (wiki entry)
Mononyms covering up monstrosity
We tend to frame these monstrous men with
mononyms. They are known by one-name designators: Napoleon, Caesar, Louis XIV.
Assigning a mononym can be seen as granting someone a status of greatness. What if our culture evolved to remove labels
of ambiguity from such megalomaniacs and instead labeled them as they deserve--as
vice-bound, ego-blinded agents of cruelty, darkness and destruction? Hitler and Stalin, as genocidists, should
always be firmly associated with the highest category of Evil.
Declaring such malignant narcissists as “great,” without bold-face,
italicized clarification that they are morally abhorrent, empowers present-day would-be dictators
to follow in their footsteps.
Lesson: we need to mature. Ethics-as-a-technology needs to be front and center in our method of governance, not just window dressing, if we are literally to survive.
Medicine-as-a-technology
Sound strange? Medicine used to be faith-based. We've normalized it as a technology. Some zealots still refuse logical, scientific medical treatment, but 21st century culture has been mostly shifted toward medicine as tech. (The anti-vaccine movement in the USA is a step back toward medicine-as-faith).
The same transition needs to occur with ethics. Ethics-as-a-technology advances in concert with science and psychology, including the ecological sciences. It is, moreover, situated in philosophy, including the critical thinking skills necessary to debunk spurious, specious, superstitious and otherwise fallacious arguments.
Keeping ethics faith-based instead of tech-based is damnable. It means that we will be stuck with the lowest level of ethics tech, which is might-makes-right. An example would be a theocracy, a form of government hostage to whatever interpretation of the sacred texts is held by those in power. If those in power decide that Black people are, say, the descendants of Ham, and deserve punishment for that reason, as drawn from scripture, then Black people will be punished.
A sharp shift toward a theocratic (White, Christian, fascist) government is in full swing here in the USA. Note well; the "Curse of Ham" was the so-called moral justification for slavery for around 500 years.
What is the greatest challenge for the 21st
century?
Today, in the nuclear age, as we move forward with technologies
of death, war, surveillance and police-state control, we can no longer suffer the reign of malignant narcissists.
Our primitive, immature level of ethics needs
to advance. For thousands of years, due to the intergenerational
transmission of dysfunctional social programming, we have been stuck.
If you ask people what they think is the greatest
challenge for 21st century civilization, they might say environmental
destruction: global warming, species extinction, pollution, degradation. They might say income inequality, or point to oppressions
like sexism, racism or homophobia. They
might say AI or robots. Some people
might say that war is our greatest challenge, recognizing the gravity of Einstein’s
“sticks and stones” quote above. There are and will be other threats, for we possess an increasing ability to transform the environment and the very processes and mechanisms of life itself: how to create and alter life, how to exploit and destroy it.
The Apotheosis Problem
However, all of these existential threats to human civilization
are downstream from the narcissists who sit on thrones of national power. These ego-blinded leaders have the ability to throttle any amelioration of said threats. Trump, for example, has killed cooperation on
global warming by calling it a “hoax." He has made this big lie one of the many loyalty
tests demanded of his cult-like base.
Ignorance-based forms of government, which rely on bullying and might-makes-right, demand such tests. Ignorance-based governments are the absolute lowest form of ethics technology. A rationalist foundation of human rights is a big step up. Right now, humanity is vacillating between ignorance and human-rights, though tilting toward the former.
Given the ability of narcissistic leaders to prevent progress
on many fronts--such as dealing with environmental damage, income
inequality, or the threat of war--and, even more important, their propensity to advance major crises in order to sow chaos as a means to maintain their rulership (look
at Netanyahu, who, to avoid facing criminal charges, is conducting genocide and creating
a full scale war in the middle east) perhaps the biggest challenge for
21st century civilization is what could be called the Apotheosis Problem
(APP): our tendency to put megalomaniacal
rulers in positions of dictatorial power.
The Apotheosis Problem can be sketched as follows:
If not 'patched' by education, humans tend to put
the worst possible leaders in power.
Traits of narcissists
The traits of narcissists are codified in professional psychological
manuals, such as the DSM-V. Their
tactics are well-known to professionals in psychiatry. Donald Trump isn’t playing “five-dimensional
chess,” a phrase used by some of his followers to praise his parasitic behavior. He is using tactics of mind control typical
of political narcissists and, as well, domestic violence abusers:
Authoritarian
leaders, like narcissistic family members, rely on well-worn tactics to
manufacture a psychological state of volatile uncertainty — where outcomes
aren’t just unknown, but constantly shifting and unpredictable. This overwhelms
the brain’s ability to anticipate and prepare, keeping people mentally
off-balance and easier to control. The good news: Awareness works like a
vaccine, gradually building psychological immunity against further harm.
(“I’m A Psychologist Who Specializes In Narcissists.
Here’s What We Need To Do To Stop Trump,” -- Jocelyn Sze,
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m-psychologist-specializes-narcissists-stop-115203532.html
The knowledge to defuse narcissists is
out there. But our culture remains saturated in sticky ignorance. We still call
narcissistic leaders “strongmen,” an ambiguous term that can be interpreted as positive (similar to calling someone "great"). A more accurate symbolism would be that of a
parasite: someone who worms their way into
power through deceit, someone who bloats their own ego and vitiates the health and
survivability of the whole. I refer to
these kinds of leaders as “enervators.”
Strongmen? No. They are parasites. Enervators.
A Catch-22
In order to increase our ethics technology, we need to
create a culture resistant to narcissistic takeover. However, enervators do everything they can
to control culture and education. Trump
himself infamously said, “I love the poorly educated.” Some of his first acts as President have been
to attack universities, museums, archives, theaters, television, radio and
social media.
Despite the grasping control tactics of authoritarian
leaders, social movements can overcome their ignorance-based systems of
governance. An example is the Civil
Rights movement in the 1960s, which ended legal segregation. The Abolitionist Movement that started in 18th century England led to the end of legal slavery.
Perhaps the greatest moment in all of human history
occurred in 1920 when women gained the right to vote in the United States. This overturned thousands of years of ignorance-based
government that relied on the ancient, original big lie: that women were incapable of thinking as
deeply as men and, as well, were morally inferior.
For many thousands of years, misogyny has been the norm, transmitted from one generation to the next. Sadly, it is so well-entrenched in our mental programming, our 'brainware,' that it is still predominant.
Can we?
Can we end war?
Doing so requires solving the Apotheosis Problem. It is daunting to the point of
impossibility. But if we break the huge questions down into a series of cultural shifts and steps, each with its own goalpost, we
get a breadcrumb trail. A glimpse of
hope.
It is at least theoretically possible that we can end war and solve the APP. Humans possess a vast amount of brain plasticity. Crudely speaking, we are programmable quantum
computers. Supervening on this is the
concept of cultural plasticity, that is, the potential for culture to take a wide
variety of forms.
Concluding thoughts
In just my own lifetime, right here in the United States, radical shifts in culture have occurred.
It’s hard for us to imagine that ten years from now culture could be
radically different again. And yet, if recent
history is guide, it is not only possible but likely.
Many millions of people are already aware of the threat
of narcissism and educated on the topic.
They have achieved a strong level of resistance, despite the primitive ethics of
the secondary school system in the USA, which teaches neither psychology nor
critical thinking skills.
It is not theoretical to claim that people and culture
can attain greater maturity. It has already happened and continues to happen, despite massive resistance from the status quo. How far could we advance in ethics tech if the status quo was not designed to keep us vain, insecure and fearful?
Even if the odds of ending war aren’t great, I argue in another blogpost why it is worthwhile to proceed for various reasons (1).
Fly Well in the Dark.
==============================
Footnote
1. https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/05/draft-intro-of-my-book-better-angels.html
9/17... eds, added a few sentences
9/15/25 added a section called "The Principle of Stability"
9/14/25 .. added some points
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