Theme: TOP TRUMP

15.01.2021

While I got lost for 3 hours in Berlin, my phone battery was down so I went went into the cafeteria of the Berliner Kurier to charge my phone. A cosy place with a window front, paper lampshades, sofas and one other person, the guy behind the counter selling coffee. So I sat there and read the newspaper. It was thin and said nothing. Only conflicting or dull Covid news. I guess not much is happening in the world anymore. All criminal minds are in lockdown too. Dull, as I said.

Dr. No in slippers surrounded by litter trays watching the new season of Peaky Blinders.

Has anyone noticed that no one is at war anymore either? Anyway, maybe not on a macro level but rather on a micro level now. Within the smaller family units now? Amplified?

Anyway, I happen to come across a full page essay about narcissists. And as expected Donald Trump was mentioned several times. Our poster child.

And it is needed. In order to explain narcissistic tendencies in an extreme example, how would we otherwise recognise them?

The funny thing is that we all have narcissistic tendencies. To some degree. They are inherent in human nature. Wanting to do good and praised for it. Wanting attention and adoration. Wanting to stand out from the crowd and recognised. Wanting to be loved above all. Those primal child wants. Being valued. Because without that we feel lost and rejected and alone. Not valued. Primal child not-wants. And narcissists crave these wants to the extreme, therefore making them basically insecure. To the extreme. And because they don’t want to feel any of the not-wants, they brutishly go out and get the wants they want. To the extreme. Making them bullies. Isn’t it curious that bullies who actually want positive attention and love, go out and give someone else negative attention and making them feel extremely unloved?

That’s where the mutation lies.

The perfect balance would be positive attention and love receives positive attention and love. But at some point in the human development, this mutation of reasoning happened.

Then it happens that any attention, even negative attention, becomes positive. The bully perceives it as positive attention. Maybe because he/she recognises it from childhood. So if a bully perceives negative attention as something positive, is bullying (negative attention towards others) not actually a sign of love? To them?

However, the result is not love but quite the opposite. Bullies are hated. By everyone. And maybe they feel it deep down that the result they want to achieve is somewhat crooked. But since negative is positive to them, they don’t recognise that there could be something wrong. They don’t know any better. So bullies continue. Searching for love, love for the bully. Giving bully love. Receiving hate.

There is an element wrong in the equation.

On the other side there is the victim. They are in the same spectrum but the other extreme. They also want attention and love and being accepted. A bully would not exist without a willing victim to play out the scenario.

I find it extraordinary that victims are almost as much hated as bullies. Nobody runs to their help to rescue them and stand next to them against the bully. They become spectators to the bullying behaviour. An entourage and therefore accomplice. There is no bully without spectators. Attention. Deprive a bully of spectators, and he will not exist. However, their behaviour is so extreme, one can’t help but watch. Therefore giving them existence. The bully becomes centre of attention, not the victim.

Victims want to be the centre of attention equally to the bully. To be loved for being a victim. But there is the mutation of reasoning for them because they achieve also the opposite. Hate.

Love(focus + action) = Hate(focus + action)

Bully x Love(focus +(-attention))

Victim x Love(focus+(+attention))

Everyone has felt both loves at some point. Because love = hate, same thing, opposite spectrum.

Depending which of the two triggered a stronger feeling, we persue to get more of.

The individual does not feel how it means to be oneself. So we are searching to experiences with others. Formatively within the family. Later with schoolmates, friends, colleagues, lovers etc.

In experiences and scenarios with them we experience what it feels to be us. In various aspects. And they are only aspects, points of view. By others. Not one of them singly defines us over all. But if we experience similar feelings of a certain kind, we tend to assume that very identity. A persona which we play out in our lives. Diverse experiences keep on coming in, however, because we assumed a certain persona (caring, uncaring, bully, victim), we single out the experiences and scenarios we believe fit this persona. And play them out. Over and over again. We completely filter out other scenarios, even if they slap us in the face and say WAKE UP, BITCH, THIS ONE COULD ALSO BE YOU, we ignore them because they don’t fit.

Both victim and bully are victim to their assumed personas, not believing that they could also be anything else and therefore getting the love and care and attention they really really want. By hate-loving each other, they will always attract scenarios with each other. That’s why you have abused again and again seek out abusers and vice versa. Until each realise that they can be anything they want and therefore get what they want. By the abuser loving (instead of hating) the abused in themselves and the abused loving (instead of hating) the abuser in them — both carry both elements in them, things will be resolved. By loving what you hate in yourself, that hated thing will no longer be a trigger for you to assume your persona.

Both deserve our sympathy. Not one of them less or more.

That is our collective moral challenge.

We need both bullies and victim scenarios to watch. And then explore the feelings about them in ourselves.

We understand (secretly admire) the bully (in us) and understand (openly despise) the victim (in us).

And we feel guilty. Both ways.

Because we only watch, making us the spectator instead of the enabler. As I said, no bully or victim without an audience.

Both clawing at our attention.

If we are honest, we’d rather be a bully than a victim. That’s why we rarely take sides with the victim. And maybe we shouldn’t as not to enable them. But by watching without prejudice or out of fear, watching the dynamics between them and truthfully acknowledging both elements in ourselves, the fact that we can be both, bully and victim simultaneously, is understanding and clarity.

Authenticity.

So Donald Trump was needed … in an extreme way, to show us that hat politicians are in no way more intelligent than any of us. We always believe that they must know something we don’t, and that is true to certain extend, however they don’t know more than us in taking responsibility for a country. Politics had to be become so outrageously ridiculous, governments being run by complete clowns, that we hopefully woke up to the idea that giving away our responsibilities to a circus is as ridiculous as the circus being there. It’s not the circuses fault that we dump our responsibilities onto them, it’s our fault. If we freely give it away, someone must pick it up. And why not he clowns?

And Donald was seriously amusing, in a way. He kept us entertained.

Good job.

Top!

Is it just me or are clowns never really funny but rather scary and tragic instead?

Who is actually laughing?