Guess who I am about to discuss?
There are two fundamental modalities of human existence: They are agency and communion.
- ‘Agency’ refers to our individual-related aspects, such as self-assertion, decisiveness, and competence.
- ‘Communion’ refers to community-related aspects of life, such as helpfulness cooperation and trustworthiness.
In societal psychology, narcissism is generally synonymous with being grandiose. A personality trait characterized by inflated opinions of oneself and a sense of entitlement. Exploitative, with limited empathy.
Narcissists’ inflated opinions of themselves are strengthened by agency-related self-opinions. For example ‘I am exceptionally bright, competent, alluring and elegant’. However, narcissists consider themselves exceptional only in traits related to agency, meaning for example, competence and intelligence, rather than communion, which is represented by honesty, agreeableness and helpfulness.
Hypothetically, an ‘agency’ narcissist might think of themselves as the most intelligent, beautiful or efficient person; but not as the most friendly, compassionate, considerate, or supportive.
They can act out an impression and promise of those communal traits, to deceive others and feed their virtue signalling needs. However communal narcissists, have grandiose self-related needs too. But their needs differ from agentic ones in that they use communal means to meet those same grandiose needs.
Some ‘narc’ needs that we have observed locally, are secured by virtue signalling, without caring about the counterproductive consequences for our citizens.
To illustrate this difference, let us use hypothetical examples to see how these two types of narcissists justify their sense of entitlement.
Imagine the case of a man who always expects his friends’ gatherings to be planned according to his availability and preferences; even though he rarely stays long and sometimes does not attend at all.
If he is an agentic narcissist i.e. a typical narcissist, he might justify the current state of affairs by saying “I deserve special treatment because I am exceptionally smart. I am an expert on almost any topic of conversation.”
A communal narcissist may reason this way: “I deserve special treatment because I am extraordinarily warm hearted, trustworthy, and helpful; everyone feels at ease telling me all their problems.”
A communal narcissist is likely to rate themselves highly on prosocial behaviour, but does that translate to actual prosocial tendencies such as being trustworthy, working well with others, listening to other people’s (including adult) problems and then solving them?
They’re people who talk about having a “mission” or being “committed to a cause” (such as Socialist Youth International, progressing into world order regimes), and they make it clear that while professing promises to help, to them, your life and concerns are less than theirs. Theirs are of a deeper meaning and intent.
For a communal narcissist, communality may merely represent lip service in the form of a hypocritical self-proclamation, hiding behind an ideology, supposedly based on ‘communal society’, that may even identify as Marxist Socialism.
Communal narcissists differ from agentic narcissists in that they rely on communal means to satisfy their self-related needs with their ideological ‘group think’ replacing critical thinking. To me, communal narcissists’ claims of their propagandised social goals are not matched by prosocial actions.
However, can we suggest that communal narcissists are intentionally deceiving the public? A communal narcissist’s beliefs might reflect self-deception, not just the ‘public impression management’ that is aided by a compliant mainstream media.
You may have been surprised when one showed their true colours by becoming hugely territorial and much more concerned with international personal aggrandizement and appreciation, than the communal goals you thought the CoL professed to be working towards.
Yet their deception of mis-promoting their policy ‘results’ when there are not many achievements at all, and having to sweep their failures and abuse scandals under the carpet, cumulatively provide more credence to this theory.
The fact is that the country is worse off since the CoL were selected by NZ First.
Perhaps narcissists are trying to manipulate the local and international public in order to deceive themselves? Are they saying, “I desperately need to believe I am exceptional, therefore if all the world’s great unwashed believe what I propagandise, maybe I can really believe it too? Even though due to my inabilities and lack of delivery, I am gradually becoming known locally to be as vacuous as a new hoover, and, through the implementation of a proven failed ideology, I am in fact destroying New Zealand.
In reality a narcissist needs the reins of power. For certain politicians, their goal is primarily to retain control by being re-selected for government in 2020, or alternatively a posting to the globalist world order.
My conclusion is that the latest two-minute ‘achievement’ video, is propaganda delivered by a communal narcissist.