Self-Central Casting
April 20, 2026 Leave a comment
In trying to understand the phenomena of the double down defiant, the disruptive and destructive characters under the evil enchantment of our culture, I came across the vain imaginings of main character syndrome (MCS).
Seeing yourself as the main character in a narrative of one’s own struggles, a mediated aspect of MCS, is considered normal. You might hear a life coach say “Living your hero life starts in your head—and it’s won in your daily choices.” Our culture embraces the internalized hero narrative.
Scientific American says To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero
Forbes offers How To Become The Hero Of Your Story: Eight Steps
But when someone believes that their experiences and problems are more important than the next guy’s experiences and problems, that self-serving perspective is nobody’s friend.
And when someone starts acting like they’re the main character of not only their story, but everyone else’s, that is delusional and narcissistic. Imagination and passions take on a dramatic self-narrative that entails self-absorbed behavior, a lack of empathy, and seeing everyone else as a side character.
Taking on this perverse aspect of MCS, a person views their life as a movie and themselves as the central character. Such a person romanticizes their importance on the world stage. They behave as if they always have an audience. Checking in with others to invoke reality-based self-reflection is not a consideration. Basking in the mind’s spotlight is more important.
When I first came across main character syndrome, I immediately thought of Anna Karenina in Tolstoy’s novel by the same name. Some have suggested that Anna is the heroine of the novel. Oprah called the novel “one of the greatest love stories of our time” referring in particular to the passionate and illicit love affair of Anna and Count Vronsky in a milieu of 19th-century Russian social norms.
But the heroines of “one of the greatest love stories of our time” are two women whose prosaic love pays attention to those around them. Dolly is not caught up in romantic notions of herself or life. She is down-to-earth practical with her love. And, it is Kitty’s self-giving love shown to her husband’s dying brother that the analytical Levin comes to recognize as making the world go round.
Anna is all drama, all self-absorbed, all self-deception, all main character syndrome. Everyone else is a side character.
It should surprise no one that a person with MCS may also have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
Someone with NPD is characterized with a perverse self-interest, grandiosity, entitlement, and power fantasies. Such are manipulative, emotionally immature, attention-seeking, and lacking empathy.
In practice, such a person may focus on information patterns in the MSM and social media and ignore anything contradictory. This myopic view of things provides a confirmation bias for an imagined reckless hero narrative.
Did Renee Good and Alex Pretti hone in on the anti-ICE media narrative that included the tough guy talk of Democrat politicians – Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz, AG Keith Ellison, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey – and then hone in on ICE officers? Did the rash Good and Pretti act out their ‘confirmed’ narrative?
Does MCS have a cultural imprimatur?
James Bowman wrote about the Tough Talk of the above politicians and the street theater response “their intemperate language” could be expected to invoke. He went on to reference Kat Rosenfield’s The Free Press article Minneapolis Isn’t a Movie which carries the subheading “There is a pervasive sense that ICE agents are more like cartoon villains than legitimate law enforcement. The killing of Renee Nicole Good proved this a dangerous illusion” and then referenced a Substack article:
After Alex Pretti was killed, Michael Shellenberger wrote on his Substack,
Both Good and Pretti were thirty-seven years old when they died, and Millennials, more than Gen X before and Gen Z after, are very progressive and are “heroes in their narratives,” researchers find. The deaths of Good and Pretti are thus the result of a collision of forces that have been building for decades. After World War II, fighting Nazis and fascists became the number one heroic fantasy for Americans and others in the West. And Baby Boomers taught their own revolutionary heroic values to their Millennial children, who see fighting Trump and ice as an opportunity to achieve a form of transcendence.
Do the endless world-saving super hero movies and video games contribute to MCS? What about viewing everything in terms of power dynamics and a hero-villain victim-oppressor narrative? Wouldn’t an action-hero of such fantasies want to bash an oppressor with her car?
Validation of a self-serving bias is accomplished when media comes along to chronicle the deadly street theater in heroic terms and to direct blame away from the deadly aggressor and place it on ICE and Trump and anything else except the character who acted out their hero fantasy.
Such validation will have the “heroes in their narratives” double down their acting out. (The deep state loves those with MCS. The deep state doesn’t care how many are lost to protect itself.)
Our culture has produced and enabled many “heroes in their narratives”, including alleged assassins and alleged attempted assassins.
Luigi Nicholas Mangione is accused of murdering of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
Tyler James Robinson is accused of murdering Charlie Kirk.
20-year-old Michael Steven Sandford attempted to steal a police officer’s firearm and use it on Trump, during a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Gregory Lee Leingang stole a forklift from a North Dakota oil refinery and later confessed to trying to kill the then-president by flipping the vehicle.
Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Ryan Wesley Routh broke into Trump International Golf Club and staked out for several hours before Trump.
Those with attention-seeking main character syndrome include left-leaning cosplayer Christians (James Talarico, David Brooks, and David French to name a few ), politicians (Gavin Newsome, J.B. Pritzker, Tim Walz, Barack Obama, and Jasmine Crockett to name a few) and federal and supreme court justices who want to be seen as heroes resisting the Trump administration. These and more are promoted on MS-13 (MS NOW), the NYT, and other propaganda outlets.
Those with attention-seeking main character syndrome include a host of activists who want the world to be looking at them as they do battle against media-designated oppressors. Hence the ubiquitous presence of cameras to record themselves on social media.
Islamism produces main character syndrome that generates “Allahu Akbar” terrorism characterized by a lack of empathy for anyone not embracing Islam and ‘heroically’ responding to Qur’an’s call to Muslims to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60).
For those with main character syndrome, what occurs is not a lack of feeling, but a lack of understanding. Hindsight, foresight and insight are banished for the sake of a romanticized fantasy that places them at its center.
Read about Pseudo-heroes here:
With hedgehog mindsets, those with main character syndrome have taught themselves not to see anything but themselves in the drama they concoct, a drama that is validated by the confirmation bias of the media and mullahs. Self-deception is key to MCS and the media and mullahs enable self-deception.
~~~
Identity Shaped by the Misshaped
I don’t find it surprising that main character syndrome is a thing when modern culture works to remake identity with its evil enchantment and the loss of a tangible community to help us break that spell.
A mechanized worldview banishes all transcendence in its path and would have us believe that the source of meaning comes from within the world of ourselves. Such a disenchanted perspective of the goodness of the Good can foster the utmost ruthlessness and egoist pursuit of one’s own narrow interests.
Without the Good, reality is abstracted, truth is inverted, language is subverted, history is weaponized, and we are alienated from each other. Progressivism, socialism, and Islamism, by these distortions and with violence, each act to strengthen a bond to itself. Identity envisioned with the myopia each requires can foster a main character syndrome hell-bent on protecting what it holds to be true.
Tangible community, with its relationships, sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, traditions, and continuity that once formed identity is being replaced with online identity promoting the symbolic devotion and fusion of identity with power for its own sake, power which demands control of everything. A perfect fit for the narcissist with the loss of community.
Sociologist Robert Nisbet, in The Quest for Community writes that community “encompasses all forms of relationships that are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time.”
Our digital age fosters social atomization and alienation along with depression and other mental illnesses. Spending time alone in front of a screen can produce MCS. The desire to overcome our isolation and to overcome the world can be found online.
Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demoniac fears and passions. – Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community
Call it main character syndrome. Call it identity shaped by the misshaped. Call it Bad Actors in Bad Fantasy. Call it self-central Casting. Whatever term you may use, you will find that the Self-center Cannot Hold.
~~~
Regarding our culture’s evil enchantment:
“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
~~~
From The War on Meaning:
The object of the system was to create a dual consciousness. At public meetings, and even in private conversations, citizens were obliged to repeat in ritual fashion grotesque falsehoods about themselves, the world, and the Soviet Union, and at the same time to keep silent about things they knew very well, not only because they were terrorized but because the incessant repetition of falsehoods which they knew to be such made them accomplices in the campaign of lies inculcated by the party and state.
-Leszek Kołakowski
~~~
It is no surprise that sloth is a characteristic of MCS driven by NPD. Empathy takes effort. Scapegoating and sacrificing victims to one’s narcissism is easy.
Recognizing and accepting the boundaries of others takes restraint. Crossing lines doesn’t.
Looking for meaning outside one’s self, the internet, and media takes effort. Accepting one’s self-narration of experiences, like a pre-written movie, is easy.
“The sixth Deadly Sin is named by the Church Acedia or Sloth. In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for. We have known it far too well for many years. The only thing perhaps that we have not known about it is that it is mortal sin.” ― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Other Six Deadly Sins
For Sayers, this is the evil enchantment of the modern age.
~~~
Heros of their narratives:
Men without chests:
Cindy Wity 
And the Beat Down Goes On
May 4, 2026 Leave a comment
“. . . the terror of the night
or the arrow that flies by day
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.” Psalm 91
Fires, floods and extreme weather will imperil a third of all life on land in the next 60 years.
Nobel Physicist Predicts END DATE For Modern Civilization: And it’s quite soon…
The New York Times’s Resident Catastrophist Delivers Another Subscription to the End of the World
You wake up in a news cycle that never sleeps. With a cup of coffee, you read what ‘doomcasters’ are saying about end-of-life scenarios appearing on the horizon. Now you are fully awake and wondering what to do with these high alert headlines? Do you let existential crisis into your life?
You sip your coffee and remember that not long ago the world was subjected to pandemic hysteria. Coronavirus, the “global crisis of unprecedented reach and proportion,” started making headlines at the beginning of 2020.
You recall the WHO declaring the coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern.” And the headlines declaring surges in COVID-19 cases attributed to the Omicron variant, a “tripledemic” – COVID combined with flu and RSV, and of overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare systems and dancing nurses.
How could you forget that Biden imposed OSHA vaccination and testing emergency standards on your business or the reality-warping restrictive policies involving mandated lockdowns, masking, social distancing, fines, and vaccines, or the CDC predicting people will die?
You pour yourself another cup of coffee and look out the kitchen window. You see the couple next store – Vivian and Zoe – walking their dog Baxter. The other day, when you took the garbage can to the curb, the apoplectic twosome accosted you with “Democracy is threatened by the likes of you extremists, fascists, racists, homophobe Christian nationalists!” and “Trump is Hitler!” They saw you going to church last Sunday.
You drink your coffee troubled that Viv and Zoe had been beaten down by another media existential crisis campaign, akin to the rollout of the COVID-19 marketing campaign that told us to worry about it, and how to worry about it.
Under the spell of the “Democracy is threatened” campaign, Viv and Zoe were in a state of emotional panic. And that had them beat down on the closest person who didn’t share their views or the views of the commercial-sponsored media. The media’s inordinate influence has you very concerned about the collective fear and confusion its campaigns were causing to psyches.
The beat down goes on . . . in our heads.
~~~
How shall we then live in the context of existential dread?
Day after day imagination is battered with dire predictions– the end of this and that unless we do this and that. The steady beat of amplified headlines overwhelms one’s patience, strength, and soul.
Climate change, pandemics, wars, “Democracy!” AI Could Make Humans Irrelevant!
How do we respond to headlines telling us that we are done for? Should we let fear and helplessness dominate our lives? Can we live in terms of “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it”? This last way of going forward is the directive C.S. Lewis prescribes in his essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.”
Published in post-war 1948 and at the beginning of the atomic age, the essay provides a reality-check perspective and presents a scenario of how to live in life-ending times.
The following is an excerpt from the opening of Lewis’ short essay. During COVID the excerpt was passed around on the internet, with “atomic” replaced with “coronavirus.” Certainly, the essay can be applied to any dire life-threatening circumstances.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
The full essay, in the document below, contains questions and positions Lewis maintains, such as
Are we “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it?”
Do we “hold up our own human standards against the idiocy of the universe?”
Are we the product of blind physical forces and therefore unable to provide answers to questions of a fatalist existence?
“But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature…?”
“We must go back to a much earlier view.”
“We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it.”
“If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?”
“Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs.”
https://www.matthewaglaser.com/living-in-an-atomic-age
“On Living in an Atomic Age” (first published 1948) by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) From: Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis (edited by Walter Hooper; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pages 73–80
Born a few years after the above essay was published, I became well aware of ‘doomcasting’ headlines. I recalled some of the headlines in my January 2025 post Surface Readings.
The post began with the words of poet W H Auden – “Now is the age of anxiety” and my own take on things: “Impending doom has been in the news during my entire lifetime.” I wrote about the headlines and pronouncements of those anxious times which included the book The Late great Planet Earth based on the modern and heretical notion of dispensationalism.
~~~
Imagination Reset
Taking in the spirit of the times, imaginations are exposed to the negation of life and dire predictions often made for political ends that use fear to move power into the hands of the few.
Taking in the digital tabloid times is the “WHAAM!” of a Roy Lichtenstein Ben-Day dots painting. Imagination is amped up and ready to pop with a Pow!
What happens to our imaginations when we are constantly confronted with crisis? And, how do we live with dire predictions?
With the 24/7/365 news cycle, it’s little wonder that “News Avoidance” is becoming a common way to deal with the constant specter of troubling things, as Thaddeus G. McCotter writes in I Didn’t Read the News Today, Oh Boy: Embracing the ‘News Avoidance’ Pandemic
“If you live today, you breath in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” ― Flannery O’Connor
What we shouldn’t avoid are resources such as poetry, art, classical literature and music to help us cope with and see beyond the terrors of the modern age. We need the signal of those who came before and dealt with all kinds of things and not the clamoring noise of influencers.
Poet Wallace Stevens, in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” writes that poetry, as it interacts with reality and the imagination, can shape our perspective and provide meaning and comfort in a world that often feels overwhelming and harsh.
Wallace emphasizes the role of imagination in countering the beat down of life. If you are a Christian, you already know that the poetry of the Psalms does just that, e.g., Psalm 91.
In the video below, Dr. Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis discusses his book, Why Literature Still Matters.
Why Literature Still Matters: An Interview with Dr. Jason Baxter | Classical Home Education
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If you need a quick antidote to climate hysteria, Itxu Díaz provides his take on the news of impending doom: Climate Change Scientists Set a Date for the Arrival of Hell on Earth: the Year 2085.
~~~
Naomi Wolf with Outspoke: “I’m here tonight to talk about a huge news story that broke in the last couple of days. It could be thread that unravels the whole COVID virus/vaccine perpetrator issue.
“A criminal syndicate, essentially.
“Even just this initial gesture is so transformational. It breaks the spell of, “No one can be held accountable, no one can be investigated from the untouchable third rail COVID vaccine rollout, COVID virus rollout.””
“The Shocking Story of NIH Secretly Funding COVID”
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