Stupid is as Stupid Does

responding to a raging narcissist

The current geo-political climate feels eerily familiar to me.

Not because I’ve lived through a trade war before - to the best of my recollection, this is my first, but because the person wielding the tactics is a gaslighting, abusive narcissist.

The DSM-5, “defines a narcissist, or a person diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), as exhibiting a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts; essentially, a persistent sense of self-importance, preoccupation with fantasies of success, a belief in being "special," and a need for excessive admiration, often accompanied by exploitative behaviour and a lack of empathy for others.”

Growing up with a narcissist for a mother, I encountered many of these grandiose tactics, including excessive punishments for real or imagined slights, like a 3-month ban on listening to music, seeing my friends and using the TV/computer.

T^#mp’s current tariff threats feel a kin to this - the unnecessary punitive nature, meant to stigmatize, isolate and belittle, that accomplishes little more than making him feel powerful.

We could spend time accessing and deconstructing his tactics, attempt to appeal to his common sense, or appeal to our long-standing relationship as neighbours - but we all know he values neither. Narcissists like the current President often manufacture the crisis they claim to fix. The rub in this current premeditated cluster fuck, is that we are giving him what he wants, our attention.

As you read this, the Narcissist in Chief is revelling in the media coverage he is receiving. He is the queen bee, happily buzzing at the centre of an oligarchic hive mind pollinated by Christofacists.

So what’s a world to do with this level of psychological dysfunction, especially when Dealing with Narcissists 101 says, “thou shalt ignore”.

How do you ignore an orange narcissistic political tsunami?

First, we have to acknowledge that his entire goal is destabilization, after which we need to come to terms with his scorched earth strategy. Like most narcissists, the orange one lives and dies by threats and bravado—we can’t change the way he thinks, but we can manage how we respond to it.

For inspiration, I looked to Bonhoeffer, a strange starting place for an atheist, but then again, I was educated to become a chaplain. While imprisoned by Nazis during WW2, Bonhoeffer wrote at length about the danger of stupidity.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity, we are defenceless.”

For Bonhoeffer, the only counter-weight to these dangers is liberation, which he believes comes from god. As an atheist, I don’t find this argument sustainable for two reasons. First, liberation as an external force appears to oppose Bonhoeffer’s assertion that inner liberation is even possible as it belays the potential for insight into the realm of mysticism instead of processing information in the form of internal dialogue and reducing the evolutionary marvel that is the human brain to dependence on divine inspiration. This leads me to the second problem: if humans are dependent on divine inspiration for insight, then homogeny of thought would be the ideal, not independence. So if part of Bonhoeffer's argument feels like a catch-22, it’s because it is - as it presupposes, an all-knowing and all-loving God is behind the curtain pulling our chain.

So what do we do? To attempt to answer this question through exegesis, a holdover from my seminary days.

• All hope lies in our agency.

Agency is predated by awareness of potentiality and a commitment to human thriving. It is a de-stratified vision that adheres to the long game encoded in our DNA and foisted upon our inadequate social competencies. To put it simply, greed and the hoarding of wealth sustain our dependence on current geopolitical systems, thereby corrupting our moral aptitude.

Our dependence on these systems demands extrication of our moral knowledge, resulting in systematic stupidity, where facts are disregarded and jettisoned in favour of a personal end, combining the philosophical nightmares of Bonhoeffer and Kant.

Too many of us are skipping the awareness step—failing to see and synthesize information around us. The irony of this, given our current unprecedented access to information, is not lost on me, especially when it is obvious that we are taking the easy route by filtering these thoughts through our cognitive bias just so we can disregard them, effectively subjugating our ethics to soothe our sense of dis-ease.

We only have one tool against this madness, humanism - to grow our critical thinking skills and fight against the dying of human enlightenment.

Thoughts?