There is a Great Divide high in the mountains of North America where water runs one way on the east, and the other way on the west; there is a great divide in human nature where the truth of living runs one way, and on the other side, runs the other way. In this piece, we shall stand and look down a ridge to see what has divided us and how about 2/3 of humans have long been blind to the other third. There have always been hidden clues in the puzzling mystery of wars, genocides, pogroms, and school shootings; everything up and down the scale of horror; down the scale to smaller forms in the modern era such as abusive husbands and even the asshole down at the office who can never stop lying, for whom truth runs the opposite way. Turns out the mystery. Isn’t much of a mystery at all, even obscured by vague terms like sin and evil. It was mostly a mystery of those evil ones caught in its grip while the rest of humanity staggered under its weight, unaware. But now the secret has been revealed, and for that, we have to thank psychology. All along we never knew who it was, sitting right there next to us in the dark.
Professionals teach us that it starts early, with grownups treating their babies as if they were property, useful only for their own needs. Some of these children became automatons unable to grow up and like broken vessels, can never be filled. Many go to war with everyone, seeking attention to ease their pain. Stripped of self-worth, they violate boundaries for childish reasons to appear as heroes. Fearful of who they truly are, they make up make-believe selves and grandiose unrealities to live in. They walk through a world that doesn’t care to understand them or even take their calls just as they can only pretend to care about others. These needy toddlers are the unluckiest of the unlucky, manipulating those who love them with lies like “gaslighting”, and “reactive abuse”, and when they fear being revealed, “smear campaigns ”.
The Cruelest Form of Gaslighting “No one is going to believe you.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv2hGHb7rLk
Gaslighting by design messes with your head, it leaves you with a permanent state of self-doubt. There is one gaslighting phrase that we often don't unpack and I can see that it might be one of the most nefarious and awful of all because of the downstream effects: “No one is going to believe you!”
Dr. Ramini Durvasula is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at California State University. L.A.
In the following video, there are a number of these characteristics on display; disconnects from consensus reality, grandiosity, childish make-believe, and in ways that for many passes as charm, gaslighting lies. Here they confess their plans to literally take control of our country. Please let me introduce the New Apostolic Reformation. Watch as they tell all in this revealing video, for they are truly a loose-knit group of people with many screws loose.
The New Apostolic Reformation
https://twitter.com/mhairiforrest/status/1547360560156532736
But this tale is not just about NAR, for there is another group with which they have many things in common. They too, would also become laws unto themselves. It is unproven that these are even aware of each other, but if the New Apostolic Reformation had enforcers they, too, would be grandiose, troubled power-hungry enforcers who seek control. They have the requisite resources: the infrastructure at scale, the revenue, and people embedded, even hidden in a larger churchy network. All within the even larger support system penumbra of wounded people in our Trump-philic culture.
Four Subtypes of Sadistic Personality: Enforcing Sadism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dna9PWLo2v0
There is Enforcing Sadism that is characterized by hostility, vitriol, and terror, all that stuff is being inflicted and is perhaps in the public interest. In other words, it is justified. This could be people in positions of responsibility, such as a manager, in law enforcement, or in a caring profession.
(Enforcer Sadists see Targets and want to) destroy their lives, to destroy their income, their livelihood, and indeed anyone associated with them. And they can go back through years of social media posts, and interviews trying to find something they can be outraged by or they can be outraged by on behalf of someone else.
This kind of sadist just wants to destroy, but the common behaviors and characteristics of this type could include being pitiless, being course, and actively seeking out rule breakers. They control and punish through being merciless, and believe that their position, their ideology gives them the right. Their Targets are beyond redemption.
Darren F. Magee, practicing counselor/psychotherapist and clinical supervisor, Ulster University
The Insanity Of A Narcissist's Many Cravings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al2XTdptw5E
“(They )have the craving to become the Enforcer. They actually crave watching (you) have pain…. They will be the inflicter of pain toward you.… They are willing to embrace Evil.”
Dr. Les Carter, Psychotherapist, and author
CORE SHAME - THE ENFORCER WHO MUST PROJECT HIS SHAME
In the group being introduced here, as in many cults, an authoritarian leader has sycophantic minions, described in popular culture as Flying Monkeys. Ordering people around like a king makes him feel important and provides a sense of sustenance, easing the pain of depression. There are but moments of relief for a heroic leader caught in perpetual need. He keeps secrets, but none darker than what he is in private, a parasite addicted to the emotional reactions of others, both good and bad. Narcissistic Supply is how the Enforcing Sadist regulates his emotions. He is a mean child who like Vladimir Putin, is driven to make drama.
GASLIGHTING TRICKS
Unlike NAR, these enforcers are covert, with followers who do their bidding as boots on the ground engaged in passive-aggressive attacks, intimidating those they imagine are compromised criminals unable to fight back. Scott Bennett describes such troubled individuals who play gaslighting tricks as “disturbed amateur magicians”. Precisely so. Sewing doubt and confusion by trickery is far and away this second group’s strong suit. This is by design; because the police don’t investigate practical jokes. These aggressive Fly Monkeys are, counterintuitively, people of color and demographically like grandchildren of foreign nationals. They present with an innocent and idealistic vibe, but these smug (twenty and thirty-something) kids make up an impressionable farm club, sycophants to leaders who play heroes behind authoritarian masks. Unlike the well-healed smug Flying Monkeys riding around town, the hands-on and boots-on-the-ground people are often Hispanic. As is the case in the wider world, these are the people that get things done. They are the operatives with Hispanic families also functioning as clients.
These characteristics match well with those described by Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates when he talks about the culture of NAR as God’s chosen people and its far-flung loose-knit empire in this Interview with the Bucks County Beacon LLC on July 26, 2023:
“They (the New Apostolic Reformation) are multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-national, and they have women in leadership so it doesn’t fit with the narrative and the stereotypes that are driving our main discussions about the Christian right”.
Those suspected must be demeaned for Master’s need for admiration and most ominously when discussing children, projection. And so it is with this group of passive-aggressive Flying Monkeys and their leadership. Not Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, school shooters seeking their last greatest high, Fascist concentration camp guards savoring the morning’s ecstatic cruelties’ self-medicating narcissistic supply, nor even Scientologists in search of milder forms of supply, but an interstate sect of wannabes posing as servants of God struggling to metastasize into power with obviously fake Havana Syndrome sonic tricks or laughable gaslighting attacks to condition Targets by a psyops process known as sensitization.
Another of their tactics is they (narcissists) can have irregularities in the way that they manage sexuality….
Dr. Les Carter, Psychotherapist, and author
EVERY ACCUSATION IS A CONFESSION
There are alternate realities where a former presidential candidate is a pedophile, and a presidential election was stolen; a world where many think everyone is crooked. But that world is a cloud of fantasy and fear where dramas play endlessly behind the surface of everyday life. Unable to face the demons within, demonhood must be imposed on the Others out there in the world. “Crooked Hillary?”. No… crooked Donald. “Lock her up?”. No, Donald, lock him up. We have lived under these inversions of the truth for too long. Malignant narcissists drown in cognitive dissonance and alternate realities. Innocent believers are targets that have been drawn in by a feeling in their hearts that a red flag can’t be a red flag if it feels like home.
“…the interplay between Trump, Evangelicals, and "Collective Narcissism" is the gravitational pull that some narcissists feel towards religion.”
Nick Carmody JD, MS Psych
Honestly, all cult leaders are either severe malignant narcissists or straight-up psychopaths. People in more severe narcissistic relationships may feel as though their experience is something far worse and different than that we observed in the more mid-range and low-range narcissistic relationships. And they’re right.
Dr. Ramini Durvasula is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at California State University. L.A.
THE PSYCHOPATHIC AND NARCISSISTIC AMBIGUITIES
In a Venn Diagram of psychopathic and narcissistic disorders, there is much overlapping as there are in Cluster B personality types generally. For that reason and more, diagnoses should be left strictly to qualified professionals. But that won’t deter us from learning psychology in everyday life in a down-to-earth way to understand behavior in daily life and at the highest levels of power. We must keep our sense of practicality.
CONJECTURE: FIELD TESTING FOR WHEN THE BIG PUSH COMES
Given the childish plans to overthrow democracy seen in the video, consider that groups could be field-testing techniques for some future event. Imagine the Lord returning through the clouds on a donkey to place these nuts on their mountainous thrones of power as the video says. Given Jan. 6, Stop the Steal, a Speaker of the House who believes that it is God who literally places authorities in their positions of power, our key to a safe future may be spotting red flags.
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
Let us avoid splitting here, black and white thinking because that in itself is a narcissistic trait. Narcissists are human beings and so vary from one to the other. Problematic and deficient humans, yes, but humans that deserve empathy and compassion It is wrong to disparage those who aren’t abusing others. Here are some very smart diagnosed narcissists who are doing great work helping us understand these ancient problems:
The Nameless Narcissist isn’t a psychiatrist but is an informative and compelling figure who has an engaging YouTube channel explaining narcissism to the world. “Don’t forget to take your meds!”
https://www.youtube.com/@Thenamelessnarcissist
SpiritNarc is an earnest young lady working toward an advanced degree and is doing important work on her YouTube channel. Among many topics, she cites brain scans that show narcissistic personality disorder is a form of neurodivergence. She has developed and is continually developing long-term plans to help afflicted people understand themselves and change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWmrJXxfPnA
Dr. Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized diagnosed narcissist and psychopath who has coined many of the terms professionals use today.
Sadistic Narcissist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yvhtGIuc-w
…both types, the classic sadist and the classic narcissist are adept at finding the chinks in people’s armors, their vulnerabilities, their frailties, and fears. Both are ruthless and venomous in the pursuit of their prey. Both are unable to empathize with their victims, self-centered and rigid.
The narcissist shatters her self-confidence, confuses her, confounds her, demeans, and debases her. The narcissist invades her territory, abuses her confidence, exhausts her resources, hurts her loved ones, threatens her security, and enmeshes her in his paranoid state of mind. Frightens her out of her wits.
The narcissistic variant of sadism is so subtle, poisonous, and pernicious, that it might well be regarded as the most dangerous of all variants of sadism. It’s not overt. It is covert… Narcissists are touch and go.
Dr. Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
DISCLAIMER
The inclusion of quotes herein in no way states or implies that the author or authors of a quote or quotes think, state, or imply that any particular group, person, or persons are in any way a narcissist.