Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths- And How We Can Stop!
Page 9
approaches .
You are able to manage your fear and anger and
Fear and anger are all- consuming and can only be
recognize that these emotions can interfere with
relieved by reacting quickly, decisively, and per-
making wise decisions .
haps overwhelmingly .
The way our brains are hardwired, only one of these approaches is dom-
inant at any given time. We literally can’t access both approaches at once;
that is how and why high- conflict politicians often trick us and bend us to
their will.
Nuances of the Fantasy Crisis Triad
Most high- conflict politicians either invent a crisis or take a real problem
that needs to be solved and blow it out of proportion into something far
more threatening; people then confuse this conflated problem with a crisis
that requires them to blindly follow the leader.
And that’s why it’s so important to scrutinize their ostensible villain
and hero.
If the villain is clearly and simply defined—that is, Mexicans, Jews, Repub-
licans, Democrats, gays and lesbians, China, Communists, corporations, fat
cats, Muslims, fascists, political correctness, capitalists, or straight white
men—consider this to be a huge red flag. The candidate doing the finger
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 54
3/1/19 1:59 PM
5: The Fantasy Crisis Triad 55
pointing is very likely an HCP. Remember their character trait of all- or-
nothing thinking.
Another reliable sign of a Fantasy Crisis Triad is if the candidate discour-
ages any real analysis, debate, or examination of the facts. That’s what Hitler
did in the earlier example to get so many Germans to blindly follow him. He
was able to distract the German people from thinking—about the absurdity
that Jews were the evil and powerful villains he said they were—so they just
believed him.
The biggest and clearest giveaway, though, is the third part of the triad:
I and only I can solve the problem. The Wannabe King rarely talks about
analyzing the problem and addressing it through cooperation, strategic alli-
ances, or any other joint effort. Instead, they insist that no one else running
for the office—perhaps no one else on the planet—has the wondrous ability
to make everything better. They and only they do. Either vote for them or
face certain doom.
In actuality, the Wannabe King usually has no clue about how to solve the
problem, because it’s a fantasy crisis. They may never have thought about it.
To them, that’s fine. Because they don’t actually care about the problem—the
very problem they insist is ruining your life and putting the country in peril.
All they care about is winning and gaining power. We will look at several
real- life examples of this in Part II of this book.
Choosing Targets of Blame
After the crisis is identified, the HCP chooses a villain—just the right target.
Then, they publicly and relentlessly hammer that target with derision. A
malignant narcissist—an HCP who is both a narcissist and a sociopath—has
just the right combination of character traits to do this: a complete lack of
empathy, ethics, and remorse; an overwhelming desire to dominate other
people and be seen as extremely superior; a preoccupation with blaming
others; and a sadistic pleasure in destroying their Targets of Blame.
Most of us don’t strategically select our enemies; most of the time, Wan-
nabe Kings do. Some do it quite consciously and deliberately; others do it
reflexively and intuitively. But they always seem to use the same criteria.
A Wannabe King’s villainous group needs to be
Somewhat familiar to voters so that the villains require no introduction
or explanation.
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 55
3/1/19 1:59 PM
56 Part I: How Narcissists and Sociopaths Get Elected
Relatively few in number, or living elsewhere, or otherwise not part of
most voters’ daily lives, ensuring that most voters have little first- hand
contact with members of the villainous group. They won’t really know
the reality of most group members’ benign behavior.
Easy to define in a word or two, for example, Muslims, Jews, infidels,
welfare queens, rich pigs, and so on. It makes no difference that it may
be impossible to identify members of this villainous group on sight—or
even after repeated contact.
Widely viewed as extremely powerful, when they are really weak, vulner-
able, and a very small part of the population (typically only 1 to 3 per-
cent) so that voters can hate them without much fear of retribution.
Already the target of some resentment, so that voters don’t need too much
training to hate them intensely.
If possible, resented because of their recent progress or achievement, which
makes it possible for the Wannabe King to blame the fantasy crisis not
just on the villains, but on those villains’ success. This encourages voters
to feel envious and angry as well as resentful.
Connected to money, finance, land, secret power or entertainment in
some way, so the villainous group can be made to seem powerful and
influential. If this connection can’t be made, the Wannabe King typically
cooks up a conspiracy theory that declares the group to be secretly ultra-
powerful, despite their outward appearance as a vulnerable group.
Conclusion
Fantasy Crisis Triads created by Wannabe Kings are effective at escalat-
ing emotions so voters believe in their fantasy crises, which escalates their
level of fear and emotional decision- making. Because of emotional repeti-
tion from the HCP, voters who dislike the fantasy hero have absorbed that
the fantasy villain (the opposing candidate) is also so bad that they come
to think of both of them as equally objectionable. In that case, Moderates
tend to vote for their usual party’s candidate, Resisters reject both oppos-
ing candidates by throwing away their votes on third- party candidates, and
Dropouts simply don’t vote.
All of this is assisted by the high- emotion media, which tend to favor
HCPs, because they are more entertaining and put more energy into
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 56
3/1/19 1:59 PM
5: The Fantasy Crisis Triad 57
building an emotional relationship with their viewers and listeners. The
result is that the emotional warfare of HCPs is endlessly repeated and they
are often elected.
To counter this, we need to repeatedly ask ourselves—and encourage
everyone we know to ask themselves—these three questions:
Is this really a crisis?
Is this really a villain?
Is this really a hero?
In Part II we will see how the development of increasingly viral forms
of high- emotion media has enabled HCP Wannabe Kings to promote their
Fantasy Crisis Triads worldwide.
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 57
3/1/19 1:59 PM
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 58
3/1/19 1:59 PM
Part
II
THE FANTASY CRISIS
TRIAD WORLDWIDE
The last one hundred years have been t
he most murderous in the
history of humanity. I mentioned the top three perpetrators in
Chapter 1: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. However, many lesser Wannabe
Kings have still destroyed their countries and killed hundreds of thou-
sands of their countrymen. Although Hitler is often thought of as an
exception, many of his strategies of extreme lying and conning appear
to be templates for Wannabe Kings up to the present.
Since the year 2000, we have seen several Wannabe Kings take
power around the world, including in Russia, Hungary, the Philip-
pines, Venezuela, and Italy, as I will discuss in this part. The list keeps
growing, so these are only a sample. The United States also has a sub-
stantial history of all sizes of Wannabe Kings, so I have chosen the
three most dramatic examples: McCarthy, Nixon, and Trump.
All of these personalities sought unlimited power and relied heav-
ily on numerous Fantasy Crisis Triads with shocking success. We must
learn this pattern or we will keep repeating it.
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 59
3/1/19 1:59 PM
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 60
3/1/19 1:59 PM
6
HOW HITLER, STALIN,
AND MAO TOOK OVER
These three Wannabe Kings all took power in the 1920s and 1930s after
the monarchies of one form or another in their respective countries were
eliminated. You might think that strong leaders would naturally follow such
circumstances because the people were used to centralized governments,
but the Wannabe Kings in the early twentieth century were far different.
They each took a quantum leap in the mass manipulation of their people (via
mass high- emotion media), they all desired and acquired unlimited power
(as HCPs), and each brought horrific destruction to their countries and the
world.
Adolf Hitler
Germany became a democracy immediately after World War I (WWI).
Prior to that, it had been a monarchy, but in 1918, as Germany lost the war,
the Kaiser abdicated the throne, and by default, the Social Democrats, the
majority in the Kaiser’s rubber- stamp Parliament, took power. The disarray
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 61
3/1/19 1:59 PM
62 Part II: The Fantasy Crisis Triad Worldwide
after the war left an opening for an authoritarian government, but no one
predicted an Adolf Hitler.
Hitler’s Early Years
As described in Chapter 1, three basic factors influence how one’s person-
ality develops:
1. Genetic tendencies
2. Early childhood
3. Cultural environment
Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in 1889 to the family of a minor cus-
toms official on the border near Germany. On the surface, his childhood in
Austria was not indicative of what he would become. Perhaps he was just
born that way. We know he fought with his domineering father over his
future career; his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps to become
a civil servant, but young Hitler wanted to be a painter. When he was thir-
teen, his father died and his mother (who was reported to have had a loving
relationship with Adolf) supported him and his sister on a meager pension.
A boyhood friend later remembered him as a pale, sickly, lanky youth
who, though usually shy and reticent, was capable of sudden bursts of
hysterical anger against those who disagreed with him.89
He didn’t leave much of an impression on his teachers, although one of
his teachers later wrote this:
Hitler was certainly gifted, although only for particular subjects, but he
lacked self- control and, to say the least, he was considered argumenta-
tive, autocratic, self- opinionated and bad- tempered, and unable to submit
to school discipline. Nor was he industrious; otherwise he would have
achieved much better results, gifted as he was.90
When Hitler dropped out of high school, his mother continued to sup-
port him, although she encouraged him to get a career. Instead, he spent
his time daydreaming, reading books, and becoming a young revolutionary.
He had been inspired by one of his high school history teachers who was a
fanatical German nationalist from southern Germany.91
As a young adult, Hitler wandered around Vienna, Austria, getting odd jobs
as a laborer and making some small paintings for pay. He continued to read a
lot and developed a reputation for being a bookish vagrant.92 By twenty- four,
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 62
3/1/19 1:59 PM
6: How Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Took Over 63
he had no friends, no family, no job, and no home. However, he had “an
unquenchable confidence in himself and a deep, burning sense of mission. ”93
Despite his air of confidence, he received more attention than he expected
when, immediately after WWI, he began giving talks as “citizenship training”
for army troops, in which he espoused his self- taught ideas of history, anti-
Semitism, and future greatness for the German people.
Hitler’s skill and success were apparently a surprise even to him ... “I could
speak!” he wrote, as though describing a Damascus Road experience.94
High- Conflict Personality
Hitler quickly adopted many people as his Targets of Blame. In his master
text, Mein Kampf (which translates to My Struggle), he makes a lot out of a
few negative encounters he had with Jews in Vienna as being the basis for his
intense anti- Semitism. Some historians are skeptical about this, for example:
In their view, Hitler’s elaborate description of his politicization during his
Vienna period was fabricated to fit the invented image of a naïve young
man reacting to real conditions, not the reality of an aimless war veteran
looking for work as a politician. In this interpretation, Hitler only seized
on anti- Semitism “as the winning horse in the existing political environ-
ment,” notes historian Roman Toppel.95
If he had a sociopathic personality, the roots of his anti- Semitism
wouldn’t really matter. He would have had an innate drive to dominate other
people, especially those who were in a weaker position. By early adulthood,
it already seemed clear that he had narcissistic personality traits; even he
admitted that he was extremely self- absorbed and confident—even as a
child. And Erich Fromm identified him as a malignant narcissist as well, as
described in Chapter 1.
The Fantasy Crisis
Hitler used several fantasy crises as he rose to power. He easily hijacked the
issue of criticizing the government in Berlin in the 1920s. More than anyone
else, he passionately blamed the “traitors” at home (the Social Democrats
in Berlin) for the loss of WWI. He spread false stories of the government
stopping the generals from winning the war, when in fact the generals told
the government that it could not be won. In November 1918, the leader
of the German army High Command and his superior, Field Marshall von
Eddy_WhyWeElect.indd 63
3/1/19 1:59 PM
64 Part II: The Fantasy Crisis Triad Worldwide
Hindenburg, told Kaiser Wilhelm II that they had militarily lost the war and
neede
d to stop fighting.96
In his speeches, Hitler promoted a new legend. The “November Crim-
inals” (the Social Democrats signed the armistice in November), he cried,
were responsible for the loss of the war, and the German army was “stabbed
in the back.” After the war, while the government was fanning the flames of
hatred for France, Hitler had a different strategy in mind.
The French occupation of the Ruhr, though it brought a renewal of German
hatred for the traditional enemy and thus revived the spirit of nationalism,
complicated Hitler’s task. It began to unify the German people behind
the republican government in Berlin which had chosen to defy France.
This was the last thing Hitler wanted. His aim was to do away with the
Republic. France could be taken care of after Germany had had its nation-
alist revolution and established a dictatorship. Against a strong current
of public opinion Hitler dared to take an unpopular line: “No—not down
with France, but down with the traitors of the Fatherland, down with the
November criminals! That must be our slogan. ”97
By attacking targets within the country, he demonstrated this key char-
acteristic of HCPs, which is to attack the people closest to you with emo-
tional warfare in order to gain power over them.
The Fantasy Villains
Of course, Hitler more specifically blamed the defeat on the Jews, who he
falsely claimed were in charge of the finance and production of the war. Soon,
he began to blame everything that was wrong in Germany on the Jews, even
though Jews made up less than 1 percent of the German population in the
1920s and 1930s (about 500,000 in a country of 67 million people).98
As Hitler began his rise to power, German Jews had only recently
become accepted into mainstream society, and even then, they primarily
lived in big cities such as Berlin. The great majority of Germans, especially
in rural areas, did not know even one person who was Jewish. They readily
believed whatever Hitler told them about Jews, since they knew no one who
could verify or dispute Hitler’s claims—and the media (radio and movies)
were totally under his control.
This was, of course, an opportune time for Hitler to teach Germans to
be intensely resentful of the Jews. After World War I, Germany struggled
financially, and then the Great Depression started worldwide in 1929, at