---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
From: "Xenophaneros Anartaxius anartaxius@... [FairfieldLife]" I think many group behaviours are not necessarily narcissistic, although they may parallel or imitate the behaviour of a leader. In the classic study When Prophesy Fails by Festinger et al., observed that when a group's expectations are not met they tend to circle the wagons and their beliefs if anything seem to become even stronger, so perhaps it is some kind of defensive mechanism for survival of the ego rather than the psychological narcissism which is 'extreme selfishness, with a grandiose view of one's own talents and a craving for admiration, as characterizing a personality type'. Perhaps fear of being exposed. A real narcissist really would not care about being exposed because the idea would just not occur to him/her/it. Your insight about "real narcissists not caring about being exposed" might be true IF we were talking about the cult/group leader. If we're talking about his/her disciples/students, however, they're often working within a mindstate of "trickle-down narcissism," which they have inherited from the teacher. You're the expert. I defer to you on this. The teacher would have told them just enough to make them feel that *they* were *special*, and truly among the elite of the planet because they had been cool enough to appreciate him or her. But that doesn't allow them to actually *believe* it enough to not worry about being exposed. Only the true narcissist is on that level of delusion. The students of narcissistic teachers have in most cases been entertaining doubts about the narcissistic leader and the wisdom of following him/her for decades, but just unwilling to admit to having had these doubts. So their first reaction when an external criticism *points out* these very doubts is to "circle the wagons" and become even *more* of a True Believer, at least on the surface. You are your own cult. Did I spend too many words on 'this'? From: "TurquoiseBee turquoiseb@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2014 3:00 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Maharishi: When one starts TM, cruder values are replaced by finer values, speech is less sharp From: "Xenophaneros Anartaxius anartaxius@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> EMPATHY: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. If you have empathy, then you ought to be able to understand and share the feelings by MJ and Turq, and see their point of view as a valid expression of life. According to some posters here I have no feelings, so you can skip me. If you look at the universe at large, observing how it operates, it really does not seem to have feelings either, it just rolls on and on, steam-rolling everything in its path. As if it did not know what it was doing. 'Empathy is the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective. You place yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling. Empathy is known to increase prosocial (helping) behaviors. While American culture might be socializing people into becoming more individualistic rather than empathic, research has uncovered the existence of "mirror neurons," which react to emotions expressed by others and then reproduce them.' Groups are notorious for lack of empathy when a member of the group begins to behave and believe differently from the collective norm. A section from the article/interview about narcissism I posted the other day that I found fascinating -- the idea of "narcissism of the group." Article URL below, excerpt below that. Anyway, I think this is the mechanism that gets triggered when someone who strongly identifies with a group hears or reads criticism of that group that causes them cognitive dissonance. They hear the trigger words, that pushes their buttons and *increases* their levels of identification with the group, and they start acting out essentially narcissistic behaviors. And these behaviors are the complete opposite of empathy. This is your brain on narcissism: The truth about a disorder that nobody really understands http://www.salon.com/2014/09/20/this_is_your_brain_about_narcissism_the_truth_about_a_disorder_that_nobody_really_understands/ Is there a chapter that was really surprising? The one on tribal narcissism. I find that topic terrible and dark and fascinating and all kinds of combinations. I’ve written a bunch for Time on morality and racism and how tribalism drives those kinds of behaviors. And tribalism in this case really is just narcissism, the grandiosity of the group. So it wasn’t too hard to find the overlap in the Venn diagram there. So I find that topic both compelling and awful. Do you want to delve more into the chapter for the reader who hasn’t gone more into it? There’s narcissism of the individual and there’s narcissism of the group, and in both cases it’s essentially the same thing. We are better, we are more entitled, we are different or at least less interested in the people around us, or the tribes or nations around us, because we’re worthier than they are. Our people are the prettiest, our language is the most musical, our clothes are the most stylish. And these people are barbarians or at the very best civilized but crude. We are deserving of resources just as I, as the individual, am deserving of the raise, or deserving of the job or deserving of the hottest girl at the party because I’m better than the other guys around me. Now this has its benign expression in sport, except when people are killed, in soccer brawls or when a fan of the San Francisco Giants is beaten up in a parking lot by a Dodgers fan. Obviously it can get ugly sometimes. But for the most part you go to a game — and I would go to an Orioles game, I would paint my face orange and black — and we are literally different colors. We are parts of different tribes. And for that kabuki-ish three hours, I don’t like you and you don’t like me. But then we go home, we wash the paint off and go back to what we’re doing. It’s a good way of bleeding off some of the steam and pressure of those feelings and it’s a culturally controlled way of doing that. And there’s even a bit of prettiness and pageantry around it. So that’s how we contain those feelings and express those feelings in harmless ways and have a really good time doing it. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel lousy when your team loses the World Series. Why do we personalize this and feel such a real sense of loss when a game was lost that you do? Well, it’s because the tribe has been hurt and you’re part of the tribe and therefore the loss is yours too.
