origins of narcissistic flight

Western culture is in flight from reality because of the way its seems that the colonialism of the past has come back to bite it on the bum.  And, in fact, Christianity plays a role in intensifying and facilitating this flight though its notions of sinfulness.

What has happened is that in the post-colonial world, where active colonialism has now ceased, the colonial past has been painted as a quintessential form of diabolical evil.  In effect, the West now looks upon its own recent past, (and symbolically, looks at its infancy) as unmitigated and undiluted evil.  

If we compare the situation to a human child, supposing that child is told that it is diabolically and abysmally evil, what will the child do?  It will flee from itself and try to find another self, or another way of being.   At the core of the human narcissistic is extreme self-loathing, and at the core of Western civilisation, there has also developed a sensation of the same profound self-loathing.   As a result of this self-loathing, the members of the West, especially its priestly caste, the academics, struggle to see things in ordinary shades of grey.  Instead they lapse into black and white thinking, where one moment they feel that they are the messiahs and saviors of the world, and the next minute they feel that they are hopelessly beyond redemption.  (They revert to primitive defence mechanisms.) 

But it is not Christianity itself, but the inability to take in history and to come to terms with it more realistically that has shattered the foundations of any ethical thinking and genuine or sincere behavior in the West.  This guilty feeling that leads to a flight from reality also prevents people from understanding each other in realistic terms, since somebody traumatized in the way that Western civilization has been, will revert to black and white thinking only.  If you try to explain your situation to them, they may cast you as a devil, or an evil doer, whilst casting themselves as heroes and martyrs for a cause.  They revert to an immature state of being unable to process the complex realities of another human being in their midst.

That is the cause of the narcissistic phenomena in the West and its regression to infantilism.

2

The profound self-loathing of the West is not DUE TO colonialism, but rather it is DUE TO the inability to process colonialism as a realistic, material fact, and to integrate knowledge of it into one’s normal behaviour.   To put it clearly, I do not see anything wrong with paying reparations to those who were subjugated, so long as one does it from the bottom of one’s heart and is not forced.  Actually that would be a wholly realistic way of handling the matter (I mean “realistic” in a psychological sense, although it could present other sorts of problems, politically and economically.)

 

Also, developing an understanding of violence and how it is still very much woven into our human natures would be a psychologically realistic way of handling the past.

 

But for the most part, nothing like this has occurred.  Instead their has been a devolution into primitive defences, as a way to dodge or disavow the past.  And those who are most likely to harp on all the time about “colonialism” are also likely to be the most primitive in their embrace of black and white thinking.  Those people, in fact, also resort to magical thinking, because they think that constantly harping on about something will make things better.  In fact it just entrenches a sense of grievance about the past, whilst turning a blind eye ongoing violence (Including the rather abusive psychological violence of constantly upbraiding others in this way, for a past that has now slipped completely out of our control.

 

As for the Nazi regime, it was not caused by colonialism at all, but rather due to the break down of society due to Germany’s war debt and other factors.   Uneducated and small-minded people, with no end to their hardship in sight, sought out and found a scapegoat.

 

However, the postmodernist intellectuals also want to punish themselves for the Holocaust, which is why we had to have a destruction of any trust or belief in the solidity of a universal ethical foundation.

 

Once again, this desire to punish oneself has led to an outgrowth of stress, uncertainty, and consequently, primitive defences.