Narcissism and Paranoia

Reviewers on the latest release of The Bourne Identity mostly saw it as a saturated film, where nothing more could be done with the character. I thought the latest, esp. the ending, was a very honest film.

It showed the indecisive, unsettling, and a restlessness, un/ease about our identity, after the schizophrenic self-fragmentation modernity has dispersed, with its artificial problems, questions of multiply divided loyalties, and a near-total paralysis of which way to act, which way to behave, what is right, what is wrong, how to judge…
Snowden is truly a modern symptom.


One article that I came upon recently in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] explored the change in behaviour of Blacks towards Whites.

Its not so much the article itself, about Whites or such, but the human condition in general today.

With overflow of information, there is a virulent attack undermining one's trust with one's self, one's senses, one's observations, one's ability to discriminate, judge, value.

Increased anxieties of space, privacy, identity can result in total apathy or high-strung paranoia.

This modern apathy manifests in smaller and smaller atomization of the individual, his needs, his aims, his purpose, his goal. It becomes sufficient if one could just survive the day, keep to the minimum, and so forth. Libertarianism is the most blatant expression of this apathetic retardation and stunting. The near-comatose condition where one is so inundated with too much indecisiveness, exhaustion resigns to pain/pleasure criteria, that colour his/her ideals and choices.
One cannot be bothered anymore to question, to take to task, to attack injustice or unfair play or stupidity that one comes across, and even understandably when its become dangerous to do so. There is conservation and a minimal humm.

At the other end is a high-blown vigilance, extreme suspicion that discharges in defensive-aggressive attitudes of testing everything to death, watching who's watching, game-mode, the panoticon, the 'program', surveillance etc.
The drain of energy leaves the self depleted and self mis-trust compensating with an unhealthy narcissism… "is that about me?", "will this affect me?"…    everything becomes me-centred, a hyper-focus.
There is a displacement from a healthy distrust to an unhealthy mistrust, and so much psychological damage, leaving one unfit and desireless to live anymore.

Individual Indecisiveness in the exhausted apathetic becomes displaced into group-conscience, back into morality, let them do whatever as long as it doesn't interfere in my comfort, my pleasure.

The mistrustful paranoid, with neither trust in his senses, nor trust in the outer world, turns questioning itself into a way of life. We all have seen one such case here!
Or on the other hand, social reputation becomes so important as validation of self-esteem and security, that the individual does anything to remain 'on top'. Interfacial narcissism, 'how am I perceived?' as an important social repute-currency reduces one to a slavish function of group-conscience again…

Quote :

"Paranoid personality disorder is characterized by a pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent. This usually begins in early adulthood and presents in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the  following:


- Suspects, without sufficient basis, that others are exploiting, harming, or deceiving him or her

- Is preoccupied with unjustified doubts about the loyalty or trustworthiness of friends or associates

- Is reluctant to confide in others because of unwarranted fear that the information will be used maliciously against him or her

- Reads hidden demeaning or threatening meanings into benign remarks or events

- Persistently bears grudges (i.e., is unforgiving of insults, injuries, or slights)

- Perceives attacks on his or her character or reputation that are not apparent to others, and is quick to react angrily or to counterattack

- Has recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding fidelity of spouse or sexual partner"

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This topic has many angles to think from.

So more later.

Modern psychiatry would be quick to label any history of pattern-recognition that is suggestive of bias against the majority or the status quo - the typical victim industry, as "paranoid projections", or false bias, etc.


In any case, a general overview that tries to keep it neutral.

Daniel and Jason Freeman wrote:

"For Burton in the Anatomy, paranoia and depression go hand in hand:

"He [the depressed person] dares not venture alone, for fear he should meet the devil, a thief, be sick; fears all old women as witches, and every black dog or cat he sees he suspecteth to be a devil, every person comes near him is maleficiated, every creature, all intend to hurt him."

And he continues:

"Suspicion and jealousy are general symptoms....If they speak in jest, he takes it in good earnest. If they not be saluted, invited, consulted with...they think themselves neglected and contemned; for a time that tortures them. If two talk together . . . he thinks presently they mean him . . . Or if they talk with him, he is ready to misconster every word they speak, and to interpret it to the worst; he cannot endure any man to look steadily at him, speak to him almost . . . He thinks they laugh or point at him . . .
In all other things they are wise, staid, discreet, and so nothing unbeseeming their dignity, person, or place, this foolish, ridiculous, and childish fear excepted."


This association with depression is typical of the way paranoia was seen until the rise of professional psychiatry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

For Burton and his contemporaries, paranoia isn’t a sign of madness; it’s a sign of depression (an illness that psychiatry later puts firmly in the category of neurosis).

The word ‘paranoia’ was coined by Hippocrates, commonly described as the ‘founder of medicine’, who was born around the year 460 BC on the Greek island of Kos.

Hippocrates used ‘paranoia’ to describe the kind of delir- ium people sometimes experience when they have a very high temperature. He did this by putting together the Greek words for ‘beside’ (para) and ‘mind’ (nous) to create a word that literally meant ‘out of one’s mind’. Such delirious ram- blings might include irrational fears about other people, though Hippocrates’ use of the term wasn’t limited to these.

Hippocrates’ sense of paranoia as derangement, of being out of one’s mind, made a comeback as a technical term in the mid-eighteenth century. This was a time of growing interest in mental illness, leading up to the creation of the new discipline of psychiatry at the beginning of the nine- teenth century.

When in 1763 the French physician and scholar François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix published his Nosologia Methododica, a hugely important work that attempts the first scientific classification of diseases, he revived the term paranoia, which he employed rather like Hippocrates had done. For Sauvages, ‘paranoia’ denoted a form of derangement, or madness, associated with high fever but also with dementia.

The use of the term was then significantly refined by Johann Heinroth (1777–1843), who held the first chair in psychiatry (at the university of Leipzig). Heinroth is credited with giving the world the term ‘psychosomatic’, but he also extended the meaning of paranoia to include delusions (or false ideas) that occurred without the presence of a fever. Paranoia was still firmly locked into a discourse of mad- ness, irrationality, and delirium. But, within that discourse, Heinroth made room for delusions that resulted not merely from physical illnesses but also from disorders of the mind. [By] two of the founding fathers of modern psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) and Eugen Bleuler (1857– 1939), paranoia was principally regarded as a symptom of psychosis. And that, at least until very recently, is pretty much where the scientific view of paranoia has been stuck. Low-level paranoia—the sort that’s experienced by millions of us on a regular basis—doesn’t get a mention.

Paranoia is the unrealistic belief that other people want to harm us.

Who are we scared of ?

If I walk past strangers in the street and they’re laughing, I always suspect they’re laughing at me. Paul, aged 21.

At work, if I’m restocking the shelves and other staff mem- bers are nearby, I sometimes think they’re joking and talking about me, but I know they aren’t really. Doreen, aged 58.

I once thought a housemate was trying to steal my posses- sions because I often caught her in the corridor near my room. I got really wound up about this and ended up locking some of my valuables in the garden shed. I began to have other thoughts—like she was trying to poison me because she was always asking me to eat food she’d cooked and giving me new foreign alcohol to try. Liz, aged 24.

If I’m sitting on the tube and I catch someone’s eye repeatedly, I wonder why they keep looking at me. Chris, aged 30.

These comments are taken from a survey.
Many people without mental illness distrust the government or other state agencies. What we can say for sure though is that para- noia will point the finger at anyone. Everyone is a potential threat.

Being ridiculed is what psychologists call social harm and other examples include being made to look bad in other people’s eyes, being excluded, or being the subject of malicious rumours—all of which commonly feature in paranoid thoughts.

Besides social and physical harm, people often worry that they’re being watched or talked about. Or they think people are using hints and double meanings to threaten them with- out anyone else noticing. They might believe other people are trying to upset or annoy them (we call this psychological harm), or steal their money or possessions (in other words, inflict financial harm). Paranoid thoughts can revolve around the idea of an enemy—perhaps someone at work we see as a rival—who wants to ruin or get rid of us. And in some severe cases, people feel their actions or thoughts are being controlled by someone else.

Who exactly is being threatened? Usually, it’s the person with the paranoid thoughts. But it can sometimes involve friends and family.
In other cases, the paranoia is curiously selfless: everyone is in danger.
So any kind of harm can feature in paranoia. But intrigu- ingly, there’s evidence to suggest that the precise form this harm takes may vary from country to country—in other words, it’s culturally determined, at least in part.
Japanese patients were much more likely to be worried about people slandering them than the European patients. The researchers put this down to Japan’s ‘shame culture’, which places huge importance on the perception of the individual by wider society and in which the fear of public disgrace is much more powerful than in Europe.

In one of the opening scenes of Woody Allen’s 1977 smash hit Annie Hall, Alvy Singer, a comedian played by Allen, is observed walking down a pretty, tree-lined street in Manhattan with his friend Rob.


Alvy: I distinctly heard it. He muttered under his breath, ‘Jew’.

Rob: You’re crazy!

Alvy: No, I’m not. We were walking off the tennis court, and you know, he was there and me and his wife, and he looked at her and then they both looked at me, and under his breath he said, ‘Jew’.

Rob: Alvy, you’re a total paranoid.

Alvy: Wh——How am I a paran——? Well, I pick up on those kind o’ things. You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said...uh, ‘Did you eat yet or what?’ and Tom Christie said, ‘No, didchoo?’ Not, did you, didchoo eat, but Jew eat? Jew. You get it? Jew eat?


Alvy believes people pick on him because he’s Jewish. And feeling threatened because of who we are is very common. Individuals who see themselves as popular and successful may conclude that they’re being victimized out of jealousy. On the other hand, people with low self-esteem may believe they’re being singled out precisely because of their deficiencies.

Sometimes it’s not a question of who we are but rather what we’ve done. So the threat is a punishment, sometimes justified, sometimes not. Richard, a 22-year-old student, explained his worries in just these terms: Because I won’t take part in some activities that everyone is doing and I decide to stand out and not give in to peer pressure, I think they talk behind my back.

And for some people, there is no explanation. They haven’t a clue why they’re being victimized—unless it’s the fact that their persecutors are just unpleasant people.

Some people believe their paranoid thoughts totally; others are only susceptible when they’re feeling especially stressed or anxious. Some refuse to entertain any suggestion that their paranoid thoughts might be unrealistic; other people are only too keen to find an alternative explanation for the way they feel. In some cases, it feels as if the paranoia is always there; in others it’s a rare occurrence.

Some people, particularly those with serious mental ill- nesses, find their paranoid thoughts very distressing. This is especially true of scenarios in which the imagined persecu- tor is believed to be extremely powerful. A classic example of this is fears about the secret service or some other gov- ernment agency—organizations who, should they wish to, could really cause someone a lot of trouble. On the other hand, many people aren’t at all distressed by their paranoid thoughts.

If it gets out of hand, paranoia can lead to people withdrawing into themselves and consequently having big prob- lems functioning normally. But many more of us are able to get along just fine with the occasional paranoid moment. We don’t dwell on it and it doesn’t have much of an impact on our emotional state. It’s that sliding scale again. It runs all the way from Alex, the graphic designer, who occasionally thinks he’s being left out by friends but doesn’t let it bother him greatly, to someone like Jeanette, a 60-year-old woman in anguish because she is convinced her former husband is persuading friends, family, and doctors that she is mad.

And in a similar, if much more prosaic, way am I really being paranoid if I think the hoodied youths approaching me at night may well be about to mug me? Aren’t I just responding sensibly to a proven danger?

In truth, it’s often difficult to completely rule out the possibility that a paranoid thought is actually correct. And it’s precisely because it’s so difficult that paranoia can thrive. Paranoia feeds on uncertainty and ambiguity. The answer is to judge the suspicious thought on the current evidence of threat—and to exclude past experiences. Easier said than done of course, but there are some guidelines we can use to help us. Essentially, the more accurate the following state- ments are, the more likely it is that the suspicious thought is exaggerated or unrealistic.

- No one else shares the suspicion.

- There’s no indisputable evidence to support the suspicion. r There is evidence against the thought.

- It’s unlikely that the person would be singled out.

- The person still has the suspicious thoughts despite reassurance from other people.

- The suspicions are based on feelings and ambiguous events.


One of the tricky aspects of paranoia is the fact that it often closely resembles other psychological experiences.

Shyness and social anxiety, for example, make us fearful of meeting other people. They won’t like us; they’ll find us boring or stupid or out of place.

"I hate social events. I’m convinced no one wants to talk to me, that they’re all laughing at me and wondering why I’m there at all."

Although [such] anxieties could be taken for shyness or social anxiety, they’re actually much closer to paranoia— and here’s why. Shyness and social anxiety may make us think the other dinner-party guests won’t like us, but we don’t assume they deliberately want to make us feel bad. If our host forgets to offer us another glass of wine, we might conclude that she has neglected us for other more engaging friends. But we don’t think she’s letting us go thirsty on purpose. Paranoia, on the other hand, is all about believing others intend to do us down. Our glass is empty because our host wants to make our evening as uncomfortable as possible.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can also easily be confused with paranoia. PTSD is triggered by a traumatic event—a road accident, for example, or a mugging or rape. Often, PTSD sufferers find themselves preoccupied with the trauma long after it’s occurred. They may experience flash- backs, when it seems as if the event is happening all over again.

Obviously these experiences can be enormously dis- tressing, and they can lead to sufferers steering clear of any situation that reminds them of the original trauma. The victim of a violent mugging may be reluctant to leave the house after dark. A woman who has been raped may avoid being alone with men she doesn’t know well.

So PTSD can make us believe that other people want to hurt us—which is pretty much a definition of paranoia, isn’t it? Actually, there’s a crucial reason why PTSD is not identical to paranoia, despite the obvious similarities. And that reason is the link to the traumatic event. People with PTSD may well be frightened of other people, but it’s always as an echo of the earlier catastrophe. The roots of paranoia, on the other hand, are much more complex.
Conspiracy theories per se aren’t paranoid, according to our definition, unless we’re worried about ourselves (or our loved ones) coming to harm. So believing the Apollo moon landing was faked isn’t paranoia. On the other hand, arguing that the ‘cover up’ is evidence of the threat posed to us all by unscrupulous and deceitful governments probably is.

Paranoia is what happens when we’re bad at judging risk.

The availability heuristic, for example, means that our view of something—and especially our sense of its prevalence or likelihood—is hugely influenced by how easily we can remember or imagine it.

We pick up on stuff we’re familiar with; the rest just drifts by.

This is especially true when the event in question has significant emotional resonance for us. For example, people habitually rate air travel as more dangerous than making a trip by car, though the opposite is true. One of the reasons for this misjudgement is that the idea of a plane crash is entrenched in our culture as the spectacular epitome of tragedy. The emotional impact, or stickiness to use a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell, is so great that mere facts make little impression.

In 1932 researchers in Tuskegee, Alabama began to look at the effects of syphilis on sufferers and the success or other- wise of various treatments for the disease. The subjects of this research study were African American sharecroppers, most of them illiterate, all of them poor.
By 1947 the outlook for syphilis patients had changed dramatically. What had once been an incurable fatal illness could now be successfully treated with penicillin. But the Tuskegee researchers opted not to give the sharecroppers penicillin, and actually prevented them seeking treatment elsewhere. Why? Because they wanted to see how the disease progressed. The scandal was eventually exposed in the early 1970s and the research study was closed down in 1972. In 1997 President Clinton made an official apology to the participants.  significant numbers of African Americans believe that Aids is a government-led plot to target black people. At first sight that might seem a crazy idea, but look at it in the context of the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male’, not to mention centuries of discrimination, neglect, and persecution. In this light, black views on Aids appear much more understandable.  

The most common type of anomalous experience is arousal—a feeling of being unusually tense and alert, of being on edge. We may have butterflies in our stomach. Our heart may pound and our mind race with thoughts.

Lots of things can make us feel this way, and we’ll look at some of the major ones below. But the root of arousal, its evolutionary function if you like, is the desire to escape danger. We may not even be conscious of the threat, but our body is gearing up for action. And if arousal is all about our sense of danger, it’s not surprising that it is frequently the backdrop to feelings of paranoia. Paranoia is, after all, a response to the threat we perceive from other people. Arousal is often accompanied by perceptual anomalies. The world around us can appear brighter or more vivid; sounds can seem louder and more intrusive. In fact, any of our senses can be affected. We may become unusually sensitive to smells; objects can feel odd to the touch.

The list of perceptual anomalies is a long one, encom- passing not just these sensory experiences but the feeling that our thoughts are not our own, or that apparently unimportant events are actually highly significant. We might have the impression that the world isn’t real, or that we don’t exist (this last one is known as depersonalization). The most notorious form of perceptual anomalies, though, is hallucinations—when we see or hear things that haven’t actually happened.

The link between anomalous experiences and paranoia has been demonstrated by numerous research studies. Paranoia, we know, is a typical feature of psychosis. And so are ‘hearing voices’ and ‘seeing things’—hallucinations, in other words. But common too are more subtle percep- tual changes. Take these comments from people with schizophrenia, surveyed for a study in 1999:

Things are louder than normal; the TV is louder; other people’s conversations seem louder.

Sometimes it seems like everything’s coming in, like my brain is a radar for sounds.

Things in the corner of my eyes often catch my attention. I feel like I see everything all at once.

But say our memories stop functioning properly. Suddenly everything in the office is new to us. The picture that we hung on the wall four years ago and have scarcely looked at since goes from being (literally and metaphorically) a part of the furniture to a strange and puzzling addition to our environment. Why is it there? Is it hiding a camera? Is someone spying on us?  When we try to make sense of these changes, when we try to understand what’s happening to us, the world can start to seem a frightening and hostile place. Why are those lights suddenly so bright? Because someone’s trying to blind me. Why is that person following me? Because they want to mug me. Or, to take an example from Ames’ study, Why are those people coming to interview me? Because they suspect I have schizophrenia and they want to hospitalize me.

It may be that this kind of memory problem is involved behind the scenes in certain anomalous experiences—for example, the perceptual oddities that make parts of our environment seem more vivid or striking to us. Some people seem especially prone—possibly because of their genetic make-up, problems in the womb or at birth, or later incidents causing minor abnormalities in the brain—though it’s generally stress that provides the immediate trigger.

When we try to get to the bottom of stuff we don’t understand, there’s no telling where we’ll end up. Previously unimportant details assume sudden and dramatic significance. Unforeseen—and strictly non-load-bearing— connections are dextrously forged. Extravagant conclusions are reached.

Construction of the Pentagon, the website notes, began on September 11, 1941—exactly sixty years before 9/11. When you add together 9 + 1 + 1, you get 11. September 11isthe254thdayoftheyear;2+5+4alsoequals11.After September 11, the year has 111 days to run.

Not convinced? Well, what if you realized that the words ‘The Pentagon’, ‘New York City’, and ‘Afghanistan’ all have 11 letters? Or that the towers of the World Trade Center resembled the figure 11? Or if you knew Flight 11 was the first plane to hit the towers?

These ambiguous events and anomalous experiences (fac- tor number one in our threat-anticipation model of para- noia) can leave us floundering to make sense of the world. But, just as nature abhors a vacuum, human beings abhor ambiguity. Ignorance isn’t an option. We want an explan- ation for the strange way we’re feeling, or the smile on our boss’s face when we passed her in the corridor. For some of us, that explanation may be a paranoid one. So our boss is really feigning friendliness, trying to mask what she really thinks of us. Our peculiar feeling of being on edge is because our colleagues have been getting at us all morning, and not because we’re exhausted after several sleepless nights.

Anxiety, in particular, is intimately connected to paranoia. In fact, if you know how anxious someone is, you’ll be able to hazard a fairly accurate guess at their level of suspiciousness—an association that seems less of a surprise when you realize that paranoia is in essence a form of anx- iety. Both are concerned with the anticipation of danger. In the case of paranoia, that danger is seen (albeit mistakenly) as coming from other people. And just as anxiety feeds off worry, so too does paranoia. Worry makes us dwell on our fears, magnifying and entrenching them.

This is especially true for people whose previous experiences have led them to feel negatively about themselves, other people, and the world in general (factor number three). After all, if you see yourself as weak and vulnerable, and other people as cruel and dangerous, it doesn’t require too much of a leap of imagination to start thinking that people might want to harm you. Our suspicious thoughts are simply an extension of our anxieties.

For some people, there’s a further unhappy circuit to be endured. Their fears make them behave suspiciously or even aggressively towards other people. Naturally, it’s hard to make (or keep) friends acting this way; the paranoid person can find themselves increasingly isolated, or at least treated differently by those around them. All of which can feel precisely like the persecution they’ve been fearing all along.  

But why should some people be more prone to this kind of misinterpretation than others? After all, everyone experiences stuff they can’t explain, but most of us don’t view it as evidence that other people are hostile towards us.

The explanation lies somewhere deep in the mix of our previous experiences, social and economic influences, our emotional state, our memories, personality, and reasoning style. And of all these influences, it’s our emotions (factor number two) that are key." [Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear]

Following paper is by a Rousseauesque liberal, therefore he presents a neat paper in retracing the paranoid origins within political philosophy, erroneously lumping Plato and Hobbes, and making a case for democrazy, like our champ, the chimp.

Where he stops, is where we know, where this goes back to.
Let alone Hobbes' puritanism that is the basis of his politics, and let alone Freud's thesis of an Egyptian Moses to explain the J.-Xt. persecution-narcissism complex.

When one begins with "life is a miracle', the whole world becomes a hostile place… not in the sense of an indifferent reality, but a deliberately hostile place…
Which breeds injustice, ressentiment, abjection, and more importantly, a strong sense of personal survival and cohesion.

Philosophies of conatus, self-preservation at all costs…

Unending anxieties of forever "wandering", forever "guest" waiting for "deliverance", for the "sign of safety", for revelations…   every sign, hint, appears portent-full…
The contest over Israel is clung to like life or death…
Existence or non-existence…?, wandering or rest…?

When one feels powerless, like the self could be taken apart any minute, then control of power and establishing absolute certainty become paramount obsession.
The need for abs. certainty becomes a faith… a science...
Hence the investment in ethics and logics and hermeneutics above all else.
Hence the self-chosenness…  that breeds animosity that breeds persecution that breeds self-inflatory control of power that breeds… vicious circle…
Hence the obsession with extreme objectivity, for which those like Heisman paid the price, despite knowing...

Danger is everywhere.

But in the mouth of Hobbes, that means the intricate connection between memory, experience and identity; played out by Bourne...

The world in his eyes...


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Lyssa wrote:

a strong sense of personal survival and cohesion.

the intricate connection between memory, experience and identity…

Which brings us to Fight Club, and the disappearing conditions that made strong self-cohesion possible, and in which absence, the weak-cohesive self comes to be guarded > safe-guarded > protected > pedestalled > privileged > precioused > "loved"> … >> guarded >>…

A strong egoism is replaced by a strong 'self-love' - dubbed individualism;
an individualism that feels threatened by anything, and begins to threaten everything… - dubbed heroism, dubbed leadership, dubbed strength…
Everything on self-love ends within me-concentrate - a hyper-narcissistic solipsism.

Then, severe masochism, self-injury, self-pushing, to break out… to pre-pare oneself for the pain that is just 'around the corner' and is 'sure to come',, or to reconfirm to oneself in the absence of any trust in anything, that one is still awake, alert, ready, can take it, not fallen off guard,, keep pinching oneself (as) awake…,,, for what confirms and what confers the most absolute certainty that the paranoid is in need of, than pain, than hurt, than displeasure, than the worst… that he has 'always known is out Only for him', than the criterion he has already established…? And where there is no threat, he would turn it to a threat, as it furthers to reconfirm his narcissism that all is out to get him. Every aggression is a masochistic self-tearing that acts as a prompt to reaffirm "self-love" more stronger again… replenishing a cycle of false-cohesive identity.

In which case, pinching oneself as awake, is still really a sleeping…

Bruises in the Fight Club, a rupturing schizophrenia…, a body knocking loud against the extreme self-wounded and self-wounded delusion…
So tightly wounded and wounded, it explodes…, has to explode…
…to even distinguish day and night, sleep and wakefulness, am I hurting or am I hurting (you)?…
The lack of distinctions experinced as a paralytic 'both' frightening(+)intimacy...

Girard said, the logic of the collapse of distinctions into mirror-doubles, triples, qudraples, a "club", a clan, a tribe… can only play out in a paroxysm of sacred violence…
It is the logical logic, because if violence makes indistinct, violence alone quickly makes distinct, the indistinct…
restores rank, role, identity...

David Fincher wrote:

"We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created."

Quote :

"With his addiction to self-help groups, Jack attends a leukemia group and experiences a guided meditation. When he is told to meet his power animal in one meditation, he finds a penguin in a snowy cave who speaks like a child-a poignant image of Jack's lonely and docile masculinity. In an article entitled "What Men Really Want," Robert Bly captures this over-emphasized docility:

When I look out at my audiences, perhaps half the young males are what I'd call soft. They're lovely, valuable people-I like them-and they're not interested in harming the earth, or starting wars, or working for corporations. There's something favorable toward life in their whole general mood and style of living. But something's wrong. There's not much energy in them. They are life-preserving but not exactly life-giving.

In a culture that's been robbed of its masculine principle, Jack finds himself only accepting his masculinity through tears and the estrogen-enriched breasts of another man who completes him.

           JACK (V.O.)
The big moosie, his eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears. Knees together, invisible steps.

Bob takes Jack into an embrace.

           JACK (V.O.)
He pancaked down on top of me.

           BOB
Two grown kids ... and they won't return my calls.

           JACK (V.O.)
Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one.

Jack's face is rapt and sincere. Bob stops talking and breaks into sobbing, putting his head down on Jack's shoulder and completely covering Jack's face.

           JACK (V.O.)
Then, I was lost in oblivion -- dark and silent and complete.

Jack's body begins to jerk in sobs. He tightens his arms around Bob.

           JACK (V.O.)
This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

Crying for Jack seems to be one way to address his masculinity and disappointment with a spiritless life. In contemporary America, it seems that an increasing number of men are turning to tears as a way of emoting. Bly discusses this catharsis-obsessed American males.

Often the younger males would begin to talk and within five minutes they would be weeping. The amount of grief and anguish in the younger males was astounding! The river was deep. . . They had learned to be receptive, and it wasn't enough to carry their marriages. In every relationship something fierce is needed once in a while; both the man and the woman need to have it.

Monick suggests that the fierceness excluded from the masculine crying model comes with the re-integration of the shadow. Monick devotes the sixth chapter of his book to the shadow of phallus called chthonic phallus:

. . . characterized by its grossness, brutality and carelessness. It can be characterized by its unmitigated power needs, by a kind of mad drivenness, by the mayhem of war and ruthless competition it occasions. Life is replete with examples of its stupid and devastating behavior, 'the man eater,' as Jung's mother called it in his childhood dream.

Though Freud and Jung saw the mother as the primary relationship for any child, Monick suggests that for a man, religion helps fill the void neglected by his father. "Psychoanalytic theory, whether Freudian or Jungian, gives singular primacy to the mother as the basis of life. This is an error."

The argument could be made that Freud, Jung, and Monick all cater to perhaps outdated gender roles that have no place in a post-modern scholarship where all gender roles are merely conditioned identities to maintain social control.

Monick suggests that in the ideal nuclear family, the individuating spirit can grow under the guidance of a mother and a father. But like most American families, Jack's family was anything but ideal:

           JACK
My mother would just go into hysterics. My Dad ... Don't know where he is. Only knew him for six years. Then, he ran off to a new city and married another woman and had more kids. Every six years -- new
city, new family. He was setting up franchises.

Tyler smiles, snorts, shakes his head.

           TYLER
A generation of men raised by women. Look what it's done to you.

With households across the country either consisting of or dominated by women, young men seem to have trouble finding guidance on the integration of the darker sides of masculinity. Monick claims mothers cannot teach their sons about chthonic phallus.

It is not only the mother's desire to keep her son close and compatible with her style of life that damages chthonic phallos. The father participates, as the king did in the fairy tale. The father who has lost the power and raw energy of chthonic phallos would also deny it to the son. In practical terms, this may become manifest in the abrogation of the father's masculine authority, which by default goes to the mother. And often when the father experiences the return of phallic energy, he leaves the domestic scene to act it out. In such cases, the son is left to fend for himself in a maternal-and often hostile-environment, with no male role-model.

With the lack of a male role-model, all that is left for the American boy without a father is the consumer "product." When there is no other solution, Jack turns to a "modern versatile domestic solution" to fill the void:

Jack flips the page of the catalogue to reveal a full-page photo of an entire kitchen and dining room set.

           JACK (V.O.)
I would flip and wonder, "What kind of dining room set *defines* me as a person?"

But how can a film with such a dark and violent conclusion be classified as sacred? The French anthropologist, René Girard, suggests that sacred violence is an inherent component of any well functioning society throughout history. Girard classifies violence into pure and impure violence. Impure violence is uncontained and lawless and warrants retaliation from the victim's fellowship. Such violence is ultimately destructive to the community because its results are interminable. However, pure violence is contained through a lawful sacrifice in which the victim and his fellowship understand the death as sacred. Such a sacrifice satisfies the cultural need for violence while maintaining order and purpose. Fight Club becomes such a structure wherein violence is contained within a particular communal order. It is worth noting that all participants in Fight Club are white males, kings of American hegemony, who have no scapegoat for their problems but themselves and the corporations. The sacrificial victim becomes a scapegoat by which to purge the society of its anger and hatred. The scapegoat allows the community to project all of its anger onto the victim, thereby eliminating its anger at itself. By sacrificing the scapegoat the community relinquishes itself from its anger. Girard suggests that the scapegoat is both fatherless and randomly chosen so that he will not be avenged after his death. The ideal scapegoat is a king or hero who has achieved success in the community, but is destroyed by destiny. "God giveth and God taketh. The best of scapegoats is thus a dethroned idol, a broken idol marginalized from the society he once ruled. And this is exactly what the action hero is." Tyler Durden is such an action hero-fatherless as Jack is his only creator, and a model of the ultimate American idol, popular icon and movie star Brad Pitt himself. While Tyler Durden becomes a scapegoat for Jack, corporate buildings become a scapegoat for Tyler as the "Demolitions Committee" of "Project Mayhem." The demolition of Brad Pitt and about seven skyscrapers leaves the viewer with a sense of peace leaving the theater. Fight Club, the film, and Fight Club, the cult within the film, becomes the reclamation of American sacred violence.

I would argue Fight Club is avante garde sublime art. However, categorizing the film in artistic terms negates the highest measurement of sacredness in America: box-office success. As with most American endeavors that afford some power, the projected image does not come for free. Film is the most costly and time-consuming art form.
Production on such a grand and costly scale will both comment on culture and affect culture profoundly. If money is not sacred in America, what is? The American dollar dictates American values, and by that measure, Fight Club is irrevocably sacred."

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Quote :

"Now I would like to turn to Fight Club specifically, a film that Fradley says is (alongside Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down [US, 1993]) “probably the most explicit cinematic take on the much-vaunted ‘crisis of masculinity’ in post-industrial American culture.” It takes the ideological stance that, in a post-liberation culture opposed to male empowerment or rites of manhood, men must still exert hegemonic power within a patriarchal system, using as little real outward violence as possible, but without losing their traditionally masculine attributes or a male-oriented vision of the future. With this conservative viewpoint, Fight Club raises its anxieties from the subtext and puts them on full display with masochism as its overt subject matter. No surprise then, when Robinson claims that “Masochistic narratives, structured so as to defer closure or resolution, often feature white men displaying their wounds as evidence of disempowerment, and finding pleasure in explorations of pain.” The Narrator in Fight Club is a single middle-class white man who, in the absence of a strong father figure, was never initiated into the ways of traditional phallic manhood. During his adult years, he fails to find self-fulfillment in vainly surrounding himself with the superficial material possessions prescribed by American consumer culture; this lack of fulfillment, springing from the film’s equating of consumerism with femininity, results in his chronic insomnia. He discovers that by visiting support groups in search of a collective sense of pain, he can find an emotional release that allows him to sleep again. However, because this pain is not grounded in a recuperation of a traditional (even primal) masculinity, and with his sense of reality already affected by the bouts of insomnia, he develops a split personality that manifests itself as Tyler Durden, the hypermasculine, anarchistic id to the Narrator’s feminized, consumerist ego. Under the film’s logic, society as superego may still be a patriarchal system, but it is a patriarchy that since the liberation era has replaced its masculine attributes with feminine ones, creating a disempowered “generation of men raised by women,” a generation that has no Great War or Great Depression in which to prove one’s manhood (unlike the romanticized males of the 1940’s and 1950’s). As Alexandra Juhasz says, “In this late-1990’s dystopia, having a penis does not insure masculinity or even what masculinity used to shore up: power.” In order to counter the effects of feminization by consumerism, the Narrator (believing that Tyler is a separate combatant) begins beating himself up and eventually creates Fight Club so that his fellow “slaves with white collars” will be able to experience the liberating power of their own masculine violence. But even when the Narrator is fighting others, he is still beating himself in the sense that they are all Everymen with a common drive for remasculinization—an image driven home later in the film when the nameless combatants shave their heads to become identical troops in Tyler’s private army, “Project Mayhem.” Fighting becomes a (self-destructive) method of self-discovery that frees men from the feminine vanity of self-improvement in gyms. This is a world in which emasculation is a fate worse than death––as the film makes evident through numerous references to castration as the worst possible loss, such as the support group for testicular cancer survivors (“Remaining Men Together”) at which the Narrator first discovers an intimate emotional release in exploring the pains of feminization––but even the emasculated Bob with “bitch-tits” (Meat Loaf Aday) is able to reaffirm his masculinity through the violence of Fight Club.

The paranoid aspect of narratives functioning under the logic of a crisis of masculinity is explained by Fradley:

If we posit that power and paranoia are little more than noirish mirrorings of each other, delusions of persecution thus structure the identity of the male subject: paranoid counter-narratives make connections and (re-)order their universe, anxiously re-cohering the world, quite literally, around it self. As such, the grandiose narcissism of the paranoiac can be seen as a form of (over-) compensation for displaced feelings of (personal, cultural, and/or socio-economic) worthlessness and inadequacy. Paranoia thus works in a cyclical double-bind, staging various masochistic fantasies in order to master them.

This paranoia is also attributed in part to “the abjection of the postmodern condition”––fears about losing control in a postmodern world that denies any sort of stable identity formation.
...The pleasures of ego fragmentation depend upon the resolidification of a newer, more coherent ego identity, says Studlar. "

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Quote :

"Paradoxically, the closer Jack is to vicariously experiencing pain and death, the more alive he feels. Fight Club has a similar effect as he feels “you weren’t alive anywhere like you were there”. The regression to the primal self is a return to the extremities of excess. To help him hit “rock bottom”, Tyler pours lye on Jack’s hand and tells him not to escape the pain but to engage it. This “near-life” experience of excessive pain has the converse effect of intensifying the experience of life. Similarly, Jack’s ability to let go of the steering wheel signals his readiness to lose everything. In finding his self, Jack has no more use for Tyler who disappears. This reckless disregard for life creates a mixed response from the viewer – one of disbelief, awe and envy. In this way, the movie makes the viewer feel he is living a lesser life or only a semblance of life and encourages the viewer to risk more to experience more. In the light of this, “refusal to risk life is worse than its destruction, and is the fundamental nihilism” (Horrocks 1999, 46)."

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""What's the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea's taken hold in the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. A person can cover it up, ignore it – but it stays there." (Inception shooting script, pp. 2–3)

"Aren't all our ideas derived from somewhere else, floating around through the most variegated channels of communication, taking hold in our brains somewhere without us knowing where they came from, and suddenly appearing as if spontaneous, while in fact recalled from our pre- or unconscious somewhat like a half-remembered dream? Can we really trust our own thoughts?

As Slavoj Žižek observes:

Quote :

"One cannot miss the uncanny resemblance between Leibniz's “monadology” and the emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and solipsism strangely coexist. That is to say, does our immersion into cyberspace not go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizean monad which, although “without windows” that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? More and more, we are monads with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever into the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe.""

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Darren Aronofsky wrote:

"Paranioa is faith in a hidden order beyond the visible…" [Pi]

Quote :

"Socrates begins telling the story of prisoners kept under a very specific set of conditions. These prisoners are kept shackled so that they may only face the wall of a dark cave that they are in, and all they see throughout their lives are the shadows of what passes by on the road above the cave and blocks the sunlight from entering the cave at that precise moment. This allegory of the cave includes the story of a man who leaves the cave and experiences the true world…

"Jason Bourne is not so much a character in Supremacy and Ultimatum as he is a manifestation of the American subconscious."

Quote :

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"Thomas Pynchon gave paranoia one of its most memorable definitions when the narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow called it “the leading edge of the discovery that everything is connected”.

A quarter of a century later, Don DeLillo elevated this view into something like the official slogan of postwar paranoia by using it repeatedly in Underworld. In doing so, DeLillo’s novel also documented the cultural transformation of paranoia from a side-effect of Cold War to a more general attitude, perhaps even the distinctive mindset of the contemporary scene. As his most paranoid character, Sister Edgar, surfs the internet to icons of Cold War paranoia - images of hydrogen bomb explosions and J. Edgar Hoover - she begins to sense that

There is no place or time out here, or in here, wherever she is. There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked… . [S]he feels the grip of systems… . She senses the paranoia of the web, the net.

In Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Chun finds that the “end of the Cold War has not dispelled paranoia but rather spread it everywhere: invisibility and uncertainty - of the enemy, of technology - has invalidated deterrence and moved paranoia from the pathological to the logical”. From a markedly different perspective, the political scientist Isaac Balbus makes a similar claim. In his Mourning and Modernity - a collection of loosely-related essays on the “psychoanalysis of contemporary society” - Balbus argues that “computer-mediated communication dramatically accelerates the compression of time and space endemic to modernity” and thus “powerfully promotes and reinforces the grandiose fantasies of omnipotence that mark the infancy of modernity”. While Balbus’s larger project is to demonstrate that modernity is a defense against mourning, it seems significant that he associates modernity with the narcissistic grandiosity long understood to be both the major symptom and the underlying cause of paranoia. And while Balbus sees this grandiosity flourishing in contemporary, networked culture, he goes a step further, suggesting that its roots lie not in the contemporary situation (“all human knowledge gathered and … hyperlinked”) but in modernity itself.

This, finally, is the view offered by John Farrell’s magnificent [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], which traces contemporary paranoia not to the features of late capitalism and mass culture but to the very “infancy of modernity.” “Don Quixote,” Farrell writes, “is the first great modern paranoid adventurer, and Cervantes’ treatment of him, with its astonishing minuteness and delicacy of observation, remains the most penetrating and influential portrait of madness in Western literature". Beginning with this premise, Farrell follows the trail of suspicion, grandiosity, and compromised human agency not only through the religious reforms of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Bunyan but also through the giants of modern rationalism: Francis Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Swift, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, and the great-grandadddy of paranoid political economy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While Farrell’s study halts in the nineteenth century, he sees paranoia as increasingly central to twentieth-century critical figures like Nietzsche, Freud, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Fredric Jameson, and Foucault, whose thinking is colored by a sweeping sense of diminished human agency.

R. D. Laing reframed madness as a form of liberation from social conditioning. Most contemporary studies are careful to articulate the differences between paranoid acting out and something like healthy suspicion. Farrell separates pathological paranoia - the clinical suspicion marked by over-interpretation, grandiosity, and feelings of persecution - from its “metaphorical extension” in various forms of social analysis. While he explores the personalities of all of his subjects - some of whom (Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau) exhibited clinical symptoms of paranoia - he is primarily interested in “accounts of the human situation … that aim to undermine our ability to distinguish our thought from coherent delusion or manipulative contrivance” and that, in so doing, highlight what is “normative or universal” about certain features of clinical paranoia. He is careful, however, not to confuse this “metaphorical” paranoia with mere suspicion or skepticism. Whereas the skeptic expresses “methodological caution and an unwillingness to go beyond what the evidence strictly allows,” the paranoiac expresses certainty in his ability to see behind “false facades … to find the hidden truth”. It is, for instance, the confident interpretation of hidden signs that delineates the paranoia of both Luther and Quixote:

When the paranoid Don Quixote was confronted with evidence that threatened his sense of perfection, he resorted to a hermeneutic system of transformation by which the obvious meaning of experience could be converted into its opposite. Evil became appearance, good reality. Here we see Luther doing the same, preserving the excellence and goodness of the creator with whom he identifies by converting evil appearances into their opposites; they are all part of God’s ultimate plan. This is suspicion with the values reversed; the appearance of fault masks a hidden good, apparent hostility conceals hidden love.

While skeptics such as Plato and Augustine saw the world as only a shadow of some truer existence, they nonetheless saw the visible world as a dim reflection, not a complete distortion, of the true. What makes Quixote and Luther paranoid is their near total refusal to accept appearances at face value.

Flieger makes a similar distinction between paranoid psychosis and “resourceful” or “reasonable” paranoia, suggesting ultimately that the “difference between health and psychosis” is a matter “of degree”. Using Žižek’s notion of “looking awry,” Flieger argues that a certain kind of paranoid knowledge can actually help us “escape from the wheel-spinning of paranoia proper”.

Patrick O’Donnell insightfully calls paranoia both “the last epistemology” in a culture that incessantly converts knowledge into mere information and “the last refuge of identity” in an age that forever exposes identity as a construct

Paranoia can be seen as a panic-stricken defense of liberal individualism in the face of evidence for a more sociological account of human action. When a deeply held commitment to the liberal view of individual agency is shattered by the discovery of social influences, the result is often an all-or-nothing reaction in which the paranoiac magnifies the rather mundane fact of social influences into a nightmarish vision of total external control. This dynamic is thus rooted in modernity, though it has been dramatically exacerbated by many features of postwar culture. Three strike me as particularly worthy of note. First, a wide range of postwar social theory has seen individuals as substantially constrained by social institutions and discourses - a powerful attack on the Enlightenment concept of autonomous individualism. Second, the astonishing growth of mass culture has reorganized the way we know the world. Mass media inundate us with information from increasingly distant sources. The networks that allow us to know the world are now astonishingly complex, and because media literally mediate between our senses and the world, the knowledge they provide requires us to trust the authority of vast, and largely invisible, networks of agents who supply, gather, filter, certify, and transmit information. At the same time, the growth of the internet has decentralized authority and authorship both - allowing all of us to diagnose our own illnesses, research our own pasts, write our own history. This democratization of authority and authorship is refreshing, but it comes at a cost, too, because it invites us to make interpretations in areas where we have little expert training. Finally, since the Cold War we have seen the growth of a Covert Sphere - the secret counterpart of the increasingly embattled public sphere. Comprised largely of the clandestine services, a parallel secret government paradoxically claims to guarantee the existence of our democracies by operating outside the purview of democratic oversight. The covert sphere is not secret; it is akin to what Michael Taussig calls a “public secret.” We know it exists and generally what it does, but we also disavow specific knowledge of its activities. In accepting this arrangement, we tacitly acknowledge that our leaders will regularly lie to the public about the activities taken on our behalf. The growth of this arrangement during the Cold War, and its reinvigoration during the “War on Terror,” institutionalizes deception and suspicion as part of our political culture. If the government admits that some of its work is “top secret,” the suspicion that we are being kept in the dark - that political outcomes are shaped by powerful, invisible agencies - is entirely reasonable. “Paranoia,” in other words, has become a condition of good citizenship.

Slavoj Žižek, who explains the contemporary popularity of paranoia this way:

The belief in the big Other which exists in the Real is, of course, the most succinct definition of paranoia; for this reason, two features which characterize today’s ideological stance - cynical distance and full reliance on paranoiac fantasy - are strictly codependent: the typical subject today is the one who, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other. Distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject’s refusal to “take it seriously,” relies on the belief that there is an “Other of the Other,” a secret, invisible, all-powerful agent who effectively “pulls the strings” behind the visible, public Power. (Ticklish Subject, 362)

For Žižek, these stories help explain the American bewilderment, narcissism, and aggression in the wake of 9/11. “It is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe,” he notes, “which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction” (“Welcome” 387). The fear of such threats can in turn lead to dangerous forms of aggression.

Farrell’s book even manages to generate suspense as the reader wonders how he can sustain his account of early modern suspicion - Luther’s view, for instance, that “everything which is believed should be hidden … under an object, perception, or experience which is contrary to it” - into the burgeoning rationalism of the Enlightenment. But Farrell does so brilliantly… From the beginning, Farrell shows, critical thought has involved imagining the world as illusory and riddled with error.

Thus, although he doesn’t say so, what Farrell actually documents is something like the critique of ideology before the letter. Don Quixote, for instance, does not simply mock its protagonist; it uses Quixote’s complaints to mount a vigorous critique of mass media and the ideology of chivalry. Cervantes mocks Quixote’s absurd sense of victimization to show that he has been “victimized, not by enchanters, but by the authors of the books of chivalry who furnished him with his ideal”. While the novel begins by showing Quixote’s submission to this ideal, it eventually shows how “Quixote’s delusion itself magically became a public commodity” through the circulation of certain socially powerful narratives. Thus both “Quixote and his creator were warring against the evils of enchantment, but whereas Quixote’s enchanters were impossible to locate outside the world of books, the enchanters who became the targets of Cervantes’ attack were all too real… They are all, he says, ‘fictions, fables, falsehoods, and dreams held by men asleep, or rather still half asleep’ ” (Farrell 46-47). Cervantes here is not far here from Engels’ notion of “false consciousness” or Marx’s view of religion as “the opiate of the masses.” Interestingly, what is particularly modern about this critique is not simply its attack on fable - an attack central to the modern shift from narrative to scientific knowledge - but its view of social control, the implication that discourse has a powerful ability to control human consciousness, to keep “men … half asleep.”

It is this interest in smashing a delusive worldview that links the paranoid impulse to the growth of modern thought. Luther and his followers, Farrell shows, painted history as a “parade of innovation, falsity, delusion” and undertook to “awaken” Christians from this historical nightmare so they could “free themselves from corrupt institutions and false idols”. Francis Bacon later converted this religious impulse into a form of scientific ideology, a proto-objectivist desire to “separate oneself from all influence of tradition, all concern with the thoughts of others, all self-concern, and all natural inclination, in order to devote oneself entirely to the facts themselves”. To do otherwise, in Bacon’s view, was to set one’s “own intellectual creations above the works of God”. And yet this intellectual task was heroically difficult, because “the facts constitute a natural world framed not in attunement with the human mind but, as Bacon puts it, like a labyrinth, full of ‘deceitful resemblances’ and ‘ambiguities of way’ ”. While Bacon’s critique of the intellect provided a welcome critique of his peers, it also reduced their arguments “to wish-fulfillments either social or personal, to what later theoreticians would label ‘ideology’ or ‘narcissism’ ”. Bacon’s “paranoia” was an attempt to “save modernity from this ‘dictatorship’ of delusion and slavish imitation”.

Once the theme of delusion had been detached from the agency of the Devil and associated with rationality itself, it became central to western thought. Descartes’ whole philosophical system, for instance, rests on a paranoid thought experiment. Moving beyond the critique of received opinion, Descartes puts all sensory evidence in doubt by wondering what would happen if “not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external thinks are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment” (Meditations 2:15, qtd. in Farrell 114). “It is impossible,” writes Farrell, “to read this seventeenth-century text without connecting the notion of an all-powerful deceiver to the God of Luther and Calvin” and it “requires no stretch of the imagination to describe the hypothesis of the malicious demon as a paranoid fantasy”.

As Descartes asserts, in a paranoid moment - the God who guarantees reason may be an evil genius)”. That this particular suspicion is arguably the founding gesture of modern, Western philosophy shows just how central the paranoid impulse is to modernity.

Hobbes pushed the matter even further by asking what might happen if unanchored belief became widespread. “What was for Luther a conspiracy of demons,” Farrell writes, “became for Hobbes a conspiracy of madmen”. For Hobbes, opinion was capable of producing a generalized social madness. “From the viewpoint of Hobbes, Quixote’s condition can no longer be thought of as a private aberration. Rather, it becomes the explanatory principle that unlocks most of human behavior … The grandiosity and suspicion of the paranoid are slowly becoming the norm of human expectation”. If Hobbes is like Bacon in this regard, he greatly extends Bacon’s antidote to collective delusion - surrender to the authority of civil government. For Hobbes, only the absolute power of the state, Leviathan, keeps us from a grim state of perpetual strife.

As Farrell moves from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, we see Pascal critiquing a similar parade of Quixotic folly - albeit a folly not of “fools” but of “the wisest” (qtd. in Farrell 154). Swift, similarly, casts history as a series of lunatic fantasies forced upon public reality by the force of imagination. The Tale of a Tub is a “vision of history as the competition of egotistical megalomaniacs driven by explosive and uncontrollable forces of the inner psyche,” and Gulliver’s Travels depicts the transformation of a naïf to “an opposite state of paranoia and misanthropy”. At least Don Quixote wasn’t cut off from humanity. So great is Swift’s contempt for “the absurdity of human vanity and of the arbitrary and fanciful distinctions upon which it depends” that Gulliver is essentially banished without a chance at redemption or reintegration.

By the time we arrive at the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the critique of social control has developed into a “great anti-social revelation”. Assuming the basic good of human beings, Rousseau envisions society as utterly corrupting and evil. Humans, he believes, are “ ‘happy slaves,’ living in a herd, in ‘vile and deceptive uniformity.’ The need for duplicity makes society into a vicious parade of uncertain appearances disguising unknowable characters”. This antisocial vision has roots partly in Rousseau’s own sense of victimization - which, by the time of hisConfessions, became a “paranoid delusion” subjecting him to increasing isolation and ridicule. Yet, Farrell makes clear that Rousseau’s notion of an essentially good human agent beset everywhere by a dangerously controlling society is “no mere private form of projection” but a result of the “mutilated form of nationalism Rousseau inherited and was seeking to defend”.

It should thus not be surprising that modern paranoia should eventually spawn a full-blown, Romantic anti-socialism - a fear that “Society” acts as if with a single will to corrupt the inherent goodness and freedom of individuals. This view would come to dominate nineteenth century American thought and continues to thrive in American political culture. “Society,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members”. It was partly this thesis that Emerson’s disciple, Henry Thoreau, would attempt to demonstrate at Walden Pond. Rousseau, however, did not advocate fleeing society. His paradoxical solution was for individuals to “abandon their particular will altogether and adopt the ‘general will’ of the state as their own…. Society, thus becomes a single will”. Whereas Hobbes saw the sovereign as an individual, Rousseau imagined the social as a transcendental agency with whom we must align our own desires. Tellingly, Farrell notes in passing that the notion of the volonté général “has a long history among French thinkers” and is traditionally understood to be “God’s will as he makes the laws”. Rousseau’s volonté général, in other words, is a version of Lacan’s Big Other - the social formation that stands in for a deceased God and that, in the truly psychotic social imaginary of a paranoid like Schreber, is God himself.

Here, then, is the repeated upshot of the paranoid approach: it theorizes social power by transforming the vast web of social relations into a monolithic agency - Leviathan, “invisible hand,” volonté général, “Them.” It conceives of this agency, moreover, as an individual, albeit a transcendent and supremely powerful individual. But there is more, for it is this very maneuver - the condensation of the social order into a representative individual - that defines the diagnostic impulse in recent cultural theory. The analogy of the social to the individual is certainly not new. The reduction of the social to a “body politic” is in fact the oldest technique in political economy. But it becomes increasingly strained when monarchy (the literal embodiment of the general will) gives way to modern democracy. “In political thought and analysis,” reminds Foucault, “we still have not cut off the head of the king”. Perhaps this is why the conception of the social-as-individual has become increasingly psychodynamic over the course of modernity. “Writings are the thoughts of the state and archives are its memory,” Novalis suggested in 1798 (qtd. in Debord 96). In his 1930 version of the same idea, Freud noted, “the process of human civilization and the developmental or educative process of individual human beings … are very similar in nature, if not the very same process applied to different kinds of object”. Given the power of such views, it is easy to why social theory still requires something like a psychoanalysis of the “social mind.”

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If the Narcissist's weak self-integration and low self-integrity develops into a Paranoia of "construing" persecutors everywhere through instigated provocation or otherwise, from which he draws and exploits the impetus to pull his self together into a more stronger self-integration, self-identity as a prolongation than an adaptation, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in his book 'The Double' presents how the Narcissist's fear of death develops into a Particular-paranoid sense of seeing one's down double, the doppleganger, as one's persecutor.  
And furthermore, the consquential 'homosexuality' developing from pathological ego-absorption that renders him unfit and unable to relate to any other of the opp. sex; marital and conjugal relations being one way the human copes with inevitable death becomes denied to him.
Its really insightful how Rank carefully ends with the following remark, quoting Wilde's Dorian:

"I have no terror of Death. It is only the coming of Death that terrifies me."

The narcissist-paranoid would rather die, than face the inevitability of death, dis-integration.
Dying is easier,, accepting the Fact of death is scary and frightening and a burdensome bundle of unceasing anxiety; a complete dis-ease with life.
The mouth speaks of a readiness to death, while the heart palpitates clinging, clutching, clasping to life at any costs…
May explain why many 'intelligent' ones [as paranoid alert ones are] are homosexuals and why many intelligent homosexuals suicide…

I believe this can be traced back to J.-Xt. nihilism.



In two parts.


Part I

Otto Rank wrote:

"Wheresoe'er toward sleep I turned,
Wheresoe'er for death I yearned,
Wheresoe'er I trod the ground,
On my way sat down by me
A wretched wight, black-vestured he,
In whom a brother's guise I found."

- MÜSSET


The beautiful verses of Musset ("December Night") elucidate:

"Wherever you go,
I shall be there always,
Up to the very last one of your days,
When I shall go to sit on your stone."

The scenario does not leave us long in doubt about the intention and meaning of these uncanny happenings. The "basic idea" is supposed to be that a person's past inescapably clings to him and that it becomes his fate as soon as he tries to get rid of it.

Hoffmann, who treated the problem of the second self in other works (Princess Brambilla, The Heart of Stone, The Choice of a Bride, The Sandman, and others), doubtless had strong personal motives for this choice of theme; yet one cannot underestimate the influence exercised by Jean Paul, who introduced the motif of the double into Romantic literature.

"In Hesperus he causes his ego to arise before him as an un- canny apparition" (Schneider, p. 317). In his childhood, Viktor is particularly aroused by those stories in which people see them- selves. "Often, before going to sleep at night, he observes his body so long that he separates it from himself and sees it standing and gesticulating next to himself. Then he goes to sleep with this strange figure" (Czerny, p. 11 ). Viktor also had a violent aversion to wax figures, a feeling which he has in common with Ottomar (The Invisible Lodge), who in a trance sees his ego in the air.

"Schoppe's notion of being chased by himself becomes a most dreadful tor- ment. For him, blissfulness lies in being eternally rid of his ego. If his glance only by chance falls upon his hands or his legs, that is enough to cause the cold fear to come over him that he could appear to himself and see his ego. The mirror must be veiled, for he shakes with fright before the spectacle of his mirror-orangu- tan" (Schneider, p. 318).

There are also mirrors which cause rejuvenation and aging, a motif which seems to have been transferred to Spikher, whose old and distorted face grins at him on one occasion (similarly, there are pictures whose proper lines can be recognized only under one particular lens ). We recall here that Spikher too, like Balduin, has all mirrors covered: "but for the contrary reason, that they no longer may reflect his ego" (Czerny, p. 12). With Schoppe, this fear goes so far that he even smashes the hated mirrors, since they cause his Self to move toward him.

It is known that Jean Paul in Titan expressed his views on Fichte's philosophy and intended to show what would be the ul- timate consequence of transcendental idealism. Critics have argued whether the poet merely meant to present his opinions to the philosopher or to lead him ad absurdum. However that may be, it seems clear in any case that both tried, each in his own way, to arrive at an understanding of the problem of the ego —a problem which concerned them personally.

In Germany, a Winter's Tale (Ch. VI), a queer fellow always ap- pears to the poet when he is sitting at his desk at night. Upon being questioned, this person acknowledges: "I am the action of your thoughts." There are also similar references in several of Heine's poems.

Up to this point, it has been a question either of a physical double, which takes a more distantly related form in the comedies of mistaken identities) " or of a likeness which has been detached from the ego and become an individual being (shadow, reflection, portrait). Now we come upon the repre- sentationally opposite form of expression of the same psychic constellation: the representation, by one and the same person, of two distinct beings separated by amnesia. These cases of double- consciousness have also been observed clinically.

From these marginal cases, we turn again to those subjects more fruitful for our analysis. In them the figure of a double is more or less clearly shaped but, at the same time, appears as the spontaneous subjective creation of a morbidly active imagina- tion. Those cases of double-consciousnesswhich we do not con- sider here—but which appear psychologically as the basis, and representationally as a kind of preliminary stage, of the fully- developed double-delusion—include Maupassant's impressive tale The Horla (1887), which serves as a direct transition over to the classification which is of interest to us.

The main character, whose diary we read, suffers from anxiety-reactions that torment him especially at night, pursue him even in his dreams, and cannot be permanently dispelled by any remedy. One night, he discovers to his terror that his carafe, filled at evening, is completely empty, although no one could enter the locked room. From this moment on, his entire interest concentrates upon that invisible spirit—the Horla—who lives in him, or next to him. He makes attempts to escape it in every way, but in vain; he is only more and more convinced of the independent existence of the mysterious creature. Every- where he feels that it overhears him, watches him, enters into his thoughts, controls him, pursues him. Often he turns around in a split second, to see it at last, and to grasp it. Often he rushes into the empty darkness of his room, where he thinks the Horla is, in order "to seize it, to throttle it, to kill it."

Finally, this thought of being rid of the invisible tyrant gains the upper hand: he has the windows and doors of his room fitted with iron shutters which can be firmly locked, and he cautiously steals out one evening to imprison the Horla inescapably behind him. Then he sets the house on fire and, from a distance, watches as it is destroyed together with any living creatures in- side. But, in the end, he is beset by doubts whether the Horla, for which all this was intended, could actually be destroyed; and he sees no other way to escape from it except by killing himself. Here again, the death which is intended for the ego as a double strikes down instead the person himself. How far his disintegra- tion goes here is shown by a mirror-fantasy which occurs prior to the decisive catastrophe. The hero has brightly illuminated his room in order to He in wait for the Horla:

Behind me stands a tall wardrobe with a mirror, which daily assisted me in shaving and getting dressed and in which I looked at myself from head to toe every time I walked past it. I was pretending to write, to deceive him, for he was watching for me also. And suddenly I felt—I knew very well what I was doing—that he was bending over my shoulder and reading, that he was there, and that he brushed against my ear. I stood up, stretched out my hands, and turned around so quickly that I almost fell. What now? One could see as well here as if the sun were shining, and i did not see myself in my mirror. The glass was empty, clear, deep, brightly lit, but my reflection was missing, though I was standing where it would be cast. I looked at the large, clear, mirrored surface from top to bottom, looked at it with horrified eyesl I no longer dared to step forward; I dared make no movement; I felt that he was there but that again he would escape me, he whose opaque body prevented my reflecting myself. And— how terrible!—suddenly I saw myself in a mist in the center of the mirror, through a sort of watery veil; and it seemed to me as if this water were slipping from left to right, very slowly, so that my image appeared more sharply outlined from second to second. . . . Finally I could recognize myself as fully as I do every day when glancing into the mirror. I had seen him; and even now I am still trembling with fright.

In a small sketch, He, which gives the impression of being a draft for The Horla, Maupassant has caused some features of in- terest to us to emerge more prominently—for example, a man's relationship to a woman. The entire narrative about the mysteri- ous "he"—who inspires the main character with a dreadful fear of himself—appears as the confession of a man who wants to marry, must many, against his better judgment, simply because he can no longer endure being alone at night after once, upon coining home, having seen "him" occupying his own accus- tomed place in the armchair by the fireplace. "He pursues me incessantly. That's madness! Yet it is so. Who, he? I know very well that he does not exist, that he is unreal. He lives only in my misgivings, in my fears, in my anxiety!—But when I am living with someone, I feel clearly, yes, quite clearly, he will no longer exist. For he exists only because I am alone, solely because I am alone!"

This same atmosphere has found moving expression, shaded with melancholy resignation, in Musset's "December Night" (1835). In a dialogue with the "vision," the poet tells us that since his childhood a shadowy double who resembles him like a brother has been following him always and everywhere. In the decisive moments of his life this companion appears, clothed in black. He cannot escape this companion however far he flees, and he is unable to ascertain its nature. And just as once upon a time, as a youth in love, he found himself alone with his double, so now, many years later, he is absorbed one night in sweet mem- ories of that time of love, and the apparition reveals itself again. The poet seeks to fathom its essence. He addresses it as his evil  fate, as his good angel, and finally, when he cannot banish love's memories, as his own reflection:

"But all at once I saw, in th' nocturnal gloom,
A noiseless form glide apace.
I saw a shadow o'er my curtain loom,
Upon my bed it took its place.
Who art thou, countenance so pale and drear,
Somber likeness of sable hue?
Sad fleeting bird, why just to me appear?
Is it an empty dream, my image here,
Which within this mirror comes to view?"

In the end, the apparition identifies itself as "Solitude." Even though it may seem strange at first glance that solitude, as with Maupassant, is perceived and represented as the burdensome companionship of a second being, the emphasis lies—as Nietzsche, too, stated—on the sociability with one's own self, objec- tified as a duplication. A similar monologue with one's own personified self is the foundation of Jean Paul's The DeviTs Confession to an Eminent Official.21 The same motif takes an interesting psychological turn in the story by J. E. Poritzky entitled One Night:

"I am very well aware of the division in our consciousness. Every- one has felt it more or less intensely—that division in which one sees one's own person passing by, like a shadow, in all of the shapes in which he ever existed. . . .But it is also possible for us now and then to catch sight of our future modes of existence. . . . This view of our future self is sometimes so vivid that we think that we see alien persons as independent entities physically detaching them- selves from us, as a child at birth. And then, one meets these apparitions of the future, conjured up from one's self, and greets them with a nod. That is my secret discovery. We are indebted to the French psychologist Ribot for some very odd examples of psychic cleavage which cannot be explained away simply as hallucinations. A very intelligent man possessed the ability of conjuring up his double before him. He would always laugh loudly at this vision, and his double responded with the same laughter. This dangerous entertainment amused him for a long time, but it finally came to a bad end. He gradually arrived at the conviction that he was being pursued by himself; and since his second self constantly tormented, teased, and annoyed him, he decided one day to put an end to this sad existence."

Maupassant also has a pronounced egocentric ori- entation ("I am very quickly wearied by everything that does not come to completion in me"); and, despite his intensive sexual life, he never did find in love the right relationship to woman: "a happiness which I did not know and which, in quiet foreknowledge, I held to be that which is most sublime on earth" (Afloat). Women especially cause him to feel clearly his inability for real devotion: "Most of all, the women let me perceive that I am alone. . . . After every kiss, after every em- brace, my feeling of isolation is more enhanced. . . . Yes—even in those moments which seem to reveal a mysterious understanding, when wish and longing blend and one imagines that one has descended into the depths of her soul—a word, one single word, exposes our error and shows us, like a flash of lightning on a stormy night, the abyss between both of us" (Solitude). Just as here, bound to his ego, he is unable to attain to the woman's self, so in He does he flee from this uncanny and terrifying ego to the woman.

That Maupassant's psychic schisma was objectified directly by the imagining of a double is shown by a hallucination, reported by Sollier, which the author "experienced one afternoon in 1889 and related that same evening to a trusted friend. He was sitting at the desk in his study. His servant had strict orders never to enter while his master was working. Suddenly, it seemed to Maupassant as if someone had opened the door. Turning around he sees, to his extreme astonishment, his own self entering,who sits down opposite him and rests his head on his hand. Everything Maupassant writes is dictated to him. When the author finished his work and arose, the hallucination disappeared" (Vorberg, p. 16).'

Other writers also experienced similar apparitions of themselves. The most familiar incident is probably the episode in Sesenheim related by Goethe (at the close of Book II, Part 3, of his autobiog- raphy Fiction and Truth) in which he takes leave of Friederike and rides along the footpath toward Drusenheim. ". . . then one of the strangest premonitions came over me. I saw myself—not with my real eyes, but those of my mind—riding on horseback toward me on the same road and clothed in a garment such as I had never worn: its color was the gray of a pike, with some gold in it. As soon as I roused myself from this dream, the figure had completely disappeared. It is strange, however, that after eight years I found myself on this same road, going to visit Friederike once more, wearing the garment of which I had dreamed and which I was wearing not from choice, but by accident. Whatever may be the state of affairs in these matters, the curious optical illusion did afford me some comfort in those moments of parting. The pain of leaving forever the magnificent Alsace, along with everything I had gained there, w as mollified. . . ." If the lover's wish not to be compelled to forsake his beloved is without any doubt the impulse causing this self-apparition, then similar hallucinations, in various other situations, are reported by Shelley."

It is noteworthy that Chamisso, the author of Peter Schlemihl, also gave artistic form to a similar incident of seeing one's second self. In that work he describes how he comes home at midnight after carousing and finds his room occupied by his double (as Maupassant has described the same situation in He, Dostoyevsky in The Double, Kipling, and others). Now a quarrel arises between them as to who is the genuine occupant." The author accounts for himself as one who has always aspired toward the beautiful, the good, and the true, while his double boasts of cowardice, hypocrisy, and selfishness. Chamisso, acknowledging with shame that his double is his true self, re- treats in defeat.

In his short story William Wilson, Edgar Allan Poe used the theme of the double in a way that has become a model for several later treatments:

"I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said: "You have conquered, and I yield. Yet hence- forward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist; and in my death see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself!"

The most moving, and psychologically the most profound, treatment of our theme is probably Dostoyevsky's early novel The Double (1846).
The novel describes the onset of mental illness in a person who is not aware of it, since he is unable to rec- ognize the symptoms in himself, and who paranoiacally views all his painful experiences as the pursuits of his enemies. His gradual transition into a delusional state, and confusion with reality is depicted with an unsurpassable skill:

"In an indescribably tormenting anxiety," Golyadkin asks himself, "Shall I recognize him, or should I act as if I were not myself at all, but rather some other person who is confusingly similar to me?" "Yes, to be sure, I am simply not myself . . . quite simply, I am a completely different person, and no one else." And he does not greet his superior.

As he ruefully reflects upon this bit of foolishness and the malice of his enemies which forced him to commit it, Mr. Golyad- kin feels "the compelling need, for his own peace of mind, to tell something very important to his physician Krestjan Ivano- vich," although he has known him only for a few days. He con- fides to the doctor in detail, with the most acute embarrassment and the characteristic vagueness of paranoids, that enemies are pursuing him—"detestable enemies who have plotted to de- stroy me."

We always find a likeness which re- sembles the main character down to the smallest particulars, such as name, voice, and clothing—a likeness which, as though "stolen from the mirror" (Hoffmann), primarily appears to the main character as a reflection. Always, too, this double works at cross-purposes with its prototype; and, as a rule, the catastrophe occurs in the relationship with a woman, predomi- nantly ending in suicide by way of the death intended for the irksome persecutor. In a number of instances this situation is combined with a thoroughgoing persecutory delusion or is even replaced by it, thus assuming the picture of a total paranoiac system of delusions.


After all, poets are always Narcissi.
A. W. SCHLEGEL


We know that Hoffmann, whose mother was a hysterical personality, was nervous, eccentric, and strongly dependent upon moods. We know too that he suffered from hallucinations, delusions of grandeur, and compulsive ideas—all of which he was fond of portraying in his writings. Afraid of becoming insane, he "often thought he saw before him his living mirror-image, his double, and other spectral figures in disguise" (Klinke, p. 49). When he was writing about them, he actually saw around him the doubles and horrifying shapes; and, when working at night, he often anxiously awakened his wife in order to show her these forms (Klinke, p. 174).s After one drinking bout, he wrote in his diary: "Seized by thoughts of death: doubles" (Hitzig, I, 174, 275). At the age of forty-seven he succumbed to a neurological illness, which Klinke diagnosed as chorea but which was also considered to be paralysis. At any rate, either disease gives evidence of his neuropathic constitution.

So it was with Jean Paul, who likewise was afraid of becoming insane and who contended with severe psychic traumas in his struggle toward creative expression. A central factor in his psy- chological conflicts is his relationship to his ego. His biographer Schneider points out in detail the significance of this for Jean Paul's mental disorders and for his literary characters: "Jean Paul relates, as one of the most noteworthy remembrances from his childhood, that the insight 'I am an T came to him as a boy like a flash of lightning; and since then, it remained a shining image before him. . . . During his stay in Leipzig, that powerful perception of his own self forced itself upon him like a terrifying specter" (Schneider, p. 316). In 1819, the writer en- ters into his diary: "First of all, [I must record] this incident: I am looking at orthel one night in Leipzig, after a serious conversation; he is looking at me; and both of us shudder upon becoming aware of our Self." (Schneider, p. 316). "In Hesperus, he causes his ego to assume the uncanny form of a spirit before him, the effect of which is that of a basilisk. We already see that the writer is occupied in artistically reproduc- ing his delusional fancy, a fancy of which he cannot rid himself. Over and over again he loses himself in the contemplation of his ownegoin solitude. . . . From the ego, the primitively per- ceived absolute within the swirling fluctuations of relationships (The Invisible Lodge], that ego gradually emerged which, at one time a transparent and trembling dream-figure, stands be- side his own ego; at another time and as a mirror-image, it rises up threateningly, moves toward the glass, and is about to step forth. Jean Paul carries this terrible idea on and on" (Schneider, pp. 317-18).  

In his memoirs Heine speaks of having undergone as a boy a kind of personality- alteration and of having believed that he was living the life of his great-uncle.19 And Musset confesses that ever since his boy- hood a sharply outlined duality had moved through his inner life.

In his Confessions of a Child of His Century, the poet describes his peevish moods as well as his attacks of rage (accès de colère), the first of which he experienced, at the age of nineteen, from jealousy of his sweetheart. These fits of jealousy later recurred, especially in his relationship with the older George Sand—a liaison which the couple themselves termed "incestuous." After this affair broke up, Musset, who even prior to it had been frivolously in- clined, gave himself over to drinking and sexual excesses, thus prematurely ruining himself both psychologically and physically.

There is no doubt that in the case of Ferdinand Raimund an unfavorable predisposition is a factor, just as it appears in those writers who were mentally disturbed. Raimund, however, suf- fered predominantly from moods of acute bad temper, melan- cholia, and hypochondriacal fears—all of which eventually drove him to suicide.22 Ever since adolescence, he demon- strated extreme irritability, flashes of anger, mistrust, etc., as well as suicidal impulses and attempts, which in the course of years led to grave emotional trouble. In his autobiographical sketch, Raimund states: "Because of the constant mental and physical strains and vexations of life, I became the victim in 1824 of a serious nervous malady, which almost turned into consumption." He thought that he was deceived by false friends; outbursts of rage alternated with deep melancholic resignation; and insomnia entered the picture. Most likely, his unhappy marriage, soon terminated by divorce, contributed to all this.

The divorce seems to be the final point in a series of unhappy amorous episodes, for again and again the writer succumbed to this passion, fatal to his well-being, but which, as he himself said, had a very strong control over him. Nor was his last, great love for Toni completely happy. He, however, felt that the fault was his own and that he was fundamentally incapable of love. This realization may have been a principal reason for his carrying out the impulse to suicide which lay dormant in him and which used an external cause (the fear of rabies) only as a rationalization. Raimund became more and more exacting, mistrustful, and melancholic. To his earlier fears was added that of losing his voice, weak as it was anyway.

In the year of his death, Raimund's hypochon- driacal and apprehensive fears reached an intolerable peak: "Even at 7:30 in the evening he closed all doors and shutters securely; and even the postman, who had an important message to deliver to him, was unable to persuade him to open the door. From this time on, he also never left the house without a pistol" (Borner, p. 91). "Overcome by fear and anxiety, he often locked himself in during his last weeks of Me and did not even want to see his sweetheart" (Castle, p. cxi). When his dog accidentally bit him during this time, the delusion of getting hydropho- bia (which had come to the surface ten years earlier) seized him, and he put an end to his We.

This statement is corroborated by the "Resignation" after the first production of the play (October 17, 1828) which, aside from other references, speaks of the role thus:

"Those moods malign, which did upon me weigh,
Through this, my part, have lightly passed away:
Disdain, mistrustful anger's agitation,
Avenging rage, from life—no consolation,
Disgrace, remorse—in fine, boundless torments. . ."  


In 1831 the play-wright said to the novelist [Karl] Spindler: "Something deep and evil dwells within me that is undermining me; and I assure you that my comic successes were only too often bom of thorough desperation. Often people cannot tell by looking at me what a sad ¡ester I am."

There can also be no doubt about Dostoyevsky's severe mental illness, even though the diagnosis (epilepsy) is debatable. Even at an early age he was odd, and his mode of life was marked by shyness and withdrawal. Like Raimund, he was ex- tremely mistrustful and considered everything done to him as an affront and as purposing to insult and vex him. As a youth in engineering school, according to his own statement, he is said to have had mild seizures (of an epileptic nature)—like those of Poe, with whom he also shared the fear of being buried alive. Dostoyevsky himself says of his seizures: "For a few moments I feel such a happiness as is impossible in one's normal condition and of which others can have no conception. . . . This sensation is so strong and so sweet that one could give away ten years of his life, or the whole of it, for the bliss of a few such seconds." After the seizures, however, he was quite depressed, feeling himself to be a criminal; and it seemed to him as if some unknown guilt were burdening him.

In his behavior, he was eccentric in every direction—"in gambling, in lascivious debauches, in searching for mystic terrors" ( Merezhkovsky, p. 84). "Everywhere and always," he writes of himself, "I have gone to the ultimate limit; and in all my life, I have gone beyond that limit without fail." In characterizing him, we must add that he—eccentric like Poe—was also filled with an exalted self-esteem and opinion of himself. In his adolescence (at about the time he was finishing The Double), he writes to his brother: "I have a terrible vice: a boundless love of myself, and ambition." His pathographer says that he was the amalgam of all varieties of self-infatuation.

The pathological disposition toward psychological disturbances is conditioned to a large degree by tie splitting of the personality, with special emphasis upon the ego-complex, to which corre- sponds an abnormally strong interest in one's own person, his psychic states, and his destinies. This point of view leads to the characteristic relationship (which we have described) to the world, to Ufe, and particularly to the love-object, to which no harmonious relationship is found. Either the direct inability to love or—leading to the same effect—an exorbitantly strained long- ing for love characterize the two poles of this overexaggerated attitude toward one's own ego. The various forms taken by the theme we have been treating are similar even down to slight de- tails. The predilection for this theme—beyond any literary in- debtedness or influences—becomes psychologically comprehen- sible through these striking and extensive conformities in the nature, and in the individual traits of character, of the type we have described.

But the typically-recurring basic ways in which these forms ap- pear do not become intelligible from the writer's individual personality. Indeed, to a certain degree they seem to be alien to it, inappropriate, and contrary to his way of otherwise viewing the world. These are the odd representations of the double as a shadow, mirror-image, or portrait, the meaningful evaluation of which we do not quite understand even though we can follow it emotionally. In the writer, as in his reader, a superindividual factor seems to be unconsciously vibrating here, lending to these motifs a mysterious psychic resonance." [The Double]

(Occultists should note the predominance of Venus aspects throughout this part.)


Part II.

Rank wrote:

""Man's shadow, I thought, is his vanity."

- NIETZSCHE


Quite generally known in all of Germany, Austria, and Yugoslavia is a test made on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve: whoever casts no shadow on the wall of the room by lamplight, or whose shadow is headless, must die inside of a year. There is a similar belief among the Jews that whoever walks by moonlight in the seventh night of Whitsuntide, and whose shadow is headless, will die that same year. There is a saying in the German provinces that stepping upon ones own shadow is a sign of death." Contrasting with the belief that whoever casts no shadow must die is a German belief that whoever sees his shadow as a duple during Epiphany must die. From this shadow-superstition, some scholars believe, developed the belief in a guardian spirit, which in its turn is closely related to the double-motif.  Rochholz, who has especially been concerned with the belief in guardian spirits, thinks that the meaning of such spirits as bénéficient was the original one and that only gradually did their harmful (death) meaning develop along with the strengthening of the belief in a Ufe after death. "So an individual's shadow, which in his lifetime had been a helpful attendant spirit," must shrivel into a terrifying and persecuting specter that torments its protégé and chases him unto death" (Rochholz).  

These superstitious notions and fears of modern civilized nations concerning the shadow have their counterpart in numerous and widespread prohibitions (taboos) of savages which refer to the shadow. From Frazer's rich collection of material, we realize that our "superstition" finds an actual counterpart in the "belief of savages. A large number of primitive peoples believe that every injury inflicted upon the shadow also harms its owner ( Frazer, p. 78), thereby opening wide the door to necromancy and magic. It is noteworthy that in some of the literary works we have discussed an echo of magical influence can be recognized in the death of the main character at the wounding of his reflection, portrait, or double. According to Negelein, "the attempt to destroy persons by wounding their doubles is widely known, even from antiquity" [sic]. Also, according to Hindu belief, one destroys an enemy by stabbing his picture or shadow in the heart (Oldenberg, Veda, p. 508 [see n. 80]).

Primitive peoples have no end of special taboos relating to the shadow. They take care not to let their shadows fall upon certain objects (especially foods); they fear even the shadows of other people (especially pregnant women, mothers-in-law, etc.; see Frazer, pp. 83ff.); and they pay heed that no one steps upon their shadows. On the Solomons, east of New Guinea, every native who steps upon the King's shadow is punished with death (Rochholz, p. 114). The same is true in New Georgia (Pradel, p. 21) and among the Kaffirs (Frazer, p. 83). Primitive peoples are also especially careful not to let their shadows fall upon a corpse or its grave, and for this reason funerals very often took place at night (Frazer, p. 80).

The meaning of death in all these events is reduced to the fear of illness or other harm. Whoever casts no shadow, dies; whoever has a small or faint shadow is ill, while a well-outlined shadow indicates recovery (Pradel). Such tests for health were really made, and many peoples even nowadays carry the sick out into the sun- light in order to lure back their expiring souls with their shadows. With the opposite intention, the inhabitants of Amboyna [Amboina, Ambon] and Uliase, two islands on the Equator, never leave their houses at noon, because in this location their shadows disappear and they are afraid of losing their souls along with them (Frazer, p. 87). Relevant here are the notions about the short and the long shadows, the small and the lengthening ones, on which Goethe's and Andersen's fairy tales are based, as is the poem by Stevenson-Dehmel. The belief that the health and strength of a person increase with the length of his shadow (Frazer, pp. 86f.) pertains here, just as does the distinction of the Zulus between the long shadow of a person, which be- comes an ancestral spirit, and the short, which remains with the deceased.

Attached to this belief is another superstition, associated with the rebirth of the father in the son. Savages who believe that the soul of the father or grandfather is reborn in the child fear, ac- cording to Frazer (p. 88), too great a resemblance of the child to his parents. Should a child strikingly resemble its father, the latter must soon die, since the child has adopted his image or sil- houette. The same holds for the name, which the primitive views as an essential part of the personality. In European culture the belief is still retained that if two offspring of the same family bear the same name, one must die. We recall here the same "nomenphobia" in Poe's William Wilson and can also understand, on the basis of "name magic," the invocation of spirits by calling their names.

According to Freud, all tabooed objects have an ambivalent character, and signs pointing to this are also not lacking in shadow-concepts. The ideas of rebirth of the paternal shade in the child, just pointed out, lead to the already-mentioned notions of the shadow as a protective spirit born simultaneously with the child. In direct contrast to the ideas of death in shadow-super- stition are the ideas—even though much less current—of the shadow as a fecundating agent ( Pradel, pp. 25 f. ). The image of the shadow of death surrounding mankind finds its opposite Biblical expression in the Annunciation, which promises Mary, though virginal, a son, for Shapis 6
In Central India there is a general fear of being impregnated by a shadow, and pregnant women avoid con- tact with a man's shadow since it might cause her child to re- semble him (Frazer, "The Belief . . . ," p. 93).

Just as almost all symbols of good fortune were originally fertility symbols, the shadow, too, has gained a meaning of good fortune from this aspect. Not only the curative effect of the shade of certain trees (especially in the Bible) is pertinent here, but above all the role of the shadow as the guardian of treasure ( cf. Pradel)—indeed, even as the augmenter of it (practically, too, the shadow functioned as the marker of property boundary lines ). In the Indie fairy tale of the woodcutter's daughter, the spirit wooing the poor girl says to her father: "Give me your daughter; then shall your shadow grow, and your treasures shall become great" (Rochholz, after the fairy tale collection of the Somadeva Bhatta). We are reminded here of Peter Schlemihl, the student Balduin, and others who are recompensed for the loss of their shadows by wealth. They intend to use this wealth to gain the beloved girl, but they fail miserably.

Nor are the heroes of similar literary creations any more successful when the problem of the double takes the form of the exchange of physiques (the Amphytrion motif)—for example, in Théophile Gautier's short story The Soul-Exchange.  

A series of further folkloric investigations has shown without any doubt that primitive man considered his mysterious double, his shadow, to be an actual spiritual being.
If we ask how it came about that the shadow was taken to be the soul, the views of primitive peoples living with nature—as well as the views of ancient civilized peoples—are of help to- ward an answer: that the primordial concept of the soul, as Negelein puts it, was a "primitive monism" in which the soul figured as an analogon to the form of the body. So the shadow, inseparable from the person, becomes one of the first "embodiments" of the human soul, "long before the first man saw his re- flection in a mirror" (Negelein). The belief of primitive peoples all over the world in the human soul as being an exact copy of the body, first perceivable in the shadow, was also the original soul-concept of ancient civilized peoples. Erwin Rohde, probably the most sensitive observer of the belief in the soul and of its cult in Greece, says:

"The belief in the psyche was the oldest and very first hypothesis by which one explained the apparitions of dreams, of fainting, and of ecstatic vision by assuming a special physical agent in these obscure actions. Already in Homer we can note the path in the course of which the psyche evaporates into a mere abstraction." "According to the Homeric conception, man has a twofold existence: in his perceptible presence, and in his invisible image which only death sets free. This, and nothing else, is his psyche. In the living human being, completely filled with his soul, there dwells, like an alien guest, a weaker double, his self other than his psyche . . . whose realm is the world of dreams. When the other self is asleep, unconscious of itself, the double is awake and active." "Such an eidolon and second self, duplicating the visible self, has originally the same meaning as the genius of the Romans, the fravauli of the Persians, and the Ka of the Egyptians." In Egypt, too, the shadow was the oldest form of the soul (Negelein according to Maspero); and according to Moret38 there were alternate terms for soul, double (Ka), image, shadow, and name. By referring to a copious literature, Spiess also supports the belief of savages in the continued existence of a shadow-like soul after death (p. 172); and he also cites the meaning of the Hebrew expression "Rephaim" for what remains of man after death: "the weary or the feeble ones, i.e., the shadows, the inhabitants of the Underworld, a name analo- gous to the Greek term" (p. 422).

The most primitive belief in the soul is therefore linked with death, as Spiess has shown for civilized peoples, and as Frazer (The Belief . . .") has especially shown for the most undeveloped savages. The first concept of the soul among primitives, which is significant for the entire development of human history, is that of tibe spirits of the deceased imagined in most instances as shadows, just as even today we speak of the "realm of shades" of departed ones.

Since the souls of the deceased are shadows, they themselves cast no shadows—a condition which the Persians, for example, asserted directly of those again brought back to life.40 Indeed, according to several authors, the observation that the corpse no longer casts a shadow is said to have lent support to the assump- tion that the soul had escaped in the shadow. Thus the Arcadian sacred region of Lykaion, in which a complete lack of shadows prevails, was considered to be the realm of those initiated into death. According to Pausanias, Description of Greece (VIII, 38, 6), the entrance into this region was denied to mankind, and whoever transgressed the law necessarily had to die within a year's time. Here, therefore, as in almost all of the cited superstitious ideas, the lack of a shadow indicates approaching death, the absence of whose shadow is anticipated. Thus, according to Rochholz (p. 19), in the Lycaic abaton "the protec- tive daimon retreats from the consecrated intruder and abandons him to the terrors of death."

Not only the souls, but also the spirits, elves, daimons, ghosts, and magicians closely associated with them have no shadows, because they originally are themselves shadows, i.e., souls. For this reason, spirits and elves, considered to be shadow- less by New Zealanders, accept nothing offered to them except the shadow. The high-born damsel is recognized by the fact that she casts no shadow, because she is a spirit. The devil, according to a Russian belief (Gaster), also has no shadow because he is an evil spirit, and for this reason is he so eager for human shadows (cf. the pact by Schlemihl, Balduin, and others). Whoever has come under the devil's influence casts no shadow (Pra- del). The numerous legends in which the devil is cheated of his reward by receiving "only" the shadow instead of the soul which was his due appear to represent a too-serious reaction upon the loss of a shadow. Originally—as Schlemihl and his successors demonstrate—it may have been mankind who was deceived in this case, since man underestimated the shadow, the value of which was known to the devil.

From abundant folkloric material of civilized peoples, Negelein has shown that "the superstitious ideas and customs deriving from the mirror image resemble in all their chief features those produced by the shadow-image." Also prominent in this connection are the apprehensions of death and of misfortune. In German territories the prohibition exists of placing the corpse before a mirror or of looking at it in a mirror; for then two corpses appear, and the second one foretells a second incident of death. According to a Dalmatian superstition, also found in Oldenburg, whoever sees himself in a mirror will die as long as there is a corpse in the house.

The general applicability of this fear is apparent from the fre- quency of its contrary measure, which requires the veiling of mirrors so that the soul of the deceased person may not remain in the house. This custom is practised today in Germany and France and among the Jews, Lithuanians, and others. Since the soul of the departed person is thought to be in the mirror, it can become visible there under certain circumstances. In Silesia it is said that at midnight on New Year's Eve, if one takes two burning lights in front of a mirror and calls the name of a deceased person, that person will appear in the mirror. In France one's reflection is said to be glimpsed in a mirror as one will ap- pear at the hour of death, if previously on the eve of Epiphany a certain ceremony is carried out.

These ideas are associated with the prohibitions of gazing at oneself in the mirror at night. If this is done, one loses his own image—i.e., one's soul. As a result, death is a necessary conse- quence, an idea based in East Prussia upon the belief that in such cases the reflection of the devil appears behind one. If, in fact, anyone notices the reflection of another face beside his own, he will soon die. For similar reasons it is disastrous for ill and asthénie persons to see their reflections, especially according to a Bohemian belief. In all of Germany the falling down or breaking of a mirror is taken to be a sign of death, although along with that, and as a euphemistic compensation, seven years of trouble are in prospect. Also, whoever's last view of himself was in a broken mirror must die or suffer seven years of distress. If thirteen people are sitting together, whoever is sitting opposite a mirror must die. In order to obtain protection from the mysterious forces of the mirror, a cat is reflected in a new mirror in certain regions. Precautions, too, are taken against allowing small children to gaze at themselves in a mirror. These precautions result from the fear of one's own reflection, which subjects one's double to all kinds of harm; and if the child is not protected, he will become proud and frivolous or else will become ill and die.

According to Negelein, the conviction that the mirror reveals concealed matters is based upon the belief in a double. This reference includes, first of all, the magic use of the mirror in order to discern the future. So in Oldenburg, for example, it is said that one can see his future in a mirror by stepping in front of it at midnight with two burning lights, gazing attentively into it, and calling one's name thrice. In association with the customs we have cited, it is clear here that "whether," not "what," is meant by "future"; that is, what is of primary interest to the individual is his own lifespan. In contrast, the significance of the mirror as a prophet of love diminishes, although a girl, in practicing similar customs, generally sees her "intended one" (equivalent, to her, with "the future"). Vain girls, however, see the devil's face when they look into the mirror at night, and if they smash a mirror, they think that they will not be married for seven years.

Savages believe that the soul is embodied in the image reproduced by glass, water, portrait, or by a shadow.
The similarly based dread of one's own portrait or of a photograph is found all over the world, according to Frazer. It is present among the Eskimos, the American Indians, and tribes in Central Africa, as well as in Asia, East India, and Europe. Since these people visualize the person's soul in his image, they fear that the foreign possessor of this image can have a harmful or deadly effect upon it. Many savages actually believe that death is imminent if their picture is taken or is in the possession of a stranger. Frazer relates delightful stories of the savages' fear of photography,

A German superstition has it that one may not allow one's portrait to be painted; otherwise one will die. Frazer has traced the same belief in Greece, Russia, and Albania, and he gives evi- dence of its traces in modem England and Scotland."

In ancient civilizations we also find ideas corresponding to the superstitions we have cited. Among the Indies and Greeks we find, for example, the rule not to gaze into one's reflection in the water, since this action will soon result in death. "When one can no longer see his eidolon in a mirror, this is a sign of death." Also, the Greeks considered it a sign of death if one dreamed that he saw his reflection in water. Germanic belief likewise attributed a thanatoptic significance to the reflection in water. If, however, the same phenomenon in a dream is interpreted as a sign of long life, we will take it up not only as a contrary objective, but will also connect it with the meaning of water-dreams as they have to do with birth.

A connection is readily made here with the interesting mythological traditions which demonstrate the belief in the fecundating effect attributed to the shadow in mirror-superstitions as well—primarily the myth of Dionysus and the mysteries relating to it. His mother, Persephone, had looked at herself in a mirror before she bore Zagreus, a fact which Negelein interprets as a "conception through the coeffectivity of personality and double." As we know, Zagreus, upon his rebirth as Dionysus, was carried in Zeus' thigh as a compensation, as it were, for his original female conception. In this story of rebirth, too, a mirror has its share. The polymorphous Zagreus was looking at himself as a bull in a mirror made by Hephaistos, when the Titans sent by Hera, his enemy, came and tore him apart despite his metamorphosis. Only his heart was saved, from which Dionysus was born in the aforementioned way with the help of Semele. But Proclus reports one more significant genethliac myth concerning Dionysus: he is said to have looked at himself in the mirror forged by Hephaistos and, led astray by this image, to have created all things. This late-Greek idea of the creation of the material world has its archetype in Indie cosmogony, which took the reflection of the primeval essence to be the foundation of the material world and which continued in Neo-Platonic and gnostic doctrines. Thus the gnostics asserted that Adam had lost his di- vine nature by gazing into a mirror and becoming enamored of his own reflection.
The harmful effect of contemplating one's reflection in a mirror is clearly represented by the legend of Entelidas, as reported by Plutarch. Entelidas, delighted by his reflection in the water, became ill of his own evil gaze and lost his beauty upon recovering health.

The well-known fable of Narcissus in the late version transmitted to us combines in a unique synthesis both aspects of the belief: the ruinous and the erotic.

Nor is it certain that his falling in love with his own image—which, after all, is the essence of the Narcissus legend—only later developed into an explanation when this original meaning was no longer known.

By no means can psychoanalysis consider it as a mere accident that the death significance of the double appears closely related to its narcissistic meaning—as also noted elsewhere in Greek legend. Our reason for not being satisfied with Frazer's account lies in the fact that his explanation of the Narcissus fable only shifts the problem to the question of the origin and significance of the underlying superstitious ideas.

In the myth of the Fates, in the changed forms of which the goddess of love takes the place of the goddess of death, Freud has shown that this tendency aims at establishing an equivalent as distant and pleasant as possible—the reason being an understandable endeavor to compensate. This development of the motif, however, is not capricious. It only refers to an old, original identity of these two figures. This identity is consciously based upon the conquest of death by a new procreation and finds its deepest foundation in the relationship to the mother.

That the death meaning of the double likewise tends to be replaced by the love meaning can be seen from manifestly late, secondary, and isolated traditions. According to these traditions, girls are able to see their sweethearts in the mirror under the same conditions in which death or misfortune also reveal themselves. And in the exception that this does not apply to vain girls we may recognize a reference to narcissism, which interferes with the choice of a love object. Similarly, in the Narcissus legend there is a late but psychologically valid version which reports that the handsome youth thought he saw his beloved twin sister (his sweetheart) in the water. Besides this plainly narcissistic infatuation, the death meaning too has so much validity that the close association and deep relationship of both complexes are removed from any doubt.

The Narcissus meaning by its nature is not alien to the motif of the double, which exhibits meanings of the spirit and of death in the folklore material.  Along with fear and hate of the double, the narcissistic infatuation in one's own image and self is most strongly marked in Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. "The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation" at the first view of his portrait, when he "stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness." At the same time, the fear seizes him that he could become old and different— a fear closely associated with the idea of death: "When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself" (p. 42). Dorian, who is directly characterized as Narcissus, loves his own image and therefore his own body: "Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed . . . those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. Morning after morning he had sat before the portrait, wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times" (p. 126). "Often . . . he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room . . . and stand with a mirror in front of the portrait . . . looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. . . . He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty . . ." (p. 150). Tied in with this narcissistic attitude is his imposing egoism, his inability to love, and his abnormal sexual life. The intimate friendships with young men, for which Hallward reproaches him, are attempts to realize the erotic infatuation with his own youthful image. From women he is able to obtain only the crudest sensual pleasures, without being capable of a spiritual relationship. Dorian shares this defective capacity for love with almost all double-heroes. He himself says in a significant quotation that this deficiency arises from his narcissistic fixation on his own ego " I wish I could love,' cried Dorian Gray, with a deep note of pathos in his voice. *But I seem to have lost the passion, and for- gotten the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself.

In a particularly clear defensive form, The Student of Prague shows how the feared self obstructs the love for a woman; and in Wilde's novel it becomes clear that fear and hate with respect to the double-self are closely connected with the narcissistic love for it and with the resistance of this love. The more Dorian despises his image, which is becoming old and ugly, the more intensive does his self-love become: "The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty . . ."

This erotic attitude toward one's own self, however, is only possible because along with it the defensive feelings can be dis- charged by way of the hated and feared double. Narcissus is ambivalent toward his ego for something in him seems to resist exclusive self-love. The form of defense against narcissicism finds expression principally in two ways: in fear and revulsion before one's own image, as seen in Dorian and most of the characters of Jean Paul; or, as in the majority of cases, in the loss of the shadow-image or mirror-image.8 This loss, however, is no loss at all, as the persecutions show. On the contrary, it is strengthening, a becoming independent and superiorly strong, which in its turn only shows the exceedingly strong interest in one's own self. Thus the apparent contradiction—the loss of the shadow-image or mirror-image represented as pursuit—is understood as a repre- sentation of the opposite, the recurrence of what is repressed in that which represses.

This same mechanism is shown by the dénouement of madness, almost regularly leading to suicide, which is so frequently linked with pursuit by the double, the self. Even when the depiction does not measure up to Dostoyevsky's unsurpassable clinical exactitude, it does become clear that it is a question of para- noid ideas of pursuit and influencing to which the hero is prey by reason of his double. Since Freud's psychoanalytic clarification of paranoia, we know that this illness has as a basis "a fixation in narcissism," to which corresponds typical megalomania, the sexual overrating of oneself.9 The stage of development from which paranoids regress to their original narcissism is sub- limated homosexuality, against the undisguised eruption of which they defend themselves with the characteristic mechanism of projection. On the basis of this insight, it can easily be shown that the pursuit of the ill person regularly proceeds from the origi- nally loved persons (or their surrogates).

The literary representations of the double-motif which describe the persecution complex confirm not only Freud's concept of the narcissistic disposition toward paranoia, but also, in an intuition rarely attained by the mentally ill, they reduce the chief pursuer to the ego itself, the person formerly loved most of all, and now direct their defense against it.  This view does not contradict the homosexual etiology of paranoia. We know, as was already men- tioned, that the homosexual love object was originally chosen with a narcissistic attitude toward one's own image.

Connected with paranoid pursuit is yet another theme which deserves emphasis. We know that the person of the pursuer fre- quently represents the father or his substitute (brother, teacher, etc.), and we also find in our material that the double is often identified with the brother. It is clearest in Musset but also appears in Hoffmann (The Devtfs Elixirs,The Doubles), Poe, Do- stoyevsky, and others. The appearance for the most part is as a twin and reminds us of the legend of the womanish Narcissus, for Narcissus thinks that he sees in his image his sister, who re- sembles him in every respect. That those writers who preferred the theme of the double also had to contend with the male sib- ling complex follows from the not infrequent treatment of fraternal rivalry in their other works. So Jean Paul, in the famous novel The Twins, has treated the theme of twin brothers who compete with each other, as has Maupassant in Peter and John and the unfinished novel The Ángelus, Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamasov, and so on.

Actually, and considered externally, the double is the rival of his prototype in anything and everything, but primarily in the love for woman—a trait which he may partly owe to the identi- fication with the brother. One author expresses himself about this relationship in another connection: "The younger brother is accustomed, even in ordinary Me, to be somehow similar to the elder, at least in external appearance. He is, as it were, a reflection of his fraternal self which has come to life; and on this ac- count he is also a rival in everything that the brother sees, feels, and thinks." What connection this identification might have with the narcissistic attitude may be shown by another statement by the same author: "The relationship of the older to the younger brother is analogous to that of the masturbator to himself."

From this fraternal attitude of rivalry toward the hated competitor in the love for the mother, the death wish and the impulse toward murder against the double becomes reasonably understandable, even though the significance of the brother in this case does not exhaust our understanding. The theme of the brothers is not precisely the root of the belief in the double, but rather only an interpretation—well-determined, to be sure—of the doubtlessly purely subjective meaning of the double. This meaning is not sufficiently explained by the psychological statement that "the mental conflict creates the double," which corresponds to a "projection of inner turmoil" and the shaping of which brings about an inner liberation, an unburdening, even if at the price of the "fear of encounter." So "fear shapes from the ego-complex the terrifying phantom of the double," which "fulfills the secret, always suppressed wishes of his soul."

The most prominent symptom of the forms which the double takes is a powerful consciousness of guilt which forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility for certain actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, who is either per- sonified by the devil himself or is created by making a diabolical pact. This detached personification of instincts and desires which were once felt to be unacceptable, but which can be satisfied without responsibility in this indirect way, appears in other forms of the theme as a bénéficient admonitor (e.g., William Wilson) who is directly addressed as the "conscience" of the person (e.g., Dorian Gray, etc.). As Freud has demonstrated, this awareness of guilt, having various sources, measures on the one hand the distance between the ego-ideal and the attained reality; on the other, it is nourished by a powerful fear of death and creates strong tendencies toward self-punishment, which also imply suicide.

What the folkloric representations and several of the literary ones directly reveal is a tremendous thana- tophobia, which refers to the defensive symptoms heretofore dis- cussed to the extent that, in these, fear (of the image, of its loss, or of pursuit) formed the most prominent characteristic.

One motif which reveals a certain connection between the fear of death and the narcissistic attitude is the wish to remain forever young. On the one hand, this wish represents the libidi- nous fixation of the individual onto a definite developmental stage of the ego;and on the other, it expresses the fear of becoming old, a fear which is really the fear of death.
Thus Wilde's Dorian says, "When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself." Here we are at the significant theme of suicide, at which point a whole series of characters come to their ends whilepur- sued by their doubles. Of this motif, apparently in such contradiction to the asserted fear of death, it can be shown precisely from its special application in this connection that it is closely relevant not only to the theme of thanatophobia, but also with narcissism. For these characters and their creators—as far as they attempted suicide or did carry it out (Raimund, Maupas- sant)—did not fear death; rather, the expectation of the unavoidable destiny of death is unbearable to them. As Dorian Gray expresses it: "I have no terror of Death. It is only the coming of Death that terrifies me" (p. 231)

It seems a subtle poetic touch when Lenau gives a narcissistic justification to the Swedish legend of the connection of the loss of one's shadow with infertility:

By the lake stands Anna, dreaming, Gazing at the waters bright,
Sees her beauty at her gleaming, Self-reflected, feels delight.

Speaks: "O beauty of the rarest, Wondrous virgin, canst reply, Sweden's maids of all the fairest, Am I thou? and art thou I?"

From the lake's green borders bending Downward to her image near,
From her breast her garments rending, Anna sees her bosom bare.

Downward does she gaze, admiring, Doubting, blissful, at the sight;
And the form, herself desiring, Stares, transported with delight.

With the gestures so enraptured, Anna sees her beauty grow,
Which her image now has captured, And to her enthralled, doth show.

"Would that thus I be forever!"
Cries she, self-enamoured, vain, "Would that th'imaged self go never!" Hark! the rushing winds bring rain!

And her likeness now is vanished In the foaming water's swirl;
Like a dream, to nothing banished, Sees herself the hapless girl.

Then the old woman appears, and warns her of the danger to her beauty from bearing children:

"Oh, then do thy shadow query : Art thou mine, ye cheeks so wan?
These my eyes, so hollow, weary?
And thou'lt weep into the pond."

She demands of the old woman that her beauty never pass away, and does enjoy this favor for fully seven years:

"Oft, with bolted door's protection,
Is she all unseen alone,
Darts her gaze to her reflection,
Feasts upon herself so shown."

The normally unconscious thought of the approaching destruction of the self—the most general example of the repression of an unendurable certainty—torments these unfortunates with the con- scious idea of their eternal, eternal [sic] inability to return, an idea from which release is only possible in death. Thus we have the strange paradox of the suicide who voluntarily seeks death in order to free himself of the intolerable thanatophobia.

It could be objected that the fear of death is simply the ex- pression of an overly strong instinct for self-preservation, insisting upon fulfillment. Certainly the only too-justified fear of death, seen as one of the fundamental evils of mankind, has its main root in the self-preservation instinct, the greatest threat to which is death. But this motivation is insufficient for pathological thanato- phobia, which occasionally leads directly to suicide. In this neu- rotic constellation—in which the material to be repressed and against which the individual defends himself is finally and actu- ally realized—it is a question of a complicated conflict in which, along with the ego-instincts serving self-preservation, the libidinous tendencies also function, which are merely rationalized in the conscious ideas of fear. Their unconscious participation explains fully the pathological fear arising here, behind which we must expect a portion of repressed libido. This, along with other already-known factors, we believe we have found in that part of narcissism which feels just as intensely threatened by the idea of death as do the pure ego-instincts, and which thereupon reacts with the pathological fear of death and its final consequences.

Spiess, from whose work we have borrowed many a documentation, expresses the view that "man's horror of death does not result merely from the natural love of Ufe." He explains this with the following words:

"That, however, is not a dependency upon earthly existence, for man often hates that. . . . No, it is the love for the personality peculiar to him, found in his conscious possession, the love for his self, for the central self of his individuality, which attaches him to life. This self-love is an inseparable element of his being. In it is founded and rooted the instinct for self-preservation, and from it emerges the deep and powerful longing to escape death or the submergence into nothingness, and the hope of again awakening to a new We and to a new era of continuing development. The thought of losing oneself is so unbearable for man, and it is this thought which makes death so terrible for him. . . . This hopeful longing may be criticized as childish vanity, foolish megalomania; the fact remains that it lives in our hearts; it influences and rules over our imagination and endeavors (p. 115)."

This relationship is evident in all of its desirable clarity—in- deed, downright plasticity—in literary material, although narcissistic self-assertion and self-exaggeration generally prevail there. The frequent slaying of the double, through which the hero seeks to protect himself permanently from the pursuits of his self, is really a suicidal act. It is, to be sure, in the painless form of slaying a different ego: an unconscious illusion of the splitting-off of a bad, culpable ego—a separation which, moreover, appears to be the precondition for every suicide. The suicidal person is unable to eliminate by direct self-destruction the fear of death resulting from the threat to his narcissism. To be sure, he seizes upon the only possible way out, suicide, but he is incapable of carrying it out other than by way of the phantom of a feared and hated double, because he loves and esteems his ego too highly to give it pain or to transform the idea of his destruction into the deed. In this subjective meaning, the double turns out to be a functional expression of the psychological fact that an individual with an attitude of this land cannot free himself from a certain phase of his narcissistically loved ego-development. He encounters it always and everywhere, and it constrains his actions within a definite direction. Here, the allegorical interpretation of the double as a part of the ineradicable past gets its psychological meaning. What attaches the person to the past becomes clear, and why this assumes the form of the double is evident.

Freud, by pointing out the animistic view of the world based on the power of thoughts, has justified our thinking of primitive man, just as of the child, as being exquisitely narcissistic.
Also, the narcissistic theories of the creation of the world which he cites, just like the later philosophical systems based on the ego (e.g., Fichte), indicate that man is able to perceive the reality surrounding him mainly only as a reflection, or as a part, of his ego. Likewise, Freud has pointed out that it is death, ANANKE the implacable, which opposes the primitive man's narcissism and obliges him to turn over a part of his omnipotence to the spirits. Linked to this fact of death, however, which is forced upon man and which he constantly seeks to deny, are the first concepts of the soul, which can be traced in primitive peoples as well as those of advanced cultures.

From the experience of dreaming, man may have taken the proof for his belief that the viable ego might exist even after death; but only his shadow and his reflected image could have convinced him that he had a mysterious double even while he was alive.

The various taboos, precautions, and evasions which primitive man uses with regard to his shadow show equally well his narcissistic esteem of his ego and his tremendous fear of its being threatened. Primitive narcissism feels itself primarily threatened by the ineluctable destruction of the self. Very clear evidence of the truth of this observation is shown by the choice, as the most primitive concept of the soul, of an image as closely similar as possible to the physical self, hence a true double. The idea of death, therefore, is denied by a duplication of the self incorporated in the shadow or in the reflected image.  

Negelein speaks directly of a "primitive monism of body and soul," by which he means that the idea of the soul originally coincided completely with that of a second body. As proof he cites the fact that the Egyptians made images of the dead in order to protect them from eternal destruction. Such a material origin, then, does the idea of the soul have. Later, it became an immaterial concept with the increasing reality-experience of man, who does not want to admit that death is everlasting annihilation.

Originally, to be sure, the question of a belief in immortality was of no concern; but the complete ignorance of the idea of death arises from primitive narcissism, as it is evidenced even in the child. For the primitive, as for the child, it is self-evident that he will continue to live, and death is conceived of as an unnatural, magically produced event. Only with the acknowledgment of the idea of death, and of the fear of death consequent upon threatened narcissism, does the wish for immortality as such appear. This wish really restores the original naive belief in an eternally continuing existence in partial accommodation to the experience of death gained in the meantime. In this way, there- fore, the primitive belief in souls is originally nothing else than a kind of belief in immortality which energetically denies the power of death; and even today the essential content of the be- lief in the soul—as it subsists in religion, superstition, and mod- em cults—has not become other, nor much more, than that.  

The thought of death is rendered supportable by assuring one- self of a second Ufe,after this one, as a double. As in the threat to narcissism by sexual love, so in the threat of death does the idea of death (originally averted by the double) recur in this figure who, according to general superstition, announces death or whose injury harms the individual.

So, then, we see primitive narcissism as that in which the li- bidinous interests and those serving self-preservation are concen- trated upon the ego with equal intensity, and which in the same way protect against a series of threats by reactions directed against the complete annihilation of the ego, or else toward its damage and impairment. These reactions do not result merely from the real fear which, as Visscher says, can be termed the de- fensive form of an exceedingly strong instinct for self-preserva- tion. They arise also from the fact that the primitive, along with the neurotic, exhibits this "normal" fear, increased to a pathological degree, which "cannot be explained from the actual ex- periences of terror." We have derived the libidinous component, which plays a part here, from the equally-intensively felt threat to narcissism, which resists the utter immolation of the ego just as much as it resists its dissolution in sexual love. That it is actually primitive narcissism which resists the threat is shown quite clearly by the reactions in which we see the threatened narcissism assert itself with heightened intensity: whether it be in the form of pathological self-love as in Greek legend or in Oscar Wilde, the representative of the modern esthete; or in the defensive form of the pathological fear of one's self, often leading to paranoid insanity and appearing personified in the pursuing shadow, mirror-image, or double. On the other hand, in the same phenomena of defense the threat also recurs, against which the individual wants to protect and assert himself. So it happens that the double, who personifies narcissistic self-love, becomes an unequivocal rival in sexual love; or else, originally created as a wish-defense against a dreaded eternal destruction, he reap- pears in superstition as the messenger of death." [The Double]

Quote :

"The psychological concept of the uncanny as something that is strangely familiar, rather than just mysterious, was perhaps first fixed by Sigmund Freud in his essay Das Unheimliche.

Because the uncanny is familiar, yet incongruous, it has been seen as creating cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by an object. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize, as in the uncanny valley effect."

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Freud wrote:

"The “double” was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an “energetic denial of the power of death,” as Rank says; and probably the “immortal” soul was the first “double” of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of the genital symbol; the same desire spurred on the ancient Egyptians to the art of making images of the dead in some lasting material. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of primitive man; and when this stage has been left behind the double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.

The idea of the 'double' does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego's development. A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our 'conscience'. In the pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to the physician's eye. The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object - the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation - renders it possible to invest the old idea of a 'double' with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it - above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times.

But it is not only this latter material, offensive as it is to the criticism of the ego, which may be incorporated into the idea of a double. There are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will. [Cf. Freud, 1901b, Chapter XII (B).]

But after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a 'double', we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in this more superficial material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the 'double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted - a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The 'double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.

Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead. The condition under which the feeling of uncanniness arises here is unmistakable. We - or our primitive forefathers - once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgement something like this: 'So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!' or, 'So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!' and so on. Conversely, anyone who has completely and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the uncanny. The most remarkable coincidences of wish and fulfilment, the most mysterious repetition of similar experiences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights and suspicious noises - none of these things will disconcert him or raise the kind of fear which can be described as 'a fear of something uncanny'. The whole thing is purely an affair of 'reality-testing', a question of the material reality of the phenomena.

The state of affairs is different when the uncanny proceeds from repressed infantile complexes, from the castration complex, womb-phantasies, etc.' but experiences which arouse this kind of uncanny feeling are not of very frequent occurrence in real life. The uncanny which proceeds from actual experience belongs for the most part to the first group [the group dealt with in the previous paragraph]. Nevertheless the distinction between the two is theoretically very important. Where the uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of material reality does not arise; its place is taken by psychical reality. What is involved is an actual repression of some content of thought and a return of this repressed content, not a cessation of belief in the reality of such a content. We might say that in the one case what had been repressed is a particular ideational content, and in the other the belief in its (material) reality. But this last phrase no doubt extends the term 'repression beyond its legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to take into account a psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having been (to a greater or lesser extent) surmounted [rather than repressed]. Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed."

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Nietzsche wrote:

"Excess is a reproach only against those who have no right to it; and almost all the passions have been brought into ill repute on account of those who were not sufficiently strong to employ them-." [WTP, 778]

Nietzsche wrote:

"When your Heart flows Broad and Full, like the River,
a Blessing and a Danger to those who live Next to it:
There is the Origin of your Virtue." [TSZ, Bestowing Virtue]

In the preliminary riot scenes of the 2016 Bourne film, the hero, when presented with new facts of his past, simply asks, "why should I care?"
A rationale needed to be given to him, argued For him…

Apathy is the natural outcome of paranoid-exhaustion, and the self retreats into itself, and all that matters to its comfortable getting along, is all that matters - give or take a little, literally…

William Pierce wrote:

"I believe that the reason so many of our people simply will not accept that real world today is that they are too comfortable with the present situation. They are living well. They feel safe. They are perceptive enough to see the destructive trends carrying our race to extinction, but their comfort and safety are more important to them, and so they adjust their perceptions accordingly.

Before we can put the White man in the fight we have to put the fight into the White man.

The European spirit is much more expressed in the pagan tradition of northern Europe. In that tradition, there was much more of the idea that man is responsible for the world around him. He is responsible for his own actions. And he's answerable to nobody but himself..."

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If other philosophy forums are microcosms of lunatic asylums exposing the dwarfing of man, then our own forum is also a microcosmic reflection of the truth, the heart is lacking development - the lust to take on tasks, the maturing into Full and Wholesome human-beings…, not just boys and girls wanting their fix, simply existing and drifting along in life.
Except the regular few, as one can see in our own surroundings, the environment we have has no tall and broad trees, no lust, no passion, within Legal and Permitted avenues.

'The War Like No Other' needs to be fought on two fronts:

- Objective stream-lining that has been the thesis of Satyr - a spartanizing of proliferating disinformation by reconnecting word to world, but More so,

- Subjective surge - with which one may overcome the J.-Xt. drive of a "will to truth", and see, what is the Active-will is a restraint, a stopping at appearance, taking face-values we call self-trust as our "will to knowledge" by willing errors, inventions, art-ifices, BEYOND cost/benefit…
The world and our selves exposed in the things we put together, with and out of sheer passion for life, the swelling and welling up of life's own upsurge, (and its coming apart), reveal more, and reveal more intricacies, than methods weighed by cost/benefit outcomes.

Hyper-Awareness that is born of a pure narcissistic self-invested as opposed to a healthy self-interested rationality, under the garb of 'science' is like a broken brake that sees masks everywhere and cannot stop tearing away at it, ultimately scratching away the healthy parts and the inner resistance itself… like a corrosion eating away at the very self. The end result of such "hyper-awareness" and narcissistic-paranoia is an exhausted Apathy and inability to meet new tasks.
The proper word for that kind of science is Xt. "Will-to-Truth'…
Like boobs and uterus sagged in old age from weak muscles,,, the inadequate development of spiritual-muscles, the heart, makes the will-to-will itself sag. There is a pronounced lack of tension.
Xt. is this Impotent inability to resist reaction to all stimuli, crowning itself under the virtue of a "will to truth" that finally un-did its own self, making way for the sagged post-modernism.

Those with such apathy promote their own broken brakes and their Xt. Will-to-Truth, as the Active state,, while the real active-restraint is relabelled as weakness or insecurity, for possessing the ability and agility to stop.

Hyper-Sensitivity or HIGH-per-Conscious is for the few and the state of the Exceptional who have the discipline of active-self-restraint, and are thereby able to employ and deploy powerful passions.

To walk on that path is only possible by those who have a fury of liveliness, that is no rational fury, yet a (sub-limated)conscious fury beyond life-dwarfing calculations of pleasure/pain, and rationalizing life so accident-proof that the very life is choked out of it, and 'truth' turns to dead-ly poison.

But the accuracy of such a Hyper-conscious (sensitivity) from the strength for self-trust, and total engagement of all senses beyond pleasure/pain is a function of the unconscious vitalities one inherits.

Rational Objectivity is forged as a Tool and only a means towards harnessing more efficient/enduring vitalities for the future.

The drive is towards the production of beings of great strengths whose reserve of self-trust may dispose them for lofty experiments that require looking past pain/pleasure, and only having their own spirit drawing them in their foreground - life banking on itself, from its own trust-fund.

The stunting of man and life, in self-satisfied rationalisms, is a narcissism of confidence derived from control over managing a small rational life, the small picture,,, precisely what ancient Initiations targeted to break down - this "self" esteem [esteem for self], rather than self-esteem [esteem from self], in birthing men out of boys, and women out of girls.

"Modern epic"  is an oxymoron today because of absent vitalities to take things and see them to the end,,, and yet, we have a whole industry of stories, of tag-lines, of thought-experiments, of bull-shite, of mundanity, of useless gibberish, vivid experiences, random moods, remote glimpses and of conscience….

Life as a whole is a slow becoming pooling from all kinds of quarters and selecting out from all kind of quarters; selection standards thus become necessary.

The best standards are born of the most comprehensive life, that for its sake, requires passionate lofty wills, willing to go to the edge,

the confidence of elastic vitalities not afraid to be stretched thin, in this process.


Human beings are nature's own continuity, - not as consciously given, but something we must Desire to make so;
to be broad and lofty and deep as Vital-nature itself.

what is needed is not only a reconnection and grounding of word to world,

but resourcing of healths for the passion to cover new grounds - loftier ideals raising an enriched world into view.

Not only the rooting of the word to world, but the SCOPE of the self and thereby the world itself must be challenged as the direct expression of the highest standards of health - life's own self-enriching power;
max. harmony born of max. dissonance - richest tensions.

Just as exercise lends strength and a confidence in oneself to take up tasks,
spiritual exercise lends strength and a self-trust to experiment and endure more.

Before Objectifying standards,
We need a Subjective sharpness, increased Scope of the self, to cause to appear and summon the highest standards as such, and to bear these standards one births.
The scope of our selves is born of our courage to face life, and the courage for our convictions in facing life.
We need to want/a-spire to stand well before forming standards to stand well.

The Apollonian is a distinguishing itself by a "That which I am not"; it is a recession, a breaking-away to put distance, de-fining itself.

The Dionysian is a distinguishing itself by a "This is what I am"; in its highest and heartfull affirmation, it is the deepest historical current that draws along everything good and bad in its sweep, its exaltation, beyond pain/pleaure. It pulls the whole force of a history with it, and leaves back what doesnt stick to it… akin to a soil eros-ion, a slow deforestation, the loosening (lysis) of earth and soil by an alluvion… and opens distance, chasms… new remote islands depositing its riches elsewhere, preparing new Individual trees as the sum total of this time EROS-ion, floating glaciers, and new sea-beds of life rearranging, revaluing, regenerating, and re-fining itself.


Stupidies cannot be reasoned with.

The apathetic stop there.

The passionate real-ize sickness can only be fought with health, a discipline of certain (bank)-balance, and the lustful courage for being more and more in touch with oneself.


We are looking at a very bleak picture, if this hedonistic current continues on, and all it produces as rebels and resistors are apathetic survivors, narcissistic preservers, cynical managers, paranoid intellects, and dare-devil players.

We lose the idea of a beautiful be-ing,

the very visage of life, the span of our most wholesome 'form', the 'swell' of our pride...


At bottom, for some of us, it is more than a matter of curiosity.

It is a madness, and an obsession that translates to the exhilaration of the creative/destructive will's pride in the face of meaninglessness…
Not just creating anything, but only of the finest standards,
of the highest excellence,
of the best of the best…


The adrenaline of the Aryan drive.

Its those suffering with the narcisstic-paranoid complex, the aggressive bullies who need ultimate verifications, lacking self-trust or born with weak genetic coherence, need to test everything to death.

Such "objectivists" who are truly chaos-worshippers, cannot stand the sight of anything that is beautiful, loyal, trust-worthy, clean in body, mind and soul, in short - Disciplined [weak as they are], and thus have them subjected to constant tests and bullying.

If the object stands its ground, the "Objectivists" can then take the credit for "bringing out the best" in ohers.

If the object breaks down, the "Objectivists" can then take the credit for "always knowing things are whorish at bottom".


Its a win-win situation, a trick-setup that is meant to compensate their lack of self-coherence [dubbed: 'flexibility', 'adaptability'];
Dubbing the inability to restrain as a voluntary action.

Its how the Xt. paranoid hedonist escapes the pain of letting, even the slightest chance of being deceived agitate him, and the pain of facing someone more coherent than he/she is.

Its far better to keep things closed between the two brackets of a win-win,

["I am the bully'] aggressive card, and also ["I am the bullied"] victim card.

The bully can then justify his bullying pretending to be the 'healthy' one who fights against becoming the 'victim' of others by being paranoid and therefore testing, and rebegins the circle...


In a man-woman context,

a chaos-worshipping 'Objectivist' under the guise of a master-tester or "experienced one" can always provoke a good woman in the name of knowledge and experiment, until she,

1. Stands her ground and he can celebrate her strength as the creation he 'brought' out,

2. Attrition Breaks her resistance down eventually, or she dumps that bully for another, and he can then categorize her as the whore he knew she always was.


In the first case, he celebrates his narcissism as a Creator,
in the second case, he celebrates his narcissism as how 'unique and alone and rare' he is that 'no woman could match him'…

The cycle is a vicious circle.

The consequences of such a position is that,

in the larger society, where no evidence will do, and no self-trust is possible, all women without exceptions "ARE" rendered whores;

and this means, if even an exceptional one should compliment or value a man as a "nice guy", it is taken as a loss of respect, and 'feminization'…


Because at bottom, to such 'objectivists', what matters to them is,

'how much effect did I have'?

'If she calls me a nice guy, I had no effect, because we all know she is at bottom a whore pretending to be a lady…', etc.


The narcissist-paranoid becomes the slave of effects,

of verifications,

needing to see this effect that one has on others…


Anything that doesn't become utilizable to one's cost-benefit will become enough to be convinced of the other's whoredom…

Given one has no trust in oneself at all, this verification and testing of the other is a never-ending trial, until a relationship is sucked dry and dies out.

But such an "Assuring" death is even more preferred than something that is disciplined and clean that provokes it.

Narcissistic-Paranoid psychopaths have this underlying complex.

No amount of verification will suffice till the other is dead, their dignity is choked out, or the relationship is dead.

Which is what chaos-worshippers are --- worshippers of death and things that dont move anymore.


I have said this before, the blond dionysian is a cultured man, and not the chaos-worshipping blind dionysian who re-labels his inability for self-control as his 'free-spirit'. It is nothing short of a barbaric weakness and a spiritual, intellectual midgetry.

A spiritual midget is so wretched he would rather lump and accuse even the exception as a slut and a whore given to another,,, than recognize a woman is quite capable of a perfect discipline that owes Nothing to Environment or all the other "excuses" to justify the pattern one is Forced to acknowledge of her sheer Spirit, her Guts, her Heart, and her straight-standing.

Typically, havent the inferior midgets always called the women superior to them as Feminists or dirty whores?…  no surprises there, and one cannot take such "Objective assessments" seriously when it comes at the cost of pulling down another to hide one's own wretchedness.

Bullying and shaming are the methods of the chaos-loving Xt. masochist, typically drawn to those women who hurt him, because they convince him all the more, "all women are at bottom whores, only degrees vary", which is very assuring and reinforces the premise of this weakling, a.k.a The Objectivist.


Needless to say, all is true gender vice-versa.

Watch out for those narcissistic bullies who love performing and inflating, that the other who has eniugh confidence and expects none of their performance, is shamed, provoked, and sullied till they 'become whores' or are 'whores just waiting to emerge'...

If anything is Toxic today, it is something that goes beyond gender - although the chaos-lovers love to perpetuate the gender divide, as if what exists in nature wasn't already enough.
Only death would give them peace.

If anything is Toxic today, it is a spiritual issue of a strong self-development and trusting one's own senses.




To the Fathers and Grand-mothers of future daughters,

inculcate the pride and strength and dignity of Will you Are in them, that no unworthy man breaks your fortress who are your daughters, unswayed by the Bullies of the world, and the worthy man inherits your fountain.

To the Fathers and Grand-mothers of future sons,

inculcate the pride and strength of Will you Are in them, that a strong man trusts himself as the one who has not surrendered to the bullying of the 'chaos'. Things tend to fall down - doesnt mean, one surrenders to the trend, losing their culture - their 'Manity'; such a one not ashamed to be called a Nice Guy, unagitated and nobly trustful of what looks good to his senses, come what may.


The Narcissistic-Paranoid complex has made the modern man so feminized, he shivers and trembles with dis/ease and un/ease at being judged a nice person.

All omega rapists find their excuse here - the pretext of a woman desiring a cultured man as an impossible, she being a whore at bottom, as all are.  

What is needed is the strong heart that can handle highs and lows of the consequences of one's judgement, and not passively resort and resign to inventing schemes and methods and "logic" to escape pain and the downsides of life, the truths of weaknes that life show.

Honesty is not a Xt.'s confession of all the weakness he is - something to hold on to, and,

Pride is not the justification of weakness, but the method of vitalizing it and self-conquering.

Good post, thank you Lyssa.
I was wondering if you could elaborate on this?

Lyssa wrote:

Honesty is not a Xt.'s confession of all the weakness he is - something to hold on to, and,

Did you intend to say that honesty (from honor) is not a spilling of one's guts, acting as if one is in a confessional as a 'show of strength' - but instead holds onto those judgments for himself?

Slaughtz wrote:

Good post, thank you Lyssa.
I was wondering if you could elaborate on this?

Lyssa wrote:

Honesty is not a Xt.'s confession of all the weakness he is - something to hold on to, and,

Did you intend to say that honesty (from honor) is not a spilling of one's guts, acting as if one is in a confessional as a 'show of strength' - but instead holds onto those judgments for himself?

No, I am referring to the bigger phenomenon covered in the three consecutive posts [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]; how 'consciousness' was rendered into a Xt. 'conscience'.


Foucault elaborated on this [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]:

Quote :

"Commenting on the significance of Rousseau’s Confessions, Gutman (1988, p. 102) states: “…there has indeed been an immense labor to turn man into a subject (an individuated self and a defined personage in the social order) in order to subject him more completely and inescapably to the traversals and furrowings of power.” For Gutman the confession sits at the heart of this labour,

In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Foucault describes how  “Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth”;

Foucault wrote:

"…the confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have singularly become a confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relationships, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses ones crimes, one’s sins one’s thoughts and desires, ones illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat…Western man has become a confessing animal." [Foucault, 1978, p. 59]

Our society has become obsessed with “the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (Foucault, 1978, p. 59).

In the West “ the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points…that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us” (Foucault, 1978, p. 60). We have become accustomed to believing that power constrains us, holds us back and pins us down and that it is only through confession, through the revelation of all of that is inside of us that we can finally become free.

Sex has become a “privileged theme of confession” (Foucault, 1978, p. 61), a form of confession that compels individuals to confess any and every sexual peculiarity. Its effect is to reinforce heterogeneous array of sexualities. Foucault (1988, p. 16) believed that “sexual interdictions are constantly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about oneself”. Through the confession of inner secrets truth becomes the means by which sex is manifested.

“The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement” (p. 61); and it this ritual which takes place within relations of power where much is at stake."

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From there on Foucault takes it in the usual Marxist direction of oppressors and exploitation of power that should be cut short through non-judgemental practices, etc. which is not our direction. For e.g.. he says,

Foucault wrote:

"When a man comes before his judges with nothing but his crimes, when he has nothing to say but "this is what I have done," when he bas nothing to say about himself, when he does not do the tribunal the favor of confiding to them something like the secret of his own being, then the judicial machine ceases to function." [1978:18]

Which is another way the Marxists try to divorce the subject from its actions, as if, the doer and the deed could be different and have no 'continuity' - precisely what Foucault wants to abolish.


In any case, his Factual observations of confessional-modernity is what is of interest.


In the confessional mode, a man or anything - a relationship becomes constituted by the act of truth-telling. It is "objective truth-telling" that has seeped and taken over life so much, it is what now integrates man, validates and verifies experience, sanctifies relationships, etc.  

Humans now simply sobbing, crying, regretting things, in the guise of 'objectivity' or 'honesty', when in fact, they have simply become the Narcissistic means of feeling relief, liberation, self-pardoning. Philosophy has just become one big confessional, in the absence of God and the Church.

Not so much about what is or is not depraved, what is or is not high and low, but "Me", and "My" depravity relying on external witnesses because one can't trust oneself not to repeat the same. Once the Church stood for employing shaming techniques with its good and evil morality; now man generates pressure for shame, by open confessions, where, if he does slide back into depravity before a public, he could always tap into that "shameful feeling",,,, while also feeling paranoid of how the public 'controls' him and 'expects of him to perform' - the 'vulnerable victim'.

The underlying drive of one who opens up showing his vulnerabilities, as someone who is 'poorly understood' is a narcissism that wants to be loved and affirmed and accepted for whatever he is. Its a subtle bullying technique of getting the world to accodomate to you --- thereby Lowering the real objective standards of all that is good to his/her limitations.

You see how the idea is made to become - the Narcissist becomes the center.


While in Honesty, it is not about the man. It is about the objecive appraisal of a high life and a low life beyond the human world; a man doesn't escape the objective assessments of his self-knowledge. Honest realizations are about overcoming one's limitations to reach a higher order - not getting the world to accomadate you, but you adopting higher standards. This is why as you point out, etymologically, honesty relates to honour.


There are Honour codes and standard banners, and high ideals, that the self-severe, merciless towards themselves, accept nothing short of the highest excellence. One doesnt justify one's weakness or limitations by arguing cleverly - you can deceive yourself and others, but the loss is ultimately to oneself.

Honesty is not the weak 'letting go' of instincts and calling it being free-spirited, but a rank-ordering of instincts that allow a more stronger self-integration/integrity.

It is Not "honest" to roll in the mud and crawl on all fours, just because our past has an animality and calling that "being free and flexible" - no matter what Freud said…

Culture is not the 'burden of the beast', that one pretends to carry it calling it a 'repression',

it is not something separate like a load on a donkey,

but it either is in the very fabric of self-becoming, or it isn't.

It is not a performance,,, one either is cultured, or isn't.

One either loves the freedom derived from the strength and confidence of strong under-takings, or one doesn't.

What the Left and the Liberals and the Xts. will never understand of the real Right, Discipline is not a burden, or a repression, but the spiritual exercise of the highest Freedom:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Bound heart, free spirit. – If someone binds up his heart and takes it captive, he can give his spirit considerable freedom: I have said this once already. But nobody will believe me if they do not already know…" [BGE, 87]

Nietzsche wrote:

"Our genuine honesty, we free spirits, – let us make sure that it does not become our vanity, our pomp and finery, our limitation, our stupidity! Every virtue tends towards stupidity, every stupidity towards virtue; “stupid to the point of holiness” they say in Russia, – let us make sure we do not end up becoming saints or tedious bores out of genuine honesty! Isn’t life a hundred times too short to be bored? You would have to believe in eternal life in order to…" [BGE, 22]

Look at ILP and the 24 hr. confession - of what one is eating, feeling, doing, thinking,… Philosophy become a Church.

The modern culture of Pacifsm which blocks avenues of men being selected or selecting themselves through combat, war, initiations, whether physical or intellectual is now giving rise to a certain line of thought, a Xt. Patriarchy, that defines love, as a woman letting a man be his freest with her, that may involve his knocking her down, physical beating, forced sex, etc.

I of all people have always believed within a certain trust, this is an intricate intimacy and a kind of self-knowledge.

But it is pure cowardice to use someone as your punching bag to "feel masculine", as an "outlet of masculinity", when one avoids going through the challenges out in the real world - not necesarily bloodshed…   there are an innumerable number of avenues to sublimate and channelize one's masc. drive, shape-form oneself,,, as opposed to someone who makes sexual agitation as an Ends in itself.

A perpetual agitation, just as women make Foreplay as an ends in itself - A perpetual pampering and pleasure.

Consequence: Taking a healthy instinct, and tiring it out with constant agitation and will-to-verification, depletes the other, kicking in a defensive mode that closes up , and the narcissistic-paranoid can then always say - 'the world was always such' - a miserable place that has always hated him, 'has always shut the doors on him'…

Sure, anyone can provoke with lies also called, 'I was just testing you', and then narcify themselves 'the most hated' and other such self-privileging, when the provoked back-fire.

The devil plays dice with you, he agitates you till your attrition, till you commit a wrong to him like he has done you,
and then he feels equalized, for levelling you down and hides his wrong behind yours, reducing human nature itself as one of chaos and weakness, that confirms and re-inforces his own chaos-worship.

The quiet calm of the NPs should not be mistaken for anything but the waiting for one to blunder and fail, so it can pounce on them then, feeling narcissistically superior at its expense. In this sense of waiting to see the other fail, they tend to make the other paranoid, to never blunder, and this perfection in turn agitates the other all the more, driving it to test and suspect and verify even further.
They tend to make you lose confidence in yourself till you do blunder, which confirms their chaos-worshipping all the more - everything is tainted at bottom.

Such NP objectivity is like quicksands pulling you in.

The larger issue is the unsettled affair with mortality.
It is not easy to accept the justice of life thriving on sacrifice. What exists at the expense of some thing else, must make way for something else. The strong at least retain a little control on this something else they can make way for.

The fear of death, whatever the conscious brain may say or not say, is the biggest factor of NPs vying to be in the spotlight forever. 


Only the overcoming of the fear of death can heal, as is the case in every other dis/ease as well.

The vestiges of the J-Xt. self-inflation still lingers in this pathology of Narcissistic-Paranoia.

One first assumes a "My world" - they hide it under the label of 'Pride'.

And should anything go beyond their limitations and thus 'exclude' them, such 'non-worship' becomes a cause of victimhood.

When everything is falsely personalized under the guise of 'pride', then anything and everything can be manipulated to become an issue that "involves" one, is "about" oneself.

The Narcissistic-paranoid works through such false self-inflated self-insertions, and personal projections into things, to get the world talking about him or his affairs, his thoughts, his opinions, seeing himself in everything or making the world absolutely about oneself - this is not the path to becoming God-like, but reducing the world to one's midgetry.

What is self-investment?

The narcissist who begins with a secure identification after his mother [primal narcissism], then 'clings' to the world as belonging to him, for self-security, and, therefore any questioning of the world itself is experienced as a self-disintegration and dis-integration as an evil in itself.
Which in turn reinforces paranoia - to suspect and look for clues, signs, twitches, gestures, anything that will make the case for how the other is betraying, lost interest, is moving away, excluding him, a receding world…

That was an excellent explanation. Similar to what I thought you meant. I must not have been precise or clear enough. Thank you for the elaboration.

A response to part of what you said:
Those who would disconnect themselves from action, like Marxists as you say:

They will claim they did not personally attack you, but became a force of nature which was to test you and help you refine yourself. This is akin to telling a boy that amputating his healthy limbs is a test of him for his own benefit.

There is an instinct that exists between two warriors. It is a noble instinct that has become perverted. This luxurious state of amorality and death acceptance is taken advantage of by the most advanced charlatans, who use it as if the necessary conditions were always present - or to summon its condition on their whim to escape any minor error on their part.

This state of mind was usually reserved for actual battles between equals, who abandon pity and restraint so they do not hold back. The joyous, grinning warrior. It came with it the expectation that, being equals,  there would be no remorse or pitiful begging when the tides had turned.

The (((charlatans))) will appeal to this condition when they are caught, but when forced into a position of possibly losing their lives, they are quick to appeal to pity. By doing so the rat demonstrates its massive sense of entitlement - to effectively call upon the basest and most noble appeals with impunity.  If nothing else, the immense rage of the failed expectations by the warrior might drive him to slay the rat... Which would only make the rat cower more pitifully until the warrior let up. The only thing the rat remembers is the hatred, supposedly not even knowing what it was it did to anger the warrior because its behavior is second nature to it.

As a result of the charlatans being unrelenting in their appeal to this instinct, it also forces the manifestation of unrelenting Aryan spirits, like OhFortunae. The same spirit which was possibly raised up in Germany after WW1 and the society had sufficiently degenerated.

Yes, you got it.


Since the world is flux and conditions and circumstances always changing, such an NP path is forever going to need contant affirmation that feeds into the narcissism and its a never-ending test.

Its an old folk saying that if you keep trying to watch the milk boil, it never does,, and the moment you turn aside is when it overflows. Putting your head into the vaginal cave, so to speak, and peering onwards and onwards, you only end up going back into the Plato's cave. Its not a rebirth, but a blockage where you seal your own grave.

There's knowledge [an unending quest - observe], there's truth [the sanctity of a border - the preserve], and then there's wisdom which knows when to apply what and how much [the reserve].

The most objective wisdom will deploy objectivity as a tool and not as an ends in itself. This was what Heisman found out tragically:

Nietzsche wrote:

"The modern spirit's lack of discipline, dressed up in all sorts of moral fashions.- "objectivity" (lack of personality, lack of will, incapacity for "love")…" [WTP, 79]

Heisman wrote:

"Radical objectivity towards subjectivity would mean attempting honesty to the point of absurdity. To focus on rooting out the deepest sources of subjectivity amounts to seeking out those truths that are most destructive to subjectivity, i.e. self-interest. It is to make a specialty of truths that kill.

If I had no biases I would be dead, rather that sitting here right now, writing about them. To approach the most biasless state of death is to pursue a course of rational self-destruction through a rigorous elimination of biases towards life. Yet to be value neutral would be to not be biased towards objectivity over subjectivity or vice versa. While objectivity is not inherently self-justified as an end in itself, objectivity could be a means. Objectivity could be a means, for example, of rational self-destruction… through the overcoming of the bias towards life. Rational self-destruction through the overcoming of the bias towards life, in turn, can be a means of achieving objectivity. And this means: To will death as a means of willing truth and to will truth as a means of willing death." " [Suicide Note]

Its why NPs are chaos-worshippers, while they feel this pursuit of truth is their being 'honest', when in fact, it is a Xt. decadence.


The honest man, who lusts to see the entire gamut of life, must also want to see life-as-appearance. To stop at the surface, is a discipline, which lets the disciplined to see life even more acutely.

It reminds me of the absurdity of Transhumanism and such Hollywood films, that dream of taking a drilling machine into the brain, and expecting what?!

Heidegger spoke in an entire lecture of a chalk that is continuously broken and broken further, until one is left with powder - he meant to imply, the more you stab with a knife into the golden goose 'nature', the more it 'withdraws', or 'closes up',,, for nature loves to hide. It discloses itself in concealment - aletheia.

Likewise a knowledge-lover cannot stab his way into the world, but must MEET LIFE AT ITS OWN GAME - this is not an individual become passive, just passionate.
(It is with J.-Xt. that passive attains a negative connotation wrt. the feminine, which is another topic.)


He must match nature, vigour for vigour, and rigour for rigour - passion with discipline, if he wants to see the whole course.

The knife and the eye isnt the only instrument.

Sometimes seeing the entirety of life also involves camouflage - leaves and walls, and scalpels, hammers and needles, and safety-pins, and tooth-picks and spoons, and also a feather-touch…  
Which is how the Jason Bourne character is crafted too - daily implements - pen daggers and paper-knives...

Not just the eyes, but the ears, and the other senses in synesthesia,,, involving the whole presence of the body, we call "subjective presence" or heart or spiritual vitality or voluptuous joy.

The NP path is an exhaustion resigning to the isolation of this or that component, unable to pull and hold the whole presence of oneself.

To be wholly present - is what is mind-full, and what is mind-full is most objective.

The quiet calm of the NPs should not be mistaken for anything but the waiting for one to blunder and fail, so it can pounce on them then, feeling narcissistically superior at its expense. In this sense of waiting to see the other fail, they tend to make the other paranoid, to never blunder, and this perfection in the other, in turn agitates them all the more, driving it to test and suspect and verify even further.
They tend to make you lose confidence in yourself till you do blunder, which confirms their chaos-worshipping all the more - everything is tainted at bottom.

Such NP objectivity is like quicksands pulling you in.

The larger issue is the unsettled affair with mortality.
It is not easy to accept the justice of life thriving on sacrifice. What exists at the expense of some thing else, must make way for something else. The strong at least retain a little control on this something else they can make way for.

The fear of death, whatever the conscious brain may say or not say, is the biggest factor of NPs vying to be in the spotlight forever.


Only the overcoming of the fear of death can heal, as is the case in every other dis/ease as well.

Which is why the War must involve a subjective strengthening of the self to spiritually accept the Justice of coming to be and passing away, is ultimately necessary - not as something to bear, but the beauty in such a 'justice'. This is more than a rational and conscious event.

Only a strong will can forego its social death in the collective memory.

Its only after this, any striving for fame begins - Achilles exemplifies this.

The Randian rational who values survival at all costs, who is monolithic in his thinking, where winning is strictly positive and losing is strictly negative, needing therefore to survive somehow or the other makes compromises in life.

But because the sensual apparatus is weak, one does not have the necessary spirit to uplift those compromises in a graceful manner. Rational justifications like a cap keep the hot sun away with dialectic reasons and logic, but one is still sweating, still burning inside. Lacking spirituality, emotions are seen as a detriment, than an advantage. The fear is always of one coming apart by it. The evil nature trying to pull "them alone" apart.

There's always a need to purge, to project and transfer, the shame and guilt and inferiority complex associated with the humbling experiences, that consciousness could not help one to fully affirm. There is no closure. Its like a raped hole that sucks in everything to seal its aggravation, but in vain. Light is swallowed. Love is consumed away. The transference makes him/her project their indigestability on the other. Seeing them blunder and fail and become tainted just as one had to, is consoling, satisfying, even a thrill. Its an ugly wretchedness.

The more honest rationals are aware of needing such objects, 'therapon', 'doubles' to hold their negativity. The less honest crooks totally relinquish "the emotions" associated with past patterns (even if the patterns remain as skeletal fact they cling to for self-coherence) into the other. The other thus becomes the tainted. They are categorized and stored away in the pain-repelling comfortable memory as the "imperfect" ones, as the "insufficient" ones, as the "controlling" evil nature that torments them, etc.
The double is no longer cherished, but divorced from oneself as the 'tainted' part, as the 'regretful' part,, and this pattern of seeing the other cannot be undone. It suits one's own survival. Any honesty here would mean the self coming apart.

Here's where Narcissism kicks in even more. One plays the "humble" part of the "bigger being" who "forgives" the other's "short-comings".  Its how it re-routes esteem back into itself, for attempting to taint the other.

Lawrence wrote a poem on this, of the compromise, the needing to prove to oneself, and the unconscious:

D.H.Lawrence wrote:

"A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
i o And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness."

One bites the hand that feeds…


Standing up to nature is not an easy task.

With the wrong and dishonest attitude, nature wrecks you in many reductive ways.

Spiritual strength that allows the delight in one's loftiest emotions is attained only on the path beyond pain/pleasure, and cost/benefit.

A healthy paranoid is prepared for unforeseeable events and strengthens himself. He exercises judgement for him, while he evaluates the other. Knowing the other in its full complexity is a determination of one's limits that one does not know. One is open and alert to dangers.

An unhealthy paranoid fearing everything as a threat, tries to reduce, weaken, shame, bully, in short, dis-integrate the other to protect himself, to raise himself in his esteem, than strengthening himself. He exercises judgement For the other, since he lacks self-trust in himself. Knowing the other within one's own pre-determined limits is key. He is closed to learning, feeling secure within his limits.

Reducing the other to one's own limits is not fore-thought, or prudence, or foresight, but Deciding ahead for another, what they are, so he can feel secure. This is not self-strengthening, but 'containing' the other, also called abstraction or daming up/drying up of the life-force from flowing.

Nietzsche wrote:

"The extent to which one needs a faith in order to flourish, how much that is 'firm' and that one does not want shaken because one clings to it - that is a measure of the degree of one's strength (or, to speak more clearly, one's weakness). Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today; hence it still finds believers.

...demand for certainty that today discharges itself in scientific-positivistic form among great masses - the demand that one wants by all means something to be firm (while owing to the fervour of this demand one treats the demonstration of this certainty more lightly and negligently): this is still the demand for foothold, support - in short, the instinct of weakness that, to be sure, does not create sundry religions, forms of metaphysics, and convictions but does - preserve them." [JW, 347]

In the lack of absolutes, and conditions of distrust, the NP is underneath a Xt. 'scientist' seeking verifications, and max. certainty, and cost/benefits to avoid falling apart.

The war-like man, irrespective of the pain/pleasure that may befall him, is the Dionysian who uses his own self as support and banks on himself.

Self-trust is the refusal to stop exploring because the harnesses aren't 100% safe, because the tools aren't totally fool-proof.

Its because they are not so, the war-like man distinguishes himself by his courage - his self is all the support he needs;
while the NP, may not venture at all, in a nature, that evil woman, "who's out to get him", "is just waiting to see him fall", "waiting to destroy his pride", etc.

When the metaphysical outlook itself is tainted with fear, one passes this imprint upon every other one sees, every situation one finds themselves in.

The world is an indifferent place.

Injecting "hostility" or "hospitality" into the world is an emotional, paranoid projection of One kind of Apollonian path. Seeing the other as "out to get it", "out to destroy it",, is the self-centric view of a weak system resigned to nature, than taking the onus to meet nature at its fiercest, its most terriblest and most majestic.

To see entropy as an evil or satanic is inserting a human moralism, from which flows, chaos-worship of the "inevitable", and all as "imperfect", and nothing is good enough, and ceaseless verification by seeking those who "destroy" them.

Deleuze attributed such ceaseless mechanical and automated verification to the sadistic complex, and contractual persuasion with a more powerful entity to the masochistic complex:

Deleuze wrote:

"The second and higher factor represents the impersonal element in sadism and identifies the impersonal violence with an Idea of pure reason. In Sade we discover a surprising affinity with Spinoza - a naturalistic and mechanistic approach imbued with the mathematical spirit. This accounts for the endless repetitions, the reiterated quantitative process of multiplying illustrations and adding victim upon victim, again and again retracing the thousand circles of an irreducibly solitary argument.

In the work of Masoch there is a similar transcendence of the imperative and the descriptive toward a higher function. But in this case it is all persuasion and education. We are no longer in the presence of a torturer seizing upon a victim and enjoying her all the more because she is unconsenting and unpersuaded. We are dealing instead with a victim in search of a torturer and who needs to educate, persuade and conclude an alliance with the torturer in order to realize the strangest of schemes. This is why advertisements are part of the language of masochism while they have no place in true sadism, and why the masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates and destroys them. The sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations. The middle ages distinguished with considerable insight between two types of commerce with the devil: the first resulted from possession, the second from a pact of alliance. The sadist thinks in terms of institutionalized possession, the masochist in terms of contracted alliance.

It is essential to the masochist that he should fashion the woman into a despot, that he should persuade her to cooperate and get her to "sign". He is essentially an educator and thus runs the risk inherent in educational undertakings. In all Masoch's novels, the woman, although persuaded, is still basically doubting, as though she were afraid: she is forced to commit herself to a role to which she may prove inadequate, either by overplaying or by falling short of expectations." [Coldness and Cruelty]

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It is the self-puling Xt. sadomasochistic NP, that would put testing as an ends in itself - the constant performance and reinvention boosts its need for attention.

A culture is more than about males and females reduced to their sexual roles, but wholesome [and that does not mean abs. perfect] Men and Women who are comprehensive mirrors of nature at its most nuanced.


To test oneself and challenge oneself is not a gender issue, but a human issue;
not everything should be reduced to cock and pussy.

Humble-brags.

A term for those, esp. Xts., who brag about how humble they are, is the kind of narcissism pertinent here.

Social Justice Warriors and the Apollonian Left.


In the following, and the above posts, I have aimed to outline only the unhealthy and negative aspects of NP. No doubt, there is a healthy and desirable side to it, but for now, my interest is in the growing Victim Industry, where just about anything can become a cause of narcissistic victimhood, and any growth past the limit of one's comfort is being relabelled as "injustice" - which is the case of the social-"Justice"-warriors.

When any suggestion can come to take on sinister undertones of trying to 'decide for them', 'control' them, etc, such an attitude pushes away others from even passing a greeting, who do not want to be falsely accused, and the narcissist's isolation in turn, breeds the victim-industry's view that 'everyone hates them', 'they are good for nobody and belong to the lowest rank', 'they are the betrayed and the marginalized and the excluded', 'the world is only full of 'users' and 'ooportunists' waiting to leave', 'they are the cast out whom nobody wants', and everyone just wants to "use, abuse, deceive and persecute them'.

The NP's destruction of forcing the other to blunder in order to taint them, to bring it out even when none is present, just to corroborate with their chaos-worship, should have no repercussions back, is a self-invested venture, where the other is no more than fodder and guinea pig confirming one's pre-established ideas of the world.

Modern Narcissism where those, who value nothing but themselves, then, when given a taste of their own, shown a mirror, will point how it is the other that has no feeling, no respect, no humanity and is apathetic. They are the 'Nazis'.

This cycle is hard to break, unless a culture valuing strength takes over.

Views that fall below or rise above the horizon of the NP's comprehension are shut down typically as a "threat", that threatens one's world view.

The liberal Left clings to itself so rigidly, a petrifaction, that will not move beyond its comfort level, enforcing a culture of dysgenics.
The danger of the Apollonian Left is that another can be pressured, shamed, and made to feel guilty for advancing, exploring, growing, expanding base, tapping into channels for self-growth, as "joining hands with chaos" ironically, when it is NPs at bottom that are chaos-worshipping, conceiving all things as a 'threat' in terms of only itself, and for only itself…

In the severe pathological case, the world has to stop growing, in order that it need not feel threatened. Justifications using Minimalism are applied here to check its environment from growing. Growth can be dismissed away as a 'luxury', or 'decadence', or 'hedonism' ironically. To keep it 'trim' is how they safeguard their comfort zone within 'safe spaces'.

In SM relations, a "Safe-word" is

Quote :

"a code word, series of code words or other signal used by a submissive or bottom to unambiguously communicate their physical or emotional state to a dominant or top, typically when approaching, or crossing, a physical, emotional, or moral boundary. Some safewords are used to stop the scene outright, while others can communicate a willingness to continue, but at a reduced level of intensity. Safewords are usually agreed upon before playing a scene by all participants…"

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Where reality itself has been entered into with an 'agreed upon pact" within the Comfort of the limit it draws - Nature and self in a BDSM relation, then "injustice" is the "safeword" of the Left.

Any justification to not grow, venture, explore and to keep others from not exploring to keep the world sheltered within Its limited parameters is a sinister and s(l)ick Nihilism.

The Narcissist who loves to perform, to be seen, will also be the Paranoid, who will single you for 'making' them perform, for seeing them. Remember that Catcalls video.
Where there is mistrust, there is easily the sense of being 'used', 'abused', 'exploited', 'victimized'…
Hear the double-standards in the cry of the "justice" warriors who feel strait-jacketed turning every voluntary behaviour as involuntary when it suits them.

They will claim they are the marginalized and should be left alone, and when one leaves them alone or is pushed till one is made to leave them alone, they will complain how you have marginalized them like a typical megacorps and upper class snob gone off for greener pastures and what a sell-out 'all' the world is. This marginalism of being left feeds into its 'unique snowflake' narcissism of how they are not slaves to follow after this or that like the rest of the world. There is a humble-bragging that keeps churning this circle.

To note, with NPs who are ultimately chaos-worshippers, nothing can satisfy. Nothing.
Even the best and the most ideal, perfect state still harbours the worm of time and so is to be shunned at some level. No merger with one's own self is possible, let alone anything else in life.
What is good and delightful is the 'certainty' that there will always be some 'injustice' one way or the other.

Every pro has a con, but with NPs, this is more a "relief" and a happy guarantee one can count on, than a plain fact.

NP is a complex, because the one and the same thing that feeds its Narcissism ['you came to me'], is simultaneously exploited to nourish its Paranoia too, that the other came to 'control' it - 'you came to me' is now turned sinister.

This takes on the aggressive component of bullying, of continual testing, looking for "Trigger words", trials, courts… the whole gamut follows, till it can reduce the other to its self-verifying consolation 'we are all weak, we are all imperfect, we hurt the ones we love'. Such an admission that it forces out, is what it understands as humanity - of a shared suffering and levelling - "we are all in the same boat" at bottom, chaos-worship.

Compare that with:

Quote :

"The paranoid attitude in the form of an idea of grandeur is obvious in the Jewish claim of being the 'chosen people.' There is even even a subterranean tie between the masochistic and the paranoid attitude in the idea that God chastises those whom He loves." [Thomas Reik, 1962, p. 230-231]

Reich wrote vehemently on Xt. patriarchal 'fascism' that brought a whole "rigor mortis" of this self-clinging, an abs. need for conrol, a petrifaction of the self, that he Falsely resolved could only be put an end to with a total loosening up of the libido, a 'sexocracy'. Like the paranoid psychotic for whom it is easier to trust a dead body than a living, growing one:

Nietzsche wrote:

"Man seeks "the truth":a world that is not... deceptive, does not change, a true world-a world in which one does not suffer;
contradiction, deception, change--causes of suffering!

Contempt, hatred for all that perishes, changes, varies whence comes this valuation of that which remains constant? ...the desire for a world of the constant.

Happiness can be guaranteed only by being; change and happiness exclude one another. The highest desire therefore contemplates unity with what has being.

The real primum mobile is disbelief in becoming, mistrust of becoming, the low valuation of all that becomes-

What kind of man reflects in this way? An unproductive, suffering kind, a kind weary of life.[WTP, 585]

While every growth is a limiting and diminishing of one's own, it is the Narcissists who take Being as the highest reality, turn the growth of the other as a personal rivalry "out to destroy it". - This is the core of Hegelian-Marxism that the paranoid SJW inherits.

That passage is enough to isolate how masochism and NP dovetail each other.

Once the metaphysical assumption has been made with emotional hues, that nature is an "evil woman", or a "hostile force" out to get them,,, becoming is evil and being is good, then this is what it reduces the entire world-view to. Growth is seen as a cancer or an overwhelming death force disintegrating it, and only to be allowed within cautious cost/benefit rationalisms - a.k.a. "personal comfort" that preserve it.

Every loftiness in this way can be reduced to a function bracketed under the lowest state, so that, even the noblest man is just a few degrees absent of ignobility and chaos, just as in Hegel's dialectic, the master was just a function of the slave ultimately. Even if one has no credible proof of being controlled or persecuted, for the pathological NP, it becomes hard to trust one's senses, swallow anything clean, neat, noble, clear... all is to be mis-trusted and sent through a ceaseless rational calculator. What remains is a view of life reduced to how much pain one can take, how much pain one can avoid, etc. etc. - a hedonistic filter.
And yet it is the clear, and the spotless, that it masochistically seeks - again and again to confirm all the more, that all is tainted.

From the opposite side of things, Klossowski helped show that at bottom the self is empty and what we call 'self' is a series of fluctuations stabilized with a steady will. They are careful 'assemblies of power'. The self is constantly building and constructing and in a meaningless world, it Creates meaning for itself.

In the pathological case, as was the Enlightenment rationalism, the more one forms a semiotized or coded self, or, the more one attempts to self-define through enlightenment rationalisms, then,

Deleuze wrote:

"the more one experiences oneself as persecuted by a counter-self because any identity is unstable lacking absolutes. Subject develops a persecuting other in a mad attempt to foreclose its own inherent instability arising from the process of infinite semiosis so as to paradoxically secure itself." [Capitalism]

This is the Uncanny or the Double/Doppelganger, that exploded and marked the anti-enlightenment Romanticist movement logically following from it.

The more one experiences one's self as a 'construct', under the scientific will-to-truth, to get to the bottom of things, tearing the self down and seeing 'nothing' there,,, it leads to an outbreak of paranoia through the form of the Double, the persecutor - who 'knows' the 'secret' and is out to 'tear open and expose' the self's vulnerability.

Romanticist NP follows Enlightenment Rationalism this way.

This line of thought however, is then used by Deleuze and those libtards supporting "race and racial identity is a "construct" and nothing is real. We needn't go there. But its enough to observe how Hegel's relativism is still playing out. One does not rely on one's own empiricism, a self-trust in the capacity of one's senses, but rational self-knowledge constructed by verifications provided by another. The Master distinguishing himself from the slave and vice-versa breeds a morbid paranoia, of finding oneself in every other, and every other as one's persecutor.

Therefore, on the one hand, there is an aversion to aspire to any Becoming past cost/benefit of one's comfort, the world and everything is tainted ultimately and 'nothing is perfect' is a source of Ressurance than simply as a fact.
Xt. Compassion is scavenging upon the weaknesses and flaws of others to feel better at their expense - i.e., delighting in its chaos-worship, that misery belongs to all. "That we are all flawed, we are all imperfect" is nourishment to its soul, being capable of only, and ever only affirming the wretched in everything - which is what offers it, the most Certainty, and this certainity which is the most stable, the least unchanging is what it trusts, and what keeps its self cohered together:

Nietzsche wrote:

"The compassionate Christian.-- The reverse side of Christian compassion for the suffering of one's neighbor is a profound suspicion of all the joy of one's neighbor, of his joy in all that he wants to do and can." [Daybreak, 80]

Life deals out a bad hand and one wants to inflict upon the world the same 'injustice', transfer the same impoverishment, deprivation, ressentiment, humiliation, deceptions, that one suffered or voluntarily took on. They translate to aggressive psychotics, wanting to f--- the other over,, the bullied by 'life' who become bullies,,, either overtly, or covertly in the form of relabelling their abjection, shame tactics, and violence as 'bringing the best out in the other' - "progress and justice".

Everything that is joyful and happy and innocent is to be mistrusted [not distrusted, but Mis-trusted].

One is unable to wish anything happy or good for the other, not out of malice, but because the idea of good itself is relativized to a few degrees better than bad. Ambitiousness past hedonistic comfort and Know Thyself becomes a useless pursuit. Why bother when everything is only a matter of degrees of difference from the ultimate chaos?

The idea of Love is reduced to no more than one of "shared suffering" in the sense of levelling down everything to their stigmata - 'all is tainted' is the holy communion of partaking.
And shared joy, like Schopenhauer's Xt., is a fleeting, transitory "grace" that one is "grateful" for in the backdrop of "shared suffering". There is only gratitude, no love. "Life is a miracle" is the slogan of the Left, against which backdrop, the emotional saturation of "injustice" can reflect brighter.
Desire is not a positive force of what one loves, but negatively defined as that which is least threatening to one.

Since every being is a "construct", therefore, one Mistrusts even one's own self. - Descartes.

Because one mistrusts even oneself, one mistrusts the other. Every other becomes a persecutor. - Dopplganger.

Girard shows the rest, the consequences of the doubling.

While a natural basis to paranoia has not been denied, tucking away the dangers of Apollonianism, as though it alone and it only constituted everything that is perfect and healthy, is a deliberate deceit and hedonistic limiting, levelling.

The Modern proliferation of artificial hybrids and artificial "diversity" is not only from a Dionysian schizoid fragmentation, but also an Apollonian creation of lies after lies, constructs after constructs to justify its inertial remaining in its comfort zone and refusal to face a larger reality. SJWs rather cry of injustice of this or that, manufacture every excuse in the world to justify their weakness, than face their limitations.

The argument that the state should be more "open-minded" to take their constant abuse of freedom, is actually how the Apollonian Left perpetuates what Girard called the 'scandal'. Immersing the entire society in 'scandals', in controversies at the drop of a hat, is how it spotlights itself, till it pulls down the whole machinary in self-justifications of its sinister nihilism. A scandal is a mirroring away till the other can be presented as no more better off than itself, and in this way, escape its own confrontation. Lies and rebuttals to lies and rebuttals to rebuttals ad. inf. is the incitation, till the original lie can be buried under the scandal and new constructs and inventions can begin again.

'Making the society stronger', 'progress', is how it deceives and justifies its abuse of freedom.
By this ill-logic, where anything can be abused endlessly in the name of 'making humanity strong', the entire state can be punched and punched and punched like a punching bag, till whats left is a "stiffness", a non-responsive Rigidity.
The transferrence of the left's own frozen self-clutching, can now be exploited to point out how the state is "false" for claiming to be strong, and how we are all in the same boat of weakness.

Anything that is strong can be abused and punished this way for being strong, till it can be shamed for actually being "weak at bottom". But what is this, except the weakness of the left, growing muscles for more wreckage at the expense of punching society and culture down. Expecting the state to be tolerant to all its decadent whimsies and punching it constantly is how it develops Its knuckle for Its benefit at the expense of the whole of evolution.

That strength means being tolerant of another's abuse, never striking back, is how it spreads its Xt.;

strength = "when someone strikes you, turn the other cheek also";
weakness = "striking back".

"Bullies are weak and tainted", says the chaos-worshipping bully.

A whole rendering of the other into a passive state of open acceptance, till the threshold can be broken down to accept its weakness as the norm, is how it perpetuates its false justifications to crouch its own weakness. And its self-hatred stemming from its weakness. Cultural Marxism is a ressentimental Abjection.

In an industry, air-pillows for cars in case of accidents are usually tested by forcefully ramming the car into a wall, repeatedly, to see if it holds.

But its a sinister nihilism from a failed brake of the weak self that turns the whole world into a laboratory and every one in it as guinea pigs and testing to death, just so it can feel secure.
The wretchedness of such a dishonest virulence is even worse than the Joker in Batman who is honest about his chaos-worship, 'why be serious?'...

The Narcissistic-Paranoia in blowing up culture, bridges, ancient sculptures, museums, temples, places of strength and health have been exemplified by the over-rational geo-Metrifying, cubifying Islamists as well as the cultural marxists through their "journalism and discourse".

Lies over lies over lies to cover its feeling of weakness and ensuing self-persecution, is a major factor of producing artifical diversities, "occupy movements" making space for its weakness to grow, and flourish. Lacan saw how this leads the NP to a collection and hoarding of things, items, concepts, to cover the lies, when the Apollonian petrifaction and the frozen image of oneself becomes significant in the absence of real actions and capacity to confront one's weakness.

Observe the petrified geo-Metric stiff repetitions of those like iambig. simply adding and adding more clauses and laws to their iteration in the name of being "as comprehensive as possible", as "empathatic as possible" to "take in everyone's view", when at bottom, these are constructs after constructs by someone who atleast has admitted his incapacity to be unable to trust his own senses. This admittance itself is the aftermath of an involuntary shock; else most likely, even that would be covered up and denied in typical constructs.

In the pathological Apollonianism, the "I am that which I am not" becomes the ground of perpetual deferment where one can endlessly keep looking at the other, and never facing the weakness or limitations of oneself, and create all these excuses and constructs - anything to avoid facing oneself. Putting the other on the defensive using a scandal, one can always play the judge who 'verifies'. In more severe cases, the other will be pushed and punched until they blunder, or the other 'persecutes' them back, for their aggression, after which, one can now continue to carry on 'I am that which I am not' in the face of the 'unjust' other who is 'out to break them'.

Solipism is not only a result of subjectivity's 'I am whatever I want to be', but also the result of the Objectivity's getting away with ever having to face itself, and continually finding flaws and manufacturing excuses in the other, to Then declare that It is what it is not.

This pathology of Narcissistic-Paranoia was the basis of the Surrealist Art Movement, where [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and Lacan both observed how the persecution complex in weakly cohered systems, feeling nothing at bottom, begin to create their own reality, manufacturing constructs, not as an irrationality, but as a systemic Rational Aggression towards maintaining self-solipsism.
The real reality becomes a 'tool', to exploit for the purpose of one's own narcissistic voice/void.

Dali and Lacan, however, took this kind of NP Surrealism as one more route of marxist revolution to tear down reality and replacing it with personal significance, at the expense of others, and the expense of the world. The marxist intention is not our concern here, but the mechanism of the NP as they correctly understood.

Dali called the technique of his Surrealist Movement, the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], where anything can become a trigger of the other 'persecuting it', that it objectifies, it stiffens to death, and presents it back to the world as "Objectivity", and in this way reveals its romanticism - the subject's power to invent, to construct, where meaning becomes the signifier than the signified, the subject than the object.

While the observation that is [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] can be a healthy case of NP, and the detection of how and what things relate in a web - that Surrealism wanted to exploit for a Marxist purpose;
in the pathological sense, it is essentially a nihilism that, abusing the other stiff and immobile and lifeless, under the self-deceit the other is a persecutor or a rival, it can keep the world and every interaction and conception reduced in a dysgenic state of its own limits, and Objectivity as the justification for those limits.

By this ill-logic, the Xt. Left promotes the insulting of each other as the "freedom of expression" citing that maturity is about being cool, passive, non-reactive, 'open-minded', 'tolerant', and the strength to bear undisturbedly every injustice and every Depravity of its weakness, while that very same "freedom of expression" is exploited by it to create an Industry, a Lawfulness of suing anyone for anything. NP is this win-win, 'having it both ways' hedonistic complex, making sure ahead, it "should" never lose.
The Xt. will-to-truth for this purpose, of tearing away the veils of nature, in the pretext of wanting to see its naked power, is exploited to feed its persecution complex, holding the naked power of nature now as "trying to subdue it", "trying to control it" or "destroy it", etc. Everything can continue to remain suspect forever, thus -

The suspicious testing of alien nature for its power,
and then the power of nature held suspect for alienating it…

A self-perpetuating discontented cycle that helps cohere its narcissistic sense of self.

The Xt. Left's Apollonian solipsism can only be checked with a culture of strength and self-trust, and increasing scope of a disciplined self and the subjective clarity born of it.

Quote :

"The aspect of paranoia that Dalí was interested in and which helped inspire the method was the ability of the brain to perceive links between things which rationally are not linked. Dalí described the paranoiac-critical method as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.

The Surrealists related theories of psychology to the idea of creativity and the production of art. In the mid-1930s André Breton wrote about a "fundamental crisis of the object". The object began being thought of not as a fixed external object but also as an extension of our subjective self. One of the types of objects manifested in Surrealism was the phantom object.

According to Dalí, these objects have a minimum of mechanical meaning, but when viewed the mind evokes phantom images which are the result of unconscious acts.

The paranoiac-critical arose from similar Surrealistic experiments with psychology and the creation of images such as Max Ernst’s frottage or Óscar Domínguez's delacalcomanie, two Surrealist techniques, which involved rubbing pencil or chalk on paper over a textured surface and interpreting the phantom images visible in the texture on the paper.
Employing the method when creating a work of art uses an active process of the mind to visualize images in the work and incorporate these into the final product. An example of the resulting work is a double image or multiple image in which an ambiguous image can be interpreted in different ways."

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Just as the liberal left and the cultural marxists produced a whole plethora of constructs, the NP sustains itself by "scandalizing" everything and anything that it sees as a trigger, to mirrors of itself. Collecting images after images, as mirror-extensions - that is all is the same chaos -, the world becomes a false re-Collection of its self, a world reduced to the familiar category of its limits, than growing out of it.

Things can be manufactured till they become so, when it can reduce it all to a pattern and the limit it is familair with;

Quote :

"Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a stimulus (an image or a sound) wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern of something where none actually exists.

Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, the man in the moon, the moon rabbit, and hidden messages within recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds.

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Quote :

"The Paranoiac-critical method is thus the reverse of the children's 'picture-puzzles' in which people are hidden in drawings of trees etc, and resembles more the 'double-images' employed by psychologists. The two faces that become a vase, and other similar illusions such as faces seen in rocks, landscapes in marble and the anthropomorphic forms of plants such as the mandrake root."

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When anything can be or become exploited as a possible trigger to the weak, then the proliferation of constructs and artificial problems can be limitless, in which  case the NP can feel "Justified" for Remaining weak in the face of the limitless:

Quote :

"As Dali once said, “Paranoiac-critical activity organizes and objectivizes in an exclusivist manner the limitless and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of subjective and objective 'significance' in the irrational…”.

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Observe how the NP empties down the whole world by its limitless constructs;

Quote :

"This method was fashioned after paranoia, partly because this specific mental aberration was in vogue in the early-twentieth-century psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature, which focused on the paranoid patient’s stable system of interpreting reality or “systematising” it, to use a common term of the time. French doctors Paul Sérieux and Joseph Capgras, for instance, had in 1909 concluded that “delirious interpretation” in cases of paranoid psychosis was, in fact, “false reasoning” having a real sensation or event as the point of departure."

Leaving aside, then, the possibility of sensory hallucination, psychiatry had already detected in paranoia a mechanism whereby the patient assigned “unreasonable” – or socially unacceptable – meaning to the object of the senses. Freud had also discussed paranoia along those lines, pointing at the ways in which the unconscious regulated the interpretation of objects of perception, after projecting on the external world unconscious undesirable phantasies. In his famous “Schreber case” Freud would employ linguistic terms to analyse the ways in which these phantasies became different paranoid themes, adding that the paranoid delirium was not an illness per se, but in fact an “attempt at recovery”, an assimilative fictional world created by the paranoid patient’s ego in order to re-establish contact with reality (“Psychoanalytic Notes” 209).

Dali, in his search for a purposeful artistic method which would discredit conventional reality by infusing it with unconscious material, placed the paranoid mechanism “at the service of an imminent crisis of consciousness, at the service of the Revolution”, as he put it in a way that chimes with the avant-garde aims of the surrealist movement in the 1930s (Collected Writings 226). Thus, the paranoid mechanism was adopted as a creative mechanism that regulates the representation of the objects of perception.

In Dali’s theory, the paranoiac activity systematised the confusion of reality by having an unconscious obsessive idea bringing together and associating the objects of perception. In his own words, “[p]aranoia makes use of the external world in order to set off its obsessive idea”, utilising it “to control an imaginative construction” (Collected Writings 223; Oui 112). It is in this sense that Dali presented the famous double/multiple-image technique as an equivalent to the formation of the paranoid delirium, explicating it by way of a step-by-step process so as to emphasise the methodical, scientific quality of his theory:

"[t]he attainment of … a double image has been made possible thanks to the violence of the paranoiac thought which has made use, with cunning and skill, of the required pretexts, coincidences, and so on, taking advantage of them so as to reveal the second image, which, in this case, supersedes the obsessive idea." (Collected Writings)

The example he offered in this explication of the paranoiac double/multiple image is that of the image of a woman, which is unconsciously associated with and accommodates the image of a lion, which in turn is unconsciously associated with and accommodates the image of a horse.

In theory, the paranoiac process of producing multiple images, that is accommodating more and more images, would be limitless, and solely dependent on the paranoiac capacity of each individual (Dali, Collected Writings). And this is of utmost importance for Dali’s artistic vision, namely the possibility of producing essentially new images, “new simulacra” as he termed them, by simulating the mechanism at work in the formation of the paranoid delirium.

The argument that Dali put forward regarding the emphasis on the representational autonomy of the constituents of the double/multiple image was that the new image must be controllable and recognisable by all (Collected Writings). Dali related this to the nature of paranoia, which employs the reality of the external world “as illustration or proof” of the obsessive idea, “with the disturbing characteristic of verifying the reality of this idea for others”.

Eventually, this entails that the paranoid method strikes a fatal blow to reality, since the latter is “placed at the service of the reality of [one’s] mind”, which means that reality assumes a position subservient to the unconscious and the imaginative capacity of the artist.

Lacan asserted that its primary organising feature was the “personal signification” that was attached to all the objects of perception. And this signification was by definition determined, and not casual:

"It is not, as it appears at first, in a purely fortuitous way that a personal signification comes to transform the significance of an overheard phrase, of an image caught sight of, of a gesture of a passer-by, of the “net” which the gaze attaches itself to while reading a newspaper."

The term “personal signification” had already been used by German psychiatrists such as Karl Jaspers to refer to “the paranoid mode of experience”, that is the subjective way in which paranoiacs experience reality (Kaplan and Sadock 2141).
Lacan placed emphasis on interpretation or, in other words, on the fact that the paranoid patient assigns “personal signification” to objects of perception.

“Metamorphosis of Narcissus” sheds light on Dali’s theory of representation. What immediately strikes the viewer of this painting is the formal resemblance of the two prevalent forms. On the left-hand side of the painting there is the figure of a young man bent over the mirroring surface of a lake. His face is hidden among his limbs, parts of which are highlighted, due to a very careful positioning of the figure between light and shadow. The figure is painted in a skin-like shade, which blends with the earthy colour of the surrounding rocky landscape and the reflecting surface. The right-hand side of the painting is dominated by the form of a gigantic hand, the fingertips holding a white egg or bulb, from whose cracking surface a narcissus flower is emerging. The contrast of light gray and darker hues enhances the careful shading and positioning of the fingers, certain parts of which are highlighted so as to be formally analogous to the Narcissus figure. Even smaller details, like the crooked line on the surface of the white bulb and the line of the parting of Narcissus’s hair, endorse the analogy of the two forms.

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What’s more, the form of the paranoid simulacrum reverberates in the right-hand background area of the painting, hidden amidst the mountains of the landscape but clearly corresponding, both formally and in terms of its light gray colour, to the paranoid simulacrum in the foreground.

Thus, the form of the newly-created paranoid simulacrum mirrors that of the young Narcissus, making this painting exemplary in terms of illustrating how the new simulacrum comes to life, how important is its formal analogy with “reality” – or the simulacrum next to it – and, finally, how a new interpretation, a new sign, is born based on the unconscious obsessive idea of the artist, who has assigned meaning to it based on formal analogy. Thus, in view of Lacan’s analysis of the paranoid delirium, and its assimilation by Dali, the paranoid simulacrum is already an interpretation of reality, its latent content being exposed on the canvas along with the manifest form. For in this painting, the clarity of signification of the hand form derives from the mirrored Narcissus figure. The paranoid simulacrum is then, in effect, a new sign, created by the unconscious desire that links together two signifiers, that is the form of two signs.

For what lay at the heart of paranoia of self-punishment – the object of Lacan’s thesis – as well as of the paranoid delirium/discourse that it generates, was the fact that the paranoid patient engaged in attacking […] mirror-images, [those] identified with, realising, in this way, [the] wish to punish [oneself], their “purely symbolic significance” or “personal signification” that could only make sense due to the theme of persecution.
He would conclude that these […] were “the double, triple and successive ‘printings’ of a prototype”.

In semiotic terms, and using Saussurean vocabulary – but not the true essence of the linguist’s theory – what Dali uncovered is that the signifier, the form of a sign, is endowed with meaning that arises from the projection of an obsessive idea.

In terms of Lacan’s later theory, however, what Dali revealed and illustrated within the visual field is the reason why the form, the signifier, is of supreme significance in the realm of representation."

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Quote :

"This painting is Dalí's interpretation of the Greek myth of Narcissus. Narcissus was a youth of great beauty who loved only himself and broke the hearts of many lovers. The gods punished him by letting him see his own reflection in a pool. He fell in love with it, but discovered he could not embrace it and died of frustration. Relenting, the gods immortalised him as the narcissus (daffodil) flower. For this picture Dalí used a meticulous technique which he described as 'hand-painted colour photography' to depict with hallucinatory effect the transformation of Narcissus, kneeling in the pool, into the hand holding the egg and flower. Narcissus as he was before his transformation is seen posing in the background. The play with 'double images' sprang from Dalí's fascination with hallucination and delusion.
This was Dalí's first painting to be made entirely in accordance with the paranoiac critical method, which the artist described as a 'Spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based on the critical-interpretative association of the phenomena of delirium' (The Conquest of the Irrational, published in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York 1942). Robert Descharnes noted that this painting meant a great deal to Dalí, as it was the first Surrealist work to offer a consistent interpretation of an irrational subject.
The artist said to Descharnes of this picture:
If one looks for some time, from a slight distance and with a certain 'distant fixedness', at the hypnotically immobile figure of Narcissus, it gradually disappears until at last it is completely invisible.

The metamorphosis of the myth takes place at that precise moment, for the image of Narcissus is suddenly transformed into the image of a hand which rises out of his own reflection. At the tips of its fingers the hand is holding an egg, a seed, a bulb from which will be born the new narcissus - the flower. Beside it can be seen the limestone sculpture of the hand - the fossil hand of the water holding the blown flower.

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Quote :

"Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman,
living and organized with a Pythagorean precision.
- Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 17.

The Dalian "paranoiac-critical method” emerged out of some surrealist experiments comparable to the psychological ones, such as the creation of an image by means of the frottage technique developed by Max Ernst, which involves the passage of a pen or a piece of chalk over a textured surface and in the subsequent interpretation of the fantastic figures that thus become visible on the canvass, as well as in the writing and drawing experiments of Leonardo da Vinci. The Spanish painter presented his ideas in a series of articles and essays published between 1930 and 1940, in Le surréalisme au service de la révolution and Le Minautore, or in separate publications, such as La femme visible (1930) or Le Mythe Tragique de L’Angleus de Millet (1936).

Dali wrote:

"I believe the moment is drawing near when, by a thought process of a paranoiac and active character, it would be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and thereby contribute to a total discrediting of the world of reality.
The new simulacra which the paranoiac thought may suddenly let loose will not merely have their origin in the unconscious, but, in addition, the force of the paranoiac power will itself be at the service of the unconscious.
These new and menacing simulacra will act skilfully and corrosively with the clarity of physical and diurnal appearances: a clarity which, with its special quality of self—reserve and modesty, will make us dream of the old metaphysical mechanism which has something about it that may readily be confused with the very essence of nature, which, according to Heraclitus, delights hiding itself.
[. . .] Paranoia makes use of the external world in order to set off its obsessive idea for others. The reality of the external world serves as an illustration and proof, and is placed thus at the service of the reality of our mid. (1998: 223)"

Dalí does not proclaim a voluntary state of madness, instead, he admires the mental agility the imaginative creativity specific of the paranoiac.

For Dali, the rotten corpse of the animal represents not the poetical decomposition, but the fight against it. Putrefaction is a form of „”cleansing”, and contains in itself the seed of a new aesthetics, which explains the iterated presence of the image in his paintings. In “The Rotten Donkey”, a eulogy of “putrefaction” the image is central, because it is related to “the agony” and “the darkness”, typical of the mental disease. (Fanés, 2007, pp. 69-70)
"Various forms assumed by the object in question will be controllable and recognizable by all, as soon as the paranoiac will simply indicate them” (Idem, p. 224).

It is by a distinctly paranoia process that it has been possible to obtain a double image: in other words, a representation of an object that is also, without the slightest pictorial or anatomical modification, the representation of another entirely different object, this one being equally devoid of any deformation or abnormality disclosing some adjustment..
The attainment of such a double image has been made possible thanks to the violence of the paranoiac thought which has made use, with cunning and skill, of the required quantity of pretexts, coincidences, and so on, taking advantage of them so as to reveal the second image, which, in this case, supersedes the obsessive idea…

The double image (an example of which might be the image of a horse that is at the same time the image of a woman) may be extended, continuing the paranoiac process, with the existence of another obsessive ideas being suffice for the emergence of a third image (the image of a lion, for example) and thus in succession until the concurrence of a number of images which would be limited only by the extent of the mind’s paranoiac capacity. (Ibidem)

Through the intense and traumatic nature of the visual images, while preserving the appearance of the objective reality, the artist is thus capable of dealing directly with profound mental states--“lyrical” ones-- in which memories and ideas bind together, on the basis of the data of his personal experience, rather than on the outside reality, a process that would otherwise simply reproduce conventional, routine thought.

It is from Dromard that Dali seems to have taken over the idea that the inaccuracy of the paranoiac judgment is the product of some deviation of one’s intelligence and sensitivity: the paranoiac, whose logic is predominantly affective, groups his ideas in accordance with his own impulses.

"Nothing seems more illustrative to the essayist-painter than the “abrupt” and “reactional” character of the phenomenon, the intense alteration of the object, the simultaneous presence of the systematic fact and of the implicit interpretation, etc., that portray the “paranoiac face”, reproduced in the fourth number of Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution (Idem: 260)."

Paranoid-critical activity is an organizing and productive force of objective chance.

These are not simple hallucinations, because the “paranoiac mind” cannot but discover alternative meanings and interpretations of real objects. Paranoid-critical activity thus reveals new and objective “meanings” of the irrational; it tangibly makes the very world of delirium pass to the level of reality. (Idem: 257)

The ambition of the Catalan painter is that the world of imagination and the world of concrete irrationality “may be” as he puts it, “as objectively evident, consistent, durable, as persuasively, cognoscitively, and communicably thick as the exterior world of phenomenal reality. […], that the images of concrete irrationality “approach the phenomenal Real, the corresponding means of expression approach those of great realist painting — Velasquez and Vermeer de Delft — to paint realistically in accordance with irrational thinking and the unknown imagination” (Idem: 253-254).

One of the most significant illustrations of the “paranoid-critical method”, beyond the space of painting, is his book Le Mythe tragique de l’Angélus de Millet, a text written between 1932 and 1933, which however remained unknown for forty-seven years and was published in 1963: it aims at unveiling the great “mythical theme” that in-forms the painting of the nineteenth century French painter, namely the death of the son followed by the sexual aggression of the mother-mantis. Stimulated by the psychoanalytical interpretation Léonard de Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, in Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood (1910), where the Freud identified the representation of an eagle as sexual symbol, Dalí, too, surprisingly discovers that L’Angélus was, in fact, a “tragic myth”:

In addition to the well-known symbolic eroticism of mystical ecstasies to which the posture of the woman in L’Angelus corresponds, you will agree wit hem that the position of the ands brought up together under the chin and leaving exposed especially the legs and the belly, is a common posture, stereotyped even in the hysterical poses of sculptures and, in particular, "art objects” sold in bazaars. The nostalgia they express is in keeping with the crepuscular feelings abundantly illustrated by post-cards in which nudes in the same posture stand out absent the sunset. The posture entails in my opinion very distinct exhibitionistic, expectant, and aggressive factors. In fact, we are dealing with a typical posture of expectation. It is an immobility that is a prelude to imminent violence. It is also a classical springing posture of animals, and it is one that is common to kangaroos and boxers, and above all, it is the one dramatically illustrated by the praying mantis (spectral posture). (1998: 291)

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Convinced that Jean François Millet’s painting hides a deeper truth, and presupposing that the two peasants—the man and the woman –are not praying to God, as it was generally believed, but to Death, Dali demanded that the canvass be X-rayed. The radiography evidenced the existence of a geometric form, a parallelepiped, placed down, between the two characters. Invisible to the open eye, because it had been covered by successive layers of paint, this presence would reveal, according to Dalí, the image of a child’s coffin, i.e., whose death the two central characters seem to be are musing over.
However Dali reaches this occlusion not by any traditional psychological method, but by means of an entirely new approach, through a process in which the interpretative disorder of paranoia is simulated in order to produce alternative forms of knowledge, otherwise inaccessible. The irrational, confuse reaction of Dali when faced with Millet’s painting—attraction and repulsion, at the same time—leads him to the understanding of the sexuality and the profound morbidity that structures the work and gives it (symbolic) meaning.

The organizational scheme of the “phantasm” that lies hidden in L’Angélus, corresponds to a Freudian narrative, including three important and successive moments. First of all, is the waiting, in the crepuscular atmosphere, which announces the sexual abuse of the mantis-female, and which is figured, in the painting, by the posture of the characters:

First phase:

Standing out against the light of the crepuscular atmosphere determining atavistic feelings, the tow disturbing obsessive simulacra embodied by the couple of L’Angelus face one another. We are dealing with a moment of waiting and immobility that heralds the imminent sexual aggression. The feminine figure—the mother—assumes the expectant pose which we have identified with the spectral pose of the praying mantis, a classical posture used as a preliminary to the cruel mating. The male—the son—is captivated and as if deprived of life by the irresistible erotic influence; he remains "nailed” tot eh ground, hypnotized by the "spectral exhibitionism” of his mother that annihilates him. The position of the hat, whose symbolism is one of the best known and least refutable ones in the language of dreams, betrays the state of sexual excitation of the son and illustrates the very act of coitus: it also serves to define a posture of shame vis-a-vis virility. …. (Idem: 294)
A violent sexual act follows symbolized in the patting by the fork thrust into the ground, accompanied by the death of the son (no pictorial element evokes it, yet Dalí trusts his own “lyric impressions”):

Second phase:

The son carries out with his mother a coitus from the rear, holding the woman’ legs in his hands at the height of his loans. We are dealing with a pose that reveals the highest degree of animality and atavism. This presentation is provided for us in the painting by one of the accessory objects, the wheel-barrow, whose erotic personality is among the most unquestionable ones. Besides the extremely complex and the extremely rich anthropomorphic metaphors it governs, the wheelbarrow is yet charged with a very concrete and special intentionality. Indeed, in the series of phantasms that are typical of erection, such as flight, skating, speeding locomotives, etc., we know animal traction—the painful traction so common in the obsessions of painters and designers (a horse pulling a heavy cart with paroxystic effort to the top of a hill)—to symbolize complexes of impotence and sexual deficiency, this by dint of the excessive effort attributed to the realization of the sexual act. The wheelbarrow takes its place among the latter representations; it is more direct than these, including as they do substitutive elements provided by the element of animal traction. This circumstance, we say, confers on the act of coitus a character of extreme and insurmountable physical effort, wholly savage and excessive, which is illustrated again by the element of the "pitchfork planted in the ploughed land”. (Idem: 295-296)
The last phase of the argumentative development of the myth—the sexual aggression of the woman—is summarized as follows:

Third phase:

As in the love of the mantis, the female devours then male after mating […] I therefore acknowledge, with extreme clearness of fact that the masculine character appeared to me, from the beginning of the first scene of expectancy, in the light of disruption and anxiety. I saw him "as if being latently dead,” "as if dying in advance”. This impression can only be linked to my identification with the said character, which has already been sufficiently clarified. I would, in conclusion, be loath to appear to under estimate much the lyrical, or purely sensitive, initiation of the reader by returning with meticulous detail to the factors of "extinction”, "monumental funerary feeling”, the woman’s active "immobility”, the man’s passive and annihilated one, and other circumstance and factors of "argumental balance”, whose prodigious resolution in the painting, however oneirical, does not contribute with lesser power to the extraction, out of the insipid and stereotyped image of Millet’s Angelus, of the maternal variant of the immense and horrifying myth of Saturn, of Abraham, of the Eternal Father with Jesus-Christ and of William Tell himself, all devouring their own sons. (Idem: 296-297)

This way, Dalí distances himself from “the passive automatism” of surrealist thinking and from his mentor, André Breton, by bringing to light the active and concrete nature of unconscious thinking, capable of manifesting itself as such, in the external reality, a reality that, because of this, bears the enigmatic mark of the artist’s inner world. The eye is not only a mirror turned to the world, it is the very process, by means of which the intellect give sensible form to the “phantasms” of the unconscious, producing images, or narratives. The point of view adopted pushes him to show interest in the interpretative automatism of sight primarily. It also incites him to assign reason a new and unexpected function: far from being a mere correlative.

This way, paradoxically, the interpreter becomes, in fact, the very subject of his own analysis, as Ades rightly notes (1995: 143-144). By appealing to the "instinctive (in)sight”, fertilized by the Surrealist “automatic thinking”, Dalí succeeds in producing entirely new images of the world. Although the aesthetics adopted after this moment would change, the painter remained faithful to the “paranoiac-critical method” throughout his life, for the simple reason that it was a useful means of asserting his own conceptual position, which seems to have "evolved directly from his painting experience”, rather than from theoretical readings (cf. Radford, 1997, p. 139)."

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Prompting and Grafting.

Quote :

""The invisible body is a mirror of containers.
Perfected, a chain of commands speaks." [Barrett Watten, Conduit]

"Coriolanus fails properly to fulfill the assignment given him and instead betrays his contempt for those he must solicit. Now he stands accused of inadequately pleading his position, of mocking the people, and is instructed to try again to seek their approval. His supporters, Cominius and Menenius, and his mother, Volumnia, exhort him to "frame his spirit" and "perform a part ... [he] hast not done before."They entreat him to swallow his pride, if only for a bracketed moment, return to the marketplace, and ask again, "mildly . . mildly ... mildly,"for the voices he requires. At this tense and fevered point of the play, and in the midst of the strained negotiation and deliberation, the consul Cominius quietly urges Coriolanus on by simply saying, "Come, come, we'll prompt you" (3.2.107).

The presence of the prompter and the prompted voice is implicitly rendered throughout much of Shakespeare's late tragedy Coriolanus. Attributions of the voice, distributions of the voice, and the beginnings and endings of the voice are repeatedly refined, re-found, and refocused. Who is speaking? Who is speaking for whom? And how is speaking spoken? Cominius's "Come, come, we'll prompt you"is a line that resonates throughout the play, a line that eclipses, crookedly eclipses, all voices at the moment of their utterance…

Derrida writes about Artaud's virulent reaction to and banishment of the prompter from his proposed theater. Artaud, as Derrida describes him, bitterly imagined the prompter as an intervening voice set on the margins of the stage to whisper into the ears of the meekly receptive performer, "receiving his delivery as if he were taking orders, submitting like a beast to the pleasure of docility"."

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Baudrillard wrote:

"Already with the traditional museum this cutting up, this regrouping, this interference of all cultures, this unconditional aestheticization that constitutes the hyperreality of culture begins, but the museum is still a memory. Never, as it did here, has culture lost its memory in the service of stockpiling and functional redistribution. And this translates a more general fact: that throughout the "civilized" world the construction of stockpiles of objects has brought with it the complementary process of stockpiles of people - the line, waiting, traffic jams, concentration, the camp. That is "mass production," not in the sense of a massive production or for use by the masses, but the production of the masses. The masses as the final product of all sociality, and, at the same time, as putting an end to sociality, because these masses that one wants us to believe are the social, are on the contrary the site of the implosion of the social. The masses are the increasingly dense sphere in which the whole social comes to be imploded, and to be devoured in an uninterrupted process of simulation.
Whence this concave mirror: it is from seeing the masses in the interior that the masses will be tempted to rush in. Typical marketing method: the whole ideology of transparency here takes on its meaning." [Simulacra and imulation]

Quiet and subtle "Prompters" implant voices, and prod one on, gradually Building up, stock-piling and shoving their narratives. They graft false-memories and try to make it stick…
Such a character-distortion was not only apparent in the Bourne Trilogy, but also in the film 'Changeling' - a violent attack on the sense-empiricism and instinctual self-trust of convincing what one is seeing is not at all what one is seeing...

Taking accountability to them means, merely hiding away a bigger lie, its "safe word", in the act of confessing and owning upto a smaller one.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] spoke of Coriolanus as a leftist guerrilla fighter.
In other words, Leftist Iconoclasm can attack great figures desperate to show all are the same flawed at bottom, and 'Tyrants' can be brought down, but the Sun/Son itself is peddled away in the highest pedestal, where it shines humble and austere - or as Baudrillard called it above, in an open 'transparency'.

"In the Corpus Christi cycles, the resurrected Christ displays his divinity by showing his stigmata to a doubting Thomas. In Shakespeare’s play, however, Coriolanus refuses to fulfill the figure of Christ, refuses to show his wounds to the Roman people, refuses to perform this histrionic custom." [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

It is a blood-thirsty communist mob, and Xt. mass-mentality, that demands wounds and flaws be made public, everything bared to establish certainty, proof of shared ownership…
If one does not partake in humble transparency and open display of wounds, no (trans)-substantiation can occur - no materialization, no confirmation, no verification, no objectification, actualization, no real-ization can occur…
As Coriolanus, they would be Prompted as having become "Traitors"…

In the recent [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Thiel called out on the so-called "irony" of what we know as the typical leftist Grafting, when he said,
"If you don't conform [to the narrative], then you don't count as diverse."

The Victim industry thrives on such Theatrics of open display; anything that feels of self-exclusion is branded sedition.

Anything that is strong and heroic and courageous must be stripped down, broken down, in the name of 'verification',,, wounds must be displayed, scars must be exposed, bodies must shake and tremble, tears must flow, fear must be in the eyes, till one is reduced to a self-doubting, self-uncertain shame for attempting something great, because they couldnt do it, so how was it possible?
Wounds and humility feed its own self-comfort.

Prompts are not just human voices and tele-prompting gadgets, but the NP mentality to dismantle the "mechanics" behind the greatness, that It can trust to feel certain and secure. A whole museum of comprehensive check-lists can be stock-piled by extracting the "mechanics" from every inter-action to a familiar category, and the world thus narrowed can now be a safe-space, that's all been comprehended and seen before… "How is this not just another rendition of…." Case in point:

Nudge, nudge, prompt...

Spamus wrote:

"But then there are memories of things that either did or did not happen, regarding things that either can or cannot be confirmed as having in fact been true.
You have a memory of having an abortion. You either did or did not. "

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But then what does this really mean? That is the question that has always fascinated me the most. Once I become cognizant of how profoundly problematic my "self" is, what can "I" do about it? And what are the philosophical implications of acknowledging that identity is, by and large, an existential contraption that is always subject to change without notice? What can we "anchor" our identity to so as to make this prefabricated...fabricated...refabricated world seem less vertiginous? And, thus, more certain."

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The Doppelganger is a Duplication, and re-duplication and re-re-…   around the only thing that it is certain - there must be Nothing at bottom; all is a mask, that must be torn to verify more and more…

Baudrillard wrote:

"Duplication suffices to render both [the real and the copy] artificial.

Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real itself." [SS]

Extracting the extractable "mechanics" away, hero and mob can be levelled down as pertaining to the same weakness. What is unextractable is "evil", is "non-real", is "entrapment", etc…

But without the passionate liveliness of the hero, wounds just remain as "dead scabs", as petrified crusts of opinion, the duration of Certified Reason, called the Mob.

In the opposite reading, the Stoic hero too, who clings to his self tightly and lacks self-trust, remains a leaking, bleeding wound, and depletes his own self. He remains "all thorns" only, and hyper-defensive. This drains his energy, his vitality, and renders him more paranoid…
Nietzsche comments on this pathological Apollonianism;

Nietzsche wrote:

"O'erhung with ugly truths, the spoil of his hunting, and rich in torn raiment; many thorns also hung on him—but I saw no rose.
Not yet had he learned laughing and beauty. Gloomy did this hunter return from the forest of knowledge.
From the fight with wild beasts returned he home: but even yet a wild beast gazeth out of his seriousness—an unconquered wild beast!
As a tiger doth he ever stand, on the point of springing; but I do not like those strained souls; ungracious is my taste towards all those self-engrossed ones.

And only when he turneth away from himself will he o'erleap his own shadow—and verily! into his sun.
Far too long did he sit in the shade; the cheeks of the penitent of the spirit became pale; he almost starved on his expectations.
Contempt is still in his eye, and loathing hideth in his mouth. To be sure, he now resteth, but he hath not yet taken rest in the sunshine.

His deed itself is still the shadow upon him: his doing obscureth the doer. Not yet hath he overcome his deed.
Also his hero-will hath he still to unlearn: an exalted one shall he be…
He hath subdued monsters, he hath solved enigmas. But he should also redeem his monsters and enigmas; into heavenly children should he transform them.
As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealousy; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.
Verily, not in satiety shall his longing cease and disappear, but in beauty! Gracefulness belongeth to the munificence of the magnanimous.

But precisely to the hero is beauty the hardest thing of all. Unattainable is beauty by all ardent wills.
A little more, a little less: precisely this is much here, it is the most here.
To stand with relaxed muscles and with unharnessed will: that is the hardest for all of you, ye sublime ones!
When power becometh gracious and descendeth into the visible—I call such condescension, beauty.

Yea, thou sublime one, one day shalt thou also be beautiful, and hold up the mirror to thine own beauty.
Then will thy soul thrill with divine desires; and there will be adoration even in thy vanity!
For this is the secret of the soul: when the hero hath abandoned it, then only approacheth it in dreams—the super-hero.—
Thus spake Zarathustra." [TSZ, The Sublime Ones]

Shakespeare's genius captures the scalding tension of the improper self-coherence from both sides - personified wounds and dead scabs are both encrustrations.
Wounds must attain to character, not remain persona-ified…
A common destiny, not a commonalized fate - which is the problem of the Doppelgänger, that Dostoevsky wrote…
Without increasing self-scope, the perception of what is Other itself, remains a solipsism of whatever does not conform.
One then attacks oneself in an increasing isolation that becomes an inescapable "self-cornering", just as Coriolanus attacks his own Rome, in the masochistic prompting of whatever that does not conform to ITS chaos-verification, as the "traitor" other, Coriolanus himself, the very false grafting of "I am that which I am not"…






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The victim mentality of those who cannot accept loss, the Idea of A defeat, is a direct consequence of those who believe their hedonistic exposure amounts to their 'open-mindedness' and anything higher or contradictory to their threshold is vilified as attempts to rob them of their "freedom". This is a narcissistic paranoia of a pathological Apollonianism that comes from rigid self-clinging.

Know-it-all is what such Nihilists value as their self-esteem.
It's their "experience" that makes the victim industry "vigilant" "active"-ists and "justice-warriors" of a reality they cling-to. They know what life is, what right is, better than the haters...

Any initiative and higher idealism is crushed immediately by the cost/benefit of personal comfort and endurance, that now takes the title of "justice" and "principles" and "idealism" of what kind of world one is entitled to, when it is an idyllism.

The unhealthy paranoia of seeing all as out to get "only them", when even flowers begin to appear deceptive, and nature just waiting to trick one, and appearances as evil as is the case of Xt. and the tempter Satan, is the result of a primal narcissistic attachment to images.
Warnings against deceivers here, is prompted by the "Image" of how one appears when deceived.

While in healthy cases, it is pride of human intelligence that is felt challenged by the prospect of deceivers, in the unhealthy case, it is a matter of one does not want to "Appear" deceived or having lost "free-will" and control. The NP feels watched by everything, since to the NP, there is nothing at all at bottom, and all is a staged performance, and identities are guaged by mutually benefitting quantitative worth, a mass of participatory spectators. Media coverage where people are seen, and watched, only adds to their symptom. As a result, narcissistic attachment with images become full-blown, and those out to deceive their "intelligence" and make them look like fools, must be exposed by "justice warriors". It is the concern with self-image, of Appearing the "mature individual" or that of knowing what it entails, that bothers and prods their activism...

When thats the case, tantrums are thrown; accusations, vilifications of the other are made; masochistic fantasies of marginalization and the progress of the progressives who have left them behind and moved on towards better options and opportunities become pervasive, aggression becomes rampant…  
Any mention of seeing the larger pic., and victimizers are ready to cast aspersions of not favouring them, of being infiltrated by foreign powers…

Under this complex, setting out to accomplish any higher ideal becomes equivalent to the nation being f---ked.
Heroism must be redefined to where the other must necessarily be weak, miserable, wretched, helpless First to be worthy of rescue to justify any "heroism".
Any other view of heroism is a tyranny.

Hedonism has so taken root, that now even a slight dis-comfort is perceived with tearful fears, real fears of 'haters' coming to take them and their "true liberties" and "human dignities" apart…

False deceivers exist, but none more so and dangerous on the inside than the outside.
The self-deception within that pretends to "know it all", such limitedness is what renders one prone to deceivers.
Transference of onus should never be the case.

Behind every Know Thyself, lies a silent Dare Thyself.
All knowing can only be a product of courage beyond cost/benefit.

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Hyper-reactives are on the rise, literally making a "non-sense" of the hash-tagging and trigger-noumenon. NP turned Victim industry expose the underlying passive-self-clinging behind every "Active"-ism. Debord pointed out this passivity is because, the society of spectators only reflect the theatre of the ruling spectacle...
The ill-logic of logical constructs...

Quote :

"The primary cause of the decadence of contemporary thought evidently lies in the fact that spectacular discourse leaves no room for any reply; while logic was only socially constructed through dialogue. Furthermore, when respect for those who speak through the spectacle is so widespread, when they are held to be rich, important, prestigious, to be authority itself, the spectators tend to want to be just as illogical as the spectacle, thereby proudly displaying an individual reflection of this authority.

The spectator’s laziness is shared by all intellectual functionaries and overnight specialists, all of whom do their best to conceal the narrow limits of their knowledge by the dogmatic repetition of arguments with illogical authority." [Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle]

Thus, in someone like Spam-us and those of its kind, one can see, how dogmatic repetition and dismissal of anything else that disturbs its self-investment and hedonistic self-containment as 'unconvincing', can be maintained ill-legaly throughout. "The other has never even attended to the substance of the matter", "the other has never even defined, let alone disturbed the core issues", etc. are convenient myths that can be maintained perpetually to carry on its hedonistic preservation. And this way every complexity can be reduced down to Its alternatives and dismissed or relativized. Anything to stall growth at all costs.

Maybe tomorrow, the very colour black could be protested and outlawed,

and then the outlawing of black could be outlawed… ad inf.

The NP can always convince itself that it is being "active" and its identity is the result of conscious consciousness, when it is a hyper-reaction built on its own automated alternating-trigger to never leave the boundary of its own comfortable construct...