Harper Crossed the RoboCon

I’ve been waylaid in posting further on the issue of narcissism by the latest political scandal to embroil the Conservative government of Stephen Harper here in Canada. It is perhaps the most outrageous scandal to date from amongst a long list, and may well be the undoing of the Harperites, if not even of the Conservative Party itself.

Advertisement

On Truth

It would be fitting to follow up on my previous remarks on narcissism and delusion — or narcissistic delusion — by addressing the possible objection: “Well, what else is there?” If the narcissism of the false self is the “human, all-too-human” condition — and is otherwise (mistakenly) called “human nature” — why not accept it as such? That is to say, why not accept that there is no knowable Truth in the universal sense, only partial perspectives?

A Withering From Within

In the former Dark Age Blog, I called our own present-day Four Riders of the Apocalypse by the names Double-Talk, Double-Think, Double-Standard, Double-Bind. They are just the various names for Nihilism. If former Maclean’s Magazine columnist Andrew Coyne thought we had come to embrace a “culture of lying”, or Arthur Herzog much earlier identifed “faking it” and The B.S. Factor (1973) as the dominant mode of contemporary public discourse, it is similary in recognition of the duplicity that undermines society presently and which has become so habitual and chronic that it is rarely even acknowledged as being an aberrant and near pathological condition. It is even considered impolite today to point that out.

(And wherever I use the term “society” I almost invariably mean the same as “commonwealth” — that is, what is “shared” in common, as is the derived meaning of the terms communicate, community, common).