"I see cheering Muslims"* (with 7/27/2016 Addendum: Another approach to the Narcissist's aversion to truth)

Armed with only my own remembrance of the Narcissistic experience, and a sense of what it means, I want to place myself in the mind of someone who could see “thousands and thousands” of people who did not exist. I know there is a type of fixed or necessary false belief peculiar to the Narcissist which is different from the psychotic’s delusion but only by a little, and which is different from the sociopath’s lying but only by a little. Entering the preconscious and unconscious of such a person, I’ll hope to give a taste of his reality.

(Delusion-ish) ‘It doesn’t matter what these idiots think is “true.” On television I saw people cheering the destruction of the Twin Towers and it was a crowd. Don’t ask me to parse numbers. It was a hideous sight of hideous people. It’s practically treasonous to count them. I heard their roar. The phenomenon is what is true; it was evil and therefore was not small, was not the “exception.” Thousands means power, and power means thousands. It was all or nothing, and it was not nothing. I am right.’

(Lie-ish) ‘When I say that I saw droves of Muslims, no little shit has the goddamnedest right to question it. Your point of view is a politically correct dream. I wake up each morning and I see the world that I live in: It is the world that has to resonate** to my needs to be the fine, great and perfect man. If it ignores those needs, then I do not exist. Therefore, the world and I are one.*** Obama is not an American because that view fits my need to be a contemptuous, superior man. Mexicans are rapists because inside, I fear and hate people who are different from me. (This is actually everyone, except my family, who are appendages of me.) I stand apart, elevated above them. And if they were “good” people, I’d have to see that goodness and love exist in the world, and again I wouldn’t exist because that is not my world. If there were empathy and real love, I would melt, return to childhood to die, become the child who starved because it was he who needed those things.’

The Narcissist occupies his own world because he failed to live, in the real one.

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* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUYKSWQmkrg&spfreload=5.

** “The successful narcissist is the one who can make the environment continuously resonate to his narcissistic needs. People respond with praise and admiration; work provides a stunning showcase for the narcissist's talents and abilities; his possessions, hobbies, and pastimes keep him buoyed up emotionally and help him sail through life.” The Search for the Real Self, James F. Masterson, M.D., The Free Press / New York, 1988, p. 100.

*** Another way of expressing this solipsism is: “The world is a mirror. Any place in it where I don’t see myself, where I don’t feel the milky warmth of myself, where my Self is not reflected and I am not bathed in glorification, I am alone in my endless botch.”

Addendum – Another approach to the Narcissist's conviction that the feeling is the fact

Why does the Narcissist’s feeling and felt need supersede fact? Remember that the Narcissist is primarily shut off, by repressive and other defensive barriers, from his deep, raw feelings – the original pains and critical losses of identity-making mirroring and bond that formed him. This shutting off, though, does not mean he has left the pain behind; it means the pain is constantly working on him: He has “ignored” it, therefore it cannot heal. He embodies the Danish proverb quoted in T. Sheppard Alexander: “You can't run from the wolf because the wolf travels with you,”* as he runs away within his entrapment. Picture an infant in an extreme helpless tantrum state. This child cannot connect to anything in the world, cannot care about a doll or a soothing word. He is fully self-enclosed, in crisis. If you hold up an action figure toy for him, he will throw it, he will hate it with a deeper than normal hatred because through it, you are trying to ignore his pain. If you say soothingly that “It is not so bad” or “It will get better,” he will hate these truths, because you are trying to ignore his pain. This is exactly where a Narcissist is. We don’t see this core in him, this direct connection to his history, because of the extremely deceptive intermediary of thought. Thought, used by his necessary escapism, must become anything but the truth. It may be Freud’s “reaction formation,” the defense mechanism of feeling the opposite of the real feeling. It may be denial, a rationalization, cloudy intellectualization, a lie. If he were to replace thinking with utter silence even for a short time, he would feel the sludgy mess of the bowels of his history – a feeling that might be distilled to: the living dead in a live world. Thinking, and its emotionally weighted form – attitude – are especially powerful escapes for the Narcissist because idealization (by a parent) then self-idealization replaced his identity early on, and self-idealization can’t be maintained without the mental fuel of identifying thought.

The Narcissist is averse to objective fact, now, because (1) it jerks him off his thought cushion and makes him feel his history, and (2) it ignores his truth: the pain he suffers, runs from, but that always reaches for help.

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* Theresa Sheppard Alexander, Facing the Wolf, Plume, 1997.