The tinpot gods of the West

Our leaders are disordered in their thinking.

We live in an era characterized by a kind of madness. We are subjected to grand visions no one wants. It is a time of hypersensitivity, where even mild discomfort triggers inappropriate levels of anger from entire sections of society.

Complementing this anger is a manufactured outrage about distant issues that do not affect us, including events from the past no one can change.

Modern life increasingly makes no sense to ordinary people.

Driving this are out-of-touch leaders who care little about the real problems that affect us. In every major area of society from politics and media to the corporate world and the great institutions we witness a parade of clowns marching in unison, a constellation of broken people presiding over declining fiefdoms.

Most seem indifferent to normal life and pontificate over the same array of bizarre talking points, often making identical announcements on everything from climate to gay rights even when these topics lie far outside their remit.

The organizations they control are often dysfunctional, unable to perform their duties well and visibly failing.

There is much talk of conspiracies. The leaders are handpicked minions of some distant elite, there to further the ambitions of the powerful. A grand conspiracy to enslave us all. Global organizations like the World Economic Forum or the United Nations have nefarious plans and use our own country’s institutions to enact them.

However true this may be there is another observation we can make. The individuals often chosen are of a type, one that naturally creates strife and confusion.

There is a certain sort of character who revels in incompetence and manages to not only survive but also appears calm, confident and even impressive despite their inability to get things done.

That type of person is a narcissist.

A legion of disordered individuals

Our world is increasingly ruled by individuals with obvious personality disorders and mental illnesses. This is reflected in the policies they pursue as well as their own behaviours.

Malignant narcissism is the most visible of these disorders. Psychopathy is almost certainly present too, but many psychopaths are well disguised. They can blend in and are often only revealed over time if at all. Not so for narcissists.

Narcissists are deeply disturbed individuals with profound behavioural deficiencies. Narcissism itself seems to emerge as a coping mechanism in childhood, where a child adopts a fake persona to accommodate some difficult situation they cannot escape. An overbearing parent who insists they be impossibly perfect, for example. This fake persona is then worn as a disguise throughout life.

The adult narcissist continues the fakery. They adopt a psychological costume to get through life to protect the wounded child within. This child never develops far because the fake persona is the one presented to the world while the child, the real person, remains hidden and protected.

It is this false person that develops, with serious repercussions for their mental health and their subsequent behaviour. Fake personas are difficult to maintain and have the grave shortcoming of not being real.

Narcissists therefore act their way through life. In every sense they are false. Little about them is real. Because of this fakery their main motivation is to seek validation for their performance, a phenomenon known as seeking narcissistic supply.

This activity dominates their life to an extent the uninitiated fail to grasp. Every aspect of the narcissist’s life is focused on the need to gain validation for their act and to stave off criticism lest they have to face up to real life and its consequences.

Everything you see with a narcissist is a construction, although the traits commonly found in malignant narcissists are easy to spot with experience.

All narcissists project a very strong image of themselves as superior. Regardless of the domain the narcissist will perceive themselves as a key figure. A thought leader, a pioneer with impressive insights, a mover and shaker leaving the rabble behind.

Narcissists seek to control their environment, including people. This is one of the key giveaways you are dealing with a narcissist. Their need to control and micromanage everything, just one of the reasons they make poor leaders.

Due to their insecurities, they are intolerant of being challenged. Any attempt to do so triggers deep defence mechanisms designed to protect their fragile sense of self. Anything other than unbridled praise is treated by narcissists as a threat to their position.

The response to actual threats is inappropriate anger. Even in professional settings narcissists often surprise others with the extremeness of their responses. Minor matters can provoke outrage.

Narcissists are emotionally detached and do not engage in normal relationships. People are only useful if they supply the narcissist with what they need. Those in personal relationships with people like this are often shocked how quickly they move on when a break occurs.

In professional settings the narcissist in a position of authority quickly filters through those willing to provide validation and those who will not. Those who see through the act are removed whenever possible.

These common traits, observed in most narcissists, are increasingly visible at the societal level too.

Our institutions reflect the limitations of narcissists

Narcissists are running the asylum. The evidence is difficult to hide. Our institutions are becoming dysfunctional with even basic services collapsing.

Nothing works because the wrong people are in charge.

For example, our cities are becoming difficult to live in. The police seem unconcerned with violent crime while people are jailed for posting memes. Everywhere we go we detect the faint trace of marijuana in the air, even where it is ostensibly illegal. Graffiti is everywhere.

Most Western nations are now characterized by incompetent leaders indifferent to the issues facing real people and instead focus on global initiatives no one is allowed to vote on.

Our institutions manifest pathological traits at odds with their stated mission, a reflection of the people running them. The same traits we see in all malignant narcissists.

The inflated sense of self is strikingly common. We now have tiny councils, municipal libraries and schools telling us their number one priority is battling climate inequality or racism. Even if these things were real the entities in question often have no obvious link to the cause; it is a means to an end, and the end is a grandiose sense of importance.

Narcissists have a need to control, and we see many organizations and companies at times mysteriously move in one direction. Support for surveillance, digital IDs, validation, confirmation, more monitoring, more bureaucracy. Licensing, papers, forms. Everything is controlled, often to the point of insanity. Everything seemingly needs a permit, proof of ID, or some piece of paper.

Institutions now react badly to being challenged. In Britain the police are routinely hammered for investigating racist or sexist tweets while foreign men raping children are let off scot-free. When someone posts a joke that a few therapeutic hangings would bring the whole thing to a halt, as used to happen, they are prosecuted for racial hate crimes.

As these imbalances are brought to widespread attention the response is not reflection or apology but outrage. The intolerance and the emotionality are reflections of the immaturity common among narcissists. The senior leaders cannot cope with challenges to their authority.

Finally the detachment. You are constantly reminded you don’t matter. When you walk into a library decked out in rainbow gay drag queen madness, who are they doing this for? Drag queens who love reading? Is the local queer community spending a lot of time in there reading books? Do they even visit libraries? And why cater to them? Where are the displays for other groups who visit more often, like intact families or religious groups?

What about visiting a bank and being lectured about your carbon footprint? What can be going on here except you are being used to validate their beliefs. They visibly agonize over cosmic justice while you remain in the mundane squalor of normality. They see much further. They care about the Big Issues. They couldn’t care less you think they are crazy. To you it’s a bank, to the senior leadership it is a platform to broadcast their majestic sense of greatness.

All this and more is how many institutions now operate. They are dysfunctional, broken and inept, and their attention is quite obviously elsewhere and not on the job at hand. All this because they reflect the narcissistic leaders who run them. They too are lost in the endless need to find validation for their broken sense of self. Everything else is just a prop designed to aid them in their quest.

Hollow men make for hollow institutions

Narcissists possess a pathological drive to attend to constant fears of inadequacy, a phenomenon that has infused most of our leading institutions.

As a result, individual narcissists prune the sensible from their sphere in case they are challenged. Leave them long enough in an organization and it begins to reflect this ruthless single-mindedness. No one is left who can make sensible decisions.

We see this now everywhere. Virtually every major broadsheet in the West is in terminal decline and they don’t seem to understand why. Yet none of them allow sincere debate on climate change or mass immigration while reminding us of the sacrifices we must make for these great causes.

During Covid the media largely moved as one, with dissension met by cancellation and outrage. The lack of self-awareness is unmissable. It is evident they don’t get it.

Challenges to their model, even the ancient request to allow open debate, is considered literal fascism. Asking to hear the other side of the transgender argument, for example, is rejected as a precursor to violence or worse. Many issues are presented in limited or biased ways because journalists increasingly believe competing views are hateful. These opinions seem to be sincerely held too. They live in a different world.

How can this happen? Narcissists make for poor leaders, yet they yearn for leadership roles as it bolsters their projected image as superior to those around them. Since their life is an act, and can be adapted easily to circumstances, they can find themselves rising through the ranks quickly, and ultimately in senior positions, their glib, superficial charms convincing enough to see them get on in areas where hard skills are deemphasized such as media or politics.

Their focus always remains themselves and when in positions of authority they hire and promote those who support this singular ambition.

Conversely, they will not tolerate challengers. If they are in a position to do so they will discard the troublesome. Given their ineptness this is often the capable who narcissists are especially sensitive to as their competency is perceived as a threat.

An organization with narcissists in senior positions can quickly find itself bereft of the capable who are replaced with sycophants mesmerized by the persuasiveness of the leader despite their incompetency.

This has a similar effect to quotas, where the unqualified are promoted. But it has the additional impact of the active removal of the competent. This quickly hollows out organizations leaving a cult-like structure where criticism is rare from insiders.

The very occasional reports we receive of a once great organ of society that has declined or collapsed often bears this out. We read anecdotes of Svengali-like leaders creating some bizarre cult where no one could challenge anything even while the whole organization went to the dogs or lost a fortune.

The rest of us wonder how this happens. Did no one see the decline? Was there no one prepared to challenge these inept decisions? From global media companies to international banks, this kind of clown show, circus world bullshit is becoming the norm. We look on aghast as demonstrably ruinous decisions are routinely made that destroy the organization over time.

Put someone in charge who has a personality disorder he needs to service and soon the only people left will be those willing to shore up their delusions.

Flattery will get you everywhere

Increasingly incompetence defines the West. Nothing works as it once did. Conspiracy theories suggesting transnational organizations like the World Economic Forum appoint their minions have a point. And narcissists are the perfect candidates to wreck everything. They are gullible enough to believe almost anything if it paints them in a positive light.

All those grand schemes to save the planet or alter food supplies are exactly the kind of dangerous nonsense the mentally compromised go for. Every serious pushback is aggressively resisted because of the existential threat it poses to narcissistic individuals and their weak sense of identity.

Who better to run some institution into the ground than people whose own abnormal thought processes will fight critics to the death to save their own fragile image? The narcissist has no choice except to go down with the ship making them perfect captains for any unpopular mission.

We see the hallmarks of a narcissistic society everywhere. Inept, broken leaders whose inner turmoil is increasingly visible to everyone who looks. Nothing they do works because their minds don’t work like ours. The act they project is an all-encompassing performance that trumps every other aspect of their lives, from personal relationships to basic competency and interest in accomplishing goals.

All of it is enslaved to a mind stuck in a permanent toddlerdom. These are our leaders and, in their mind, the brilliant ideas whose goals they further are beyond our grasp. We don’t get the grand vision or the need to sacrifice because we lack their inhuman greatness.

These are people trapped in a fictional world of their own making. But they operate in our world too, however much it confuses them. They may be the captains unwisely chosen by a broken society, but we must remember the ship is eternal and captains come and go.

You are the weapon

Narcissists by their nature resist reality. They have elaborate methods to do so. They have to. Their life is a rehearsed performance. They therefore seem to have great strength as they resist all criticism and sail through hard times, unaffected by everything around them.

To the unobservant this can give them an aura of invincibility. We have all witnessed politicians and even businessmen lurch from one calamity to the next and somehow walk away unscathed. This is the narcissism effect. Their forcefield is strong. Nothing is ever their fault. Some of those in their orbit too believe this because they never waver from the act, and the act is one of projected greatness and vision. It would have worked had I not been surrounded by incompetents. This cope is the very essence of narcissism. I can do no wrong; I am a god among men.

Bursting this absurd bubble is the great hope for society. Reality is their kryptonite. This is the one thing they cannot cope with. And it is the only option for Western nations who have been ravaged by the army of abnormal fakes running our countries.

It never occurs to narcissists that reality always asserts itself in the end. It cannot be escaped. Their lives are a performance, a game to be won. They feel like they win often as they can dismiss calamity as someone else’s fault.

Their minds are not bogged down by the doubts most grapple with, so they have advantages. This helps them get on in life by quickly overcoming the failures the rest of us use to improve.

The real weapon is competency. Narcissists are rarely competent. They skim the surface of life, absorbing just enough to pass muster. But time and again we see them come unstuck when real life asserts itself.

It is superiority they fear as they are driven by a sense of inferiority their entire mind’s apparatus is bent towards avoiding. The genuinely able terrify the narcissist. The calm, experienced professionals they occasionally must deal with. They shun them when they can and will ruin them if in a position to do so.

It is an able society they cannot operate in. A meritocracy. An environment where ability is expected, assessed and rewarded, and where incompetence is punished. The able quickly outdo the broken, inept narcissists, and this makes them face their own shortcomings. It destroys their carefully cultivated fake persona.

How does this help? It is difficult to defeat an army of fakes who spend every waking hour scheming to climb the greasy pole of success. Where their paranoia is permanently at DEFCON 1, always at the ready.

And yet this is the hope. Demanding competency. Real people with actual experience. These are the natural enemies of the fakes. People who can accomplish goals without applause. Those who don’t need a fan club to perform basic tasks. Normal people who aspire to proficiency, not awards.

Everyone else, in other words. Ordinary human beings. We are the corrective measure to the madness. We all sense this even if we can’t imagine being a president or a CEO ourselves.

But we can resist the decline by being competent and valuing ability. Supporting the able and celebrating them. Calling out the grifters and talentless social climbers wherever we meet them. Learning to spot the act.

It is all there in the inappropriate visions, the outrage at being challenged, and the air of incompetency. The vague sense of delusion that guides their decisions. Climate schemes, social engineering, obsessing over sexual orientation, wrecking economies, banning money and cars, tinkering with the food supply. It is all nonsense.

We shy away from this. Most people are nice after all. But to do so is to let the narcissists off the hook and we can see where that gets us.

We, therefore, must be the competents they fear.

We must be the nemesis of the frightened toddlers dismantling our great nations to bolster a fragile sense of identity. All it takes is a solid dose of reality and they are finished. We must be the reality they face.