Part 1: The Shitball
This is the first part of a series that attempts to capture my current thinking about The Situation.
TL;DR: Our attention has been hijacked and weaponized. It is imperative for us to to direct our attention to healthier and more productive places.
The reasons we’re in The Situation are multifarious, but I feel this important equation hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention:
For me, the answer to “How could they possibly do this?!” is abundantly clear: attention. Malignant narcissism is a real mental disorder the compels its sufferers to do anything possible to keep attention on themselves.
Beyond the desire to focus primarily on themselves and be held in high regard by virtually everyone in their lives, people with malignant narcissism tend to have a darker side to their self-absorption. These individuals can be highly manipulative and don’t care who they hurt as long as they get their own way.
The troubled kid who’s flailing, yelling, and breaking things is doing this because he’s desperately trying to get the attention of the adults around him. Like many behavioral issues that plague adults, malignant narcissism stems from the tragedy of children being deprived of love and attention. Those children grow up to adopt maladaptive behaviors that ultimately harden into a full-blown mental health disorder.
Mental health, man. It horrifies me that mental health isn’t a front-and-center part of any conversation around The Situation. We look past this factor at our own peril, as everything stems from the mind. Imploring malignant narcissists to consider the perspectives, wellbeing, and plight of other people is as futile as telling someone suffering from depression to “just be happy!”
May I have your attention, please?
Malignant narcissism coupled with the attention economy and our current media landscape proves to be an extraordinarily potent — and dangerous — combination. For decades, we’ve all been frogs as our media landscape boils over: always becoming more breathless, hyperbolic, sensationalist, crude, black-and-white, polarizing, splintered, bite-sized, watered down, infotaining, illogical, anti-intellectual, infantilizing, unmoored, uncaring, commoditized, capitalized, “content”-ized, etc, etc. Use whatever words you want, but thoughtful and nuanced it ain’t.
Our primate brains — orders of magnitude out of our evolutionary depths! — have been ragdolled by a frothy, relentless, unceasing media tsunami. The result is complete disorientation. We become unmoored from logic, rationality, values, and our shared humanity. We watch in horror as loved ones become swallowed whole by hyperbolic talking points, or worse travel further down increasingly-unhinged rabbit holes. We even begin to question our own sanity: “what exactly is truth, anyways?”
And in this state is where the malignant narcissists find us. Muddled and confused, like juvenile antelopes separated from the herd. The malignant narcissists cynically (and, as covered above, compulsively!) weaponize the media landscape to help them achieve their primary goal: for you to pay attention to them.
Sprinkle a whole lotta money and power (two problematic topics that I feel are already well-covered and generally better understood) over this potent combination, and you have a real recipe for disaster. I feel this equation explains — at least partially — how we find ourself in The Situation.
Now for the billion-dollar question: what the fuck do we do about it?
In harm’s way
The fantastic book Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray deftly digs into the psychology of outrage. It all boils down to harm.
Studies show that feelings of harm are the master key of morality: all people judge acts as wrong based on how harmful they feel.
Gray details how our perception of harm is shared by all of us, but who exactly is getting harmed is where minds diverge. Your perception of harm (and potential for it) influences your answer to “Pick one: Black or Blue Lives Matter?” Outraged and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion are well worth reading as they dig into the psychological and moral forces that influence our deeply-held beliefs. With The Situation, these forces are on full display like fucking 4th of July fireworks.
The malignant narcissists and their repugnant lackeys are fully aware that thinking, caring, feeling, empathetic people want to reduce harm to people, animals, and the Earth. The malignant narcissists found a weak spot called compassion, and now they are attacking it — nay, spamming it repeatedly. This sets up what I suppose you could call the “Own-The-Libs Cycle”:
This cycle is the lifeblood — the oxygen — of the malignant narcissists. They overwhelmingly want your love, but if you deny them love they’ll gladly accept your hate. It energizes and fuels them just the same.
(Important side note: glee is NOT the same as true happiness. These people are deeply, deeply unwell, and glee likely functions the same way cocaine does to their systems: quick dopamine hit then back to their vapid, hollow, decrepit emotional stasis.)
I see the majority of people — including some of my closest loved ones — trapped in this tumble cycle of despair. They suffer and oscillate between one overwhelmingly negative emotion to another. Outrage morphs into despondency which morphs into sadness which morphs into helplessness. And even if they see the light at the end of the emotional rollercoaster, the next piece of breaking news hits reset and begins yet-another cycle.
This tragedy is heartbreaking, unhealthy, untenable, and unsustainable. Days have turned into months which have turned into years and…my god we’ve been subjected to this for OVER A DECADE. Over a decade of our collective consciousness stolen by scowling, deeply unwell malignant narcissists. It wrenches my heart to contemplate all of the love that’s been snuffed out, the relationships lost, the lives lost, the surrender to cynicism.
I feel strongly that it’s critical to take care of ourselves, our families, our communities, and to strive to live a life of love and happiness and positivity. Always, but especially in this moment. We need to direct our attention, our energy, our loving souls, to positive constructive and worthy endeavors.
It is for these reasons I desperately want this cycle to be broken. But how can we do that?
Decoupling harm from the people causing it
I want to be very, very clear about what I’m about to propose: I’m not advocating anyone to stop paying attention, stop caring, or simply stick their head in the sand. Anyone with a still-intact conscious will agree that it’s not morally justifiable to pretend that everything is hunky-dory and to simply put in ear plugs and play Candy Crush or whatever.
BUT.
There’s some importance nuance to what we pay attention to, what we care about, and what we direct our energy towards. Right now, so many people feel like they must give attention — oxygen! lifeblood! — to the malignant narcissists because they deeply care about the harm they are inflicting on the world. “I want to stay informed.” This is an incredibly understandable perspective; we’re wired to prevent harm so we must be vigilant! Don’t take your eyes off the predator approaching the herd. It makes perfect sense.
But I will remind you: the malignant narcissists have taken full advantage of this psychological instinct. They desperately want your eyeballs to be fixated on them; they want to be the first thing you think of in the morning and the last thing you think of when you go to bed. Giving them our attention gives them power.
I believe it’s important and urgent for us to do three things:
- Take care of ourselves and protect our mental health and wellbeing.
- Continue to care about and work to prevent harm to The Good.
- Deprive the malignant narcissists the attention they crave.
Can this be accomplished? It requires some reframing, but I think so.
Introducing: The Shitball
The Shitball is a ball of shit consisting of the malignant narcissists and other cynical, morally-bankrupt souls that enable the malignant narcissists. The Shitball spews out all manner of hateful, awful, cruel, illogical, ill-conceived, cynical, outlandish, counterintuitive, counterproductive, insulting, ghoulish, harmful shit. That’s what The Shitball does. That’s what The Shitball has always done. That’s what The Shitball will always do. The Shitball acts in bad faith and doesn’t honor laws or norms. There’s no reasoning with The Shitball. There’s no point in negotiating with The Shitball. The Shitball’s moral compass points due south. The Shitball says “fuck your feelings.” The Shitball will continue to surprise you with how shitty it can be.
Take The Shitball as a given.
With every news cycle, people will exclaim, “Can you believe The Shitball did this?!?!?”
“Yes!” will be your unequivocal answer. Of course The Shitball did that. That’s what The Shitball does. The Shitball does shitty things. Say it with me:
“The Shitball does shitty things.”
(Feel free to riff on this — for instance,“Shitball be shittin'” — in conversation.)
Internalizing this fact is the first step of breaking The Shitball’s spell.
Then, direct your attention away from The Shitball. Build That Wall™ around The Shitball. You may worry that averting your gaze will cause you to lose track of The Shitball, but don’t worry. There will still be copious evidence of its shitty presence.
And there will still be plenty of people still paying lots of attention to The Shitball. In fact, we have entire institutions dedicated to paying attention to The Shitball. We even have professionals — including elected representatives we voted for! — to hold The Shitball accountable! That’s why it’s crucial to support high-quality journalism, and to contact your representatives to remind them how important it is to oppose The Shitball at every turn in order to protect The Good.
The Good
What is The Good? The Good embodies all positive qualities of existence: our better selves, animals, Nature, Earth, peace, freedom, truth, justice, democracy, human rights, dignity, diversity, systems, institutions, infrastructure, education, spirituality, creativity, art, culture, music, collaboration, progress, evolution, exploration, integrity, ethics, and on and on.
The Good needs to be protected. The Good deserves our attention. The Good deserves our action. The Good deserves our life energy.
the battle of good vs shit
The Shitball is relentlessly attacking The Good in an epic battle between Good and Shit. I can’t bring myself to call them Evil; these people are sad, small, pathetic, deeply flawed, emotionally-stunted children. The irony isn’t lost on me that the people talking about REAL MEN are the same people that are utterly terrified of confronting and working through their own feelings. I’d pity them if they weren’t so, so…shitty.
Shitball be shittin’, as they say.
Build That Wall™
Unfortunately, real harm is being done, and no wall is powerful enough to protect The Good from The Shitball. But Build That Wall™ anyways.
Why?
The Wall screens The Shitball from our sight. The Wall serves as the beeswax in our ears to block the grotesque-yet-alluring Siren that is The Shitball. The Wall allows us to focus on The Good that’s subjected to the cruelty and malice that spills over from the other side of The Wall. The Wall helps us break the spell of The Shitball.
Direct none of your attention to The Shitball.
Direct all of your attention to The Good.
Direct none of your attention to The Shitball.
Direct all of your attention to The Good.
Direct none of your attention to The Shitball.
Direct all of your attention to The Good.
Part 2 of this series will explore where I feel our energy needs to go in order to ultimately prevail in the battle between The Shitball and The Good.