Amerika

People navigate life emotionally/socially. They religion on symbolism/superstition or its secular equivalent, egalitarian politics, to rationalize life as good and their own behavior as good. This way they feel safe from peer pressure and the judgment of the herd.

We as a species have no tangible enemy, only a tendency of ourselves toward individualism and through that, Crowdism, or the tendency of any group to defend individuals and therefore settle on a lowest common denominator of resentment and scapegoating.

The social impulse itself creates Crowdism. People want to get along with others, and the first rule of socializing is to be passive, not aggressive. That way everyone can feel safe both physically and mentally, in freedom from peer pressure critique.

Given a choice between following goals or logic, people choose social methods to navigate life and make it work for them:

Rockmann believes many managers overemphasize tangible incentives — like bonuses — and underestimate the importance of high-quality day-to-day relationships. Such relationships are a lens by which employees view everything in an organization: organizational changes, opportunities, technology, and so on.

Rockmann’s research shows that leaders should move beyond focusing solely on their own one-on-one relationships with their subordinates and view how relationships function across teams or units of employees.

The Prisms metaphor builds on the idea that relationships don’t just get things done more efficiently and produce results — they also impact how subordinates interpret and respond to events and information. For example, when a manager communicates openly with their subordinates about challenges like limited resources or budget cuts, subordinates are more likely to respond with empathy, seeing the situation as a shared problem rather than a failure by their manager.

This replaces nature and logic, since socializing is based on compromise with others instead of figuring out what is right and going ahead to do it. People do what is socially necessary, which means appearing pacifistic, and then rationalize it as what needed to be done according to principles or forgotten goals.

Social concerns predominate over realistic concerns, in other words. However this mean that people use social signaling as a way of advancing themselves, and they are insincere about all that they do because these are social signals not serious attempts to fix problems.

Consider for example the status signaling of vegetarians:

Nezlek concludes that vegetarianism may reflect a pattern of independence and nonconformity rather than a heightened concern for social harmony. Across cultures, vegetarians expressed lower regard for values linked to social order and tradition, such as Conformity, Security, and Benevolence.

At the same time, they rated values tied to personal agency, including Stimulation, Achievement, and Power, as more important. Nezlek interprets this combination as evidence that vegetarianism may function less as a moral imperative and more as a form of self-definition through resistance to dominant norms.

People do not become vegetarians for social reasons, but because they want to establish identities for themselves as non-conformists. This is not to pick on vegetarians; almost everyone is doing the same with whatever political views, religions, and lifestyle choices they elect to follow.

This is how to succeed in the world of peer pressure: stand out but do not be aggressive. The problem with approaching life from a socializing perspective is that it depends on emotional reactions, and this encourages people to act out and be individualistic.

Individualism encourages a similar pathology to narcissism and solipsism, namely treating other people as tools to manipulate. When parents do this to their children it destroys a sense of social safety and the kids orient toward rebellion:

The study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, found that children who experience more maternal warmth at age 3 have more positive perceptions of social safety at age 14, which in turn predicts better physical and mental health outcomes at age 17.

Greater maternal warmth, defined as more praise, positive tone of voice and acts of affection, has previously been shown to predict better health across the lifespan.

If Mom is more fixated on looking cool to her friends than bonding with her kids, her children will never know a form of social safety, and consequently will spend their entire lives defining themselves in opposition to whatever is the status quo.

When children do not trust their society, they see it as an enemy, and therefore have a view of themselves as a whole against the world which encourages solipsism. This replaces seeing the world as a whole with seeing it as an enemy countered by the self.

Not surprisingly, this attitude correlates with narcissism because when you see the world as an enemy and yourself as a savior, you scapegoat the world and deify yourself:

In our meta-analysis, we combined the results of 33 previous studies comprising more than 10,000 participants to examine how narcissism relates to each of the four adult attachment styles. Overall, narcissism was linked to each of the three insecure attachment styles.

But when we looked at the two types of narcissism separately, an interesting pattern emerged. Vulnerable narcissism was consistently linked to insecure attachment styles – with associations of moderate strength for preoccupied and fearful attachment styles.

In contrast, grandiose narcissism showed no such link.

Grandiose narcissism — the true sociopaths who believe they are the center of the universe — probably reflects some genetic defect, more likely things missing than added.

But for the rest? We see a link between early life alienation and narcissism. Them against the world, therefore the world is bad, and therefore they can treat it like an ashtray.

Things get even worse after divorce which seems a comment event for narcissistic parents:

The study found that after a divorce, parents move apart, household income falls, parents work longer hours, families move more frequently and households relocate to poorer neighborhoods with less economic opportunity, leading to children’s long-term struggles to recover financially and socially.

“These changes in family life reveal that rather than an isolated legal shock, divorce represents a bundle of treatments — including income loss, neighborhood changes and family restructuring — each of which might affect children’s outcomes,” wrote the authors of the working paper.

Living in a city also creates the paranoid defensive egotism of the narcissist:

The fMRI scans showed that volunteers who currently lived in a city exhibited greater activation in the amygdala than did rural denizens during social stress. Previous studies have suggested that the amygdala, among other roles, evaluates social threats and is overactive in people with anxiety disorders. People who’d been raised in a city, regardless of their current home, showed a different pattern: more activation in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC), another region thought to be involved in emotion and social processing, and implicated in some studies on schizophrenia.

If you live in a modern society, congratulations, you had PTSD from living in a world of narcissists who are alienated and alienating.

Things are going to change soon because everyone is miserable and the money is no longer good. The “American Dream” is dead and so is the hope of a better tomorrow.

When we look back, we are going to see that the problem was always us. In groups we create alienation by distancing ourselves from reality. This produces instability and makes narcissists.

For centuries we have blamed kings, authorities, the rich, and the normally adapted. But now we are going to have to face the fact that we as a group are not good, and we did this to ourselves.

Tags: emotion, individualism, peer pressure, rationalization, socializing, superstition, symbolism