Seven years ago, I suggested that the Age of Authenticity, as an episteme, causes us to fashion different kinds of selves that, at once, are a logical entailment and consequence of the kinds of selves the Age of Reason asked us to make and are a new kind of self, one “larger and more permeable.” Such selves, even as they grow more common, as the liberal order collapses, are nevertheless pathologized today. In the DSM IV, people who have difficulty constructing “other people” as a category, and who struggle to retain the knowledge that the other creatures walking around who look like them are the same sort of creature are referred to as having “Cluster B” personality disorders. This means that the individual’s personality was defectively built, producing sometimes-charming but never empathetic personalities.
Narcissism and Hustle-fuckery
Clinical narcissism is one of these personality disorders. Narcissists live terrifying lives because they are governed by a profound sense of worthlessness. They believe that they are subhuman creatures whose only relevance or value to others is achieved by tricking people into thinking they are, in fact, superhuman. Narcissists live in constant fear of being found out, of being forced to confront what they see as an irreconcilable, impassible gap between the self the loathsome person they actually are and the universally-adored person they must be perceived as.
Narcissists are often regarded as malevolent or ill-intentioned and certainly, they can do a lot of damage. I have the scars to prove it. But they are often experienced as charming, exciting, fun people to know who do you no harm whatsoever, provided you reinforce the belief that the are the self they aspire to be.
The problem comes when one accidentally or intentionally fucks with a narcissist’s hustle. Hustle-fuckery is always dangerous, regardless. But when one fucks with a narcissist’s hustle, by showing that one genuinely sees past the self they present to the world, it can lock one into a Manichean struggle, because the maintenance of the illusory self is viewed by the narcissist as a necessary condition for their survival, because, rather than seeing their inner self as an ordinary damaged human self, they see it as a thing so loathsome that it could never be accepted or loved.
Fucking with a narcissist’s hustle is dangerous, risky. But it is also necessary. So many of the bullies and monsters who stand in our way or cause us pain, not just in politics but in our work lives, friendships and family lives, are people with Cluster B personality architectures, people whose ego boundaries are profoundly malformed.
So, when one provokes a narcissist into showing some aspect of themselves that they seek to conceal or specifically calls out or identifies that behaviour, the narcissist feels wounded. They experience what is termed “narcissistic injury.” It is an injury both in the sense that the narcissist experiences real pain when this happens and because it does inflict damage on the person’s narcissistic personality architecture. After experiencing narcissistic injury, a person often needs to spend time recovering, refashioning their sense of self, re-narrating events to fit this refashioning, seeking comfort, experiencing real debilitating depression and grief, shedding real tears.
The narcissistic injury, then, is paradoxical. It is a real injury caused by a perceived attack on or damage to a fake thing.
Triggering, Then and Now
In progressive i.e. liberal-influenced putatively left-wing circles, this phenomenon has dangerously coincided with the vulgarization of the term “trigger” and the adoption of a liberal politics of affect (i.e. emotion). From the beginning, demonstrating emotional sensitivity has been central to the liberal concept of selfhood; both the ability to shed tears and the ability to stoically refrain from shedding tears while feeling very deeply are central to the liberal ideal of the self. When liberals idealize self-control, that ideal is possible precisely because, for a sensitive person, self-control is a kind of emotional athleticism, demonstrating extraordinary strength.
Whereas, socialist politics has traditionally styled itself in opposition to liberalism and consequently featured unrestrained expressions of emotion, fist pounding and cries to “smash the state,” progressive politics is all about restraint. Everyone is expected to show the big emotions they have; everyone is supposed to talk about how big their emotions are; and then everyone is expected to demonstrate the liberal virtue of self-control by not matching that with shouting, crying, desk-pounding and fist-pumping but instead show how one is an ideal person because one’s sensitivity is exceeded only by one’s self-control. And when a progressive is exposed to unrestrained emotion, they are often “triggered.”
Triggering was once a psychiatric term that applied only to people who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While PTSD sufferers can sometimes recall the event(s) that traumatized them in a dispassionate and accurate way, this entails a level of repression and detachment from the emotions accompanying the traumatic experience. Triggering is when something that is associated with the traumatic event causes the sufferer to re-experience the event and the extreme emotions associated. Often, it is a piece of sensory input peripheral to the experience. For instance, a friend of mine was a military contractor doing firefighting for the US military in Afghanistan. While he can recall, dispassionately, the event that caused his PTSD, simply recalling and re-narrating that event does not trigger him. He is only triggered when he smells a particular combination of spices being cooked with onions that preceded the attack that traumatized him. Triggering, in its original meaning, referred not just to an unmediated experience of emotion but physical manifestations like rapid drops in body temperature, swelling in the lungs, loss of circulation to extremities and temporary blindness.
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Today, “triggered” means very upset.
Etiquette and Orthodoxy
Of course, affect politics are not the only part of liberalism that progressives practice. They also have adopted liberal practices of etiquette. This goes beyond a simple demand that progressive politics be polite and self-controlled. Etiquette is, by definition, faddish, because it is a means by which those at the top of society can impose a set of occult rules on others that will have changed by the time those outside the elite figure them out. Etiquette, then, is not just a set of rules about how to act, speak and dress; it is the process by which these rules are in constant flux, creating new forms of social transgression. Many working class people follow Donald Trump because his politics are an attack on etiquette—Trump really is attacking “the elite” and “draining the swamp” from a certain cultural perspective. His actions render etiquette less powerful in an increasing number of places.
This does not just produce a sense of cultural liberation but of intellectual liberation because this kind of etiquette breach is necessary to challenge orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are enforced through etiquette. If you dispute a mere ideology or worldview, those holding that worldview understand your statement to be wrong. A modern flat-earther can say “you’re lying; the earth is flat,” the response to which is “you’re wrong; here’s why.” But when Galileo challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s orthodoxy with respect to the heavens, by saying “the earth revolves around the sun in an elliptical orbit in space,” the response was not “you’re wrong” but “you are not permitted to have said that. Therefore we shall behave as though you have not and our vision of the universe has never been challenged.”
Putting It All Together
So let’s put all this together and think about its impact on progressive politics.
As I have stated before, a progressive politics of emotion functions as etiquette not ideology. So when someone expresses themselves in a way that triggers someone (as per the contemporary usage), we must not merely silence the offender; we must act as though the idea they have expressed is beyond the pale and cannot be considered, discussed or even acknowledged as an idea. Because inflicting narcissistic injury is triggering (not just by the contemporary definition but sometimes even by the original medical one), one must never inflict narcissistic injury. Progressive etiquette politics conscripts us into denying or eliding any apparent differences between the self a person wishes to present to the world and the self they reveal themselves to be.
In this way, the progressive scene has come to be dominated by narcissists and gas-lighters by placing any challenge to their narcissism beyond the pale, because such a challenge is impermissible by the orthodoxy. We have thus produced a system of incentives that encourage people to build more narcissistic, porous, oversized selves that contain all kinds of things they shouldn’t, like other people’s thoughts, other people’s bodies, other people’s desires.
And this leads us back to the central issue as we endeavour to think past the liberal identity politics some people mistakenly call “intersectionalism:” do I own who other people think I am or do they? Progressive identitarianism grows increasingly unequivocal on that point—you own other people’s thoughts about who you are and they do not. And that view is batshit fucking insane, a narcissistic delusion.
A real left politics, a real socialist politics must do the opposite. To engage in real debate, real solidarity, real acts of mutual recognition and empathy, real confrontations with evil, left politics must declare open season on narcissism and the affect and etiquette politics that intimidate us into thinking that inflicting narcissistic injury is a bad act. It is by this sleight of hand that the Third Wayers, the Blairites, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans who cry crocodile tears over pipelines they build, treaties they violate, future generations they condemn to misery and death, are able to hold the power over us that they do.
Because they have taken from us the ability to shout “You are not who you say you are!”
