A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Hand Over
December 8, 2025 Leave a comment
When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things and a group of people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?”
Objective reality – the existence of things as they are – is obvious to everyone. And so are the values, accumulated over several millennia, of what is true and of what works and what hasn’t. But not everyone accepts the obvious and the values based on time proven objective reality. Some see themselves as Progressive in rejecting both.
Today’s academic, artistic, media, and political elites, a vanguard of Progressive Groupthink, reject the existence of things as they are and do so within the safe space of their ranks thereby creating an illusion of invulnerability and inherent morality. Members of this vanguard suppress dissenting opinions and avoid critically evaluated alternatives so as to maintain the group’s shared illusion of unanimity.
The vanguard’s conformity is maintained with mind guards – the media reports “right thinking” about a matter – and with self-censorship of deviations from shared beliefs and with shared views of the enemy – those who present a reality contrary to the groups’ notion of reality.
When we hear the vanguard’s irrational take on what is going on in the world, its roiling Doublethink, its name calling and shunning of voices outside its collective choir, and its dysfunctional decision-making which objective reality tells us will result in disastrous, dehumanizing, and even deadly outcomes, we ask “Where is this coming from and where is this going?
Those of us who keep an ear to the ground in order to hear what is approaching will answer “History is repeating itself.”
The objective reality of the murderous totalitarian regimes of the last century, which Progressives willfully ignore to promote their glorious future of equality via the same means, will help us understand the denial-of-reality collaboration of today’s intelligentsia – those who hold to one way of thinking – and their quest for total domination of the body, mind, and soul with Progressive Groupthink.
Specifically, Russian Soviet history will help us understand the conformity dynamic behind today’s intelligentsia. For this understanding I turn to one of the most informed scholars of the Russian history of ideas as communicated in its literature: Northwestern Professor Gary Saul Morson.
***
In Morson’s magnum opus Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter Morson details how politics and literature, in the writings of realists, idealists, and revolutionaries, played against each other during the Soviet period.
He describes Soviet thinking that rejected the realism and the real people depicted in nineteenth-century Russian fiction and required that reality be written to include “not only of the observable present but also the inevitable future in the making” and with Socialist Realist heroes – utopianism made flesh.
Writers of Russian realism – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and others – wrote about what they saw and experienced. They are the “wonder” in the title. They represented the world as it was in their writings about the Gulag, mass starvation, torture, unspeakable violence, about how people thought about and dealt with what was going on, and about how many succumbed to the imposed Soviet mindset.
Russian realist authors confronted those of the “certainty,” those who wrote redefined reality in terms of the “observable present and the inevitable future in the making” and in terms of “positive heroes.”
The “positive hero” was to set an example for the reader’s behavior. A Soviet cosmonaut, for one example, became a “positive hero.” A cosmonaut’s space trip was seen as science, materialism, and atheism triumphing over the transcendent values held in the U.S., the enemy of the Soviet Union.
The “certainty” writers followed the lead of the embodiment of “certainty” – Vladimir Lenin. Lenin mocked his opponents’ self-characterization as ‘seekers’ of truth. He held that dialectical materialists do not seek truth; they already possess it. And so, the party-minded “positive hero” refused dialogue, refused to see any alternatives to the Marxist-Leninist-materialist-atheistic “truth” espoused by the party, the representatives of Karl Marx’s class-struggling proletariat.
From Wonder Confronts Certainty:
“The Soviets would label fidelity to present facts “bourgeois objectivism.” It was the best that could be expected from the age of realism, but must give way to socialist realism, which shows the ideal world inevitably coming. The socialist realist author was expected to focus on the people of the future, “positive heroes” exhibiting complete “Party-mindedness.” True positive heroes do not have bring their thinking into accord with the party, a process requiring effort; they exhibit Party-mindedness so thorough that no effort is required”
“Party-mindedness”, we learn from the writings of Russian realist authors, was propagated through the means of propaganda, show trials, random arrests, and the constant terror that there might be any hint, any innuendo, any false statement that would convict one of not being party-minded.
The “party-mindedness” of the 20th century Russian intelligentsia, its conformity to only one way of thinking, is replicated today.
***
Here’s Morson in his Touchtone article Beyond Belief: Literary Reflections on Thoughtless Conformity:
“I happened to witness two professors waiting for an elevator. To make conversation, one voiced an opinion on some political question to see if the other agreed. When she did, they chattered away on a dozen other topics with perfect assurance that they agreed on those, too. Evidently, their beliefs came as a package. Subsequently I noticed this way of thinking many times, as I imagine many of my readers have.
The process works something like this: a person first chooses the group with whom he wishes to identify and then adopts its opinions. He believes as strongly in gun control, let us say, as he does in supporting Planned Parenthood, defunding the police, and banning fossil fuels. It is evident that no arguments or evidence can shake his opinions on any of these topics because arguments or evidence had nothing to do with why they were adopted.
To be sure, a person who thinks this way can cite facts and reasons to justify his opinion, but they have been acquired in the same way as the opinion itself. They are the same reasons others in the group have learned to give. I used to find it eerie to hear repeatedly the same arguments expressed in the same phrases, as if I were listening to a recording rather than to highly educated people who imagined that, unlike their intellectual inferiors, they had arrived at opinions rationally and would change them as evidence warranted. I thought of Jonathan Swift’s observation that no one was ever talked out of an opinion he was not first talked into.”
***
Reading Morson’s article, I was reminded of the easy-going liberal mindset of the Stiva Oblonsky character in Tolstoy’s Russian realism novel Anna Karenina.
Behind Stiva’s smile, his self-possessed mannerisms and hedonism is what Tolstoy described as “the liberalism of the blood.”
From the novel:
“Stepan Arkadyevitch took and read a liberal newspaper, not a radical one, but one advocating the viewpoint maintained by the majority. And even though neither science, nor art or politics held any particular interest for him, he firmly maintained the same views on all these subjects that were maintained by the majority and by his paper, and he changed them only when the majority changed them, or, better put, he did not change them at all; they imperceptibly changed within him . . .
“And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.”
Stiva, we learn in in the novel, does not recognize his conscious when it speaks to him. And that is aided by his living-in-the-moment forgetting. He did not want to remember any unpleasant thing.
Self-deception and romantic ideology play key roles in Anna’s life.
***
Czeslaw Milosz, Polish American poet, novelist, translator, critic, and diplomat, is best known for The Captive Mind (1953). His essay collection focuses on intellectuals, specifically poets and other writers.
As Charles Haywood writes in his 2019 article The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz), [Milosz’s] “book shows how mental gymnastics, rather than coercion, caused writers under Communism to adhere to Communism. Thereby, indirectly, it congratulates writers who believe their minds free from such, or other, contortions.
“The West incorrectly sees “might and coercion” as the reasons those in Eastern Europe submit to Communism. But, rather, unwilling to face either physical or spiritual death, many choose instead to be “reborn” through taking these metaphorical pills, because “[t]here is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.” Intellectuals, and artists especially, do not want to be “internal exiles, irreconcilable, non-participating, eroded by hatred.” So they swallow the pills and adopt the “New Faith” (a term Milosz uses throughout the book) which offers the intellectual the certainty he is both correct and virtuous, and therefore gives him a sense of belonging, gives him a feeling of being “warm-hearted and good . . . a friend of mankind—not mankind as it is, but as it should be.”” (Emphasis mine.)
Returning to Morson’s article about package thinking, Morson relates
“What really matters, [Czeslaw} Milosz explains, is “the intellectual’s feeling of belonging.” His defining “characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.” For this reason, as well as to prosper, he must root out all the old ways of thinking. Milosz describes a phenomenon with which university people are all too familiar, the always incomplete process of teaching oneself to say the right things (in the right words), and avoid saying the wrong ones, so that one never makes a slip entailing ostracism or worse. Of course, the best way to do this is to get oneself actually to share the prescribed views. Milosz describes how
after long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. To identify self with the role one is obliged to play . . . permits a relaxation of one’s vigilance. Proper reflexes at the proper time become truly automatic.”
***
One obvious feature of our culture’s downward trend toward mindless conformity is critical thinking’s easy alternative: clicking on a machine to receive packaged thoughts.
Why think when packaged thoughts are there for the clicking? And why expand one’s personal bandwidth when you can reaffirm your tribal identity with a click?
Why research and consider a range of ideas and thoughts when clicking on machine AI is ready to do away with mystery and your curiosity, wonder, and impatience? And why think outside package thinking when life is short – shortened by every minute clicking on a machine.
Why read classic literature to gain wisdom, insight, and understanding from other people in other places and in other times, when you can click on a remote for package thinking entertainment.
Have you bought into the globalist, academic, secular and progressive (GASP) package (a feature of Wikipedia) that censors alternative views as “extremist” or “fringe theories” or “conspiracy theories” or “racist?”
Did you buy into the globalist open borders “welcoming the stranger” package where millions of unvetted illegal invaders entered the country as simple or criminal or terrorism opportunists? Did you accept the package thinking that allows third world invaders into our country to replace American workers and American values and do all manner of harm to its citizens as empathy, as what Jesus would do? Take a look at the strangers welcomed: Arrested: Worst of the Worst | Homeland Security And, there’s this: They Called It ‘Compassion’ — But it was Child Trafficking – American Thinker
Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package where everyone, except certain individuals who hold more power and privilege, must be made equal no matter the human cost? Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package and willfully forgetting the objective reality of the horrors of socialism/communism? Are you willfully handing over your life, your thoughts, to “Party-mindedness”?
Did you accept the “don’t question the science” COVID package thinking of mandates, masking, social distancing, vaccine passports, isolation camps, vaccine efficacy, and of COVID’s origin lies? America’s COVID Response Was Based on Lies
Likewise, did you not question the package thinking of “climate experts” who announced their verdict that the world would end if we didn’t act now. Not long ago, woven into almost every weather report on local and mainstream media when major weather events (floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires) occurred was the narrative that climate change was behind them – without ever mentioning large-scale natural phenomena such as solar cycles, ocean currents and volcanoes that have been affecting weather for many millennia.
The Green New scam was behind Biden’s $93 Billion Crony Climate Heist. Will declassifying carbon dioxide (necessary for all of life) as a pollutant and the end of carbon dioxide regulation mean the end of the Green New scam? Are we now seeing The End of the Green New Scam? | The Rude Awakening? Matt Ridely thinks so: The end of the climate cult – The Spectator World
(A climate expert I trust: https://judithcurry.com/about/)
Do you go along with the package thinking of the [John] Rawlsian theory of ad hoc justice that, for example, releases someone arrested 40 times, is not considered a “criminal” because of their minority status, and is released by a judge back onto the street where he sets a woman on fire?
Do you buy philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – the package thinking that says that people are entirely products of their environment, of their society, of their age, and that’s why they do what they do. Therefore, they are not responsible for what they do because of external influence. That’s the package thinking behind the Rawlsian theory of justice and behind the executions and horrors of the French revolution working to change social environment.
Have you agreed with the insurrection thought package being espoused by The Seditious Six imploring military service members to “refuse illegal orders” thereby implying that orders coming out of the Trump administration are considered illegal by them and therefore military service members should disobey their commanding officer and join the club of the “Party-minded.” Remember, package thinking has only one train of thought – gaining and maintaining power over reality.
Have you agreed with the insurrection package thinking espoused previously by NYT’s op-ed columnist David Brooks? Do the values of your party-minded package thinking allow you to hamstring a DEMOCRACY! elected president with the rulings of party-minded federal court judges that will be overturned. Do the values of your party-minded package thinking justify the deep state, in the labyrinth of government, to sabotage the efforts of a Democratically elected President?
Do the values of your package thinking allow you to call for uprisings by any means necessary, to burn down buildings, to destroy property, to destroy businesses, to steal, do violence on others, to defund the police, to create pipe bombs, to assassinate? To ignore your conscience?
Did you accept the “Danger to our Democracy” thought package the media delivered during the last presidential election cycle? It should be obvious from the likes of David Brooks, that the “guardians of democracy” are the ones who want to tear it down.
Have bought into the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) playbook that conforms and coerces everyone to identify with Soviet style party-mindedness package thinking?
Have bought into viewing everything including humans through the lens of materialism?
Have you bought into package thinking so as to not be considered an outsider? Have you bought into conformity for conformity’s sake?
Is censorship the worst thing that can happen to a people? Or, is it “Party-mindedness?”
When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things with the smug air of certainty and people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?” and “Where is this coming from and where is it going?”
What happened in Russia didn’t stay in Russia. And a mind is still a terrible thing to hand over.
What happened in Russia didn’t stay in Russia . . . Britain Is Lost | ZeroHedge
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You can put your ear to the road and hear what is quickly approaching. Download and listen to the following podcasts:
London is falling – or has it fallen already?
Liz Truss, the 56th prime minister of the United Kingdom, in her very first episode of The Liz Truss Show discusses how bad things are in Britain with a mass migration and economic doom loop – and how to defeat the deep state who have let this happen
https://justthenews.com/podcasts/liz-truss-show/london-falling-or-has-it-fallen-already
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Interview with Professor Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, Package Thinking, and The Importance of Critical Thinking
Professor Gary Saul Morson shares his thought-provoking definition of an intellectual—someone who seeks truth independently, values ideas for their own sake, and stands apart from identity-driven thinking. Whether discussing classic Russian Literature or analyzing modern society, Professor Morson is one of the most insightful and consequential scholars of our time. Discover how this interview, and its exploration of timeless topics, can inspire bold, principled leadership and innovation within today’s business environment.
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The Moral Imagination – Michael Matheson Miller
Gary Saul Morson Ph.D.: Thinking Like Lenin
Vladimir Lenin’s ideas are alive and well today: Party-ness, politics as win-lose, zero-sum game, Who-Whom, rejection of truth, ideology, violence, philosophical materialism, adherence to lying.
Ep. 15: Thinking Like Lenin, with Gary Saul Morson
Is Hope Naïve in a World Like Ours? | Esau McCaulley & Gary Saul Morson at Northwestern
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Quotes:
In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea … gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage – if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. … No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous. Galileo Galilei
If the Brave New World cannot insert a square peg into a round hole, it will redefine “roundness” until a perfect fit results.
-Jerome Meckier, from Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure
…a sense of unity is opposite of a sense of uniformity. Uniformity, where everyone “belongs”, uses the same cliches, thinks alike and behaves alike, produces a society which seems comfortable at first but is totally lacking in human dignity. Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, realizes that it is man’s destiny to unite and not divide… Unity, so understood, is the extra dimension that raises the sense of belonging into genuine human life.
-Northrop Frye, from The Bush Garden
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something. -Plato
“The past is our always-available counterculture, and it’s a rich one. Every minute you spend attending to something not-immediately-present, you are helping to build a counterculture.” ― Alan Jacobs
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Links:
Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? Gary Saul Morson offers three explanations from the treasury of Russian literature.
https://tomklingenstein.com/mind-forgd-manacles-why-intellectuals-conform/
The greatest depiction of woke totalitarianism was written 150 years ago in Russia
Anti-Communism Week has been marked for November 2025. Writer-producer Julie Behling’s documentary “Beneath Sheep’s Clothing” warns of communism’s devastation: “Globally, communism claimed the lives of approximately 150 million people in the 20th century.”
‘Beneath Sheep’s Clothing’: Communism’s Capture Of America | ZeroHedge
Totalitarian governments cannot afford that its citizens remain autonomous persons. This poses a threat to their quest to consolidate power. Individual liberty threatens the theoretical, utopian foundations of promising the re-distribution of goods, and equality; communism ultimately fails to re-distribute the essence of human nature.
10 Habits of Mind to Avoid Ideological Thinking
Everyday Habits That Reveal a Low IQ (Backed by Psychology)
Everyday Habits That Reveal a Low IQ (Backed by Psychology) – YouTube
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Added 12-15-2025:
Sam Faddis (formerly with the CIA) sits down to talk about the reality of the ongoing Marxist revolution in America.
Cindy Wity 
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:
All the Dream Houses of the Left: The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny.
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.
~~~
The Feminine Wound: The Radicalization of Young Women Is about More than the Internet and Social Media › American Greatness
Heros of their narratives:
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Filed under 2026 Current Events, mental health, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, social engineering, social science Tagged with Main character syndrome, mental health, narcissism, politics, sociology