What is a Discard? Is this a description of one?

1PolarBear wrote:Ok, it's fun, but I don't think I will keep that convo up, it's just too much. Besides, I said what I had to say. You can reply, I will read it, but the answer will be short, not those long walls of text.

Yes I was thinking the posts were getting pretty long.

I might get a reply in tomorrow but obviously I understand.

I wrote half a reply and saved it but I don't think the forum logged it.

Just wondering do you think the narcissism the general population has to some degree is the same as pathological narcissism or do you think it is different? Doesn't pathological narcissism come with mirroring errors down at the interconnected and emotional areas of Theory of Mind whereas the general population by percentage isn't expected to have that stuff going on? - or is it more like the Pineapple vs errors in self and context?

1PolarBear wrote:Yes, but real doctors don't follow questionnaires. I am not saying it should be that way, but it is made that way. It's a discussion between the practitioners and the scientists. Plenty of practitioners will do like you say, but in theory they are not supposed to.

Exactly.

Just wanted to say I enjoyed reading - at the story about Freud's cigar.

user1357911 wrote:Just wondering do you think the narcissism the general population has to some degree is the same as pathological narcissism or do you think it is different?

Strictly speaking, there is pretty much as many definitions as there are people writing about it, and I mean just people you could consider authorities. There are general overlaps, and they aim more or less at the same things, but the etiology, the psychological process they describe is usually quite different, so the devil's in the details. It changed quite a bit through time as well.

What I was trying to show is the basic idea, which is based on the mythos of Narcissus, and was popularized probably by Freud. I think that one and many after are seen as a spectrum in severity, from innocuous to pathological, depending on how it affects people in their everyday lives. But if you mean pathological in the sense of the DSM, then I believe it is different so much you can almost say it is another thing. Like most personality disorders, the DSM definitions are not valid, or have very poor validity as compared to the construct. The original is more about delusional thinking, while the DSM is more about arrogance. So they don't really fit, but it is possible to make a few bridges between the two, but they are essentially different.

user1357911 wrote:Doesn't pathological narcissism come with mirroring errors down at the interconnected and emotional areas of Theory of Mind whereas the general population by percentage isn't expected to have that stuff going on? - or is it more like the Pineapple vs errors in self and context?

You mean the so-called lack of emotional empathy? I don't think it happens, it's more of an Internet myth, lot's of it brought forward by narcissists. Basically they are splitting. And I explain those difference through splitting too. Obviously when you split and project, you lack empathy. Even the delusional part, if you talk with an idealized self and your own ideas instead of a person, you will lack empathy, not just emotional, but also cognitive, because it is a phantom, and you really talk to yourself.

The thing is that empathy is based on sameness, and is itself pretty delusional. It will work when you are the same, but will fail when you are different. It shows at very basic levels, like if someone sees another with a different skin color getting hurt, the feeling elicited by empathy is less, it's been proven. And we are just talking about basic physical pain here, nothing too complicated like different personalities or different cultures. So this idea that normal people can read people's mind while some special monsters can't is just a myth. It's cheap morality.

Now, just think if you were grandiose and basically were what I described as narcissism. But you have good intentions, because you believe in the right things, you have the right "values". So you believe you are a good person, and others that don't "fit" the values, that believe differently, are bad people with bad intentions. So what the person will do is split the good from the bad and will reject on others their own narcissism, while trying to preserve the good. So all bad intentions are projected out, and the good intentions are upheld, sometimes in quite lyrical terms. Then you will inevitably say they lack empathy, because they are different, they don't understand you, and the proof is that they don't share the values, which they would if they had good intentions.

I just saw it in display in a group of historians, that wrote a pamphlet to denounce some other person which they claim is using history for his own political purpose, and they make up a big conspiracy theory out of it. If he says a claim, they simply deny it usually using fallacious arguments or borderline ones which are differences in interpretation, then they split and give him bad intentions, and bad values, as well as lack of empathy. So he ends up looking like a monster out to kill everybody and discriminate against the valued members of the community, while all he does is try to put back some part of history in their overall context. It's just not a context they want to know about, so they reject it, and since they don't want to talk about it, they project some other stuff. And of course in so doing, they do the same thing as they accuse him of doing, which is to falsify history for political reasons. They of course, are History itself, the total authority in the matter and they have to stamp down on the amateur, because of course we don't want misinformation. But to me, he seem quite the opposite of what they say, while they on the other hand, seem to be just as they accuse him of being.

So you can see this stuff going on all the time if you look properly and are attentive. Sometimes it is not even in individuals, but in groups like this case. It's even easier in groups, because there is social reinforcement. It does not mean they are not living up their pathology. I think it is more important to see the pattern than to try and diagnose individuals. Then you will see it is quite common if you don't take care about avoiding it, but chances are you won't anyway because of social reinforcement.

There is another deeper level to this empathy stuff. I don't know if you heard about the Sally Anne experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally–Anne_test), There the point of the experiment is to measure "theory of mind". The ability to attribute false beliefs to others. So if someone fails to do that, they are said to lack empathy. On the other hand, if they do it, they basically are doing what a narcissist would do, which is to attribute some fictional mental state on another, and a bad one at that. You have to assume that the other is dumber than yourself, while you are all knowing. You know where the object is, and you know the other does not, so you assume they will make a mistake, so they can be fooled easily. Not only you know where the object is, but you can change it of place, so the other will fall into the trap.

Now, let's go back the the Historians. They basically did what is done in the test of Sally. They took some parts of history and changed it of place, changed it of context. Of course they know what they did, and they know they did it to fool others as well. This allows them to believe things like how dumb people were in past to believe in such and such a thing, while we know better, we are empaths and know the right context, the right "values".

Now comes someone that knows they did that and instead of being fooled by the change in baskets, he knows historically that the ball was in the first basket, and that it is the right basket to have it as well, that they did not have the right to change the ball from baskets, to essentially steal the ball. That it is legitimate to believe the ball is in the original basket and that if it is not in there, it is because it was stolen, but I still own the ball, so I put it back in the original basket.

That really creates a distortion in the thieves, so they accuse him to be doing the same thing as they did, which is to change the ball of baskets, but on top of it, they will try and find a whole bunch of reasons why he would do such a thing. Basically, he does not want to play their game on their own terms, so they end up betraying their game by taking their basket, the values it represents, and since the guy refused the values, assume it is because he thinks they are bad and thinks the opposite, instead of the more natural way of thinking it, which is that stealing is wrong, or that the original basket was simply a better one. So they start claiming and believing that the first basket is the opposite ideologically as the second, while in reality it is simply different. But more importantly, they attribute their own ideas to others, so they are not dealing with reality anymore, but a construction of it, plus their empathy fails dramatically. And that is simply based on the basic idea that they originally believed nobody would see the con, or they don't want to admit it was a con in the first place. So why they do that, is hard to tell. Maybe they truly believe everybody else are idiots, in which case they show grandiose delusion, or they deliberately find justifications for their actions, and why others should go with the con.

That's why I said there is an original failure that is not deliberate. The desire to con someone is not deliberate, or I should say, the belief that attributing a false belief to someone would con them. Failure to be conned is seen as a lack of empathy, or bad theory of mind, while funnily enough, it is a failure of empathy on the part of the con artist. So it's why you have to be cautious with this thing, it does not explain anything. If it is seen in the first meaning, it is not narcissism, but if it is seen in the second meaning, it is narcissism. If by lack of empathy someone means the failure to create a con by attributing false beliefs to someone else, then it is true. If it is any other meaning, it is not the case and is probably mostly projection. If you take it in the first sense though, it is essentially the same as delusion of grandeur, so is not necessary as a different construct to explain things. It can be observed directly without resorting to mind reading.

If someone pretends they are something they clearly are not, like History, it is direct, no need to explain it in terms of empathy. You could, but the grandiosity is quite apparent already. It's also obvious that if someone disagrees and call out the delusion, that the person will not show any type of "empathy", they won't try to understand the different point of view, why should they? They did a con and others are expected to believe it, or they are using their God given right to change things around, which is the same.

I find that test pretty interesting actually. They ask: "Where will Sally look for her marble?"
I kind of wonder what I would answer.
The question itself is a bit dumb.
If you answer the old place, then it is just a dumb question. It's like yeah, Sally would be fooled, I win, good for you buddy.
But on the other hand, if it is understood as "where will she find the marble?", the question makes more sense. So I might just answer the new location, because Sally is smart, so she will eventually figure things out by looking everywhere in the vicinity and will find the ball where it is.
If they asked something more specific, like " Where will she look first for her marble?", then the answer would be more certain.
I don't know why they ask the question in so ambiguous terms, but to me it seems like to answer the question in the old location is to assume the one asking the question is a moron, or that you are.

1PolarBear wrote:Like most personality disorders, the DSM definitions are not valid, or have very poor validity as compared to the construct. The original is more about delusional thinking, while the DSM is more about arrogance. So they don't really fit, but it is possible to make a few bridges between the two, but they are essentially different.

Yes for some reason the DSM doesn't seem to refer to underlying psychology, although circumstances could make a person act a certain way. A psychiatrist using it would otherwise mistake one disorder for another. It's common sense but you would expect it not to be purely behaviour oriented in case something else interferes with how the person behaves.

1PolarBear wrote:You mean the so-called lack of emotional empathy? I don't think it happens, it's more of an Internet myth, lot's of it brought forward by narcissists. Basically they are splitting. And I explain those difference through splitting too. Obviously when you split and project, you lack empathy. Even the delusional part, if you talk with an idealized self and your own ideas instead of a person, you will lack empathy, not just emotional, but also cognitive, because it is a phantom, and you really talk to yourself.

Why would I-You mean lack of other than through that mechanism? Lack of emotional empathy would occur when a person is cut off from others through their ideas and always justified in their experience and their standpoint (if the person is always right they will not empathize?) but that is not really a conversation with a false self on the part of the narcissist? (the conversation is *through* false self.) Where does Agency (to change data) get given to false self in the first place? So you could say you are in a conversation with the person's "false self" as the data is being changed, the individual is the false self, using the data through those schema and not through the data on its own,) assuming that is what you meant. (All functions of false self and other mechanisms.)
That is more what I meant with the I-You part, I do not mean the person with NPD or any mirror error would be an Autist in any way. If "You is an extension of I" in self or agency, "your rights are through me", so the cognitive aspect functions there in interrelation. (Or any other similar variation).

Which got me thinking the person with Narcissism would have to fail to understand there is an error not to need agency to change something that might harm another person if their Theory of Mind is good.

When it comes to emotional empathy I was going to ask were you thinking of psychopathy, but the emotional empathy error would be similar there, in the individual's interrelation? "I do not empathize with you because it is my right to [function without that]" also comes up? (There is always a mechanism.)

1PolarBear wrote:The thing is that empathy is based on sameness, and is itself pretty delusional. It will work when you are the same, but will fail when you are different. It shows at very basic levels, like if someone sees another with a different skin color getting hurt, the feeling elicited by empathy is less, it's been proven. And we are just talking about basic physical pain here, nothing too complicated like different personalities or different cultures. So this idea that normal people can read people's mind while some special monsters can't is just a myth. It's cheap morality.

True, it made me wonder if everyone has error of that sort, if the whole population is going round with a bunch of mixed semantics about living person and black and white skin etc, when at least if you have good ToM you have to have an actual issue with people of the opposite skin colour to be less aware of them as persons (affected by discomfort, or thinking one colour is better than the other etc.).

1PolarBear wrote:Now, just think if you were grandiose and basically were what I described as narcissism. But you have good intentions, because you believe in the right things, you have the right "values". So you believe you are a good person, and others that don't "fit" the values, that believe differently, are bad people with bad intentions. So what the person will do is split the good from the bad and will reject on others their own narcissism, while trying to preserve the good. So all bad intentions are projected out, and the good intentions are upheld, sometimes in quite lyrical terms. Then you will inevitably say they lack empathy, because they are different, they don't understand you, and the proof is that they don't share the values, which they would if they had good intentions.

So perhaps what I am thinking of is "Malignant Narcissism" or Psychopathic thinking with Narcissism as a Primary Mirror as you explained? (Explaining Narcissism is otherwise harmless in its intent, so there is no rationalization or intent in any errors in Empathy?) Possibly correct. The shape of Narcissism is probably also influenced by disorder profile. I heard I-You, emotionally, was self as other in BPD for example. Lack of empathy would have very little to do with a "nice" narcissist. (Much like people with BPD being labelled as lacking empathy?) - (there is an empathy deficit in the function but not in the person?)

1PolarBear wrote:I just saw it in display in a group of historians, that wrote a pamphlet to denounce some other person which they claim is using history for his own political purpose, and they make up a big conspiracy theory out of it. If he says a claim, they simply deny it usually using fallacious arguments or borderline ones which are differences in interpretation, then they split and give him bad intentions, and bad values, as well as lack of empathy. So he ends up looking like a monster out to kill everybody and discriminate against the valued members of the community, while all he does is try to put back some part of history in their overall context. It's just not a context they want to know about, so they reject it, and since they don't want to talk about it, they project some other stuff. And of course in so doing, they do the same thing as they accuse him of doing, which is to falsify history for political reasons. They of course, are History itself, the total authority in the matter and they have to stamp down on the amateur, because of course we don't want misinformation. But to me, he seem quite the opposite of what they say, while they on the other hand, seem to be just as they accuse him of being.

The idea being (as part of narcissism) they believe in their actions fully. Whereas if the narcissism is about morality the person either probably has a guilt complex or has done something wrong. (Or both).

1PolarBear wrote:There is another deeper level to this empathy stuff. I don't know if you heard about the Sally Anne experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally–Anne_test), There the point of the experiment is to measure "theory of mind". The ability to attribute false beliefs to others. So if someone fails to do that, they are said to lack empathy. On the other hand, if they do it, they basically are doing what a narcissist would do, which is to attribute some fictional mental state on another, and a bad one at that. You have to assume that the other is dumber than yourself, while you are all knowing. You know where the object is, and you know the other does not, so you assume they will make a mistake, so they can be fooled easily. Not only you know where the object is, but you can change it of place, so the other will fall into the trap.

Part of a test for Autism in children. Hopefully the "test" would be ongoing assessment and not just a "test".

Are you trying to suggest for some people self-delusion might be so severe they would do the equivalent of insist and believe Sally would know where the marble is? (Or Anne insists she never moved it..) With the people you've explained, you would think there seems to be a limit to how unhealthy a person can get with logic intact, the jumbled concepts would be so bad the person wouldn't even be able to formulate some of their thought normally? Brings up the idea of Psychological Error Vs Socialization? In "normal narcissism" perhaps it is more a case of socialization, expectations from others etc. For example in the case of the Royal Family. Perhaps socialization without any psychological error is entirely "put on" as an external factor and simply "understood by the person". (Unlike psychological error.)

1PolarBear wrote:Now comes someone that knows they did that and instead of being fooled by the change in baskets, he knows historically that the ball was in the first basket, and that it is the right basket to have it as well, that they did not have the right to change the ball from baskets, to essentially steal the ball. That it is legitimate to believe the ball is in the original basket and that if it is not in there, it is because it was stolen, but I still own the ball, so I put it back in the original basket.

That really creates a distortion in the thieves, so they accuse him to be doing the same thing as they did, which is to change the ball of baskets, but on top of it, they will try and find a whole bunch of reasons why he would do such a thing. Basically, he does not want to play their game on their own terms, so they end up betraying their game by taking their basket, the values it represents, and since the guy refused the values, assume it is because he thinks they are bad and thinks the opposite, instead of the more natural way of thinking it, which is that stealing is wrong, or that the original basket was simply a better one. So they start claiming and believing that the first basket is the opposite ideologically as the second, while in reality it is simply different. But more importantly, they attribute their own ideas to others, so they are not dealing with reality anymore, but a construction of it, plus their empathy fails dramatically. And that is simply based on the basic idea that they originally believed nobody would see the con, or they don't want to admit it was a con in the first place. So why they do that, is hard to tell. Maybe they truly believe everybody else are idiots, in which case they show grandiose delusion, or they deliberately find justifications for their actions, and why others should go with the con.

Don't they already have an empathy problem in the first place because they steal the ball? Though you suggested an individual with narcissism would see the theft as "not a theft" if they did so, unless they were also being immoral at the time. So for the marble stealers the whole thing "was not a theft"? From the beginning to the end...

1PolarBear wrote:I find that test pretty interesting actually. They ask: "Where will Sally look for her marble?"
I kind of wonder what I would answer.
The question itself is a bit dumb.
If you answer the old place, then it is just a dumb question. It's like yeah, Sally would be fooled, I win, good for you buddy.
But on the other hand, if it is understood as "where will she find the marble?", the question makes more sense. So I might just answer the new location, because Sally is smart, so she will eventually figure things out by looking everywhere in the vicinity and will find the ball where it is.
If they asked something more specific, like " Where will she look first for her marble?", then the answer would be more certain.
I don't know why they ask the question in so ambiguous terms, but to me it seems like to answer the question in the old location is to assume the one asking the question is a moron, or that you are.

Yes, I skim-read the first time and thought she'll look for the damn thing everywhere.

user1357911 wrote:Yes for some reason the DSM doesn't seem to refer to underlying psychology, although circumstances could make a person act a certain way. A psychiatrist using it would otherwise mistake one disorder for another. It's common sense but you would expect it not to be purely behaviour oriented in case something else interferes with how the person behaves.

It's a choice they made. Reliability over validity. They hoped those personalities were real, but they eventually realized they weren't. So they might be out in the next DSM. Or they will be deconstructed in traits as it was originally intended for the DSM 5.

user1357911 wrote:Why would I-You mean lack of other than through that mechanism? Lack of emotional empathy would occur when a person is cut off from others through their ideas and always justified in their experience and their standpoint (if the person is always right they will not empathize?) but that is not really a conversation with a false self on the part of the narcissist? (the conversation is *through* false self.)

Well, the narcissist becomes the false self, but you as an other, will interact with them through their false self, because there is nothing else. They on the other hand, will interact with their false self projected onto you, either through idealization or devaluation. Either way, empathy will fail if there is a marked difference between that false self and the person. So it will depend on how "false" in the real sense of the word, the image is. How far it is from reality.

user1357911 wrote:Where does Agency (to change data) get given to false self in the first place? So you could say you are in a conversation with the person's "false self" as the data is being changed, the individual is the false self, using the data through those schema and not through the data on its own,) assuming that is what you meant. (All functions of false self and other mechanisms.)

In the first place, false self gets created the same way any beliefs are created, true or false. It just becomes false because of society and the needs intrinsic to language which itself is social. There is also emotions that often creates false selves. If you want something really bad, you will ignore those things that are not what you want. People have a need to simplify things into black and white in order to make decisions. It's normal. What's not normal is if you do it all the time for everything. Most of the time, things are not clear cut, so you don't know, or you take whatever decision a bit randomly. Speaking of which, I am not sure I got your stuff right, so my answer might be off base. It sounds about right though.

user1357911 wrote:That is more what I meant with the I-You part, I do not mean the person with NPD or any mirror error would be an Autist in any way. If "You is an extension of I" in self or agency, "your rights are through me", so the cognitive aspect functions there in interrelation. (Or any other similar variation).

Right, it's a different type.

user1357911 wrote:Which got me thinking the person with Narcissism would have to fail to understand there is an error not to need agency to change something that might harm another person if their Theory of Mind is good.

Yes, they often think they are in the right. That's when you start seeing pathology.

user1357911 wrote:When it comes to emotional empathy I was going to ask were you thinking of psychopathy, but the emotional empathy error would be similar there, in the individual's interrelation? "I do not empathize with you because it is my right to [function without that]" also comes up? (There is always a mechanism.)

I wasn't particularly thinking about it, but yes, it would be the same.

user1357911 wrote:True, it made me wonder if everyone has error of that sort, if the whole population is going round with a bunch of mixed semantics about living person and black and white skin etc, when at least if you have good ToM you have to have an actual issue with people of the opposite skin colour to be less aware of them as persons (affected by discomfort, or thinking one colour is better than the other etc.).

Well, it seems to be universal. The way they did the experiments, there was no "choice" to speak of, no morality involved. It's simply how our empathy works. It does not look at ideas like "human" and those type of things, it just look at similarities. So the reaction people had, they were not even aware of them. It's like when you recoil from something hot, you recoil automatically, you don't start thinking about it and recoil less fast if you think the danger is mild and so on. It's a reflex. So that is what they were studying.

user1357911 wrote:So perhaps what I am thinking of is "Malignant Narcissism" or Psychopathic thinking with Narcissism as a Primary Mirror as you explained? (Explaining Narcissism is otherwise harmless in its intent, so there is no rationalization or intent in any errors in Empathy?) Possibly correct. The shape of Narcissism is probably also influenced by disorder profile. I heard I-You, emotionally, was self as other in BPD for example. Lack of empathy would have very little to do with a "nice" narcissist. (Much like people with BPD being labelled as lacking empathy?) - (there is an empathy deficit in the function but not in the person?)

Well, not necessarily, I mean those words are all loaded with moral values. I try and stay clear of that. It's up to you to decide someone is nice or not nice. I don't think like I said, that there are special monsters that you can say, this is a bad person entirely because of personality. Empathy itself is a morally loaded term. So to me when you say things like that, it is gobbledydook stuff.

What I can say, is that people do terrible things in the name of empathy and those that rely on it to make decisions are usually the worst offenders. So the nice narcissist might not be nice for long, just like the malignant one does not really exist. They are both the same. I mean, perhaps the vast majority are malignant, as long as they believe in something. There is nothing special about it.

user1357911 wrote:The idea being (as part of narcissism) they believe in their actions fully. Whereas if the narcissism is about morality the person either probably has a guilt complex or has done something wrong. (Or both).

Right, true narcissism is ego syntonic, so there won't be any guilt. They believe in their actions fully. Of course in reality like I said, it's rare the break from reality is complete, so there can always be a part in the person that is good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqjlfvdIUVs

That's another narcissistic fantasy story.
Only through Palpatine (the false self) can Anakin gain the full power of the dark side.
At first he had plenty of good intentions, and he believed all the things, the prophesies and the goodness of the cause. Then they did not live up to it, so he split.
Then he got caught into the false self, because more or less one with the Emperor because he was part of him as his hand.
It's so common that people don't see it.
The Force here, is the power of idealization.
So he idealizes the Jedis, become one of them, but cannot totally, they keep their distance and don't become one with him. So he splits eventually and paints them black.
Then he becomes a kind of narcissist supply for Palpatine, who is an idol, and then at the total end, he is about to try and become that idol, but gets stopped just in time.
So talking about nice or malignant, does not make too much sense, they are all force users. Who's good or bad depends on which side you are on, and what you do.

user1357911 wrote:Are you trying to suggest for some people self-delusion might be so severe they would do the equivalent of insist and believe Sally would know where the marble is? (Or Anne insists she never moved it..)

Yes, I see it all the time. it's just that in the experiment, you now for sure that she was not looking when the switch happened, but in real life most of the time people don't really know. They might assume she was there or was looking through the hole in the door.

Like let's say you are in an environment, and you hear something all the time, you meet someone new, you assume they know more or less what you know, which may not be true. If there are lies in that culture that happen, you might know all it's history and what you are supposed to believe or not, but not everybody will, and they might break the spell in some way. Like in the story of the Emperor's new clothes. When the child speaks up, in real life, most people would double down and punish the child for saying untrue things.

And like I said, I postulate two reasons. One is the people that know it is a con, and don't want to be faced with their contradictions, or there are those that end up believing the con is what needs to be believed because it is good, and anything else is bad, so they have become the idol, and their desires are taking over reality. They are not working in a true or false world anymore, but a good or bad one, and both are intermixed. It's not even some people, I would say it is a sizeable majority.

I don't know if you saw the drama over Gabby Petito and Brian Laudrie, but to me it was quite telling as far as mass delusions went.
Basically, they were two people travelling, Brian killed Gabby and then disappeared. What was interesting is that they had been arrested by the police a week earlier because of a domestic dispute and there were videos or the encounter with the police.

So now, everybody called him a narcissist, and it is why he killed her, and she was a victim of abuse, and if the policemen had had better training, they should have stopped it. But that is not what they did, they saw Brian as the victim, and they more or less let them go. Then because of their psychic empathic abilities, those experts that were popping up everywhere, were predicting that he was long gone, and there was a hunt for the man, even with literally bounty hunters coming in as heroes that would find him, and they were following his trail closely. Then they found the body of Brian, and he had killed himself. Suddenly, the furor stopped and nobody cared anymore. No more empaths and mind readers. It's a good example of people self-deluding in that exact same way. They assumed because she was dead and he was not, that it implied a whole bunch of things, and they were blaming people that did not have that info for failing to predict the future, to know just as much as those seers knew, and their predictions ended up being totally false. Nobody even considered maybe it was not that clear cut, that maybe he was just some guy that snapped and then regretted it, and that he might just have decided to end it. It's what I thought, but it's not what everybody was saying.
I did not see any "signs" of him being an abuser in the video, on the contrary. I think of all the youtube experts, there were only some body language people that got it right, and I think they changed their mind after people put pressure on them.

Anyway, it was a good example of what I am saying. They were accusing the policemen of not knowing what they knew, plus of not having been part of their con, which truly was a con. All those empaths are just con artists.

user1357911 wrote: With the people you've explained, you would think there seems to be a limit to how unhealthy a person can get with logic intact, the jumbled concepts would be so bad the person wouldn't even be able to formulate some of their thought normally?

No, it's not about logic, it's about not seeing reality as it is, but as you want it to be, and playing with time, so you get cognitive bias. Affirming something now, denying it in the past. People have a hard time seeing it is a contradiction for some reason. You could say it is a problem of empathy, so funnily, the people passing the tests are bad empaths or at least they can fail in other settings. I mean, they decided to side with the known victim in the Laundrie case, its the basis, so he was bad, devalued, and Petito was an angel idealized. And it had to be like that "morally". They would not extend their empathy to the policemen that did not know at the time, or to Brian, that maybe he is not some special monster. They were more busy idealizing their idol. Most of those people would pass the Sally test, and yet they fail at empathy when it counts. And the fail at it because they have it, so that's the irony.
Just like Anakin turns to the dark side, because he is good with the force.

user1357911 wrote: Brings up the idea of Psychological Error Vs Socialization? In "normal narcissism" perhaps it is more a case of socialization, expectations from others etc. For example in the case of the Royal Family. Perhaps socialization without any psychological error is entirely "put on" as an external factor and simply "understood by the person". (Unlike psychological error.)

Yes, it's part of the puzzle. But the Royal Family are still in reality because they are trained into it from birth. So they know the drills and how to deal with image. Some might fail at it of course, but they are in less danger than the average person that gets into high spheres. But yes, it's possible to act like narcissists for social reason without falling into it yourself, and it might be hard for an external observer to know on the face of it. Not that it makes much difference. That's not what I call normal narcissism though, it's just acting a part.

user1357911 wrote:Don't they already have an empathy problem in the first place because they steal the ball? Though you suggested an individual with narcissism would see the theft as "not a theft" if they did so, unless they were also being immoral at the time. So for the marble stealers the whole thing "was not a theft"? From the beginning to the end...

Well the thief in those experiments, are the experimenters, and obviously they consider themselves justified of doing so because they are scientists. Clearly they don't care about the trauma they might foster on Sally, in part because she is not a real person. But they clearly pass themselves as above the law in that setting, so yes, they act as if they lacked empathy, and maybe they do.

user1357911 wrote: Yes, I skim-read the first time and thought she'll look for the damn thing everywhere.

Which makes sense to me, but not to those making the experiment, and it says something about them.

It's a choice they made. Reliability over validity. They hoped those personalities were real, but they eventually realized they weren't. So they might be out in the next DSM. Or they will be deconstructed in traits as it was originally intended for the DSM 5.

Exactly. They should really redo the DSM-5 in that sense. Underlying cognition/thought pattern/psychology looks to have been completely dropped. Its not really possible to treat behaviours unless they look at behavioural approaches, which don't work in all cases or for everyone, due to the presence of underlying schema.

Well, the narcissist becomes the false self, but you as an other, will interact with them through their false self, because there is nothing else.

Exactly.

They on the other hand, will interact with their false self projected onto you, either through idealization or devaluation. Either way, empathy will fail if there is a marked difference between that false self and the person. So it will depend on how "false" in the real sense of the word, the image is. How far it is from reality.

This is the part that was missing in the example I was explaining. Narcissistic construct without projection. Or maybe I'm missing the point with the idea of projection.

People have a need to simplify things into black and white in order to make decisions. It's normal. What's not normal is if you do it all the time for everything. Most of the time, things are not clear cut

But that separation would have to come from somewhere, the person could see it as decisiveness for example.

It does not look at ideas like "human" and those type of things, it just look at similarities. So the reaction people had, they were not even aware of them. It's like when you recoil from something hot, you recoil automatically, you don't start thinking about it and recoil less fast if you think the danger is mild and so on. It's a reflex. So that is what they were studying.

The recoil might be the clue - source of fear or discomfort.

What I can say, is that people do terrible things in the name of empathy and those that rely on it to make decisions are usually the worst offenders. So the nice narcissist might not be nice for long, just like the malignant one does not really exist. They are both the same. I mean, perhaps the vast majority are malignant, as long as they believe in something. There is nothing special about it.

I should have written well-intentioned. And by "malignant" I meant the subtype not to call the person "inherently malignant".

That's another narcissistic fantasy story.
Only through Palpatine (the false self) can Anakin gain the full power of the dark side.
At first he had plenty of good intentions, and he believed all the things, the prophesies and the goodness of the cause. Then they did not live up to it, so he split.
Then he got caught into the false self, because more or less one with the Emperor because he was part of him as his hand.

But wouldn't Palpatine be the ego maniac with the power fantasy, whereas Anakin was trying to save his wife? (as something of a rationalization) but fell under his influence? It isn't straight away that Anakin develops his own sense of power in the way Palpatine has... It was once suggested in an internet article that Darth Vader had BPD - whether he would count as having something completely different later on in the story though, I don't know. He seems nothing but power hungry later on.(Much the same as Palpatine.)

So now, everybody called him a narcissist, and it is why he killed her, and she was a victim of abuse, and if the policemen had had better training, they should have stopped it. But that is not what they did, they saw Brian as the victim, and they more or less let them go. Then because of their psychic empathic abilities, those experts that were popping up everywhere, were predicting that he was long gone, and there was a hunt for the man, even with literally bounty hunters coming in as heroes that would find him, and they were following his trail closely. Then they found the body of Brian, and he had killed himself. Suddenly, the furor stopped and nobody cared anymore. No more empaths and mind readers. It's a good example of people self-deluding in that exact same way. They assumed because she was dead and he was not, that it implied a whole bunch of things, and they were blaming people that did not have that info for failing to predict the future, to know just as much as those seers knew, and their predictions ended up being totally false. Nobody even considered maybe it was not that clear cut, that maybe he was just some guy that snapped and then regretted it, and that he might just have decided to end it. It's what I thought, but it's not what everybody was saying.

So it wasn't a case of people being appalled if he "was a monster and had killed her" but not if he had snapped and regretted it then taken his own life - perhaps they saw retribution to have taken effect, or decided he did not really deserve what they had originally dished out? Judgementalism?

No, it's not about logic, it's about not seeing reality as it is, but as you want it to be, and playing with time, so you get cognitive bias. Affirming something now, denying it in the past. People have a hard time seeing it is a contradiction for some reason.

Yes but you would have to contest logic to do that and there wouldn't there be all sorts of denials, repressions and "reversals" of fact. Surely every time soft concept edits hard concept the person has to use an incorrect semantic? The person's neural connections would be all over the place. - I can only come up with the alternative - most people don't think much about what they do and just have "want" in place of what they intend, decide or comprehend. But for a while I was thinking people's brains really were the messes that seemed required - unless they are.

user1357911 wrote:Exactly. They should really redo the DSM-5 in that sense. Underlying cognition/thought pattern/psychology looks to have been completely dropped. Its not really possible to treat behaviours unless they look at behavioural approaches, which don't work in all cases or for everyone, due to the presence of underlying schema.

There is still no real etiology in the trait approach though, it's just deconstructing the personalities.

user1357911 wrote:

They on the other hand, will interact with their false self projected onto you, either through idealization or devaluation. Either way, empathy will fail if there is a marked difference between that false self and the person. So it will depend on how "false" in the real sense of the word, the image is. How far it is from reality.

This is the part that was missing in the example I was explaining. Narcissistic construct without projection. Or maybe I'm missing the point with the idea of projection.

Well, without projection is just delusion and grandiose self. So the narcissist looking at themselves. Or people looking at them seeing those things. We are talking about an idealized total narc here of course, which don't really exist.

I just was listening to some radio podcasters complaining about the vaccine mandates, and they pretty much go over all those things I talked about literally, except for the word narcissism.

They'll say that the government is disconnected from people's reality, that their mandates don't make any sense when put together, that they lie all the time, saying one thing today when they were saying the opposite yesterday. That they are arrogant. That it is only political for expediency (basically exploitation and denying people's existence as people). That they are new priests deciding what is good and bad. All that put together is narcissism. People see it eventually for what it is.

user1357911 wrote:

People have a need to simplify things into black and white in order to make decisions. It's normal. What's not normal is if you do it all the time for everything. Most of the time, things are not clear cut

But that separation would have to come from somewhere, the person could see it as decisiveness for example.

Yes, I am not saying it is narcissism yet, it's just the start of it. Also it is possible to be decisive without lying to yourself. Like I may know that orange and apples are both good, I choose one decisively. I don't need to turn around and devalue the other for that to happen, nor do I need to idealize the one I chose. But again, that's normal too, but it leads to bad things if it goes too far. It's just that those things pile on, and the more you do it, the more disconnected from reality, and then it becomes a complete mess of lies and contradictions. Then you don't have a real self anymore, just a posturing. A big fraud. It's hard to come back from that, you have to let go of everything social, then reinvent yourself from scratch essentially. Or, you can join some decent religious group type of thing, then the conversion acts like a cover, but then chances are you will redo the same pattern eventually.

user1357911 wrote:

It does not look at ideas like "human" and those type of things, it just look at similarities. So the reaction people had, they were not even aware of them. It's like when you recoil from something hot, you recoil automatically, you don't start thinking about it and recoil less fast if you think the danger is mild and so on. It's a reflex. So that is what they were studying.

The recoil might be the clue - source of fear or discomfort.

It does not explain why you would recoil more from seeing someone with your skin color recoil. We have an intrinsic "race" bias, which is linked to empathy, so empathy and racism go hand in hand.

user1357911 wrote:But wouldn't Palpatine be the ego maniac with the power fantasy, whereas Anakin was trying to save his wife? (as something of a rationalization) but fell under his influence?

Well, yes, but the story is about Anakin and his fall into narcissism. If you made a story about Palpatine, it would probably be the same. At first, yes, Anakin is full of good intentions, like saving his wife, saving his mother. Like Yoda says, he has too strong attachments to people around him, which makes him susceptible to the dark side. People are extensions of himself. He gets under Palpatine's influence in the same way, but this time from below because he envies Palpatine, so he becomes his extension. You would call that co-dependency perhaps, but I call it poor boundaries.

user1357911 wrote: It isn't straight away that Anakin develops his own sense of power in the way Palpatine has... It was once suggested in an internet article that Darth Vader had BPD - whether he would count as having something completely different later on in the story though, I don't know. He seems nothing but power hungry later on.(Much the same as Palpatine.)

Yes, I saw that article in the past, but BPD and narcissism aren't that far off. I think it is better to see it as narcissism. It's just that they see black and white thinking and so on, so they say BPD, as well the strong attachments, strong emotions. There is this weird idea people have that narcissism is about no emotion, and no empathy, so they totally miss it, again due to their own black and white thinking. One does not exclude the other either. Like it's true he has some abandonment issues, but he did leave his mother to be a Jedi. He actually never develops like Palpatine. Like I said, he is saved by Luke just before it would happen. Just before he would become the idol, and Luke would become him. But clearly he was envious before that, and was learning and so on. Narcissism is not a thing, it's a process. Plenty of people will be in the process, at different levels and in different ways, on different things. Now, it is a very slow one in his case, over six movies.

user1357911 wrote:So it wasn't a case of people being appalled if he "was a monster and had killed her" but not if he had snapped and regretted it then taken his own life - perhaps they saw retribution to have taken effect, or decided he did not really deserve what they had originally dished out? Judgementalism?

Well, people were riling themselves up, creating drama, overloading their emotions and empathy. All cluster B disorders are drama disorders. So you can bet all the narcissists out there would be up there projecting. Once the idol or the monster were shown to be false, they had to drop it. He is not the droid they were looking for.

Incidentally, some people asked the question, how come people get all upset when it is a white girl, while it happens every day for people of color. So yeah, all the white empaths got real empathic, which they would not do with another skin color. They also got all upset when it was said of course and then they started projecting. How dare they take her place? and blahblah. Diminish her anguish and tragedy? or trying to slow down my empathy? And yet, reality remains...

user1357911 wrote:Yes but you would have to contest logic to do that and there wouldn't there be all sorts of denials, repressions and "reversals" of fact. Surely every time soft concept edits hard concept the person has to use an incorrect semantic? The person's neural connections would be all over the place. - I can only come up with the alternative - most people don't think much about what they do and just have "want" in place of what they intend, decide or comprehend. But for a while I was thinking people's brains really were the messes that seemed required - unless they are.

Well, it's not "semantic". Your alternative is closer to the truth. I mean, from the outside, it may look like a total mess, because you don't have the same end or desire, so the other person's behavior may not make sense, or be contradictory, but for them it may not be. People do lie pathologically, habitually. They lie to themselves, and they lie to others. It takes discipline not to do it, so if you never did even try to say something true, it's like being on a boat and you are not in control. So they will just say things "change". Like Science has changed, or History has changed, or whatever delusion.

Just take Anakin, we see his stuff as changing side. He was good, now he is bad and a lot cooler.
So you could say he betrayed his principles, and so on, that he contradicted himself, or that he is inconsistent. That he was weak and was seduced by the dark side.

But perhaps he sees it differently. Perhaps he thinks that he is still the same boy Anakin, that dreamed about being a powerful Jedi and fight for life, the people he loves. So for him, there is no change, he just realized that the Jedis were not about that, but Palpatine was. Or at least closer to what he wanted, which is eternal life. Ultimately being a god. It's just that what you wish for sometimes are quite different in reality. It's also what "saved" him ultimately, he wanted to save Luke. So he is the same guy through and through. Lucas did a good job on this.

1PolarBear wrote:There is still no real etiology in the trait approach though, it's just deconstructing the personalities.

Really strange that people are only interested in classifying things and not in understanding them fully. Makes me think of things like the covid masks with gaps round the edges etc.

1PolarBear wrote:Well, without projection is just delusion and grandiose self. So the narcissist looking at themselves. Or people looking at them seeing those things. We are talking about an idealized total narc here of course, which don't really exist.

Of course because everyone has some aspects of self and percieved self other than ego.

1PolarBear wrote:Yes, I am not saying it is narcissism yet, it's just the start of it. Also it is possible to be decisive without lying to yourself. Like I may know that orange and apples are both good, I choose one decisively. I don't need to turn around and devalue the other for that to happen, nor do I need to idealize the one I chose. But again, that's normal too, but it leads to bad things if it goes too far. It's just that those things pile on, and the more you do it, the more disconnected from reality, and then it becomes a complete mess of lies and contradictions. Then you don't have a real self anymore, just a posturing. A big fraud. It's hard to come back from that, you have to let go of everything social, then reinvent yourself from scratch essentially. Or, you can join some decent religious group type of thing, then the conversion acts like a cover, but then chances are you will redo the same pattern eventually.

That makes sense, although particularly likely to redo a pattern if you don't believe in the religion.

1PolarBear wrote:Yes, I saw that article in the past, but BPD and narcissism aren't that far off. I think it is better to see it as narcissism. It's just that they see black and white thinking and so on, so they say BPD, as well the strong attachments, strong emotions. There is this weird idea people have that narcissism is about no emotion, and no empathy, so they totally miss it, again due to their own black and white thinking. One does not exclude the other either. Like it's true he has some abandonment issues, but he did leave his mother to be a Jedi. He actually never develops like Palpatine. Like I said, he is saved by Luke just before it would happen. Just before he would become the idol, and Luke would become him. But clearly he was envious before that, and was learning and so on. Narcissism is not a thing, it's a process. Plenty of people will be in the process, at different levels and in different ways, on different things. Now, it is a very slow one in his case, over six movies.

I hadn't actually meant to get into a conversation about narcissism as a whole because I can only say I know about particular parts of ego ideation etc. and the question I had about "discard", but yes for some reason people do see people with narcissism that way sometimes but as I was also thinking, they probably vary depending on the person.

1PolarBear wrote:Incidentally, some people asked the question, how come people get all upset when it is a white girl, while it happens every day for people of color. So yeah, all the white empaths got real empathic, which they would not do with another skin color. They also got all upset when it was said of course and then they started projecting. How dare they take her place? and blahblah. Diminish her anguish and tragedy? or trying to slow down my empathy? And yet, reality remains...

Surely some of that is upbringing, and there are also exceptions to the rule, people who have moved to and or married into opposite coloured cultures etc.

1PolarBear wrote:Well, it's not "semantic". Your alternative is closer to the truth. I mean, from the outside, it may look like a total mess, because you don't have the same end or desire, so the other person's behavior may not make sense, or be contradictory, but for them it may not be. People do lie pathologically, habitually. They lie to themselves, and they lie to others. It takes discipline not to do it, so if you never did even try to say something true, it's like being on a boat and you are not in control. So they will just say things "change". Like Science has changed, or History has changed, or whatever delusion.

It might be that when people lie they make a conscious rationalization, and typically I think when people lie to themselves they know what they are "deluding themself" about is not really true, the only hardwired issue is probably lack of respect for the truth, whereas if you literally delude yourself due to an actual defence that gets hardwired, its difficult not to notice? Not to say there is nothing wrong with them, its probably whatever allows them to behave that way is in a different place? The hardwired delusion is probably in relation to use of the truth (not in each lie) but that there must be something, because to choose to do it you have to contest common sense.

Or maybe some people have a "logic test" in their common sense and others don't seem to, or seem to use it less, but I think that's what I meant, there would have to be something allowing that to happen. Sometimes when I speak with people they agree, but other people don't. I wonder if it has to do with heart vs head (temperament). Maybe some people have a strong 'logic test' in their hardwiring but others have a lot of different options and connectors to choose from. (feeling? creativity?)

1PolarBear wrote:But perhaps he sees it differently. Perhaps he thinks that he is still the same boy Anakin, that dreamed about being a powerful Jedi and fight for life, the people he loves. So for him, there is no change, he just realized that the Jedis were not about that, but Palpatine was. Or at least closer to what he wanted, which is eternal life. Ultimately being a god. It's just that what you wish for sometimes are quite different in reality. It's also what "saved" him ultimately, he wanted to save Luke. So he is the same guy through and through. Lucas did a good job on this.

Its a good description, and yes the films are intelligently made.

user1357911 wrote:Surely some of that is upbringing, and there are also exceptions to the rule, people who have moved to and or married into opposite coloured cultures etc.

It does not change it. People might just make an exception for some people they are close to, but nothing general. They tested that too. They did not test upbringing though, but it would only works for those people that were part of it, the same general patter would still apply for all the others.

user1357911 wrote:It might be that when people lie they make a conscious rationalization, and typically I think when people lie to themselves they know what they are "deluding themself" about is not really true, the only hardwired issue is probably lack of respect for the truth, whereas if you literally delude yourself due to an actual defence that gets hardwired, its difficult not to notice? Not to say there is nothing wrong with them, its probably whatever allows them to behave that way is in a different place? The hardwired delusion is probably in relation to use of the truth (not in each lie) but that there must be something, because to choose to do it you have to contest common sense.

Delusion is a belief not everybody has, it's got nothing to do with truth per say. If anything, it is more respect for the truth. It's long subject, but just like the others, in psychology, the word is a social one. It's whether your beliefs are in sync with those of others. Whether they are true or not is not really the issue. If you take one person in an environment, and put them into another fairly different, it would show up as delusion if they don't accept the new norms of the people already there.

user1357911 wrote:Or maybe some people have a "logic test" in their common sense and others don't seem to, or seem to use it less, but I think that's what I meant, there would have to be something allowing that to happen. Sometimes when I speak with people they agree, but other people don't. I wonder if it has to do with heart vs head (temperament). Maybe some people have a strong 'logic test' in their hardwiring but others have a lot of different options and connectors to choose from. (feeling? creativity?)

Most of the time, people's opinions are based on social usefulness. So people will disagree if that usefulness is not expedient for their political goals. The difficulty is that they will rarely tell you their real goals, so people simply talk over each others. Just take the US right now, they are drumming war against Russia. We don't know why, we only know it is not the reasons they are giving, so they will of course disagree with those that don't want the same and there won't be any resolution until they show their hand. Basically, nobody is using their head. It's not a delusion in that case, but for outside observers, if they believe what the US gov says, they will be delusional because it's a lie, but they want to believe. Others that look at the situation in context don't see it the same. The spokewoman was quite clear, that any attempt to try and look at things on the ground is Russia talking points, so you have to believe them without reserve, because it's the whole point of it, it's a "us" vs "them", and there is projection of their own wishes for war on the other. It's about getting Joe some narc supply, otherwise he may go to sleep. Of course, in such a society, if it became mainstream and accepted, it's the person that looks at reality that would be seen as delusional, and maybe it's the case, I don't know. It's clear where the narcissism is at any rate.

That's why truth is a difficult concept. If it's a team thing, then telling the truth becomes telling the team's truth, but if not, then what do you base it on? most people would go with the other team's truth, which is what team 1 would expect. Or you can look at the few evidence you have and try and read mind of Putin. Basically it is what team 1 did, and they want other people to believe it. Whether they truly believe it themselves, is impossible to tell, but given they show strong narcissistic behavior, I believe they do. I believe they believe they have the right to gaslight people that that truth is whatever they say is true and there is nothing else to look at.

But isn't the idea of delusion being "anything out of keeping from social norms" a bit like a Pineapple people can be distracted by resulting in the horrific Hawaiian Pizza of a bad system?