“5 Boys” Struck A Nerve

Hey, I got a comment on one of my posts! And not just one telling everybody to buy Kamanga herbal impotence pills. A real comment!

Johnny Caustic says:

Hey, you’ve really got me thinking. Suddenly I begin to understand what you’ve been going on about lately. If this characterization of liberals is true, it’s a genuinely profound insight.

I’ve known a lot of readers wouldn’t really understand what I’ve been saying, though I’ve been hoping a few might. Lack of belief is what I fear – that people will think that what I am saying is just not possible, because my readers are too sane, and they themselves would never think this way, so Liberals don’t either.

I understand this risk, because ten years ago, I would never have believed any of this myself. Even once I was crushed beneath all of the evidence for this in my own life, when I saw it again and again right in front of me, I still was in disbelief, and questioned my own perceptions of reality, and my own ability to understand other people. Could Narcissists be this different?

Please understand, I want this website to be as impressive as possible, scientifically. So I will make every effort to make the information here as impressive, and useful to you, as possible. I will not water it down with useless posts, or bad information. I won’t make stuff up which sounds good, and fill empty space with it. When I feel I have nothing more to add, I will stop blogging, rather than waste your time. I would never waste my time writing all of these posts, or waste your precious time reading them, if I did not feel the information about the amygdala hijack and the Narcissist’s brain was every bit as real, useful, and just plain interesting, as the information about r/K and ideology is.

I came to see this mental quirk of Narcissists only because I dealt with a large number of Narcissists who knew each other, and who did these things to each other regularly. They know all of these tricks inside and out, experience them themselves, use them regularly on each other, and interestingly, are still susceptible to them, even as they know what is being done to them. Knowing the trick, and what it does, doesn’t immunize them to it’s effects. It’s crazy.

As a result of these experiences, I have watched endless numbers of get-togethers devolve into epic fights, for seemingly no reason. One minute everybody is happy, the next minute, one guy goes off and the argument erupts – for no reason. I saw individuals grow upset and lash out at innocent people, when seemingly nothing happened to precipitate it.

Without that experience, it is difficult to grasp how different the Narcissist’s perceptions are. Over time, and with much repetition of these incidents, I developed the ability to spot these little cues which they were sending each other, and I came to understand why they were lashing out. At first I thought they were accidents, but eventually found that these were purposeful “Dog Whistle” type attacks. It was as if the Narcissists have a whole language of their own, which only they speak and understand, and which they use to irritate each other at every opportunity.

Even with this type of experience though, it can be difficult to understand. I am sure there are many people right now, living with Narcissists day in and day out. They go about their day innocuously, and are puzzled when the Narcissist suddenly erupts for no reason, and lashes out at them. “What triggered that?” If you are normal, it will seem bizarre, to the point you would question your own grasp on reality.

Normal people don’t realize that an innocuous phrase they used, an innocent laugh, or a happy smile delivered at the wrong time, functioned as a “Narcissistic Dog Whistle.” The Narcissist’s defective amygdala flagged that meaningless gesture/phrase/whatever as highly meaningful because they saw it as a potential direct insult to their own greatness and perfection – even though that was the furthest thing from the mind of the person who delivered it.

If you don’t understand what it is like, seeing the whole world as a continuous, never-ending affirmation of your own omnipotence and perfection, you will see the Dog Whistle stimuli as meaningless, and your brain will disregard it.

I’m Black and he says “5 boys?” “Boys –> Racism –> I’m Black –>Blacks were enslaved hundreds of years ago –>I’m embarrassed by this–>He embarrassed me–>I’m not perfect–>There’s something wrong with me! –>PANIC!” If you have a functional amygdala – it’s meaningless. If not, it is a highly significant racist attack, custom tailored to insult Obama, and it is significant.

To the Narcissist, their self image as awesome perfection, is so overwhelmingly important to everything they are, that their amygdala flags even the most meaningless, innocuous piece of information as supremely important if it might, in any way, impact that image. It makes for an individual who is highly sensitive to any criticism (as Narcissists are known to be), and who is even sensitive to non-criticism, if their brain can turn it around to be critical (even if all the observers aren’t seeing what was said as critical).

This defective amygdala is why Mike Wallace can find his own 19 year old son’s dead body at the bottom of a cliff he fell off of, and yet years later, when asked what traumatized him the most, he said it was being assailed by some opposing council in a lawsuit. The experience with his son doesn’t even enter his mind.

The Narcissist notices these inconsequential things because of the strength of the amygdala reactions they produce. If I said “five boys,” and you suddenly felt like you were dangling from a ledge five stories up, you’d notice it. And if your amygdala didn’t see your son’s death as important, and didn’t do the same thing to you, it wouldn’t cross your radar.

This is who the Liberal is. And the funny thing is, the article I linked to in that post, here, indicates the Liberal assumes we are that person too. We know exactly how “5 boys” was a coded racist message, and that is why we said it. Why wouldn’t we see that? To the white Liberal that was clearly a racist “Dog Whistle,” and they think we know it too, and are just lying about not seeing it.

We are as much of a cipher to them, as they are to us. We can decode them, but we have to listen to what they tell us. The stranger, the wackier it is, the more we need to listen, and figure out why they are willing to embarrass themselves by saying such silly things. What is the foundational belief they hold about us, how did they derive that belief from their understanding of their own psychology, and what does it tell us about who they are, and how they are different. Most importantly, how can we make practical use of that information to advance the cause of freedom, protect our great nation from tyranny, and give the next generation as much opportunity as we have enjoyed?