Chapter 3: The Results of Programmed Narcissism
from the book "RootEd: How Trauma Impacts Learning and Society" by S.R. Zelenz
The fall of the Kingdoms perpetuated the dictatorships in Europe and Asia. The countries that did not befall communist dictators were those where the monarchy was willing to allow a democratic government. Those monarchs were not murdered.
America never had a monarchy. Schools were enacted and fully reinforced in the 1800's and early 1900's. Students were not being trained to serve a monarch. They did not befall a dictatorship because there was no monarch to murder. However, they were programmed to create a unified nation and workforce through their schools.
America was ahead of programming the masses to eradicate individual cultural norms, rituals, and beliefs. Dictators took swaths of countries and tried to formulate nationalist rhetoric to unify the people. These failed significantly in areas where there were too many different cultures. These cultures often fought the forced erasure of their identity. America has yet to accomplish this goal. Even now we still see education attempting to eradicate history, to erase cultural understanding, and to discourage diverse languages. This forced limitation was designed to create a cohesive culture, yet more than 160 years of compulsory education has yet to achieve this in America.
So why did it even survive this long in America? Well, the dictatorships were implemented on lands where the people had always been. There was a sense of place and ownership over the land. Their ancestors were buried there. They had a history that was thousands of centuries old. Abuse was the only method which was consistently utilized across all dictatorships to reinforce compliance with removal of one's need to hold on to identity.
In America, the only people who had the same struggle were the Native Americans. African Americans were not in America by choice. The rest were immigrants looking for opportunity or fleeing tyranny at home. They had no "place" anymore and they were more willing to succumb to an external party telling them who they needed to be in order to stay there. Yet, the people deciding the narrative were not the ones who had a true historic belonging to this land. Only the Native Americans did. So, the genocide of the Native American population and harsh stripping of their cultural identity was acutely focused on. This later led to widespread alcoholism, abuse, and severe poverty in their individual tribal nations. All colonization across the globe used religious programming to reinforce subservient behavior. This was the closest thing to a Kingdom that America had known.
European settlers had already been subjected to Kingdoms and the partnership with the Church. They did not question it. Some came to America to explore religious freedom, some of which was actually worse than the religions enforced in their homelands. Others found a more compassionate strategy, yet it was still a forced indoctrination reinforced by external parties and a deity (King). "Free will" was given lip service, but vehemently punishable, even by death.
The use of the term "free will" has been advocated throughout the centuries to give the people a semblance of choice and to make them feel that they have some kind of control over their reality. Yet, stories tell how failure to do as one is told will lead to poverty, abuse, sexual abuse, imprisonment, or death. Sometimes all of these. The purveyors of moral code were some of the most abusive people around. In fact, they are quite the opposite of what they preach. Their predatory behavior also had nothing to do with wealth or one’s station in life. Anyone could snatch the reins of power by proclaiming religious superiority.
Programmed Narcissism
Stanely Milgram performed an experiment that was published in 1973 relating to what lengths people will go in order to follow authority. He found that people were more willing to harm others if ordered to than they were to defy authority (Milgram, 1973). He believed that obedience is deeply ingrained in the social order. All social orders require someone in authority, people who submit to the authority, and people who defy authority (Milgram, 1973). He also states that these factors surpass any “training in ethics, sympathy, or moral conduct” (Milgram, 1973, p. 62).
What his experiment does not take into account is the possibility that society has been programmed to obey authority and this programming runs deeper than any education relating to defiance of authority for the sake of morality or ethics. Fear has much to do with this.
This begins with parenting. Children who are raised in a home where punishments that resulted in isolation and exclusion train the children that they are not worthy and will not be included unless they comply. This generates a conditioned loneliness. Loneliness increases neurological self-preservation behaviors. So, parents or others who treat a child in a manner such as time-out, sending them to their room and forcibly denying them connection, isolating them in the classroom, or excluding them from family or school outings reinforces narcissistic self-preservation behaviors. These behaviors include hypervigilance, lack of empathy, and more. Adults are given free rein to violate a child’s boundaries and autonomy, which then begins the development of narcissistic abuse training and conditioning.
Loneliness increases morning cortisol levels, the stress hormone (Cacioppo, 2013). It creates a hypervigilance setting the brain to look for potential threats (Cacioppo, 2013). This makes the brain see threats where they may or may not exist (Cacioppo, 2013). This also creates memory biases regarding social interactions (Cacioppo, 2013). All of which increases the likelihood of increased negative interactions with others (Cacioppo, 2013). It increases defensiveness because the person who feels lonely is only focused on how they feel and not how others feel (Cacioppo, 2013). Loneliness increases prepotent responding, which means that impulsive behaviors will increase (Cacioppo, 2013). It also disturbs sleep cycles because the brain is still in hypervigilance mode to self-protect (Cacioppo, 2013). It is very clear that symptoms of what many label as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are very likely symptoms of severe loneliness and not receiving adequate nor appropriate attention. The way in which adults treat children exacerbates the very issue the child is already reacting from and it becomes a downward spiral that goes out of control without someone to stop the cycle.
If we were to label this as a mental disorder, we would be dismissing the fact that it is a physical developmental disorder. It was created by the society in which the child grew up and as such, society is responsible for the creation of what results. A two-year-old child is not going to be forced to think unequivocally the same way a 42-year-old would. Psychologically, two-year-old children are incapable of understanding at that level. If only certain portions of the brain were affected, one could easily have the brain of a 42-year-old with limitations in the prefrontal cortex as a direct result of childhood traumas impacting brain development. Thus the 42-year-old’s ability to make rational decisions, regulate emotions, and think beyond the way a self-serving two-year-old can would not be absurd.
The challenge lies in the fact that one cannot control all adult interaction situations or experiences that a child might have in order to prevent the trauma that truncates development. However, we can make strides as a society to stop the current socially acceptable behaviors that are very clearly developmentally inappropriate and abusively reinforced. Physical punishment, as well as psychological manipulation of children, are two major components we need to address. Narcissistic behaviors are often transferred within family lines just as abuse cycles run in families. It can be broken, but it takes a lot of education and retraining people on how to interact with children when working with those in traumatic situations or who have gone through traumatic situations.
Unfortunately, we also find predatory people in the “helping” fields such as social services, psychology, and education. These predators vary from those who seek to violate a child in seriously inappropriate manners, but also those who seek to manipulate children as if they were puppets. Those who use children as a way to live out their own deeper desires or dreams (overzealous parents or coaches who want the child to be a superstar). We also see it in people who are desperate to find something wrong with the child and proceed to demand focus on how overwhelmed they are with the child and that they don’t understand why the child has so many problems (often a direct result of schools or daycares not having the capacity to actually work appropriately with a child to meet the child’s actual needs). Some parents utilize the carrot on a stick manipulation method that is reinforced by the schools who encourage parents to do these things in the home environment. The schools will not take responsibility for their contribution to the child’s behavior. They are always quick to blame the parent(s). Neither parents nor schools are listening to the child.
The rare few who do not reinforce the procession ensuring adult needs are always met, without consideration of the child’s needs, are frequently attacked. The children have no escape. They are at the mercy of adults who spend their time policing the behavior of other adults to ensure the end result is attention on the adults and convenience for the adults. The child is just the product the adults deal with. It’s all about the adults. If this is what a child grows up with, then we cannot expect them to grow up to be a well-adjusted and productive member of society when all of the adults in the child’s life went out of their way to ensure the child was kept in a state of unacceptable, a problem, needing help, and perpetually never good enough or of value. They were just a pawn in a grown-up game of “look at me!” They learn narcissism from the adults who raised them. They learn that what is morally and ethically sound is not important. They learn that doing what you are told surpasses any personal feelings or concerns.
Drugging children for the schools is something the pharmaceutical industry, medical, and psychiatric industry joined forces with the education field to generate more jobs for adults using the children as fodder for their needs to be met. If a child has attention-deficit, it means they aren’t getting enough attention. Yet the solution we see is to drug them, rather than to change the adults in the equation and how they respond to the child.
Adults will never admit to being the reason that children are behaving badly. Children are like frogs in the pond. They start developing odd legs and such when chemical spills happen in their environment. They try to draw your attention to it but are almost always dismissed or misunderstood because adults only see things from their own perspective. They very infrequently attempt to understand what the child might be thinking or experiencing, or they do not have the capacity to interpret or understand. Rather than seeking help to ask what the child is saying, they seek help to find a way to control the child. Thus, perpetuating and exacerbating the problem.
When the abused become the abusers, they are no better, but often far worse than the monster they were trying to defeat. Their numbers can destroy entire nations and populations with contempt and murderous retaliation. Facts do not matter because their cognitive dissonance won’t allow anything to redirect their narcissistic rage.
The human mind can be easily manipulated if people set in place the right programmatic materials for consumption. The reason gun control is not taken seriously in America is because society is easy to manipulate due to the programming. If propaganda is spread to bring narcissistic rage, people will willingly use those weapons to harm citizens without remorse. I have seen how oppressed members of society start behaving in the same manner as their abuser(s) in order to feel safe and theoretically heard. All this does is increase the abuse in society. It is not justice. It does not create the equality that they seek. It creates equality of abuse only. This response is then used to reinforce how dangerous they were to begin with, which only reinforces their oppression.
I find it fascinating when people think themselves impervious to dictatorship or similar situations that have occurred in other nations. What that literally states is they think themselves superior and more intelligent. They are literally stating that all other countries who have befallen to such leadership were ignorant and stupid. Now, what that really is, is heavily misguided narcissism and cognitive dissonance reinforcing their self-belief to being above reproach. There is no more dangerous position than to be like this. In fact, it is this level of self-identification that actually generated the dictatorships that resulted. Severe national pride and belief in superiority.
Children vs. Adults
Adults expect coddling or aggression as the only two forms of communicating with children. They were likely yelled at or praised for everything as a child so they only know aggression or coddling as an adult. They were never spoken to as logical intelligent beings when they were children, so when they are spoken to like this as an adult, they think they are being insulted if they don't know something. There is an inherent need to be superior, which makes sense since compulsory education taught them that you mean nothing unless you compete and are on top. So those who suddenly no longer feel they are on top become contemptuous. They even feel that their own limited knowledge and experience trumps those who are career researchers and experts in the field. This is all cognitive dissonance.
All of this was highly developed in schools. Parents merely reinforce school demands since parents are beholden to schools. People literally advise others to appease narcissistic abuse out of professional protocol. One can be considered unprofessional for expecting intellectual discourse to be allowed conversation. Do not expect respectful treatment or one can be deemed as wrong simply for speaking up and even addressing another as an equal or someone who should respect anyone else.
Personal Experience
I taught students by helping them teach each other and giving them ownership over their experience and speaking with them in a manner that encouraged self-reflection and opportunity for change. Adults don't like that very much. They get angry and offended when you do that with them. Adults were raised with teachers that controlled them, told them what to do, gave them gold stars, and punished or shamed them. So, their perception of the world was shaped by this treatment. When you hold a mirror up and discuss behavior, they take it as a personal attack.
When speaking with a child about their behavior, be sure to separate the behavior from the person. Be sure they understand that. They are not the behavior. They can control the behavior. They cannot control "who" they are. When you make them feel like the "who" is being attacked, they get on the defensive and narcissistic rage is unleashed. What I'm noticing with adults is their cognitive dissonance over new information sets them into hypervigilance, projections, gaslighting, and narcissistic rage. They take literally everything as a personal attack on their character. That is because they were raised that way. So, in order to talk to adults, there is a level of unprogramming them that has to happen in order to get them to the point of hearing what is being said. If they are coddled through that process, they won't hear what is being said. They are only seeking the comfort that comes from relieving the cognitive dissonance. This means their belief won't change because it is back to what they know.
The education system and authoritarian parenting paradigm has literally created an entire adult populace that cannot handle looking at their own behaviors and self-reflecting. Nor do they know how to find information to change. They rely upon others to tell them everything. They seek constant validation for everything they do and become angry when they are ignored or given feedback that would actually help them improve.
Adults avoid being honest with each other and often choose passive-aggressive behavior in order to not be responsible for their actions. They fear speaking honestly and they feel like they have to either avoid the person expecting honesty (perhaps to deal with their own issues or because they don't know how to respond because they feel challenged), act dramatically, go to their room, and slam the door, or they act like nothing happened and avoid the topic completely. Resolution is never found through any of these methods. The only thing that happens through this behavior is the festering of the wound, which will only get worse.
Adults cannot cope. They have learned narcissistic abuse either by becoming abusive or by responding to being controlled by a narcissist. Examples include:
Women advising other women to be wary of men.
Co-workers advise each other to remain silent and take the clearly abusive situation at work in order to keep their jobs.
People advising others to appease the abuser (parent/spouse/even child sometimes) in order to keep the family together because the image of family is more important than psychological well-being.
Everyone was trained to shut up and take it.
When confronted over the actual behavior, the abuse commences.
The cognitive dissonance goes into overdrive.
The narcissistic rage becomes the central focus
Hypervigilance is a programmed response to trauma. There is a lot of hysteria in American television and news. The media is constantly pumping narcissism to the masses, normalizing it so that people don’t question the behaviors and the society they find themselves in. They may stand dumbfounded and surprised by the way the world seems to be, but they will never question what their accepted systems have done to contribute to this. They won’t question their own parenting that is considered the norm. They believe they are doing right. They are doing their best. They are doing what they know. What they know is being reinforced by external parties that keep the entire society in hypervigilance. Hypervigilance makes the population easier to manipulate.
Abusers keep their victims on edge. They keep their victims feeling insecure. They keep their victims fearing. They use dramatic loud sounds to reinforce this fear. Shock value to numb the senses so they can make people dissociate and be easier to control. Exposure to healthy human behavior is uncommon because conditioning from intentionally hysterical behavior makes populations easier to control.
Narcissism and Basic Survival
When comparing humanity with the natural world, we tend to separate ourselves by our ability to be creative, artistic, produce architectural wonders, and many more amazing things that cannot be done by any other species on the planet. We also associate this with having the ability to have empathy, sympathize, and show an array of emotions not frequently identified in the wild. This does not mean that these emotions or abilities do not exist in the wild. It suggests that humanity has not yet been able to fully understand the creatures in the wild, despite their determination to understand and conquer nature. One factor that humanity holds in equity with wild animals is narcissism.
Survival of the Fittest
We have all heard people preach their strong positions by using terms such as survival of the fittest, only the strong survive, and many others. Some even use these phrases to justify doing heinous acts to those they deem weaker or less than. The means by which humanity has taken this natural instinct has gone far more insidiously than any wild creature has ever fathomed.
Fear is a mighty motivator. Fear of loss of control. Just as it is easier to control victims by reinforcing narcissistic behaviors to constantly move the goalposts, gaslight them, project on them, and isolate them with silence so they always question themselves, thus preventing them from standing up and doing something - those victims do the same to other groups who are in positions weaker than their own. Removing support of identity, support of self-awareness, support of improving core identity with confidence, is not a mistake. It is intentional. It is narcissism.
Narcissism is Fear of Death
Narcissism is a core human survival mechanism. Those who have learned how to navigate the world either improve their strategies (especially if given healthy mentorship and guidance), or they remain stuck because the world has hardened them, and they cannot let that guard down for one second for fear of death. That's what it really is. It is fear of death.
Narcissism is fear. It is fear of death. Death of the ego, but more importantly death of the familiar. The unknown is what terrifies because it cannot be controlled. So, something one cannot control feels like death. It is fear of death. Man’s fear of nature is exactly this. The need to control it to ensure survival. Unfortunately, man can never truly control nature, for in the attempt to control nature, he kills himself.
Teaching Narcissism in Schools
Schools aren't about the kids. They are all about the adults and what they are getting out of it. The education industry in America is one of the largest employers and the most guaranteed supply of job security due to the focus of its product. It is unfortunate to reduce it to such factors, but when attempts to focus on the children and the psychological impact made on them, priorities become clear. It does not lie with the children and their highest development. It's about efficient processing of products for funding guarantee and job security. Others also look at it as childcare. The testing machine is also about jobs and product manufacture. The sheer depth of how far the educational job creation front covers is far and wide. It includes every single facet of manufacture imaginable. It also separates the children from the real world.
The separation of school from life sets people up to separate navigating the world and communicating with others in a constructive manner. It turns into a free-for-all dominance competition. Rather than serving as each other's teachers and students, we turn into people who feel we have to prove we're right over literally anyone else and then people feel attacked if they are corrected. Now the way one is corrected is part of the issue. Most people assert their "knowledge" in a form of dominance over the other, thus the crumbling of any constructive debate or mutual navigation of the topic.
Imagine how different our political landscape would be if we were to suddenly start communicating in a more receptive fashion. The largest factor to note is that the dominating behavior is reactionary. It is not responsive. Reaction is a means for manipulation and directing people to lose their self-control. This makes them easier to control. When they are out of control, you can sell them anything or get them to react any way you want them to because they are easy to make emotional/volatile/lacking in self-control.
This is done intentionally. If you want a healthy country, you have to start by communicating like the perfect classroom environment where the teacher speaks to students from a position of understanding them and not speaking condescendingly while they restate how students see the situation and offer other alternatives for students to consider. The challenge with this is that it requires people to be patient with one another. It requires time.
When I tried to introduce this to public school teachers through means of introducing democracy for classroom management, their #1 response was, "we don't have time for that." Think about that for a minute.
Empathy
A recent study involving 11 experiments and 1,200 participants resulted in demonstrating that people would not choose empathy regardless of positive feelings due to the amount of effort involved (Cameron et al., 2019). The researchers did find that if participants were told they were more empathetic than the other group, they would be more likely to choose things that demonstrated more empathy (Cameron et al., 2019). This further reinforces the way education has programmed them to respond to what they are told, as in being told who or what they are and living up to that. This is an approval seeking behavior and is demonstrated in all narcissistic power dynamic relationships. Participants saw the researchers as the experts and more knowledgeable, so when told by these researchers that they were more empathetic, they believed it and did it. However, when left on their own or told that they weren’t as empathetic as the other group, they did not choose empathetic options.
This further reinforces what Milgram suggested. That participants will obey authority without thinking. If they are told to harm someone, they are more likely to follow orders. If they are told they are more empathetic, they will prove they are more empathetic. They are not taking independent moral or ethical stands based upon their own beliefs. They take their own self-beliefs from external sources first. In fact, the researchers also found that most of the participants had a very strong preference to avoid showing empathy even when the example was expressing joy (Cameron et. al, 2019). Researchers believed it had to do with the participants considering it to be more effort to choose empathy (Cameron et. al, 2019).
A recent study from the University of California Berkeley found that various studies spanning over twenty years demonstrated that those who were in a position of power demonstrated behaviors reminiscent of those who have suffered traumatic brain injuries (Keltner, 2016). They behaved more impulsively, were less aware of the risks they were taking, and were challenged in empathizing with others (Keltner, 2016). Naish and Obhi (2015) also found that when in positions responding to power, participants were able to mirror the responses of the person of authority. However, when participants were the person of authority, they were unable to mirror the responses of those in positions below them. This lack of mirroring or responsive empathy was reinforced through Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
Keltner studies behaviors and the research of Naish and Obhi studies the brain itself. Both studies demonstrated a lack of empathy and ability to relate to others for those who wield some sort of power. Effort to produce empathy did not change the results. Neurologists, Lord David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, define this as Hubris syndrome, “a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years, and with minimal constraint on the leader” (Owen & Davidson, 2009, p.1397).
Licensed psychotherapist, Bree Bonchay, LCSW has purported that over 158 million people in the United States are affected by narcissistic abuse (Bonchay, 2018). “There are 304 million persons in the U.S. One in 25 people will have the disorders associated with ‘no conscience’ which include antisocial personality disorder, sociopath, and psychopath. Three hundred and four million divided by 25 = 12.16 million people with no conscience” (Brown, 2010, para. 4-5).
The damage goes beyond the personal impact to the individual. Everyone impacted by narcissistic abuse impacts our medical systems, work environments, school systems, and social environments. This increased stress response impacts people with physical and psychological symptoms. Symptoms vary from person to person, but can include heart attack, weight gain or loss, anxiety, depression, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, insomnia, autoimmune disorders, migraines, epilepsy, digestion issues, arthritis, cancer, Type 2 Diabetes, alcohol and drug addiction, high cholesterol, and much more. One would normally consider these negative problems for a society to bear, but when you look at the economic results, this generates numerous jobs. More things to sell. More people to medicate. More patients to treat. There is no motivation to stop this problem. It’s a huge money-maker.