Psychoanalysis

Communism And Narcissism

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Everyone is a communist. The only real question is how far out their primary narcissism allows them to draw the lines of communal inclusion. Within those lines communism flourishes, outside of those lines their consciously held ideologies flourish.

We could say that primary narcissism at its most pronounced sees members of the immediate nuclear family as insiders and all others as outsiders. But most apply the insider designation to other people too. Relatives, neighbors, teachers, teammates, work colleagues, cultural groups, nation states.

When it comes to those who we consider to be insiders, those who fall within the bounds of our primary narcissism, we’re communists through and through. We’re willing to give help to these people and to receive help from them. We consider them to be worthy of the same rights and privileges that we enjoy. We generally want the best for them and try to set up the environmental conditions necessary for them to grow and flourish. We believe they have an inalienable claim to a dignified existence. We don’t use them as mere tools for our own ends but see them as human beings in all their complexity. If they fall down we pick them back up and we hope they’ll do the same for us.

These ways of being and relating come naturally and effortlessly. It’s only beyond our bubbles of primary narcissism, that area where the insider designation is traded for the outsider designation, that our ideologies change. Beyond these bubbles we start thinking of people in terms of their use value, we might see them and treat them as less, we feel justified in denying them certain rights and privileges, we don’t particularly care about their growth or happiness, we use them for our own ends.

But make that bubble a little bigger, start to view some of those outsiders as insiders, and suddenly treating these people in the fashion outlined  above becomes unthinkable. Everyone is a communist, that’s the default ideology. The only question is how far out the psychological line of communal inclusion extends, which is really a question of primary narcissism.

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