The Misprojection of Projection: an ALTERNATIVE.

There is no shortage of contemporary dialogue about the villainy of narcissism, yet this only proves to be the case when the tradition of objective moral criticism has run dry and when psychology has filled the void. What there has not yet been sufficient conversation in addressing is that narcissism rarely is exclusively a personal phenomenon, since there are social forces which produce it, and psychology is one such force.

Certainly NOT another narcissistic self-insertion for Ms. Gao.

Egalitarian psychology, conspiring with politics, commits the most atrocities in this regard, since it is emblematic of the “leveling” that Kierkegaard described nearly two hundred years ago. What is a more barbaric rule than “treat all others with respect, though they’ve not earned it?” What is more repulsive as a style of parenting than to deny that one’s own child is special?

Love must always manifest in love for the distinctions; it is hatred which aspires to subvert all difference and unify all things in stark conformity. A loving parent neither thinks one’s child a “normal person” nor would force the child to fit the paradigm of “normalcy”, since no two children are the same. Each individual is only partly “human” in the sense that we can speak of “universal human nature”. As Camus has pointed out, we too secrete inhuman qualities. That is because, though we appear identical in our genes, in our lives we see that we are utterly unique. The universals don’t absolve us of particulars, and both the Good and Evil in one’s nature tend to be particular.

We sympathize with characters according to the kinds of individuals we tend to be. Yet sympathy is neither good nor bad; it’s neutral, and we ought to sympathize with those who set the best example, not with everyone. Only the psychopath can sympathize with everyone, since this is only by imagining a category that includes all beings that have feelings.

Narcissists are all egalitarians at heart, since they can’t understand the Other but as an extension of the Self, and treating everyone as equal in the abstract is no more nor less than treating everybody as identical at heart. Were this not at the heart of equalizing ideology, one could not make such sweeping statements as “all villains represent the evil in us all,” for such a claim assumes that all of us are villains of a common nature or that all of us who hate the villain hate him for the selfsame reason, not as someone Other but as someone who reminds us of the Self.

Don’t get me wrong: I want to be regarded as an Equal. Yet that is a form of love that only can be accessed through my individuality. It is by owning my unique potentialities and choosing what my path in life will be that I become the sort of person who is worthy of respect. Like all good things, it can’t be forced. It is by seeing someone as an Other that one manages, at times of serendipity, to find a genuine equality, and this is rare and precious, even fleeting, not to be acquired cheaply.

This should be the attitude we have to those most close to us, and it must stand in starkest contrast to the World of conflict, competition, and coercion which we live in customarily. Yet neither this equality nor that disparity is evil; what is evil is the process that reduces all distinctions to conformity. The narcissist is everybody’s equal since he is the lowest element in everyone, according to his own neurotic outlook. Yet the fighter loves the Other as a source of competition, and the lover loves the Other as an equal *individual*. The latter is the very opposite of narcissism, since it’s born out of encounter with particulars, not merely comforting abstractions.

Nor is this an individual that’s pure self-interest. Self-interest, like any selfishness, is pure conformity, reducing everything to Self. The *individual* is something forged by action which is often selfless action, and by recognizing such a selflessness in others we become their equals insofar as we can find it in ourselves.


**[({R.G.)}]**


Click for the Original Assertion.

An Addendum: Why I Do Not Watch *Attack on Titan*.

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