McMahon, Why Did You Emphasize Narcissism, Not Ambition, For Assignment #2 This Semester?
When I originally conceived this assignment several months ago, I felt that David Brooks' "The Moral Bucket List" was an excellent window into gleaning insights into the three stories of unbridled ambition. However, over that course of time I came to see that ambition and moral character can be integrated and are not necessarily at odds with one another. I didn't want to impose a false dichotomy on my students.
Secondly, I saw the theme of narcissism giving us a clearer explanation of the characters' unhinged, self-destructive ways. That's why this personal view change compelled me to emphasize Kristen Dombek's "Emptiness," an essay that cogently defines narcissism. This definition reveals a lot about the characters we are studying.
Unit on The Meaning of Ambition and Narcissism
Essay Two for 150 Points (Life of Image Vs. Life of Substance)
Option One: To an audience of college students, write a persuasive essay that addresses the contention that "Bartleby, the Scrivener, "Winter Dreams" or "The Other Woman" illustrates the moral principles in David Brooks' online essay "The Moral Bucket List" or Kristen Dombek's online essay "Emptiness." And pertaining to "Emptiness," see "What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist."
Suggested Structure
Paragraph 1: Summarize Brooks' or Dombek's essay. 150 words.
Paragraph 2. Frame the debate of your argumentative thesis by asking how and why the story addresses the major ideas in Brooks' or Dombek's essay. Then answer your question with a thesis. 150 words.
Paragraphs 3-6: Supporting paragraphs: They support your thesis' mapping components. 125 words each for 500
Paragraph 7: Write your counterargument-rebuttal paragraph. 150 words.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion: Restate your thesis with emotion (pathos) and show its broader ramifications. 100 words (total is 1,050 words).
If you wish, you can analyze these fallen characters through the following essays as well:
"Emptiness" by Kristen Dombek
"Love People, Not Pleasure," by Arthur C. Brooks
"Ambition Explosion" by David Brooks
You might also consult Pascal's famous Pensees:
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
"Winter Dreams" (easier PDF version to read)
Ideas in Kristen Dombek's essay "Emptiness" that you should focus on as you find comparisons in the narcissistic character of Dexter Green from "Winter Dreams":
Dexter Green is empty; he has no self. He only has an idea of what the successful self looks like to others, what Dombek calls "selfiness."
Dexter imitates an image of success at the expense of others whom he uses in the service of his grand performance.
Empty, loveless, and without any real connection to other human beings, Dexter focuses on all he knows: creating a "hologram of the superpowered self" or what elsewhere Dombek calls the "simulacrum of the superpowered self."
In other words, Dexter doesn't work on building a real life for himself. Rather, he becomes a curator of his fake life, which becomes a "reality" to himself and others. In doing this, he fulfills Pascal's insight that most people hate their real life but prefer to create an imaginary life for themselves and for others.
For Dexter Green, people are not people. They are tools to help him hone and chisel his successful image.
As a narcissist, Dexter disregards content, substance, morality, and integrity. He only worships one thing: the "hologram" of the Super Self. That is his "winter dream." He is smart enough to know that the "winter dream" is a destructive illusion, but he does not care, but he has invested too much of his life in this "winter dream" and this dream is all he knows.
Nothing embodies this "winter dream," this "hologram" of superior success, more than Judy Jones. The tragedy and farce of the story is that Judy Jones is a mediocrity, a cipher, a hoax, a complete illusion.
Dexter Green "gets played" by the very illusion that he worships above all else.
Sample Introduction That Transitions to a Thesis
In the age of social media, we curate our own lives. A curator is a guide who controls the message. He is the custodian of his own self-image. Indeed, in the age of social media we curate our own lives, often emphasizing that which makes us look successful and desirable and concealing that which puts us in a less flattering light. The danger of being our own curator is that we begin to believe in our own BS. For the last two decades, I’ve curated myself as an intellectual, one who passionately engages in my three loves, reading, writing, and piano playing, but I’ve recently had an awakening in which I realized that thousands of hours lazily spent on the Internet have compromised my intellectual life rendering me somewhat of a fraud to others and myself. My awakening is partly the result of four books: So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work by Cal Newport, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, and Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter. I am not alone in realizing I’ve squandered thousands of hours engaging in mindless clicking before an Internet screen. My friend, who is far more brilliant than I am, described his wasted existence in the following email:
Like you, I got lost and wasted tens of thousands of hours on the internet. I'm wondering when I reached my 10,000 hours of internet mastery? If I started regular use around 1995, and I averaged at least a few hours a day (which increased over the years to a current and embarrassing 8+/day...my job allows me to spend half or so of the eight-hour shift on the internet, then I'm on a few hours at night), I'm guessing I achieved Internet Mastery by about 2000 or so. I've probably logged 50,000 hours or so by now...which means I could have mastered five different art forms by now. What a tragic waste.
My friend and I both agreed that we’re going to drastically cut down our Internet use and devote ourselves to “deep work,” defined by Cal Newport as prolonged periods of mental discomfort resulting from giving singular concentration to one’s craft. We can only make this change because our self-curated image as “intellectuals” has proven to be a false one in the face of our wasted Internet time. Hopefully, we will change and no longer be curators of a lie.
Sadly, the Great Curator of BS Himself, Dexter Green from "Winter Dreams," is doomed to a life of stagnation and moral decrepitude because he embodies the recalcitrant characteristics of a narcissist discussed in Kristin Dombeck’s essay “Emptiness” evidenced by __________________________, ______________________________, ___________________________, and ____________________________________.
4 Questions We Must Ask About Our Introduction:
One. Is it authentic?
Two. Is it compelling and hook the reader? (sometimes we have to be personal and gut-wrenching)
Three. Is it relevant to our thesis?
Four. Does it transition to our thesis?
Five Motifs in Fiction:
One. Engaging in a contest or battle. A protagonist vs. an antagonist.
Two. Going on a journey. Luke Skywalker leaves his boring planet.
Three. Finding a new home.
Four. Enduring suffering resulting in spiritual purification.
Five. Consummation. Obsessions put their characters in the demonic state. The result of obsessions is consummating: Being eaten alive by the obsession resulting in spiritual and/or physical death.
Study Questions for "Winter Dreams"
Read PDF pages 7-9 to see Judy Jones as ecstasy and opiate. Also, she is a narcissist who destroys men and derives pleasure from her power.
Dexter's life is enduring the intervals between one Judy Jones Moment and another. Judy Jones is the Chanel No.5 Moment.
Study Questions:
One. How does the story introduce social class anxieties into Dexter’s personality?
America champions the All-Or-Nothing Fallacy of Success: Either you're number 1 or you're nothing. This is a childish notion of success that lacks education, nuance, and credibility, yet it has a stronghold in America.
The All-Or-Nothing Fallacy contributes to narcissism since it makes the self valid only if it conquers all others.
Dexter’s dad is “second best,” the owner of a second best grocery store, evidencing working class roots.
Dexter works as a caddie, a servant to the upper classes, and he finds this humiliating.
He reads the bleak weather as an omen of his doom while living in the underclass, working as a servile caddy for professional players and tastemakers, people who matter.
He feels irrelevant and irrelevance stirs resentment and depression in his veins.
He sees life as extremes, those who have and those who have not; the dreary Northern spring and the gorgeous fall.
He creates this false binary universe: We call this the All or Nothing Fallacy.
After the depression of spring, October brings him hope and November brings him “ecstatic triumph.”
We see Dexter’s vaulting ambition to get away from the lowly caddy job. He’s “too old” for it, he thinks, at 14.
Two. What compelled Dexter to hurry away from his caddy job?
Judy Jones becomes the Alpha Trophy, the acquisition that the Number #1 Male gets to "have" for bragging rights. This tragically becomes Dexter Green's motivational principle.
An 11-year-old girl, Miss Jones, described as “beautifully ugly” and “who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men.”
Indeed, beauty can unhinge men and dislocate men from reality, as we shall see in the story.
But not just beauty—beauty combined with the aura of upper class money: This is the noxious cocktail that will undermine Dexter Green.
The girl addressed Dexter as “boy,” a sign of his lowly servitude, and this has an emasculating effect on him.
His sense of emasculating is further reinforced when the caddy-master shows up and says to Dexter, “What you standing there like a dummy for? Go pick up the young lady’s clubs.”
He quits from compulsion: “The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite caddy, and the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer were not to be made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received a strong emotional shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet.”
His perturbation is the great anxiety that makes him compulsive and unhinges him. He’s high-strung and compulsive.
We read a warning of his compulsive nature: “As so frequently would be the case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated by his winter dreams.”
Three. We read a famous passage: "But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings on the rich, that there was anything shoddy in the boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people -- he wanted the glittering things themselves.” What does this passage mean?
Dexter believes he can, through hard work, embody “glitter,” that is to say the apotheosis of success. America is not a country; it’s a dream.
America is “Winter Dreams,” the idea that we find personal fulfillment, meaning, and higher purpose through the attainment of “glitter,” what McMahon is fond of calling the Chanel No. 5 Moment. It is this very sick idolatry that will undermine Dexter Green.
We also read that while he become successful in business, he suffered certain “denials,” and that the story is about one of those denials, and that would be the denial of acquiring Judy Jones, who for Dexter is the highest example (apotheosis) of “glitter,” of Dexter’s “Winter Dreams.”
Four. As we read about Dexter’s rise in the laundry industry and the rich patrons who frequent his establishments, we learn what about old and new money?
Old money has a certain aura, a certain “heritage,” and a snobbery attached to it. On the other hand, new money, the rags to riches story such as Dexter’s, has humble beginnings and class insecurity attached to it even as the person of new wealth amasses riches because in part he will always feel a bit like a fish out of water and he will always have memories of his poor beginnings.
Moreover, he may not know all the codes and linguistic tics that the old rich use in their arsenal of being smugly rich. He may have some of his old caddy behaviors, which he thinks about when he returns to play golf at his old course—not as a caddy but as a man who’s “made it.”
We can surmise perhaps that Dexter is not just desperate to be rich but is desperate to have an identity of being rich, of not being looked down upon by those with old money, and his delusion is that winning the affections of old-money Judy Jones with all her intoxicating beauty is his ticket to happiness.
But much of his quest is in his own imagination. Therefore, his quest is an illusion or a chimera, and it is this chimera that will unhinge him.
Five. One of the brilliant things in this story is the way Fitzgerald quickly exposes Judy Jones’ personality at the golf course where she hits a golf ball into Mr. T.A. Hedrick’s abdomen. What do we learn about her in such a brief passage?
Coming from old money, Judy Jones is self-centered, entitled, and used to not being accountable for anything. In other words, she is somewhat of a cipher and wastrel. She makes messes and expects others to clean them up. She can hurt others, but feel no empathy for her actions. In other words, she’s an empty-headed, repellant narcissist.
And here lies the story’s tragedy: Dexter Green has hinged is whole notion of happiness on going on a Love Quest for Judy Jones, a Narcissistic Cipher. His “winter dreams” are futile, delusional, and empty. They will bring him nothing but a handful of ashes and dust.
In some ways, Judy Jones, a nonentity with no talent other than exercising her narcissistic self-centeredness, foreshadows Reality TV stars.
Another important observation from this scene is that Dexter watches the old-money golf players gawk and admire Judy Jones’ beauty, doing so with a certain misogyny and lasciviousness.
Ostentatiousness and the Libido Ostentandi (ostentatio)
Their remarks make her all the more a compelling “trophy.” Dexter is diseased by the need to create an image through the amassing of trophies, what in Latin is called the libido ostentandi. Dexter’s lust for ostentatiousness will blind him from the fundamental emptiness that defines his existence.
Over time, Dexter will see Judy Jones for what she really is: heroin. And he sees himself as a heroin addict. He needs his fix; at the same time he despises a substance that controls and destroys him. He knows Judy Jones is his disease. He fights in the war overseas to get the hell away from her, but nothing works.
The story should be called: "Winter Dreams: The Story of a Drug Addict"
Six. After seeing the adult beauty Judy Jones at the golf course, Dexter goes on a night swim and hears piano that he associates with the correct life path he has taken: “The sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what was happening to him now. It was a mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attuned to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again.”
How does the above passage speak to The Trickster as part of Dexter’s Quest to find his Winter Dreams?
“Winter Dreams” is essentially a chimera story: A man quests for his chimera and is crushed by the emptiness of his dream. Therefore, a chimera can be called a Trickster. A Trickster is a character or an idea that carries us through the four levels of emotion: earthly, angelic, mystical, and demonic.
The Trickster must give us hope and promise of finding a land of milk and honey only to throw us down from the heavens and into the inferno of our own making.
Seven. In Part III, how do we see Dexter as a committed student of social class?
While Dexter asserts his superiority over the old-money rich due to his hard work ethic, he wants his children to grow up as old money, and Dexter wants to learn the codes of old money: casual dress, facial expressions (hauteur and superciliousness), and all the consumer secrets the old rich enjoy. The rich have a secret code of conduct that sets them apart from the rest, and Dexter wants to be an expert on this code.
Dexter must “keep to the set patterns” so that his peasant background will never be revealed and thus bring shame to him and his future family.
Further, he lies about his origins, tells the rich he’s from Keeble, not the working-class Black Bear Village.
Eight. Even though Judy Jones is a flirt and a shallow coquette, she inadvertently asks Dexter an existential question during their first dinner: “Who are you, anyhow?” How does her question touch on one of the story’s major themes?
As an American, Dexter believes he can re-invent himself anyway he wants. He is a chameleon, and he is free to dream himself into the kind of person he wants to be. The idea that we can become our dream is uniquely American.
The irony is that in many ways he doesn’t know who he is since his energies have created a façade to others and to himself. He is living out Pascal's insight: He despises his real life and retreats into an imaginary life.
Irony of the Story:
In fact, his answer to Judy’s question "Who are you?" is unwittingly true. He says, “I’m nobody. . . . My career is largely a matter of futures.” In fact, he only lives in the future, not the present, and this is part of his unhinged character: to be disconnected and disengaged from the present as he looks to the future when he will finally be worthy of achieving the American Dream. But he will never be worthy. His hope is a chimera that pushes him to constantly look ahead into the future and never in the present moment.
When he assures Judy he is not poor and she kisses him, her kisses arouse a “surfeit that would demand more surfeit.” In other words, his desires will always outrun his capacity to fulfill them, and Judy Jones is the embodiment of his excess desires or concupiscence.
What we have, then, is a mutually self-destructive symbiosis or interdependence. What’s scary is that that unhealthy symbiosis is the very foundation of Dexter’s “Winter Dreams.”
Nine. Much of the story chronicles Dexter’s addiction to Judy Jones like a junkie hooked on drugs. Explain.
We read, “Dexter surrendered himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come into contact.”
The unhinged man is so needy and compulsive that he surrenders his self-interest to an unethical, morally bankrupt force in the name of his carnal and monetary idolatry.
He has no moral foundation to save him from pursuing someone as unprincipled as Judy Jones.
Judy Jones as Drug
We can further explore Dexter’s unhinging with Judy Jones by looking at her as a drug. She is less human to Dexter and more of a substance of his addiction. And in turn Judy Jones is addicted to the power she has over men by her power to intoxicate them. She in turn is addicted to seeing men addicted to her.
We see that Dexter is no needy for Judy Jones that he sacrifices his dignity and self-respect to pursue her. For example, he knows she loves other men in her shallow capricious way and that she sometimes “loves” in the same pathetic, superficial manner, and she even tells him so, but rather than be upset he accepts her imperfect, disloyal love. We read, for example, that after telling him that she was in love with another man earlier the same day as they lie in bed, he finds her words “beautiful and romantic.”
When she lies to him and says she did not kiss a man earlier the same day, Dexter knows she’s lying, but he’s okay with that because he is “glad that she has taken the time to lie to him.”
Because Judy Jones is aware that he has no standards of behavior that she must adhere to, she knows she can get away with anything. Deep down, she can’t love him because he lacks self-respect, but she herself lacks self-respect because if she had it, she would not be in a relationship with someone she doesn’t respect. Both of them are degraded in the relationship, a fact that neither wants to see. Both are unhinged in this manner.
As you read the story, you will see that the narrative has many parallels with drug addiction as it pertains to Dexter Green’s relationship with Judy Jones.
Over and over again, we see that Judy Jones, the consummate Trickster, sends Dexter into hell through neglect and infidelity, but then gives him just enough honey so he’ll come back to her. She does this to many men, not just Dexter. We read, “Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer.”
She is clearly a sick person and the men who become addicted to her are just as sickly. They live in a demimonde of no-respect and emptiness.
Like a drug addict, Dexter becomes unhinged and cannot be civil to others when she unexpectedly disappears at a social event. He panics and is overcome with anxiety that causes him to lose his polite facade.
We read that Judy Jones is not a self-possessed person in her compulsion to torture men: “Judy made these forays upon the helpless and defeated without malice, indeed half unconscious that there was anything mischievous in anything that she did.”
Even the “strong and the brilliant, “play her game and not their own.” She always has the upper hand.
Her beauty is her power, but as we shall see, using beauty for power and identity is a sure failure because beauty is transitory.
For example, I know a man who used to look like Paul McCartney, but as this celebrity wannabe aged, his face bloated and his distorted features no longer gave him the cachet he enjoyed in his youth. He now lives in his mother’s basement where he traipses around in a robe and eats Hot Pockets while trolling on the Internet.
But while her beauty is in its prime, she is Dexter’s drug, as we read: “The helpless ecstasy of losing himself with in her was opiate rather than tonic.”
When you think about the above line, many of us love the drama of a tormented obsession, and we therefore choose to stay entrapped in our torment because to lose that drama would force us to face the abyss or the existential vacuum that defines our empty existence.
In many ways, the story teaches us that we are our own worst enemy. Sadly, many of us “unhinge” ourselves from reality for lack of anything better to do.
Another way of looking at Dexter’s “Winter Dreams” is that he was feeding off the sick energy of desperation that Judy Jones created between her and her bevy of lovers.
Dexter knows he’s an addict, at least on an unconscious level. This makes him a divided soul: Part of him wants to escape his addiction to Judy Jones. He even gets engaged to another woman as a hopeful “cure” for his disease. Imagine getting engaged to someone you don’t love as a “cure” for a love addiction. That is a cogent sign of being unhinged.
His Judy Jones substitute is Irene Scheerer. Unlike Judy Jones who is described as a refined beauty, we read little of Irene’s physical charms except that she is “a little stout.”
We have to wonder if the world is full of Judy Jones archetypes that enchant men, leave them, and damage the men so that they can never love other women because these damaged men are forever fixated on their own personal “Judy Jones.” Perhaps we can call this the Angelina Jolie Factor: One look into her eyes and you’re permanently damaged, unhinged, and ready to abandon reality as you know it.
Even as he tries to love Irene, he keeps thinking about the manner in which Judy Jones beckons, torments, and insults him, and he is desperate to convince himself that he cannot pursue Judy Jones any longer. But as an unhinged man, as a man possessed by the IDEA of what Judy Jones represents—complete power, ecstasy, and abandonment—he finds his drug addiction incurable, and as such he hates himself and he hates Judy Jones—the very woman he cannot free himself from.
At night, he argues with himself about Judy Jones, going over a laundry list as to why she’d be a horrible wife. But that is the cortex in his brain. The limbic part of his brain, where emotion and reptilian desire reside, continue to rage a protest for acquiring Judy Jones.
He sees Judy Jones at a dance and he realizes that he had long ago been “hardened against jealousy.” He still wants her. He’s twenty-five, he has devoted 14 years to obsessing over Judy Jones, and he is about to marry Irene Scheerer.
About to get married to Irene, he still obsesses over Judy Jones, wondering if she still cares about him, and Irene is nothing but a backdrop to his life, “no more than a curtain spread behind him.” She will be part of a marital façade, but his demonic possession will still rage on.
Introduction to Being Unhinged: We Are Our Own Worst Enemies
Few things matter more in this world than in learning how to not be our own worst enemies. We destroy ourselves through self-induced fears that can cause so much anxiety as to kill us more than the things we’re afraid of such as having a heart attack while going to the dentist or undergoing an angiogram. The procedures don’t kill us. Our fears do.
The second way we become our own worst enemy is by desiring things that are worthless or at least not as valuable as our overestimation of them. We sacrifice our time, money, and sanity for some Holy Grail that turns out to be something cheap and transitory, a fleeting desire for someone we put on a pedestal, a material acquisition that promises elevated social status, a desirable “lifestyle” that proves boring and empty.
We tend to blow things out of proportion, either in our fears or desires, because we crave drama. We crave drama because we’re bored. We’re bored because our lives our empty, and either we cannot accept the emptiness as an ok thing or we cannot accept the emptiness because we think there’s something more, some kind of higher purpose or meaning.
For some people, finding higher purpose or meaning is really important for getting them out of their selves, from freeing themselves from their self-centeredness and their nagging sense of anxious restlessness.
But other people don’t need a sense of higher purpose. They accept the meaninglessness of their lives with surprising tranquility and manage to live in the present and be engaged with their interests and stay connected to friends and family. For such people, a sense of connection and engagement with the present is the closest thing they have to “meaning.”
But most of us lack this peace of mind and tranquility to engage in life. Most of us have personal demons inside us that make us our own worst enemy. Most of us blow our fears and desires out of proportion. Most of us are compelled, against our notion of free will, to become unhinged, dislocated, and broken.
Most of us unhinge ourselves, hit rock bottom, then analyze how we unhinged ourselves, and then we spend the rest of our lives trying to repair ourselves, making ourselves “the project.” We read self-help books, we go into therapy, we go into counseling, we explore various religions, we attempt to connect with some group or purpose that is larger than ourselves.
Some of us feel “fixed.” Some of us, in spite of evidence to the contrary, convince ourselves that we’re “fixed,” and we want to share our “fixed self” with the world and the manner in which we “fixed” ourselves when in fact we are quite broken. Some of us get even more dislocated, broken, and lost than before we tried to fix ourselves.
Some of us, in a perverse way, enjoy being unhinged because we crave the drama of being broken and being dislocated, and this broken state of being is all we know.
For most of us, we don’t even know how we reached this broken state. Nor do we know we’re broken. Our broken state is our normal because it’s all we know. We don’t know, nor can we even imagine, what it would be like to not be broken.
Most of us lack the metacognition and self-awareness to even have this conversation with ourselves. Most of us are smart enough to have this conversation, but we don’t know how to begin. Or we’re too scared to explore this facet of our existence, preferring instead to live on the surface, to escape what we’re doing, to avoid our examining the motivations for our behavior.
However, it seems reasonable, beneficial even, to analyze our tendency to self-destruct, to become unhinged. It’s in our self-interest to study our self-destructive process, its causes and effects, with the hope that perhaps we could curtail this self-destruction.
Knowing our self-destructive ways is no guarantee that we will stop our self-destructive inclinations. They may persist in the presence of our keen self-awareness of them. But it would seem reasonable and in our self-interest to at least start the conversation about our self-destructiveness. It would seem reasonable that it’s better to know what makes us tick than to remain ignorant of our inner workings. So with that in mind, let us look at what it means to be unhinged.
Being Unhinged
When we study the psychological condition of being unhinged, we are talking about the state of being overcome by enormous fear and anxiety, being disconnected from our core self, losing our sense of self-possession, having no free will, being governed by compulsion, and being unable to engage and connect with the present.
Being unhinged, we live far too much “inside our head,” and lack the corrective communications we would have if were more connected to other people and able to listen to their warnings and admonishments.
When we live too much inside our head, we find that our unhinging is the result of exaggerated or disproportionate assessments that result in enormous fears and anxieties.
Unable to get outside our head, we become unhinged because we suffer from “demonic” possession. We are not talking about demonic possession in the religious sense; rather, we are talking about demonic possession in the obsessive sense. Something has possessed us, and we in turn have become obsessed with this thing that has gone deeply inside us.
Some example of things that obsess people who become unhinged:
- Gambling, drinking, working out, anorexia, any addiction
- Finding one’s “true love”
- Vaulting ambition
- Greed
- Jealousy
- Envy
- Gluttony
- Lust
- Materialism like acquiring a Mercedes or a Rolex
- Dreaming of the perfect life, with the perfect house, the perfect spouse, and the perfect image that conforms to everything you’ve heard is the perfect life
- Vindication: proving to others that you were right all along
- Revenge
- Any attempt to substitute basic needs with false substitutes such eating a gallon of rocky road ice cream to fill the ache and emptiness of loneliness.
- The quest for your Holy Grail even if the alleged grail is a mirage or a chimera
- Creating the “perfect body” so people will love and admire you
- Becoming a towering intellectual so people will be in awe of your daunting intellect
- Creating some artistic vision
- Fearing vaccinations or wheat products because you read on the Internet, without testing the credibility of your sources, that vaccinations and wheat products will “disease” and “kill” you
- Any kind of paranoia derived from reading dubious Internet sources
- Extreme pessimism
- Extreme optimism
Often we would like to talk about the causes of being unhinged, but we become frustrated because our sense of being possessed and obsessed seems inexplicable. We say, “It just happened.”
But in fact, there are certain personalities that are more vulnerable to being unhinged:
- Proud
- Narcissistic
- Self-pitying
- Eccentric
- Introverted
- Depressed
- Highly imaginative, creative people
- Highly sensitive, fragile people
- People with Asperger’s syndrome
- People on the bipolar spectrum
- People who feel “emotionally damaged” from some past trauma
- People who are overwhelmed with past demons
- People who are heartbroken over a lost love
- People who are heartbroken over God and have lost their faith
- People who are heartbroken with life and feel disappointed with this place people call Planet Earth, what for them is a living hell
- People who are desperate for answers to the tormenting questions that plague their existence
Often in the condition of being unhinged, we are chasing a mirage that we wish to obtain in the future, we are disconnecting with our present through addictive and compulsive behavior, and we are in a state of anxiety from our frustration at not being able to possess our chimera or mirage.
We all become unhinged from time to time, but what separates an unhinged person from the rest of us is the frequency and chronic nature of being in the condition of being unhinged.
We can break down the condition of being unhinged in the following eight distinguishing characteristics.
One. The first characteristic is our delusional self that creates false justifications for irrational behavior. “This thing is so cheap I can’t afford NOT to buy it.” “By buying the Seiko SBDX017 for two thousand dollars, I’ll stop buying six-hundred-dollar watches every four months or so, so that over a five-year period, the two-thousand-dollar Seiko will save me seven thousand dollars. I can’t afford NOT to buy the Seiko.”
Two. The second characteristic is fear of facing our personal shortcomings, what amounts to having someone hand us our butt on a stick. The disparity between our self-image and our true self is too frightening for most of us to bear. We’d rather live with a flattering self-image. We’d rather believe we’re not wasting our lives on nonsense. We’re so desperate to avoid the truth of our personal shortcomings that we engage in diversionary behavior (avoiding the truth through various distractions and escapism) that makes us unhinged.
Three. Related to the second, the third characteristic is the intoxication that overcomes us when we become an image of mythology, celebrity, fame, or power to others so that we see ourselves, not for who we really are, but through the lens of those who worship our mythical self.
Four. The fourth characteristic of becoming unhinged is desire for some mirage or chimera that rips us apart from our powers of reason.
Five. The fifth characteristic of becoming unhinged is obsessive-compulsive behavior that compromises our sense of self-possession and free will.
Six. The sixth characteristic embodies all of the previous four, the state of disconnection, which causes intense anxiety and panic. We are desperate to not feel this disconnection, and we will resort to any extreme to not feel this anxiety. Our extreme behaviors exacerbate our condition, making us more anxious and feeling compelled to be even more extreme, thus creating a vicious cycle.
Seven. Not knowing one is unhinged is a key characteristic. In other words, the unhinged lacks the metacognition and self-awareness to recognize that he is unhinged.
Eight. The eighth and most striking characteristic is the enormous anxiety and fear that afflicts us and in turn makes us unhinged.
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