Remember You Must Die

“From ancient times the saying comes,
There is no death; there is no life.
Indeed, the skies are cloudless
And the river waters clear.”
Yoshimoto (Samurai 1185 -1333. Zen Death Poems, Yoal Hoffman, tr)

“What makes the patient with a character disorder a patient at all? In fact, this, as well as the related question — when is analysis terminated? — reveal the inner limits of psychoanalysis. The theory of the individual becomes a theory of society. The
psychoanalytic theory of narcissism is entangled in the same web. Narcissism is a character disorder, often surfacing with such vague symptoms as “emptiness” and “futility.” Moreover, the narcissistic patient is often not dysfunctional but well adjusted. Otto Kernberg comments that the narcissistic patient who is successful in professional life often appears to himself and others as perfectly normal. This confesses, without admitting, that the character disorder is not an individual, but a social disorder.”
Russell Jacoby (Crisis of Narcissism)

“…as the priestess began to speak: ‘Trojan son of Anchises,
sprung from the blood of the gods, the path to hell is easy:
black Dis’s door is open night and day:
but to retrace your steps, and go out to the air above,
that is work, that is the task.”
Virgil (The Aeneid Book VI, tr. A.S. Kline )

There seems to be crises today in every imaginable field. A crisis of crises. Russell Jacoby wrote a short but trenchant essay on narcissism for Telos. One among many essays on ‘Capitalism and the Crisis of Narcisissm’. And he touches on several points that I have commented on numerous times in this blog. And as Jacoby notes, the title should be Narcissism and the Crisis of Capitalism. And Jacoby notes the reactionary flavour of much writing (or thinking) on narcissism. The idea of a crisis of narcissism implies a surge of narcissistic personalities and suggests a past when people were less narcissistic, less self obsessed. I think I have probably been guilty of this myself.

“The decay of the patriarchal family signalled the onset of the new narcissism: so goes the argument. In brief, the critique of narcissism is suspected of secreting a love of authority. It honors patriarchal authority, and bemoans its decline. The term “permissive” society similarly suggests an affection for obedience, and families and societies which did not spare the rod or gallows.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

I had one off line debate with a longtime reader who was furious that I was suggesting that the decline of patriarchal authority (the withering of the Oedipal complex) was a negative. And that wasn’t really what I was saying.

“Contemporary psychoanalytic theorists confirm that narcissism does not derive from specific childhood traumas. No fantasy (or reality) of an uncle, who has seduced or raped the mother before the eyes of the child, lies at the root of narcissism. Rather, an entire upbringing and atmosphere is involved. According to Heinz Kohut, the most common etiology of narcissism is the personality of the parents; they themselves are narcissistic. With their children, they are cold, distant, and uninterested. Narcissistic parents breed narcissistic children.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

And here Jacoby references Marcuse’s concept of ‘repressive desublimation’. I remember this idea as far back as the sixties. And it seemed hugely relevant to that period.

“…a simultaneous release of sexual energies — desublimation — and a contraction of its mode. Sexuality was integrated into late capitalism.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

The sixties was the front edge of mass marketing, of an intensified and increasingly sophisticated advertising apparatus. And sex was, rather obviously, at the center of it. And here its useful to look at just how ‘sex’ is used in marketing. There are complex dynamics of gender and class that permeate the selling of every commodity one can imagine. As Jacoby notes, sex doesn’t adorn the commodity, the commodity adorns (what Jacoby calls) denatured sexuality. And that doesn’t even go far enough. If you want to choose a new toothpaste (for whatever reason) you , the consumer, are guided to teeth whiteners, and are shown images of beautiful young people with perfect smiles. But not just perfect smiles but images that create a narrative of sexual fulfilment. And not just sexual fulfilment, but success. And the linkage goes on and on and on. Not just success but personal betterment. Progress. Societal improvement. And here often ‘health’ is implied, and its ties to improving planetary stability. There is really not end to it.

One of the changes that occurred with the decline in punitive parental authority was that the Super Ego was weakened.

“The environment which used to be experienced as threateningly close is now experienced more and more as threateningly distant; where children were formerly overly stimulated by the emotional life (including the erotic) of their parents, they are now often under stimulated.”
Heinz Kohut (The Restoration of the Self)

The distant parenting of the educated classes in the West. And here is the essential feature of the ‘crisis’ of narcissism.

“…the critics of narcissism and dwindling parental authority, or at least the Frankfurt School, do not urge the restoration of past forms of authority. Their analysis distinguishes between authority and authoritarianism. This is no quibble. If this distinction is lost, the social-psychology of fascism and the social configuration of narcissism blur.”
Russel Jacoby (Ibid)

“The most cowardly, unresisting people become implacable as soon as they can exercise their absolute parental authority. The abuse of this authority is, as it were, a crude compensation for all the submissiveness and dependence to which they abuse
themselves willy-nilly in bourgeois society.”
Karl Marx (Peuchet: On Suicide, 1846)

The fact is that the waning of Patriarchy, in the classic sense, has ushered in a new form of cultural (societal) instability. And perhaps one that is, clinically speaking, more difficult to treat. But its not a choice, society has become (because of a host of contributing factors) even more irrational. The loss of an Oedipal narrative is a part of a larger set of problems that has reshaped the family and parenting.

“The most advanced social groups — affluent young professionals — expose most sharply the advanced tendencies of capitalism. Narcissism is conventionally designated as hedonistic, the pursuit of self-gratification. The description misses its inner structure: the hedonism of narcissism is parsimonious. It does not squander its energies in the mad pursuit of pleasure but doles it out while scanning interest rates and stock reports. Hedonism is not an invariant beyond and outside society, but bares the imprint of history and class. Not the dissolute hedonism of the surplus aristocracy but resolute hedonism marks the ambitious professionals; hedonism becomes calculated and calculating, healthy and approved, as well as profitable. As the psychic household of the individual is remodeled into a financial counseling service, children receive a poor rating; they are high risks, requiring too much initial investment and too few guaranteed returns. The exchange principle, capitalism’s own weapon, is used by the bourgeoisie to prune its own family. Hedonism devours itself.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

Risk averse, the logic of investment. There is a tributary here of Market based calculation. Children get a poor rating. Indeed. And this is also the result of the ascension of scientism, and instrumental thinking. Of positivism, too. The bourgeois family must cut costs, let go of the elderly (send them to retirement homes, and here the Covid narrative interposes, too, as an opportunistic and instinctual economic solution.)

“Neither narcissism or the family can be considered apart from the tendencies of capitalism. Both express in different terms the subordination to the exchange principle. Both accept the same currency. Children are deemed an increasingly unwise investment. For the professional, children are judged a drain and obstacle to career and pleasures. Pets, autos, jogging, tennis lessons, offer more reliable compensation for the same expenditure. The “fatherless” and “kinless” society devolves into the “childless” society.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

The intolerance of sacrifice, as it relates to raising children, to having children, to being a parent, is also reflected in an intolerance of ambiguity, a hallmark of the fascist character structure. They relate because ideas children cannot be made secure, there is no guarantee, there is only a certain loss of control. Also becoming a father or mother is tied into a recognition of having reached a certain age. And sex, the foundation of hedonism, and of marketing that exploits or uses hedonistic urges is associated with youth. The connection between sexual activity and children is increasingly hidden and distanced. Children from certain perspectives can be seen to be robbing the parent of their youth. For women there is the additional physical hardship of giving birth. Western educated young adults are waiting longer to have children, IF they have children, and additionally there are questions of the ‘biological clock’ for women, often perceived as unfair. The unfairness of biological destiny. And so there has been a massive increase in technologies of reproduction, from IVF to artificial wombs to even surrogacy, with the outsourcing at least part of the risk.

“Analytical therapy began officially with Freud, and, as we all know, treatment was soon restricted to young patients. ‘Never trust any patient over 30’ could then have been—and now often is—the slogan of many orthodox Freudians, analogous to the slogan of the student revolt in the 1960s and not in my opinion a coincidence, because we can now see that the Freudian point of view anticipated and paved the way for many radical changes in society, the most obvious among which being the emphasis on sex . But I want to deal here with the youth-centred vision so apparent in our culture today and the accompanying repression of most of the archetypes surrounding old age, and to dare to raise the question of the extent of the contribution of Freudian thought to contemporary gerontophobia. I do not pretend to have the answer, but I suggest that if in fact the Freudian Weltanschauung has exerted this influence, it has probably done so indirectly by centring psychic life on and around sexuality, which in its turn is biologically and archetypally linked with youth.”
Luigi Zoja (‘Working against Dorian Gray: analysis and the old ‘, Journal of Analytical Psychology)

There is a repression and denial of age. Age is covered up, both literally and figuratively. Everyone wants to look younger than they are. You don’t look a day over fifty etc. And as a topic, it is deemed impolite to ask someone their age. And there are contradictions within that. First, some of this is the result of marketing, the ‘youth’ market, the under 30 demographic that is often the primary target for advertisers. But it is more than that, too. The retreat from procreation does not stop fecundity from remaining a symbol of ‘useful’ and ‘productive’.

“On the surface, these patients may not present seriously disturbed behavior; some of them may function socially very well, and they usually have much better impulse control than the infantile personality. These patients present an unusual degree of self-reference in their interactions with other people, a great need to be loved and admired by others, and a curious apparent contradiction between a very inflated concept of themselves and an inordinate need for tribute from others. Their emotional life is shallow. They experience little empathy for the feelings of others, they obtain very little enjoyment from life other than from the tributes they receive from others or from their own grandiose fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when external glitter wears off and no new sources feed their self-regard. They envy others, tend to idealize some people from whom they expect narcissistic supplies and to depreciate and treat with contempt those from whom they do not expect anything (often their former idols). In general, their relationships with other people are clearly exploitative and sometimes parasitic.”
Otto Kernberg (Borderline Condition and Pathological Narcisissm)

Now, there is a fascinating and pretty cogent chapter on Freud at the start of James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld. And it will help with the topics of age, death, and narcissism. (and Capitalism).

“There were then three dominant views of the dream: romantic, rationalist, and somaticist. Freud took strands from each and wove them together into an elegant system. From the romantics, he took the idea that the dream contained a hidden but important personal message from another world. From the rationalists, Freud accepted the idea that the manifestdream, dream language as it appeared, was a worthless jumble of nonsense—for Freud, however, it was decipherable into a latent value and meaning. With the somaticists, he agreedthat the dream reflected physiological processes—for Freud, however, these had mainly to do with sexuality and sleep. Of the three positions, the romantic one was nearest to Freud’s, and therefore it is this romantic position, by having been most assimilated, that most disappeared from the postFreudian era in which we all live and dream. Like the romantics, Freud built a world upon the dream and connected thedream primarily with the realm of sleep ,the nightworld, and with classical myth, giving to it a separate region with its own topography.”
James Hillman (The Dream and the Underworld)

Freud saw dreams utilizing material from the previous day (or couple of days, sometimes). The tools for the dreamwork were traces or images from the dreamer’s daily life. This is the rationalist Freud. The book is titled, after all, The Interpretation of Dreams. Interpretation is the job of the dayworld (as Hillman puts it). But the ‘dream’ is not of the dayworld. The dream is itself, and is of the nightworld (the unconscious).

“Now Freud fully recognized, even in the most romantic sense, that the dream itself belonged to the underworld. Hesays that the day residues “are not the dream itself. . . . They could not of themselves form a dream. They are, strictly speaking, only the psychical material which the dream work employs . . .”. The dayworld is only the material cause of the dream; its formal, efficient and final causes are the wishes of Eros working upon the psyche in the night to keep it sleeping. Moreover, he is unequivocal and adamant about the final cause, the dream’s purpose. It has nothing to do with the dayworld. Freud says, “. . . it would be misleading to say that dreams are concerned with the tasks of life before usor seek to find a solution for the problems of our daily work.. . . Useful work of this kind is remote from dreams. . . . There is only one useful task . . . that can be ascribed to a dream, and that is the guarding of sleep.”
James Hillman (Ibid)

Jung made one significant point about dreams and that had to do with the hows and whys of remembering — Jung saw the dream as ‘wanting’ to be made conscious. In a sense the dream itself emerges after sleep because there is an impulse (or instinct) in it that wants to be interpreted. And I think this is important (Freud never could find a good explanation for why we don’t remember some dreams but do remember others. Just as there was no satisfactory explanation for childhood amnesia).

It is worth noting, too, that Hillman is something of a controversial figure in the field of psychoanalysis. I am ambivalent enough about Jung let alone one of his interpreters. But Hillman casts a pretty long shadow over Jungian thinking, and he was never really a clinician of any sort (there are literally no case studies in Hillman) but more a theorist, an interesting slightly pop figure who Americans seem to love and who has very little visibility outside the US. His last book (I think it was his last) was a NYTimes bestseller. So, that is perhaps the ultimate red flag. Still, he is not without value, but it is worth remembering he is right on the edge of popularizer of Jungian ideas, and serious thinker.

Still, the early work of Hillman remains pretty good. And I agree with him that it is the non clinical Freud (the philosophical Freud) that is actually most important. Hillman quotes Swiss analyst Adolph Guggenbuhl-Craig. “Guggenbuhl-Craig once remarked: ‘The Freudians cannot properly understand Freud because they take him at his word. The Jungians may be better at understanding Freud because they can read him for his mythology.” Still, Hillman retains that reactionary quality one finds in Jung. In fact its probably worse in Hillman. And there is pretty fair summation of Hillman by a former student and coleague.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265054676_James_Hillman_The_unmaking_of_a_psychologist_Part_one_His_legacy

That all said, I still think Hillman is very much worth reading. (One of the comparisons for Hillman is Joseph Campbell, and that seems apt).

The current decline in reproduction also coincides with a systematic war on farming and food, and all the emerging markets connected to the Climate ‘crisis’ (sic) and also the WEF anti-population agenda. That distance Heinz Kohut notes the restructuring of the psyche was connected with the ‘atmosphere’ of distance and coldness. Familial relations today feel colder than fifty years ago. The rise of screen technology and the internet has meant another outsourcing of parental affection. Of course this is more acute within families of the affluent bourgeoisie. And the global south, suffering their own traumas, did escape this one — to a degree anyway.

So discussions of narcissism always risk (at least from leftist critics) accusations of conservatism. And partly this is true. But thats really not the point. The genocide being live streamed from Gaza, and the entire Zionist machine for propaganda and government infiltration, is the actual crisis. Everything is set against this global trauma. Only well functioning pathological narcissists could come up with a campaign to sell people on the idea of eating bugs. And again, the Covid protocols are a benchmark in societal obedience. Covid allowed many to see their powerlessness in a clear light not heretofore experienced. And this same frustration is experienced with the Gaza genocide.

“The antisocial personality may be considered a subgroup of the narcissistic personality. Antisocial personality structures present the same general constellation of traits that I have just mentioned, in combination with additional severe superego pathology. The main characteristics of these narcissistic personalities are grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a remarkable absence of interest in and empathy for others in spite of the fact that they are so very eager to obtain admiration and approval from other people. These patients experience a remarkably intense envy of other people who seem to have things they do not have or who simply seem to enjoy their lives. “
Otto Kernberg (Ibid)

Sounds remarkably like every Zionist politician and spokesperson I’ve seen.

I will add that the diagnosis of pathological narcissism often blurs into meta-psychological analysis. Often of a pop variety. And the Capitalist CEO or Zionist leader are, again, perfectly described by Kernberg:

“A narcissistic patient experiences his relationships with other people as being purely exploitative, as if he were “squeezing a lemon and then dropping the remains.” People may appear to him either to have some potential food inside, which the patient has to extract, or to be already emptied and therefore valueless. In addition, these shadowy external objects sometimes suddenly seem to be invested with high and dangerous powers, as the patient projects onto others the primitive characteristics of his own superego and of his own exploitative nature. His attitude towards others is either deprecatory—he has extracted all he needs and tosses them aside—or fearful—others may attack, exploit, and force him to submit to them. “
Otto Kernberg (Ibid)

The pathological narcissist is then perfectly suited to leading a successful life. So to return to Jacoby and the quote at the very top of this posting; what makes the pathological narcissist a ‘patient’? He is already adjusted to society. What is the yardstick here? Zionism seems a delusional supremacist ideology of violence, bigoted and racist and predicated on fantasies of omnipotence. And yet Israeli leaders and society are applauded and feted in Washington.

“The body is reviled because its impulses are disgusting, immoral, and threaten to overwhelm the child striving for bodily mastery and independence. The child also seeks acceptance from the parents and society who will abandon or punish the narcissistic child who does not conform. Sexuality and desire are repressed, inhibited, and condemned, while the body becomes a source of pollution and corruption. There is subsequently a connection between bodily disgust, repression, and the attempt to escape body meanings through idealization of the mind and soul. That which is noble, clean, nonthreatening, and controllable becomes the desideratum, which generates that emblematically Western conception of man as both disgustingly sinful when sexual and sublimely noble when divorced from physicality.”
Jerry S. Piven (Death and Delusion)

Today you can substitute technology for mind and soul.

And Piven’s quote brings to mind Klaus Theweleit and his two volume Male Fantasies, published in the 1980s, originally in Germany.

“The first volume of Theweleit’s Male Fantasies is primarily concerned with the ways in which the “soldierly men” defined the boundaries of their own bodies, and therefore the visible edges of their own masculinity, through a symbolic ordering of the women with whom they came into contact and conflict. For these men, women became embodied symbols of male anxieties about the porous and disintegrating boundaries of both their own bodies and the state with which they identified themselves, Germany. The soldierly men therefore faced and engaged women with the only technique their experience and training had given them: annihilating violence, both literal and symbolic. They were incapable of expressing love for or experiencing intimacy with women. This was despite their copiously expressed love for horses, guns, hunting, shooting, their native villages, homeland soil, the German Volk and other men – especially other soldierly men above or below them in rank and fellow soldierly men who fought and drilled with them (Theweleit 1987).”
Kevin S. Amidon and Dan Krier (On rereading Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies)

“…what they do is done for the phantom of their ego [Phantom von ego] which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated [mitgeteilt] to them;—as a consequence they all of them dwell in a fog of impersonal, semi-personal opinions, and arbitrary, as it were poetical evaluations, the one forever in the head of someone else, and the head of this someone else again in the head of others: a strange world of phantasms.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Daybreak, Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, 1888)

So that sense of emotional distance (and I think its clear the U.S. has always been an emotionally cold society, perhaps the very most cold. And its best writers have focused on this, from Evan S. Connell in Mr & Mrs Bridge, a neglected novel, to Dreiser and Fitzgerald and Chandler. To D.H. Lawrence writing OF America. And I should add Connell is a remarkably under-appreciated novelist and an interesting solitary figure in the literary landscape.) But today we have Keir Starmer and DJ Vance — Macron — the feminized and soft or chubby men/children, or Pete Hegseth and multiple Israeli leaders who are self consciously hyper masculine and cartoon like in their presentation of power. The latter are closer to the Freikorps of which Theweleit writes. The former are the stunted infantilized men/children of western liberalism.

The pathological narcissist does well in contemporary society. In the arts its almost a prerequisite. I once described it in relation to contemporary music (popular anyway) as the Shrieking Ego. You look at the Diddy case, and at Jay Z and his empire, this is the pathological narcissist and his black (but bleached) Stepford wife. (Interestingly the 1975 film version of the Ira Levin book was written by William Goldman and directed by the underrated Bryan Forbes. And Forbes also directed Séance on a Wet Afternoon, starring the sublime Kim Stanley…and scheduled to be remade {sigh} with screenplay by the pedestrian Jack Thorne. And here in microcosm again is the decline of culture- see the original before the psychic pollution spreads.’Séance’ was made in 1964, it was a critical success but box office failure and ended the production company Allied Film Makers, a partnership of Forbes, Attenborough and Jack Hawkins ). But I digress…

The successful pathological narcissist or borderline personality, even the anti-social personality, often are perfectly suited for work in advanced Capitalism and if that diagnosis were made public I doubt anyone would care. Someone suggested Trump could be going senile and the answer was ‘how we would we know’? Bill Gates is an anti social personality, and I will bet you eventually his ex wife will write of this. But so what. Musk is a narcissist, and Joe Biden was a garden variety sociopath. Trump or Macron or Merz or Rutte, all exhibit problems related to narcissism (Puer aeternus). All of them seem decidedly immature, as if they never really attained adulthood. So immaturity is also no obstacle to success in business or politics.

“Yet narcissism may not be the successor to authoritarianism but to another social psychological form. Class may be the missing and elusive ingredient. What lurks behind the critique of narcissism is the authority of the “classic” bourgeois family…{ } The bourgeois family, it seems likely, developed into the narcissistic family; the class composition remains roughly the same.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

The crisis of narcissism (sic) is the crisis of Western Society. Society today is made in the form of the (new) narcissistic bourgeoisie — not just the commodity structure of parenting (per Jacoby) but in the stunted process of maturation (Jungians would say individuation). The unresolved Oedipal drama. The disparaging of psychoanalysis today is certainly tied into the fact that it is hard to define who should be a patient. And why they should be patients. It is viewed as far more efficient to treat symptoms with pharmaceuticals, anyway. Trust the science.

“We now know that implicit and explicit memories are stored in different neuroanatomical structures, respectively subcortical and cortical. The former is the only memory ‘available’ in the first two years of life. This means that the most archaic mnestic traces, including those related to earliest traumas, can be registered only in a non-representational form. I propose to use Bion’s term, ‘inaccessible unconscious’, to refer generally to all these systems of basic and primitive memory. { } Since these mnestic traces cannot be verbalized or ever become conscious (as memories that can be represented and recalled as ‘thoughts’), the question emerges as to how they can be evoked within the analytic setting, so that we may help our patients to work them through. Mancia (2003), following Freud, has noted that some traces of these very remote events can be found in dreams and of course in the transference. But what can be done when a patient does not dream or there seems to be no transference at all? What can we do in contexts where, rather than commenting on the film being screened and working “on its plot, we first need to repair the actual device that projects images on the screen of the mind, that is, the alpha function of the patient? It is my assumption that representational deficits connected with preverbal traumas that generate autistic or psychotic nuclei in the patient’s personality ‘force their way’ towards a stage of prerepresentability via projective identification, action and enactment. In particular, I believe that they speak ‘semiotically’: unlike ordinary repressed memories, they can emerge almost exclusively in the form of disturbances in the setting. While such disturbances are most commonly thought to involve enactment and forms of action, they can also present themselves in a general feeling of blankness and deprivation.”
Giuseppe Civitarese (Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis)

Not unlike Jung’s idea of dreams wanting to reach consciousness. The unconscious, of which nobody has any direct knowledge, could well have features which are processing centers, preparing the darkest primitive experiences into something that could fit, at least partly, with the waking conscious mind. This is the age of autism. The blank generation (pathological narcissists tend to complain of blankness, emptiness, a feeling of colourless indifference). The unconscious of contemporary humanity is enfeebled and constricted, whatever that feature that urges the experience or trace memory or feeling toward consciousness may resemble American bridges and highways today. Or ‘Chat Support’ drop downs. In other words crumbling and weak, or immature and weak, or simply not working. Like having special needs servants who drop the plates at every meal. And the loss of language skills plays into this, as ever more limited tools for dreamwork. (there is something significant in how AI Chat assistance never provides any — that these AI aids produce largely gibberish and not assistance. They quite literally cannot answer the simplest question. But the nature of this useless text is a metaphor for the uselessness of most lives today, humanity can only produce meaninglessness quite literally. (Now China uses very effective AI in self driving trucks but always segregated from society, from the public. It becomes an effective machine in isolation, its own metaphor.) Society can automate everything, probably, if it wants to, but most things will not work as well as if humans did the work. There are allegorical implications in automation — or rather in faulty automation, faulty robotics. But even if efficient, the endgame is robots serving robots, robot consumers and customers.

“In addition, it is precisely the experience of frailty and helplessness that terrifies the child with the subjective sense of annihilation. As Freud illustrates in The Future of an Illusion (l927), helplessness is at the very heart of religious strivings, as human beings need fantasies of protective parents and fictions to evade the terror of death.”
Jerry S. Piven (Ibid)

But the point I want to get at here is firstly, Jacoby’s on narcissism, on the pathological narcissist and society today. And second is the sense of something closely related to Nietzsche’s ideas on compassion (or empathy, pity, all of them). For Nietzsche saw compassion in a negative light. Although I take from him is this is the contagion of mimetic co-suffering, something dramatically present in contemporary society. And it reminds of a meme I saw a while back about being an *Empath*. (the text read: ‘I can tell how people are feeling simply by deciding how I think they feel in my own mind and instantly believing it.’) This is related to liberalism’s virtue signaling. It is about this contagious idea of virtue and caring. (The new courts Gavin Newsome proposes in California to warehouse the homeless against their will is called *Care Court*). Lynne Henderson wrote two just outstanding articles on the Victim’s Rights movement. The first written back in 1985 during the Reagan presidency.

https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/1922/

and the second written in 1999. This analysis is a near casebook for Nietzschean morality.

https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/1957/

The victim’s rights movement is ‘shrieking ego’ compassion. Lynch mob compassion (which is not unlike Philip K. Dick’s future crime), and in broadest sense it is a version of bad faith. Western liberalism is awash in ersatz compassion.

“We might say that the Stoic objector depicts the person who needs the goods of fortune as a type of pathological narcissist: incapable of respecting others because she is boundlessly needy and wrapped up in her own demands. { } Sometimes, therefore, Stoics seem to go further in the direction of valuing the external than their theory really permits. Thus, Seneca urges the slave-owner to treat the slave with respect, to renounce physical cruelty and sexual abuse – conceding, apparently, that these things, albeit external to virtue, do matter. Other Stoics, similarly, risked their lives for political liberty – again, apparently granting that this matters. Ultimately, it would appear that the Stoics are not only inconsistent when they ascribe value to these things while denying that they do so; they are also incoherent, in the sense that they draw the line in an arbitrary place. Why object to cruelty and not to the institution of slavery itself? Why object to sexual abuse and torture, and not to social conditions that keep people in a state of hunger and poverty?”
Martha C. Nussbaum (Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions)

The Nietzschean morality here is read by Adorno (and Horkheimer and Marcuse) as both the dream and the nightmare of Enlightenment promise. And Christianity.

“In a famous passage in The Gay Science (section 335) Nietzsche jeers at the notion of basing morality on inner moral sentiments, on conscience, on the one hand, or on the Kantian categorical imperative, on universalizability, on the other. In five swift, witty and cogent paragraphs he disposes of both what I have called the Enlightenment project to discover rational foundations for an objective morality and of the confidence of the everyday moral agent in post-Enlightenment culture that his moral practice and utterance are in good order. But Nietzsche then goes on to confront the problem that this act of destruction has created. The underlying structure of his argument is as follows: if there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates. There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. I myself must now bring into existence ‘new tables of what is good’. We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (p. 266). The rational and rationally justified autonomous moral subject of the eighteenth century is a fiction, an illusion; so, Nietzsche resolves, let will replace reason and let us make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will, an act of the will that by its quality may remind us of that archaic aristocratic self-assertiveness which preceded what Nietzsche took to be the disaster of slave-morality and which by its effectiveness may be the prophetic precursor of a new era.”
Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue)

The age of AI and deep fakes and the near constant stream of misinformation, is transforming ideas of morality. As are the character disorders that no longer exist AS disorders. Society no longer cares if Musk is pathological narcissist with borderline tendencies (and a white South African racist). Musk is very smart in narrowly prescribed areas of endeavour. He is a bit of an idiot savant, in fact. But he IS successful. This discussion ultimately ends with a default position that is something akin to ‘the search for truth’. Like Philip Marlow the truth is what matters. Marlow is a modern Knights Errant. (see Bresson’s brilliant Lancelot du Lac 1974. For this is a film about the deterioration of Camelot. The fruitless crusades, the search for the Grail and the failure of return. An entire social order is fraying, and the violence only intensifies. You will note this is one of my top ten films of all time).

“Adorno’s programmatic endorsement of Nietzsche’s condemnation of morality at the outset of his lecture series is based, to put it succinctly, on their shared suspicion that behind and even especially in the purest moral norms there lurk very specific power interests, and therefore there is no such thing as neutral, disinterested, objective, or universally true morality.”
Ulrich Plass (Moral Critique and Private Ethics in Nietzsche and Adorno)

Nietzsche (like Heidegger, the Nazi, both, as Babette Babich observes, remind us to think philosophically) cannot be approached like most thinkers. With Nietzsche’s condemnation of ‘compassion’, the idea either has to be read as allegory, or simply fascism. And likely (and this is the conundrum) it is both.

The Nietzschean idea of mimetic contagion is worth a last note here. In vulgar Marxism the attacks are directed against post modernism, cultural Marxism (sic), and psychoanalysis. The USSR did reject Wilhelm Reich. But the far right today, from MAGA adherents in the U.S., to the hyper nationalist and racist parties in Europe (Vlaams Belang, National Front, AfD, etc) also attack ‘cultural Marxism’ and also blame post modernism. I always wonder if the Stalinists I know grasp this.

The quote below is taken from the introduction to Dominco Losurdo’s book Nietzsche, Aristocratic Rebel:

“Hope is possible again! Our German mission isn’t over yet! I’m in better spirit than ever, for not yet everything has capitulated to Franco-Jewish levelling and ‘elegance’, and to the greedy instincts of Jetztzeit (‘now-time’). There is still bravery, and it’s a German bravery that has something else to it than the élan of our lamentable neighbours. Over and above the war between nations, that international hydra which suddenly raised its fearsome heads has alarmed us by heralding quite different battles to come.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Letter to friend, when an orderly in Franco/Prussian war)

Dominic Losurdo’s book on Nietzsche sees the philosopher driven by a deeply entrenched fear of socialism. Certainly there is ample material to construct this biography. Nietzsche was but twenty four when he served briefly in the Prussian Army. But its not a convincing bio Losurdo paints, and points up some of what I find unconvincing about Losurdo altogether. And he is another who blames ‘the French’ post structuralists. (which always smacks of anti intellectualism to me). Today’s vulgar Marxists tend, in my experience, to be drawn from the middle classes, white, and often from more privileged strata, and they are usually educated at expensive Universities. These ironies, however, seem lost to them. And that is another allegory.

“Much like Nietzsche, Adorno is a modern thinker misrecognized as Romantic, even reactionary, when viewed through certain distortions of the present. Quite recently, the Frankfurt School’s anti-Stalinism has been characterized as evidence of nefarious complicity with the deep state machinations of the CIA (at the same time as their being impotent liberal academics). This amounts to an extension of the accusation that Adorno’s failure to cheerfully back the student protests in West Germany in the late 1960s evidences fidelity to the reactionary authoritarianism he spent his life critiquing. Similarly, characterizations of Nietzsche as an ideological precursor to German fascism grant far too much credit to fascism and not enough to Nietzsche’s critique of German ideology: “To think German, to feel German—I can do anything, but not that.”
Jaime Keesling (Hope Despite All Doubts)

I will finish here without finishing. These are topics that could, and do, fill volumes. The western culture of narcissism, of common pathological narcissism, and one of emotional mimetic contagion and ersatz empathy, is a culture that I don’t think can be saved. Preparing for what comes next is perhaps the point.

“Already in Nietzsche’s day the whole nexus of concepts like praxis, organization, and so forth, showed a side whose implications are becoming only apparent today. Nietzsche withdrew from the demands of the day for the sake of advancing a number of the categories in question. He understood that, in and of itself, the concept of praxis is inadequate to differentiate between a barbarian and a non barbarian world. Precisely the point where he refused to provide his philosophy with prescriptive instructions is its moment of truth.”
Theodor Adorno (Problems of Moral Philosophy)

“In short, this tradition claims that the soft soul of the compassionate can be invaded by the serpents of resentment and hatred. When Seneca writes to Nero reproving compassion, he hardly aims to encourage Nero in his tendencies toward brutality. On the contrary: his project is to get Nero to care less about insults to his reputation, about wealth and power generally. This, Seneca argues, will make him a more gentle and humane ruler.”
Martha C. Nussbaum (Ibid)

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