One of my students has written me a two page letter in which he recognizes that he is failing my course and requests a D because he is graduating and needs it. He is unable to earn a D, he says, because the subject is beyond his grasp. This is why he has not prepared himself for the examination. He wants me to know that usually he gets grades of C and better. Therefore, he reasons, he deserves a D in this course, although he is unable to master the material to a D level. I have explained that graduation is a result of passing courses, not the other way around. He has not understood.
In these pages I have protested a great deal about Reeducation and its theory that one could not control one’s life. There are many things one can in fact control which Reeducation was not aware of, because Reeducation did not believe one could be an adult, or be competent. However one thing I definitely cannot control are the poor attitudes of students like this one. I can explain to them what the requirements are and how they can fulfill them. I can attempt to show them that their attitudes are self-defeating and that other attitudes are available for the taking, and I can fail them. The university, however, imagines that we can, almost magically, whip them into shapes they clearly do not wish to take or are constitutionally unable to take. I find this very unrealistic.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
The reason my average is F is that I simply cannot grasp this subject.
Dear Student. That is indeed why your average is an F. Your powers of discernment are truly remarkable! Perhaps there is no need for you to graduate at all. Why not set up shop as an astrologist for a ladies’ magazine?
I know I am always beating the abusive drum, but, this is abusive! It is making you the heavy. When he does not graduate, it will be your fault, see, because he tried, he talked to you, but you were not accommodating, you were the problem, he tried! I wonder if Boot Camp changed. When I went in 1988, if a recruit did not pass something, physical or written exams, depending on the severity of that exam, that recruit was “bagged” back a week or three. Since there were several companies graduating every week a recruit could always graduate, just not graduate when he or she wrote home and informed his/her family that they were going to graduate. And you know some of those poor people save all of their cash to travel to the site of the boot camp to watch their kid graduate. So what do you think happens when the family shows up and their child is not graduating (even though when they are bagged back they are free to call or write home and tell their family this)?
Oh, I think it is called bagged back because one was expected to pack his or her bags and leave. LOL! That awful green duffle bag.
Amazing, isn’t it?! He thinks he should still graduate although he cannot grasp this required subject. He has told everyone he is graduating but he has not done the things he needs to do to graduate. And yes, he is making me the heavy.
Further notes: he really does assume graduation is automatic. He says this several times. He claims to be a good student in other courses and he thinks this means he should be passed in this one.
He claims he has had a tutor, yet he has barely been to class. And he wants “inside info” on the final … and once again, he says he requires of me that I give him at least a D.
Finally, he calls me “Mrs. Z.”
I’ve been thinking recently about a certain very common male disease. It’s an internal narrative that runs like this:
“Females and everything they say or do are not real. Therefore I do not need to conform to what they tell me is reality. If one says that I will not pass my course because I failed it, then that is just part of my own mind acting up and giving me negative messages. It’s not real. What I need to do is dominate that part of my own mind that has been giving me negative messages, so that everything will be well. Because reality is what I think it is, and women and what they say and think and do are just in the process of disrupting the immutable reality concerning me in relation to myself and how I am great!”
(I just had a load of emails this morning from someone, which reminded me of this eternal male sickness.)
I was thinking along the same lines on the way home, and was sort of cooking a post comparing students and men.
Students: On the menu of grades available at this restaurant, I want this grade, for this price. Serve it to me.
Men: I want x y and z services from women, give them to me.
yeah. Only what I’m noticing is more dire — more sick, if you will.
It’s not just the infantile narcissism but the fact that it is so common in so many males that it gets to define reality itself, at the expense of critical thinking and a more subtle and engaged (and engaging) perspective.
I’ve been in the process of putting together the meaning of this phenomenon for a while.
My father for instance has the kind of hypermasculinity that is resonant with George W’s chimpean antics. He even has the same muscles in his face, indicating a similar emotional makeup. To invoke Nietzsche, he is a “backwards” personality, who believes that using force is the only way to get someone to do what you want them to do. Now I have seen how this kind of mentality of backwardsness is paired with a quality of extreme solipsism. There is an actual inability to listen to reason. The only way to deal with this kind of personality is to smack them upside the head. They respond to force — and to force only. And they respond to it as if it were the voice of reason.
In any case, my father is an extreme type of this backwards condition. His solipsism increased to such a degree that he heard God’s voice and so on. At one point, when he was feeling (in his own words) “as normal as I will ever possibly hope to be” he admitted that part of the cause of his punitive and impulsive behaviour toward me was that he thought I was “part of his brain.” He said, “I think I thought you were part of my brain.”
Obviously, this is a problem that cannot be cured. But I have got to thinking about another person who I used to associate with via email regularly, and it would seem that, although less crazy, this person also acts as if I were part of his brain. It’s as if he can see me as a character in a novel or a children’s story or something, but he is unable to distinguish how much of his characterisation of me is an emotional projection of what he expects me to be like and to act like, and how much is actually me. In short, he mistakes his own projections for the actual real, and there is nothing I could do to set him right, because it just becomes fodder for another projection, rather than what it ought to be — a straight corrective. Furthermore, he brings into the fray a kind of subtle discourse concerning Reality (big R). He thinks that insofar as I point out that the projection of me he is making isn’t real, that I am disagreeing with Reality. I’m causing him unnecessary hardship due to my refusal to be subdued (as part of his own mental functioning) — so I am the bad guy, necessarily, insofar as I disagree with the reality he has projected from his brain.
Ah, so tiresome! –those who lack critical thinking powers and attempt to make others (but women, especially) pay for what they’re lacking.
My ex, the abusive one, used to say I lacked critical thinking powers and was projecting into him. What I was actually saying was that I did not like what was going on and wanted some changes, and what he was actually saying was that he wanted to continue with his outrageous behavior *and* to have me stay and accept it. But what was so interesting was that according to him (a professor of Philosophy!) I lacked critical thinking skills and was projecting.
Yeah, it is a real problem to assert something like that, because the other person can use the same argument, and there is nobody to say that one of you is wrong, the other right. That is why finally actions speak louder than words — you leave. So, I don’t think you can ever win an argument like that, by words alone. That is because the other person recognises the form of the words, and indeed their function, but has no respect at all for the intention behind them — which is to bring things to light. The “backwards” kind of person sees the use of words as a particular kind of use of force, which they are entitled to resist with even greater force as they see fit.
Yes – since the intention is not to shed light but to win or impose one’s will. This ex said that he had gone into Philosophy in the first place so as to gain a rhetorical arsenal for winning arguments!
There is no intention to shed light or to receive light. In actual fact, communication is thwarted by these people — much to their own detriment, I think. Such a person may feel as if they’ve won an argument because in the short term they’ve managed to distort, bewitch, or otherwise pull the wool over someone’s eyes. But the naivety of the backwards type is to continue to feel that the other person does not register — even on the dimmest level — what is occurring. Even those who have no training in philosophy will eventually sense, at a gut level, that something it twisted and distorted at the level of communication. Most people will certainly sense this. Then there are those — like myself — who will also fight back.
The basis for this approach to life is a contemptuous assumption that others have no gut-level intuition that enables them to discern truth from falsity, that their memories are infinitely short, and that dominating someone is as rich and rewarding as actually having a sincere relationship with them.
For these people dominating someone is actually more rich and rewarding than having a sincere relationship, because a relationship of domination is the most sincere/authentic one they can muster – the relationships in which they appear to be sincere are actually superficial ones.
But yes, most do figure these people out. What is funny is that these people never expect it – they really do assume that others lack gumption, intellectual abilities, and so on.
Yeah. I think there is a sense of emptiness or bad self esteem, or at any rate some element of nuturing, perhaps, missing that produces these types. So, they feel that the superficiality thing is the best they can do. Perhaps they are genuinely constructed in this way, so that the routing of their neurological wiring does not give them a choice. The negative payoff alone would otherwise provide the impetus for thinking differently.
When I described my ex to my friend the psychic, who is anything but bourgeois, middle class, and so on, he instantly said it was all about very extreme maternal neglect.
Apparently therapy for most people constructed this way does not break through the wiring – the most it can do is teach them how to behave better, again at a superficial level, and give them more information about how people who do feel the world in a more “normal” way, function.
At the time I read an interesting web site about this, Sam Vaknin’s site on narcissism. Vaknin is a narcissist who understands what is going on with him and can explain it to “regular” people. But he keeps warning that although he understands it all at an intellectual level and realizes that the way he is driven to prey upon people is not right, it is what he is driven to do, so his advice to everyone is not to get into a deep relationship with him.
Maternal neglect rings true about this thing. It is interesting that these narcissistic types insist on a strict differentiation between people on the basis of gender. They seem to need this, somehow, in order to go on feeding. It’s at a gut level for them, that they seem to know if men and women were treated equally, they would not have such easy prey. So, they perpetuate what was probably done to them — ideologically setting the groundwork to create a generation of hollowed out women … mothers who are so not much not their own person due to discrimination of all sorts that they are not free to nurture. My father’s mother was the victim of a hasty marriage in order to survive — her husband having been killed during the war. This feature of marrying in order to survive is an aspect of patriarchy which doesn’t allow for genuine emotional adjustment.
I’m interested in that Vaknin guy’s site — although I doubt that he could tell me something I didn’t already know.
Vaknin was apparently the victim of terrible child abuse at the hands of an abused mother, if I have gotten this right. He says people like his site and find it useful, but he maintains it for narcissistic reasons: he gets attention. So it fulfills his needs in a way that is actually helpful to others, and he has thus found a way to get what he needs without doing harm, but there is no emotional connection for him between helping others and doing so in a way which is fulfilling for him. He has hit on a practical solution for his problem, period. He’s here: http://samvak.tripod.com/
Vaknin appears to be in exile from his native Israel after serving jail time there for shady business dealings. If I have gotten it right, the shady business dealings were undertaken as a result of the narcissism and attendant amorality. So getting narcissistic supply by explaining narcissism is very useful to him – it keeps him from doing illegal things to get narcissistic supply.
Hm…very interesting. And I found the site through google. Yes, a lot of what he has to say is really spot on, in terms of what I was intuiting earlier. For instance, he says that the narcissist incorporates others into his own ego and can’t distinguish between himself and others. Hmmm.
I have a feeling, though, that all of this is even more complex than it seems at first sight. My father for instance — whilst always subject to flights of rage — did not become so confused about the difference between himself and others until he had experienced quite a few additional traumas than the ones he’d undergone (which I know about) during his childhood. Furthermore, my father does not preen like a narcissist. He often has the attitude that there is nothing that can be told to him that he either didn’t know already, or alternatively, which doesn’t register as a slight against his independent thought processes. Still, he would come across as an arch-conservative, not narcissistic preener.
There is also the issue of narcissistic compensation, which can be an expresssion of an effect of extreme psychological bruising. For example, when I wrote my autobiography, I was feeling the effect that I was totally hated in my new environment and that my value had been reduced to nothing. Hence, my seeking to rebalance this affect by focussing heavily upon myself and the good aspects of my personal experiences. This approach was surely quite extreme, as well as socially detached. Yet it was ultimately healthy, and saved me. The way that bruising is a swelling that cushions the wound until it can heal is a good analogy. Perhaps occasional narcissism serves a purpose then?
Anyways…..
The inverted narcissist would seem to fit my father.
this also reads like it is my father.
The second one – “warped reality…” *really* fits my X. A lot of other people I know have at least elements of that inverted narcissist description.
Narcissism serving an occasional purpose – certainly.
Abusive people, many of them I think do not need to be narcissists to be abusive or to be bullies. It’s a strategy which works.
And then there is always the problem that a lot of people genuinely misunderstand what it means to be narcissistic versus what it means to be in a mode of dissent. I am sure that my mode of dissent (often dissent from being abused or from complying to an arrangement that serves a narcissistic purpose) is itself considered to be improperly out of kilter with what I ought to be doing, if I were really “balanced”. The proletarian has very little power of their own, and very often some self-ascribed police figure regarding society’s mores will as it were point a sharp finger at you and command in an authoritative voice that one should “Sit!” or “Roll over”. Failure to do so would imply that one thought oneself to be “too special” and therefore probably suffering from some disorder or other. Vaknin himself points out that a deviation from the norms of society does not imply a deviation from morality in an objective sense. Yet the subtelty of this lesson is lost on most people.
Jennifer – precisely. Actual mental health means seeing outside collective insanity. And can mean dissent. And with *no* narcissism one can be converted into Sartrean etre-pour-les-autres, I do believe.
That second one is eerily like my ex. The inverted narcissist would fit a lot of people I know.
And with *no* narcissism one can be converted into Sartrean etre-pour-les-autres, I do believe.
Yes– it would be like going through life without a buffer, or like cars without bumpers and shock aborbers. Why would this be considered ideal, except by those who cannot really think themselves into the consequences (ie, it would be considered “ideal” by those who lack wisdom and empathy.)
That second one is eerily like my ex. The inverted narcissist would fit a lot of people I know.
Many people give up on their spontaneous (authentic) self as one of the major costs of taking up one’s place within mind-body dualistic bourgeois society. This kind of narcissism is the norm.