I hope everyone had as relaxing a holiday as I did. While it’s true that I am no longer employed, it would also be accurate to describe me as a much busier person these days. The only difference is that 100% of my efforts go toward my own interests instead of those of others, and that is quite motivating.

Although the political firestorm is over and the last embers are still dying, I am no less interested in civics than I was last month, and I am still very concerned about the current body politic, specifically the cult that has formed around Q, Trump, and right wing extremism in general. But as concerned as I am where this might lead, I am more consumed by fascination than anything else. It’s the fascination of watching a person that you know for a fact is intelligent and educated fail to see a fact that is right in front of their face. It brings to mind an amusing Snickers commercial I saw years ago, where a young football player gets laid out and the coach comes running up to see if he’s okay. He asks the player a couple basic questions, and the bemused player answers them as though they are insultingly easy… and he seems fine, nothing wrong with his brain at all, until….

And honestly, that’s how I perceive those who have been entranced by this political phenomenon. It’s way past the point of differences in opinion or perspective – not even in the same league. John McCain famously told one of his supporters that his opponent was a patriotic American, and that their differences were simply a matter of which course will lead to the results everyone desires. He claimed his ideas were more effective, which is a proposition any reasonable person will gladly engage.

But that’s not what is happening right now. When Trump began to gain political capital, his opponents quickly pointed out that almost nothing he says is true. Now, this isn’t the first time a Presidential candidate was accused of being dishonest, but it was the first time a candidates’ support based decided to respond to that accusation by agreeing with it and instead just insisting that all candidates were dishonest. That has never happened before, and it was disorienting to many of us. But it proved an effective tactic – now instead of demonstrating that Trump was dishonest (which is a trivial task) his opponents had to somehow demonstrate that the alterative candidate was fully honest (which is impossible). What made this even more difficult to combat is that most of Trump’s opponents don’t even recognize that what Trump does is actually different from lying – he bullshits.

You might think bullshitting is the same as lying – it isn’t. It’s not even in the same ballpark, and I really hope that all who read this consider taking this to heart because it is very, very important to distinguish lies from bullshit.

To tell the truth is to describe a situation to the best of your ability such that it corresponds with reality. Honesty requires an understanding of what is true and a recognition that the truth matters. It seeks to accurately represent reality so that others might recognize it.

Lying is deliberately describing a situation in a way that is not true. It is an effort to conceal the reality of a situation. Lying requires an understanding of what is true and it requires a recognition that the truth matters. It seeks to sabotoge reality by misrepresenting it.

Bullshitting is describing a situation in such a way as to achieve the desired effect from the listener. It is fully unconcerned with what is real – the truth is irrelevant, all that matters is the effect of the words on the audience. It makes no reference to reality at all.

The difference between lying and bullshitting is not intuitive. I’ve had a difficult time helping people understand it, even people who despise dishonesty, and Trump. It’s not easy to understand how bullshit can be neither true nor false. Bullshit is dishonest, but it is not necessarily lying, because to lie one must recognize truth. Bullshit requires no such formality. Barack Obama, in his recent interview on 60 minutes, described this with perfect precision when he explained why Trump’s “truth decay” is so damaging – more damaging than merely lying.

“We have gone through a presidency that disregarded a whole host of basic institutional norms, expectations we had for a president that had been observed by Republicans and Democrats previously. And maybe most importantly, and most disconcertingly, what we’ve seen is what some people call truth decay, something that’s been accelerated by outgoing President Trump, the sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn’t even matter.”

Via Esquire

But although I don’t expect people to automatically be able to recognize the difference between the concept of lying and the concept of bullshitting (Note: Both are forms of dishonesty. A bullshitter is being dishonest even if what they say happens to be true, because telling the truth was incidental and the bullshitter likely doesn’t know they told the truth. It doesn’t matter to them.) there is one thing happening that I cannot get my head around – the near-total lack of self-awareness exhibited by Trump cultists, Qurackpots, and apologists.

There is an adage about narcissists that runs “Every accusation is a confession”. The adage describes a very important observation about narcissists – they lack the ego boundaries healthy people possess that enable us to distinguish between our identity and the rest of the universe. To a narcissist, facts are obvious and there can be no honest dispute. Psychology is such a fledgeling science and the only thing more difficult than parsing out someone else’s psychology is to parse out one’s own – the very nature of doing so prohibits it. Imagine trying to use your own eyes to assess your eyesight – I suppose it would be possible in theory, but good luck making it happen. Even if you accomplished it, how could you be sure? This is the challenge we all face, and the only saving grace is that most of us recognize the impossibility of assessing our own relationship to reality.

Narcissists, however, don’t recognize this at all. To the narcissist, there are two ways to see things – their way, or the wrong way. Narcissism is not “being in love with yourself” as most people believe. It is not vanity or an overly-inflated ego. Although narcissists do exhibit these traints, one can be vain and conceited without being narcissistic. Narcissism is the inability to recognize ones self as a component of reality rather than its center. A narcissistic puzzle piece would not see itself as one piece in a box full of pieces – it would see itself as the piece to which all other pieces are connected, and the only one that truly matters. If any of the other pieces go missing, the narcissistic puzzle piece would regard the puzzle as missing a piece. If the narcissistic puzzle piece were to itself go missing, it would tell you that the puzzle no longer exists. It’s gone. Those other pieces are useless scraps of cardboard. The piece that matters isn’t there anymore.

In extreme cases, the narcissist sees itself not as the center of reality, but as its architect. They regard themselves as the source of reality, truth, and relevance. They are not merely the standard by which all of reality is measured, but the archetect of that standard, and therefore empowered to change it at will.

And that brings me to Donald Trump, the 2020 election, and the behavior of his worshippers.

Although Trump would never subject himself to a formal diagnosis, his neice Dr. Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, considers him a clear case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a diagnosis which gained the corcurrence of 37 mental health experts who studied and assessed his behavior. This condition wasn’t obvious through most of his life, specifically because his life was designed around concealing his failings, amplifying his successes, and manufacturing victories. The first signs of it to a national audience were in his embracing of birtherism, and as he began creeping farther and farther into the public eye, he began making claims that were specifically narcissistic. No example is more than when Trump testified – under oath – that his net worth depends on, among other things, his emotional state.

But even this isn’t the part I find most fascinating. You see, we understand narcissism. We know what behaviors to expect. I find Trump’s belief that his emotional state determines the value of his estate as natural as a blind man’s inability to see – this is what we expect from individuals who lack a capacity the rest of us possess. What I find much more fascinating is the inability of his followers to recognize the toxicity of this behavior.

A hallmark of narcissism is know as “projection” – the act of projecting ones own characteristics onto another, usually the worst traints one possesses. The narcissist presumes that his or her responses are not specific to them, but represent the human condition. They draw no real distinction between themselves and humanity – those ego boundaries aren’t there – so they imagine that the worst traints they possess reside within everyone else in equal proportion. As a result, liars always assume they are being lied to. Hustlers always assume they are being scammed. Thugs are always on the lookout for violence. Cheaters trust no one.

So now we have the amazing situation where the faction that vowed revenge on its political opponents is convinced that Biden and Harris are coming after them on 21 Jan 2021. The faction that sneered at any idea that our election might have been tampered with by a foreign adversary is furious that Americans have “stolen” the election through the process outlined in the Constitution. We have Republican legislators suggesting that a Biden cabinet pick might lack confirmation support because she has a history of mean tweeting. We have the faction who warned of Obama declaring martial law now demanding that Trump declare martial law. We have the faction who has been prepareing to fight against an oppressive federal government now celebrating the federal use of military troops on US soil. We have the faction that insists on state’s right suing OTHER states for not governing themselves the way they like. We have the faction who celebrated the Senate’s decision not to allow evidence or witnesses at the impeachment trial furious that courts are dismissing election-related lawsuits due to lack of evidence. We have the faction that accused Democrats of being crybabies after the 2016 literally demanding that the election results be overturned.

None of this is a surprise to anyone who understands the nature of narcissism and authoritarianism. (Just to be clear – one need not be an aspiring autocrat in order to qualify as authoritarian. If one’s ideology is such that they seek a central authority figure in which they can place the fullness of their loyalty, whose role it would be to direct their behavior, they are authoritarian.) And one of the surest signs that you are engaging a narcissist is when they begin to level baffling charges of behaviors from left field that bear no resemblance to the behavior of the person they’re accusing.

You can be almost certain that when you see someone doing this, they are only confessing what they would do, or have done, under the same circumstances.