=======
I'll be editing this over the next few days, I recommend coming back later
=======
The Apotheosis Problem
Patching the exploits that narcissists use
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.
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
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.
Never back down: the motto of lemmings
Egomaniacal leaders would rather commit genocide than back down. The USA and Israel are doing so 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 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 used to be faith-based. Now it is a technology. The same transition needs to occur with ethics, and would follow similar lines of science and psychology, backed by critical thinking skills.
Keeping ethics faith-based instead of technology-based means that we will be stuck with the lowest level of ethics tech, which is might-makes-right.
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 things like 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 truth of Einstein’s “sticks and stones” quote above. There are no doubt other threats as well, due to our increasing ability to transform the environment and the process of evolution itself.
The Apotheosis Problem
However. all of these serious threats to human civilization are downstream from the narcissists who sit in the thrones of national power--narcissists who therefore 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 are based on might-makes-right, the lowest level of ethics tech, demand such tests.
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 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 in the first place.
The Apotheosis Problem can be roughly sketched as follows:
If not educationally inoculated, 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 valorize 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.
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.
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 question 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 intellectual inoculation, despite the ignorance of the secondary school system in the USA, which teaches students neither psychology nor critical thinking skills.
What if the school system was on board? What if corporate advertisers weren't flooding our minds with messages that do their best to make us insecure, and instead showed us how to improve our psychological health?
It is not theoretical to claim that people and culture can attain greater maturity. It has already happened.
Even if the odds of ending war aren’t great, I argue in another blogpost why it is worthwhile to proceed (1).
Fly Well in the Dark.
==============================
Footnote
1. https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/05/draft-intro-of-my-book-better-angels.html
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment