What is Racism Really? A Culture of Narcissism.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master. Whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Gustav LeBon
For the record I’d like to make it clear that I know not all white people are narcissists and or racists and cultural and racial pride that doesn’t require the demonization or dehumanization of other races and cultures is a healthy, humanity affirming thing. Any racist of any color is a beholder of cultural narcissism if not personally, fully engaged in narcissistic personality disorder.
The narcissist/racist doesn’t truly see the person they’re judging. They’ve devalued and or dehumanized this group in their imagination which feeds their narcissistic sense of specialness and superiority. They’ve created a character or multiple characters in their minds and are attacking their own imaginations when they lash out at a black, brown, Jewish or Asian person.
Although they’ve convinced themselves that they fully understand these people, their motives, their values, and predilections, the racist doesn’t go deep enough to realize the difference between what they’ve imagined and who the person on whom they’ve projected their deluded fantasies really is. Because if they were actually aware of what they were feeling, they’d realize they are essentially hating themselves when faced with the target of their racism.
They have no genuine power to create anyone’s value. Their egos may be telling them they are somewhat closer to being god than the subjects of their scorn, putting everyone in the little categories they think people should be in.
Most likely they haven’t bothered to venture out of their narcissistic comfort zone to openly and honestly meet a person of a different race without a Times Square ticker of narcissistic imaginings and fears scrolling through their minds. As the old internet meme goes: They are drinking the poison and expecting the other person to die.
To be white in the western world invites one to be highly narcissistic. Everywhere you look, in the selective history taught in many schools, in politics, advertising, television, movies, boardrooms, bedroom communities, upper echelons of academia and society, it’s the white people’s world. It was one of my parent’s reasons for raising us in all white neighborhoods aside from integration. It’s a white man’s world, they wanted us to understand whites and be comfortable around them, or as comfortable as was possible. One of my early kindergarten memories is being called a nigger by a white classmate whose face was always dirty.
Under the euphemism known as racism there is the narcissist and the psychopath. The difference between narcissism and psychopathy is the psychopath’s propensity for violence. Narcissism is learned. Psychopathy, while the gene has yet to be identified, is known to run in families. We can draw a direct line from generations of slavers and Jim Crow, as well as, a larger than we think, group of American Hitler and Nazi sympathizers during the depression, into the issues America is dealing with in these times.
Narcissistic behavior in white men towards other ethnicities and women was the social standard in this great land from the year sixteen nineteen to, technically, the passing of the Civil Rights Act in nineteen sixty-six, 190 years of legal American slavery beginning with independence, 404 years all total in reality. In my research of many slave narratives it was clearly evident how many slave owners, workers in slave handling, and slave trading exhibited narcissistic or psychopathic behavior. Self serving, complete lack of empathy, appearing to enjoy inflicting pain, terrorizing, murdering, raping for profit, it was without question pure insanity.
White Anglo Saxon Protestants were the first generations of the American social and political hierarchy. Their narcissism was upheld, fed into and protected by the law of the land, along with the pure psychopathy of the people in the slave trade, the Jim Crow south and the KKK.
They dominated and set such a barricade of exclusivity around themselves in this country that no woman, no Negro, no Indian, no Chinese, no Irish, no Jew, no Italian, not even a Catholic, or any other ethnic or religious group stood a chance of breaking through their ranks for hundreds of years. Those profoundly narcissistic and psychopathic personalities set the intellectual and emotional standard for how one is supposed to behave as a member of the dominant class in this country.
The dominant class in this country is still mainly white men although that demographic has been changing which is the reason a number of white men and patriarchy worshipping white women feel threatened enough to take stupidly desperate, and soul damning measures. If they don’t constantly see themselves affirmed as a culture above all others, they get insulted, frightened and very threatened.
They’re thinking if blacks, Asians, LatinX’s, etc, aren’t down, then white people aren’t up. Oneupmanship. Existence as a zero sum game. I have to make you dirty so that I can be the only beholder of clean. The more down you are, the higher up I am.
Looking at European history and the way monarchs and lords, treated the common people, it’s no surprise this mentality thrives in the hearts of those in positions of power, their hench-people, and followers today. It’s given white people who have this need to feel superior when they look at the rest of the world, affirmation that they are indeed the best humanity has to offer. It’s cultural narcissism that can be traced back to the conquering Roman Empire, which is the philosophical foundation of modern democratic societies worldwide.
Looking at world events from a historical perspective, the conquered, in order to overcome and gain control of their own fates, study and adopt the methods of the conquerors and, over centuries, eventually become the next up and coming oppressor. In Western Europe in the span of roughly five centuries the people who were once conquered and colonized by the Romans came to bask in the same political and ethnic narcissism and assumptions of superiority over darker races as the Romans once did over them.
Humanity has a tendency to rise up when trod upon even if the rising is centuries and generations in coming. Seems to be the way of the world. Look at Israel and Palestine. Israelis are doing to the Palestinians the same thing the Russians and the Germans did to their ancestors before it escalated into the pogroms and the holocaust. It enabled those who believed themselves to be God’s chosen people to do some very ungodly things to their fellow human beings. Gotta watch out for that egotistical “god’s chosen” delusion, it always goes off the rails. Don’t Nazi’s believe themselves to be god’s chosen also? The perfect examples of human beings? It never ends well.
Cultural narcissism, as the phrase implies, is when a racial or cultural group determine themselves to be superior to all others not of their group. According to Dr George Simon, author of In Sheep’s Clothing, characteristics of cultural narcissism are:
• Overvaluing of power, success, money, stereotypical beauty
• Excessive striving for position, status, sense of superiority
• Excessive self focus, egocentricity, and lack of awareness or concern for others
• Selfishness and greed
• Failure to accept responsibility for their actions
• Expectation of favor or sense of entitlement
• Lack of appreciation and gratitude
- Poor sense of moral obligation
Does that sound like anyone you know? Racist white Americans, as a group, promote and reward narcissism and positively reinforce demeaning, negative, and psychopathic behavior towards other races. Deflexion, gaslighting, lying and transference are common games played by corrupt politicians, and their pundits, also common games deployed by narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths. Pay no attention to the personality disorder behind the curtain at your own risk.
Think of it this way. We are all aware that a person can have an inferiority complex. We need to also understand that a person can have a superiority complex. Both complexes are rife with untruths and delusions. Cultural narcissism is at the root of mass psychosis. Mass psychosis as in witch burning, Nazism, and white supremacy fueled conspiracies and conspiracy theories. It amazes me how many people think there’s a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world when clearly the conspiracy to control the world is in realm of white Protestant men. Threatened narcissists, every one.
Perpetuation of racial stereotypes through entertainment was very popular and only rather recently ended mid twentieth century as people of color became increasingly intolerant of second class citizen treatment. Whites ingested and perpetuated those theatrical stereotypes as truth and reality for all members of the particular culture or race being presented probably because their own self concept was based on stereotypes and unquestioned assumptions of human value, and they’d never bothered to really get to know someone who wasn’t white if they knew a non white person at all. Mickey Rooney’s severely cringe-worthy Mr Yunioshi, that embarrassing blotch on the otherwise wonderful Breakfast at Tiffany’s, comes to mind among others.
The racist’s mind is closed to anything resembling the true person who is the unfortunate target of their racism. That Times Square ticker of narcissistic delusions, prejudices and fears scrolling through their minds rather than risking being in the actual moment without judgment or fear of the other person.
The racist fears any non white group that doesn’t acquiesce to affirm their narcissism. They interpret this lack of white ego affirmation as an attack against them because in their minds only one can be on top, they’ve held that top position for centuries, and are terrified by encroaching non whites.
An equivalent comparison I could make here would be the same as an abused spouse after years of tolerating and dealing with victimhood suddenly isn’t playing the abuser’s game anymore and steps out of the attachment to find their own truth. The narcissistic abuser takes this person’s rejection of what they were forcing that person to be, as a rejection of the narcissist’s validity as a human being.
In their minds the abuser and the abused cannot both be valid human beings. In the narcissist’s mind, someone has to be on the bottom. The narcissist’s identity and artificial sense of self is absolutely dependent on someone being under their foot. The current social sentiment of not opting in to the racist’s delusions of superiority is, at this time, quaking their racist hierarchical landscape. Sure they feel rejected and threatened. The narcissist is always threatened by situations and people they have no control over.
People who aren’t constantly affirming white superiority either through praise, and imitation, or by staying beaten down, are the true enemy and the narcissist, subsequently telescoping into psychopathy, resorts to terrorism to keep the falsehoods they’ve aligned their identities with from being publicly exposed and deconstructed.
I’ve always thought of racism as a neurosis or a phobia. Why, when the target of a collection of unreasonable fears is a particular racial group whom the person has had very little contact or personal experience with, is it not seen as the batshit crazy reaction that it is? We euphemize these serious personality disorders by labeling them as racism.
Reacting negatively to people you don’t know based on how they look, or what their religion is, attaching your identity to rumors and stereotypes perpetuated by racist gossip, racist media, and what your parents told you to think of “those people”. Not much based on actual personal experience other than the fear of. They will always see the gains of people of color as their losses.
The constant and pernicious evaluation of everyone’s worth as compared to their own hot air inflated egos, invested up to the very boundaries of their identities in delusional thinking in their efforts to “save” the white race. What they’re actually trying to save at the core of it, is the fading societal affirmation of their narcissism.
Crazy doesn’t let go of a person without a struggle. Especially if crazy thinks it’s one hundred percent right. Only a crazy person who realizes they’re crazy might be inclined to question their own thinking. The narcissist, sociopath or psychopath does not question him or her self. Self examination in the light of truth is not what the narcissist does. The narcissist shoves their narrative and machinations down everyone’s throat at all costs. Alexander Putin, Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump, right wing talking heads, and competitively priced senators and congresspeople come to mind.
The Taliban is another good example of cultural narcissism, they think all those not of their ilk to be infidels and therefore expendable. In their minds, their atrocities against humanity are the will of God because those infidels are “evil.” But that concept exists only their minds. They are making the rules and decisions and saying it’s the will of God when it’s merely their own will. Definitely a textbook example of cultural narcissism. The Taliban and the white supremacists are the same archetypical personality with the same agendas just different targets. Isn’t it interesting they’re both having a bit of a moment in the spotlight at the same time and that they think they are each other’s enemies?
We can parse out the issues this country is facing by addressing systemic racism and cultural bias in their individual bubbles, but not much will change until white cultural narcissism is thoroughly examined, and narcissistic personality disorder, and psychopathy mislabeled as racism are exposed to the light of truth.
