The Last Psychiatrist: The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam
You create illusions about yourself, thus distorting what is real. I have been reading some of the lit on narcissism and they say the problem is forming such notions not based on actual achievements. But, as TLP says above, the achievements as they are publicly recognized may be part of the illusion. Grades can be inflated to please consumers dressed as students. It's near impossible to tell what is real, because reality itself is no longer real.
I prefer to think of it in a different way. It's not about "achievements", it's that one doesn't develop enough grit in one's character. One doesn't actually encounter limits, negative experiences and disappointments honestly. So, one mortgages one's life to an illusion that somehow, sometime in the future, one will make a sudden breakthrough, and one's inner glory will be revealed.
People who think this way do not develop their characters. They don't have any traction on the road below. They don't experience the rubber hitting the surface, which is the pleasure of living. Therefore, they can be easily duped. Life is about whatever they want it to be about. You could tell them they will fly in the future, and they will even believe you, because it seems possible to them, in the absence of consciously experienced reality. They float away into an abstraction, unbounded by time.
You repress the negative and keep hoping for compensation in the future, which never comes.
Cf.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAp_HGYYFJ8
PS.
I've just realised that the American dream is just another example of fakey-fake new age shamanism. They get a forensic artist to sketch you, which implies that you are already dead -- but you haven't faced death, at all. There's no initiation and no real transformation.
You create illusions about yourself, thus distorting what is real. I have been reading some of the lit on narcissism and they say the problem is forming such notions not based on actual achievements. But, as TLP says above, the achievements as they are publicly recognized may be part of the illusion. Grades can be inflated to please consumers dressed as students. It's near impossible to tell what is real, because reality itself is no longer real.
I prefer to think of it in a different way. It's not about "achievements", it's that one doesn't develop enough grit in one's character. One doesn't actually encounter limits, negative experiences and disappointments honestly. So, one mortgages one's life to an illusion that somehow, sometime in the future, one will make a sudden breakthrough, and one's inner glory will be revealed.
People who think this way do not develop their characters. They don't have any traction on the road below. They don't experience the rubber hitting the surface, which is the pleasure of living. Therefore, they can be easily duped. Life is about whatever they want it to be about. You could tell them they will fly in the future, and they will even believe you, because it seems possible to them, in the absence of consciously experienced reality. They float away into an abstraction, unbounded by time.
You repress the negative and keep hoping for compensation in the future, which never comes.
Cf.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAp_HGYYFJ8
PS.
I've just realised that the American dream is just another example of fakey-fake new age shamanism. They get a forensic artist to sketch you, which implies that you are already dead -- but you haven't faced death, at all. There's no initiation and no real transformation.
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