The Curse of Narcissism, Part VIII | Clarissa's Blog: "I’m starting to think that much of these narcissistic attacks have to do with people of the spiritual middle classes being able to communicate more effectively with others of the spiritual middle. If you can imagine that everybody has a structure to their psyche, then some soul structures will be very amenable to bumbling through life in a semi-conscious state and will enjoy this as the optimal level of life possible for them. This bubbling along and this half-consciousness can probably feel like mental toughness to those who do it, or at least they are free to convince themselves that this is what it is. And others, who notice that people like me point out things with more nuance, will imagine that I am only using nuance because I’m scared or fragile, and that in the absence of my fear or fragility, I would simply bumble along, half-awake and half-asleep and not feel anything. In that case, I would have become assimilated and would be mentally tough. But it hardly seems worth it living life in that way, and one can easily be blindsided and partially or fully destroyed. Having a different soul structure from that one who belongs, inherently, to the spiritual middle-classes, the bumbling mode is not my optimal state. It’s not that I feel jealous of it, and I am not hurt by not being able to switch off my mind and go into automatic mode. I’m just not convinced by the defensive rhetoric that this is a form of toughness.
But my mistake, before, was imagining that those who like me who have different soul structures can speak to those who like to bumble. The bumbling ones are militantly aggressive against being educated, so they resort to control mechanisms, which often look a lot like narcissism..
It is true that they are more self-centred than the higher spiritual caste, and that in all sorts of very significant ways they “know not what they do”. They really are just relating things to terms they can understand. “Why doth Jennifer not simply bumble along? Why does she read a book? She must be insecure! It has to be very painful to read a book, so nobody will do it unless they have something wrong with them.”
This is how they read all of their own fears and anxieties into my character, when I am just not like them to begin with and have different needs. Being switched off and resigned is not one of my needs. Those of the spiritual middle classes imagine it must be very painful to be fully alert. Sometimes it is — but mostly, even in pain, there is a huge amount of ecstasy. But one has to imagine that for the spiritually middle-class person, this looks like ego-denial, and vulnerabillity to real things.
Can I go so far as to say that a lot of intra-family warfare might be due to jealousy and misunderstanding in relation to someone in the family being more intellectually gifted than the parent?
But the parent in question will still have the advantage of being able to relate his or her concerns directly to other middle-class people, who will have similar moods and feelings about those who break with convention so as to think for themselves. These middle-class types have the benefit of always being implicitly understood."
'via Blog this'
But my mistake, before, was imagining that those who like me who have different soul structures can speak to those who like to bumble. The bumbling ones are militantly aggressive against being educated, so they resort to control mechanisms, which often look a lot like narcissism..
It is true that they are more self-centred than the higher spiritual caste, and that in all sorts of very significant ways they “know not what they do”. They really are just relating things to terms they can understand. “Why doth Jennifer not simply bumble along? Why does she read a book? She must be insecure! It has to be very painful to read a book, so nobody will do it unless they have something wrong with them.”
This is how they read all of their own fears and anxieties into my character, when I am just not like them to begin with and have different needs. Being switched off and resigned is not one of my needs. Those of the spiritual middle classes imagine it must be very painful to be fully alert. Sometimes it is — but mostly, even in pain, there is a huge amount of ecstasy. But one has to imagine that for the spiritually middle-class person, this looks like ego-denial, and vulnerabillity to real things.
Can I go so far as to say that a lot of intra-family warfare might be due to jealousy and misunderstanding in relation to someone in the family being more intellectually gifted than the parent?
But the parent in question will still have the advantage of being able to relate his or her concerns directly to other middle-class people, who will have similar moods and feelings about those who break with convention so as to think for themselves. These middle-class types have the benefit of always being implicitly understood."
'via Blog this'
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