I remember the first time I saw The Sixth Sense, famous for its twist ending. Perhaps I could have slowed down and figured it out before the reveal, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was fully armed with advance knowledge there was I major twist, but I didn’t see it coming. A good movie lets you escape and get lost in the story unfolding in front of you. I had forgotten to even try to figure out what the surprise would be.
Bruce Willis’s character is a classic fictional unreliable narrator. If he knew he was a ghost at the start his interactions with other ghosts and a tiny human that can see those ghosts would be different. But there is a sort of bias wall between reality and his perceptions, his framing is skewed by that bias.
I am not a trained psychologist or psychiatrist. Not that formal education or training would do me any good career wise. There’s still a lot of anti-science and anti-intellectual sentiment floating around. You gotta give the dwindling number of cult members something to do. Not all of them get to deport decent people who just happen to have the (allegedly) wrong skin color. So hey, Fauci is in the news again. Let’s reinstate the bullshit false accusations that came about when he was scapegoated the first time around.
For myself, real life unreliable narrators are easy to spot. Even without formal training it just comes naturally. This is because there’s nothing wrong with my pattern recognition skills, and a science degree. I also figured out the science degree wasn’t going to work out for employment. Going into massive debt to get a masters degree - that wasn’t a grave I wanted to dig into. But it did help a lot structuring my thoughts and solidifying the critical thinking abilities learned in high school. Ah yes, those glorious days of high school where I first discovered that people have patterns, too. I didn’t hang out with the cliques that would be most likely to be found at the type of rally Charlie Kirk would be hosting. I learned to avoid them. Which being in a fairly large school meant spending a lot of time by myself. A classic Generation Jones nerd world of books and movies that I could absorb at my own pace without being assaulted by people in various stages of narcissism.
Yes, it’s another one of those posts. Because at this point the actual objective facts are undeniable. Not only is Trump objectively an unreliable narrator due to his lifelong narcissistic personality disorder, his dementia addled brain is mush. “The Donald Trump you see today is the best you’ll see because it only just gets worse.”
I would gladly trade some peace and stability to replace the flex of seeing something of the kind of world that exists today. The NPD affected brain by definition is heavily biased. The NPD affected brain is an unreliable narrator to the body it operates. The dementia affected brain by definition is a supercharged unreliable narrator. Nothing is more important than the self. Every narration is skewed. Unreliably skewed. Every story is now purposefully guided towards the skewed alternate reality or a jumbled mess as the various parts of the brain that govern impulse control and memory fade into pudding. As Gartner and others mention on the various news shows and social media postings, it’s not cool to diagnose without interviewing by a trained professional. But we’ve seen the trajectory over a decade. The constant need for attention and providing material for the loyal subjects to get a short term attention boost is a great form of relevant and damning material.
Over not just the decade of active Trumpism and but decades leading up to that, narcissists without NPD have been “trained” to ignore the personality cult leader’s worst displays. Like Fauci being unfairly scapegoated, Biden, Obama, Comey, Jack Smith, oh….its much shorter to say anyone that ever has disagreed with you is bad. The multi billion dollar online grifting community latched on, amplified and the lingering seeds of doubt, although wilting now, the plants grew and the rot spread long enough to influence elections over millions of impressionable minds. It’s absolutely no big surprise that Congressional ability to check and balance, to stop the madness, wasn’t going to happen. The narcissists in control of those wheels in the machine didn’t do much about the 2008 financial crisis or January 6th. Or a concerned response to climate change issues.Why should we expect different now.
Gartner has explained across his presentations that Trump is a good candidate to throw a hissy fit and launch some nukes. I’m a bit more hopeful than that, but it is something to think about. Yet, this is because my favorite scenario is more like some other nut job responds to his outrageous demands and pulls a big FU in retaliation. And at least we’d never know who was wrong because everyone at that point is an unreliable narrator. Some form of monetary reward is part of the online grifter’s speech, and even they aren’t dumb enough to think hustling you for Patreon subscriptions is going to help, right?
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