"Black Narcissus": Story of a false social justice war

He recognized that his story was not an easy one to tell, as many people would not want to believe. It involved a certain encounter. He thought it very instructive. This is his story:

"The roommate started saying he was having trouble paying his share of the rent. He had stories to tell about this, they seemed plausible. Always the story was about someone else he was dependent on, but who was not reliable. As if this were a mirror of the situation he was trying to create with me. He would make a semi-promise (set up an expectation) of so much money by such and such a date. When the time came, the non-promise was not fulfilled, and he was so sorry, but it was 'their' fault. He found this depressing and so was able to indulge some self-pity and ask me to understand.

When I started to make clear that I needed him to pay the money, he increased a tendency I now realized he had been engaging in since he first moved in: trying to gaslight me (say that I'm crazy, or act badly, usually because he thinks I am impolite to someone else -- always because I'm not 'nice' to them by letting them set and enforce the terms of whatever it is they want to (for example) sell me when they knock on the door. In fact, this man had been constantly making low-level allusions to the possibility that I and others like me (I'm white, he's black) am 'racist'. He presented himself as a very politically engaged left-liberal, though he also made it clear that his fight was not only for the left against the right, but for liberalism, and the government system we have, and which he would like to appeal to as on his side, against me, and that was also part of his supposed liberal politics, which in the end were just about fighting and winning for the sake of the collective identity he presented himself to me as. So he would accuse me of being a racist, mentally ill (evidence of this was that I would sometimes get angry or upset about something--as if he would have something on me enabling him to win by making me lose (fighting is important to him because he thinks his side only wins if an opponent loses), or an angry asshole who isn't nice to everyone by letting them determine what I must buy or agree to, etc.

One day I have a friend deliver a legal letter to him saying to him that he owes this amount of money, and I will have to pursue the matter in court and seek his eviction if he does not pay. He seems to have readied himself for this moment. He tore up the letter in the envelope, but he knew what it was. He then came into the living room where I was speaking with this (mutual) friend, and started jabbering about gentrification. Because I am white, university educated, and middle class, he doesn't like me, and thinks I must be not only the enemy of his people and cause, but people like me are responsible for the poverty faced by people like him, and the police violence to which they are sometimes subjected.

Let's talk about that for a minute. When he first moved in in 2016, he told me that he is a martial arts expert and could kill a person "accidentally" by using a chokehold. That is actually not a karate maneuver so much as a police one, and that's where he got the idea to say this. A black man had been killed 2 years earlier on Staten Island by the NYPD in a chokehold. It's a police maneuver, and this man believed it would be appropriate to use against me. If what? Perhaps only if I were a 'racist', and so he would try to set up a situation that he could make look like that. (As an aside, it would not change this if it were true, but the difference between him and I is he wanted that to be true, because then he can be the master who fights to defeat the bad guy and wins, and that would validate his vanity. Note too that he probably does hold the beliefs he says he does).

Well, this argument, which he started because he wanted to produce evidence (first of all, to satisfy himself) that it was not about the money he owed, and obviously would not be held responsible for paying, but something else.

Was he a police informant? That's possible, and since I have had encounters with the police, including one just a few months before he moved in, which suggest that they don't like me and would be happy to either have me taken out somehow, or try to keep me in control by harassments. Why keep me in control? Ask them, but what I know that they mentioned to me as their concerns is that I am a writer, prone to some political dissidence, and they think they can say that I am crazy and get people who are authorities in that matter to agree and take me out, at least temporarily, or throw at me some big time harassment that will shake me up and put me in a situation that I don't like but is not easy to get out of. Which could also include having someone like this man as a roommate.

He went on in 45 minutes insulting me every way he could think of, interestingly mostly by accusing me of not being enough of a master to be able to handle successfully threats from other people. This big and strong man thinks he's a real man. He's going to prove that his daddy or whatever he's got is bigger than what I have, and so he will win by starting a fight, or just enjoy his vanity in this.

At one point, he started suggesting that maybe I had some “problem” that he could identity and that partly excuse my behaving badly, in a way that would involve his appealing to some public authorities, who could then be trusted to help me with my problem, on his behalf. I thought, well, first, he is reminding me that liberals like him, while they may sound like radicals in some ways, really are liberals who believing in the existing system of government, and are really most eager to appeal to it to solve all their problems. That’s what they really believe in, big government. I also had the feeling that even when he is being less directly aggressive, everything he believes in or wants to do is something that to me feels highly coercive. It was another form of his aggression. He’d figure me maybe as autistic or having some other registrable problem that I could be tagged with. Oh, I can’t wait. That will really be satisfying. In any case, he was responding to my saying that I needed to get his part of the rent for the last several months or else I would need to evict him, by trying to make his own power grab and take and wield control his own domination over me, in the name, naturally, of whatever institutions or principles of authority he believes in.

This man cannot claim to be politically much of a left-liberal. His beliefs are all about himself and his collective identity as a black man, and he has made it clear in various statements that he believes in coercive uses of government or other power to fight and win against the white racists he thinks he sees everywhere. Indeed, he presents himself as a bit paranoid about this. But the point is, if he is on the side of Black Lives Matter (which he has never said he was), then does it makes sense that he would want to turn police tactics against a white left-liberal or radical (and a person like that in particular) in the name of black people but actually more on behalf of the neoliberal corporate police state.

So could he be employed by some such authority? I find it more interesting and likely to suppose that he aligns himself with them because what he wants is power. He's a narcissist, his politics such as they are include a high capacity or tolerance for something like a misanthropic sociopathy, and he does believe the black liberal race ideology narrative (and certain is a living example of what is wrong with it---sometimes, though in fact usually black protestors, even the most militant ones, have not been very concerned with fighting white people, even those they have strongly felt political reasons for not liking. It's the police who are responsible for most organized violence used for what might seem to be political, or anti-political, purposes).

This man is above all on the side of the police --- and that form of policing and imprisonment that is the "mental health" establishment -- while apparently believing (we can't easily know how to evaluate that, though there is no sign that he does any political work, though he does like arguing with people and rehashing arguments he gets from the liberal media --

He's an unwitting collaborator in the new fascism. Indeed, he told me he was "interested in" fascism, and made a lot of bizarre, implicitly threatening, statements clearly made in a histrionic and provocative spirit, obviously in order to provoke me and/or make me nervous.

He spent 45 minutes trying to escalate the mutual negative feelings so that he could get me to say something he could use against me. Then he stood up and appeared to be contemplating what to do for a few seconds, and then lunged at me, through me to the floor, and tried to put me in -- a headlock.

He knew I was vulnerable on the points he used to harass and attack me, and he knew that I have struggled with difficult situations involving other black people. He showed no empathy towards me in cases where I complained about anything, which is consistent with the behavior not only of the ideologically implacable, but also of narcissists.

Narcissists demand empathy from others, and they actually have almost none of it for anyone else themselves. Other people are to be used for their satisfactions. When that doesn’t work, they are very quick to anger and slow to appease, and while at first they seemed charming, because they really go all out to get people—almost anyone, indiscriminately—to like them, now they seem suddenly to hate you. As another political narcissist said to me when she was frustrated, “I can be your worst enemy.” No doubt.

It is also a stance of resentment. A lot of political “radicalism”—particular less for its place on a left-right spectrum as its tendency to be contentious and express extreme anger, easily provoked—is based on resentments. Few of us are immune to this, but most people don’t quite based their whole existence on this.

This man in recent conversations was so strikingly implacable in the rage he expressed, which was a kind of floating rage in that it could attach to anything, anything he could think of to complain about or think me to be in the wrong. Now, this is interesting: his anger is proportional, it seems, to an inability to believe that he is even involved in what was happening and so would have any responsibility. He acts like someone who is so much the master (the police do this too, of course, as do certain other kinds of professionals in jobs that involve social control), that he just sees the other from a standpoint that is uninvolved, not in the world he looks at as if from a God's-eye standpoint, such that his own motives could not be in question. The problem with people who are Masters is their intolerance of lack, which they typically attribute to the people they are bullying. Men in prisons are often like this. That’s why so many men are raped in prisons; they are prayed on by men who cannot stand the idea of a person being weak. That is because they worship power, and fear and hate lack.

It is also a characteristic of the narcissism that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan associates with the "mirror stage." People look at projections of themselves, and are inclined to both identify with and admire them, and react aggressively when the idealistic expectations associated with the (self-)image are disappointed or seem threatened. It particularly rarely works to argue any point with a narcissist, because they don’t understand arguments as discussions that do not aim at one person winning while the other loses, but at trying to understand a matter, including what someone wants and why they want it. Instead, the person who engages in an argument from the mirror standpoint only really understands that you are saying words against him, and he’s got to fight back.

I had another roommate who would do this. He would say something to me about something he wanted or believed was true, and I made the mistake of thinking I could engage in the discussion as someone who is trying to understand. But then I would say, what do you mean, or what makes you think that is true, and all he understood was that I apparently still didn’t get it, for he was using his words only as tools to get what he wanted. So he quickly began saying things that were wildly irrational. This is a common problem in American culture because Americans mostly think an argument is a fight, or a bit of nastiness, or something that only misbehaving employees and children do, instead of just behaving like they should. Eventually this roommate started communicating to me by leaving things that were symbols of what he expected me to do, like he would sweep some dirt into a pile on the floor, then. place a dustpan by it and leave it there. He would then expect compliance and start acting threatening again if instead of obeying, I said something. It’s important to understand that people like this are desperate, in fact it is not wrong to say that they themselves are like people who think they cannot breathe in the air around them, and usually the other person is to blame. They will come out swinging, doing what the French call saying “n’importe quoi” (anything at all), as they flail about desperately trying somehow to get the better of the situation. This may be aimed at a kind of recognition, but it is one that does not pass through any form of reasoning. You cannot refute what they say nor should you take it too literally.

Of course, politically, this may seem complicated. In fact, the narcissist, who is in a sense never able to breathe freely, must be viewed somehow as the flip side of masters who hate those who resist their dominance, as cops tend to (they will even manufacture this resistance, though of course any living sentient body will naturally and unconsciously the application to it of a hostile force aiming to force the person or body to bend to its will. Narcissists who think the whole world is a system of oppression are more right than any of the situations they most often try to master would warrant recognizing. The bully who demands recognition so that he can extort his own esteem, which he blames you for denying or threatening, is a variant of this. Narcissism is a political malaise, as ultimately all psychical syndromes are—indeed, the complexes and figures in which we classify them, to the extent that they make any sense at all, are not just names of types of personal, now presumed biologically caused (in a reflex of scientific thought that mirrors racist and other notions of innate inferiority), moral failure or psychological malaise; always such malaises are social figures. Neurosis and psychosis, obsession and hysteria, are figures of social life that are always instantiated not only in the individuals who suffer from them but in situations that are constructed in certain ways that tend to assign individuals roles within them. How could we speak of the Oedipus complex if it were only a way of understanding sons and not also fathers, nay, more than that: also social systems and institutions that are based on paternal authority, as we all know many are?

I have to say that I have never had to deal with anyone so implacably angry and unable to see their own involvement in the situations that they put themselves into, in order to fight, hoping to win, but in any case wanting the fight.

I am on the side of Black Lives Matter, though in my own way and for reasons of my own. I have been saying for some time now that (1) no one is right (just as no one is wrong) just because they are black, (2) a lot of "left-liberals" do what the filmmaker R. W. Fassbinder called using one's oppression as a weapon. People sometimes make false claims about this, and the purpose or effect is to shore up their own participation in some form of domination.

Not only is there nothing in this position of mine that is in itself racist, but seeing relationships as I do is actually a very good standpoint from which to see how forms of domination, oppression, and injustice, be it particular or systematic, are possible, how they work, and what might or might not work well in combatting or trying to change them.

This man gaslighted me both about his claim that I must be "mentally ill" and the race thing. He played both these things for all he could. He also tried to suggest that either I or maybe he were gay, though I'm not and I doubt he is. He wanted to control me by making me anxious.

There are other symptoms of narcissism on his part. One obvious lesson is that around such a person I need to have a poker face. Not treat them like a friend you would say anything personal to. In fact, say little to and try very hard to not react, because he will always be looking for a reaction.

Perhaps then it is not surprising that this man never seems to have any guilt about not having paid me rent for a long time. If I ask him about it, he just complains, sometimes a bit despondent but usually angrily, that he is doing the best he can, and things are hard for him, so why don't I have (unilateral) empathy.

He certainly could be a police informant. Such people are often not above the fray themselves. The police snag vulnerable people who themselves may be losers in some way, and partly with threats of their own, try to enroll them in harassing or attacking or setting up someone else.

Of course, I don't know that he is a police informant, and it is best I not say that he could be, because the police could certainly use that against me. (They would say I am paranoid and crazy).

One interesting thing he said was when I asked him what he thought of people who, if offered a job as an enforcer against other people, and expected to use violence against them, his reaction was: How could you blame us? What other option do they have?

Many of the things he said to me were clearly provocations. He was quite histrionic. People like this are theatrical subjects, responding to the situation they are in and making statements that are more about what response they want from the address than anything they want to say about a referent. This must be why Harold Bloom calls American culture ‘Gnostic’: people often don’t say what they mean, but what they think will effectively hint at what they want you to understand. But that they will in no event state directly, because then what they want from you is out there, on the table, up for grabs: it can now be evaluated as a claim and argued for or against, contested. You can see this in a certain way in the practice of many Americans in discussion to say “Well, for example….” without telling you what their example is an example of. That would be what they want you to know, which they will not tell you, but expect you to figure it out. A culture of the unsaid but implied will be one of the obviousness of statements not made on the one hand, and the need to always figure it and people out on the other.

The person caught up in mirror stage dynamics does not ask himself any questions. He will have no questions for himself. He will assume that he is right, not wonder if he is, and, as a warrior would, he will observe your apparent faults, in order to use any and all of them against you. These people are generally angry. Anyone can get trapped in this, and I can very well ask myself, but doesn’t this man engage my own narcissism, putting me on the defensive, so that my only choice, apparently, is to fight back and be equally without empathy and thinking only of #1. In this way, some people will pull you down to their level. Doubtless our legal system is one reason why this narcissism is such a problem in our culture today. Everyone knows that in a legal proceeding, you must assume that you are in the right and “innocent”: if implicated at all, you would be guilty. Just as with the police you are best off not trying to find the right thing to say, but saying nothing, or as little as possible.

We have social institutions that produce and reward narcissism. It is a threat to the possibility of meaningful social life with its public and political dimensions, and it is a deformation that occurs at the level of language. It makes people irrational, but note, in America being ‘rational’ is, like ‘arguing’, either a dirty word or it means you are doing what we expect of you (then you are rational) or are talking back and so showing you don’t get it, and are disobeying on the other. Socialist and radically democratic traditions have so far always placed a high value on rational discourse, needing the vibrant civil society that capitalism with its liberties alone may indeed threaten. Populist and nationalist movements, and pseudo-nationalist ones (championing a particular group and in such a way that ultimately nothing is clear about what they want except that it must include positive representations of or inclusions of members of the group themselves). Compare this to a labor strike on the one hand and crowning a worker’s son as king on the other.

Furthermore, it is now widely thought that the empiricist posture of the individual subject of seeing and knowing who is as if outside of what he looks at, not implicated, situated bodily, affectively, socially, historically, is not only (10 the dominant figure of subjectivity in Western philosophical thought from Descartes to Heidegger and the latter Wittgenstein (who criticize this perspective and offer something rather different in its place), and thus now outdated roughly since the end of World War II, but also (2) a fiction that empowered and presupposed a bourgeoise, male, colonial, modern state based, subjectivity that operated by subordinating perspectives that now seem to be available based on subject positions that were outside that dominant frame (principally: indigenous, non-European, feminist, or gay; sometimes arguments are made for Jewish or “Oriental” (usually meaning India and/or China, and especially in antiquity). So adopting what is in any case blatantly a standpoint of power is from a certain historical standpoint ironical when used by individuals who might be structurally or historically situated as to be victims of the observational standpoint (sometimes linked, after Foucault, with a panoptic surveillant gaze, the point of view of a God who sees everything). On the other hand, some would simply observe that in the situation I am describing, a certain kind of masculine subjectivity is at stake. To see that and oppose it with something different doesn’t require being feminine, gay, or anything else, but it may require being positioned somehow to see it as problematic. Of course, a critical standpoint defines points of view that are associated generally with the political left, or a will towards it, or with the art world, which in many ways amounts to the same thing. It is a left-liberal perspective. It’s also one you could learn at an American university in my generation. The critiques of academic intellectuals as involved in the reproduction or enforcement of power relations are complicated, but clearly no one and nothing is immune from critique, and culture is not only a mask of power, but it is that. We think and talk about what we want and why. And if there are alternatives, their claim is not to be perfect and stand outside all social power, but to be better than a prevailing alternative. Why people like me with such an education could not more just be asked what we can do with it to contribute, is an interesting question to pose of some of the reflexive forms of radicals that are too resistant to really questioning much of anything. There is no political left without thinking rigorously about problems and trying to understand the world we live in. That it also needs to ground itself in some outsider subjectivity is actually less clear, but that all thinking is determined partly by the material social positioning of the thinker is clear enough.

To engage in real social criticism, like art, is something that can move beyond this. You have already begun to do so if you think about things like capitalism and how it rewards competitiveness, games of power and challenging or being challenged, and looking out only for number one, and perhaps by means necessary. I am interested in social criticism, but don’t think liberals who are involved in enforcement of any kind, which is generally norm enforcement or enforcement of forms of domination (not really law, everyone knows the police for instance have no concern for that, just as the health care system that punishes or involuntarily tries to treat and control the people seen as lacking on its terms). A lesson in this is that you could be a certain kind of social justice warrior, and really only care about yourself. Such people are the kind of idealists who can quickly become cynics. I believed that he and I did differed above all because I am on the left, and he really cannot be. He cannot be because he has too much invested in fighting against whatever he fears losing. There are worse things than getting an education in bad politics.

The police did come (I called them) when he tried, finally, to put me in the headlock. If my friend had not been here to separate him from me, he might well have called the police himself and told them a story, told in a way he could reasonably expect they would believe. He will act very proper with authorities, and also knows how to make himself appear with them, the right attitudes, and all that.

The man has an interesting career (which may also be a cover, but it would be a provocative one): He is a graphic artist who draws images of superheroes from comic book and movie stories. This is his job most of the day, and he spends break time playing video games of warriors who resemble, as do their situations, what he creates in his working time. The rest of his time is spent between political arguments and sometimes with girls. He said he likes pleasure.

He doesn't recognize any real moral obligations, as narcissists generally don't. I think we can conclude that if he has a chance while being here, he will set up a situation that will hurt me while enabling him to get something he wants, which is partly vanity.

Only his sense of mastery seemed to depart when it came to any obligation he might have towards me. Apparently there was none. This was masked for him by his posture of mastery. He could get pretty scarily enraged, and about anything, including a few cents extra cost for a light bulb I wanted on so that I would not accidentally trip in the hallway. I was paying the electricity bill. But of course these fights are not about their supposed content, which is also why they were not about race or anything else, even if he thought they were. They were about power. This is a man who presents himself as the boss of it all, and if you don't like that, he may hurt you. If he feels threatened somehow, he will start acting aggressively.

Have I ever entertained racist thoughts? Sure, but of course, people like me who think and wonder about matters are often much more vulnerable, when faced with people who have few scruples.

I was once almost gang raped when I was in jail for a couple of hours and a big black man angrily demanded I do something. I mentioned this to him once, and he said, that's nothing. Some guys will put cornflakes in their ass and say, no, lick it, boy. Why would he say that to me? He seemed to want me to be on the defensive.

I have also admitted that I think many black liberals have very authoritarian personalities. That is how it looks from the standpoint of my university-educated, middle class, white, and in some ways very liberal background. I do think this is true. Saying that or supposing anything else as a common trait among any group of people is not what makes one a racist, and in any case, saying that they are does not necessarily invalidate what they say. For example, a man assaults you and does you physical harm. You then angrily tell someone else that you think a lot of black people are like this. Well, you could be blamed for thinking that, but of course, at the same it is also true. The rational objection would not be that it isn't, but that other things are true also. Maybe the man had a life so hard and so full of violence that he himself was a victim of that you can hardly judge him. Sure. But if you punch me in the mouth, and take out some teeth and disfigure my face in the process, I'm going to probably react the same way you or your black neighbor or friend or anyone else will react, which is angrily. That doesn't mean I have to sustain angry feelings about your people as a matter of course, and indeed, I prefer and try not to.

I had trouble getting much sympathy from people in liberal New York where I live. If I were angry about what this man did, or said what I thought of him, many would basically just stop dealing with me. They would be reacting on the basis of their own prejudices about me.

I engaged this roommate in a mediation, and he promised in it to apply for a loan from the city to pay me the back rent he owes, but then he did not follow through on that, and stopped responding altogether when I told him, which was certainly a mistake, that I would file a lawsuit in housing court if he did not participate in trying to solve the problem of the money he owes me.

The "mirror stage" theory works well. It explains how someone only recognizes what they see, which is not themselves, normally, but some other person or the situation that they are in. Conversations will fail if the other person is totally in the mirror stage and you are not. This would explain I think why a statement that is not actually an insult, or at least does not need to be taken as fighting words, might only meet with more hostility.

I am sure if the police want to use a roommate like him to get at me, which actually they appear to have done before, with his predecessor (I have written about this, it's on my site), then there probably is very little I can do.

One thing I will say and very clearly is this: I am not on the side of the right-wing, whether they are white men who are racists, or anything else. Someone like this could have a lot of fun drawing me as such, and so might the police or anyone working with them. Why not? We have seen Republicans in the Senate suggest that a right-wing Supreme Court appointee is, by being approved, striking a note of success for the cause of (normally "oppressed") women. Such statements are utterly cynical ones, made only to support or justify extant forms of domination.

Such cynical people want above all to keep things as they are, and they seek their own benefit in the process.

My only complaint, that such people deliberately misread, is not that black people oppress white people in reverse, but rather that some people make use of narratives of the oppression of the people they belong to or identify with somehow, apparently supporting their cause, in ways that are not about "fighting the power." But quite the opposite.

If I am smart, this man will not do me more harm. Unfortunately, this means I have to either stop him from returning (he has been staying with family since the pandemic started-- and of course, I'm to blame for that too!) or else find a way to deal with him if he is here. He will very likely make that extremely difficult. I will not easily find people who want to help me. Even city agencies, not to mention the police, will back off if I am outwitted in finessing the race question, because of course it is not about that. If it were, consider: would his somehow making me homeless or arranging somehow to take me out, what would that do to advance the cause of black people in this country who have been fighting against, specifically, the abuse of police powers against them?

If authorities and their employees wear t-shirts that say "I am oppressed" and then they threaten you, on behalf of things being the way they are and to the advantage of whoever benefits from and through the oppression that their t-shirts may not be lying about, are they fighting the power, or are they at best a faction within it?

One thing that would achieve is that those who believe in the cause he claims to be motivated mostly by, which is the great cause of Black Americans, whatever that is defined to be (could this be the problem? The solution then might not be to repudiate the claims of many Black Americans to be victims of injustice, but to define that cause a bit more sharply and less as a catch-all matter that tries to leverage every conflict between any black and white persons), then the result of his efforts, if successful, would be to prevent someone like me from effectively joining it, as comrade or ally.

I find it curious that it never occurred to him that he and I might be or have been oppressed by some of the same things. Certainly I can have been a victim of injustices perpetrated by the police and institutions connected with them, and other things. We could say that we are both victims of capitalism, or the extreme American form of it. Why not? But his view of the world seems to not allow for that, because he thinks he is oppressed because and as a black man (and the ways of not being oppressed would be ways of being that, specific to it, somehow). His view of oppression is that it is what ‘white’ people do to ‘black’ people. Is that true? I think in the main, it is not. Slavery was a product of capitalism and colonialism, which was one of the forms it took. Our society today remains very oppressive, and certainly is more so for people of some demographics than others. No one denies; I never would and never did. Slavery was not a scheme cooked up to oppress black people because white people had a hatred. People say things like that of the ‘Holocaust’, and I think those statements are much more credible, but are still not the whole truth. Of course, hatred of foreigners, or of outsiders, lies deep in both Western and most cultures; it is ancient. Is it intrinsic to “the West,” such that it should be replaced by some other cultural ethos? For now, let’s note that the West’s being replaced by the East, or indigenous cultures, or Jewish ones, or anything else, is not on the historical agenda and cannot be, except in an ideological reflex that deserves direct comparison with many of the real and supposedly counter-hegemonic nationalisms, which I think have more in common with fascism than anything else. There is an emergent world culture today, it is truly global, for the first time, and it is essentially capitalist, and its cultural forms are largely Western and European. They are not just that, they are hybrids, or variations. There is a place for the values we can associate with non-Western cultures and the cultivation of them, and that place is at the heart of global society today. It lies beyond all oppositions, since it is a world of multiplicities and hybrid forms with identities that are notably less fixed, rigid, and exclusive than most were until recently. Ironically or not, the culture of the United States is one place where these mixtures and hybridizations are happening, though the logic is certainly not new. That slavery and colonialism were due to the nastiness of white people with ideologies particular to them but separable for capitalism (this logically must follow as part of the argument) is tantamount in the end to saying that Western society is mentally ill. I suggest that that too, even more than being absurd practically (conceptually it is not, just obviously a false way of thinking), is a gesture to some kind of fascism. Slavery was not cause by white people being white, nor even their failure to appreciate black people being African. Its principal cause was greed. It was a form of capitalism. The forms of oppression today that appear to be articulated in terms of race, gender, sexuality, nationality/ethnicity, or even religion, or (why not?) language, all are real phenomena that can be described, and structures that can be defined, but the universal framework is obviously capitalism and state forms that have been compatible with it. In fact, at almost any time in history, most people, even living in the heart of the metropolitan centers that profited so much from things like colonialism and slavery, were dirt poor and profoundly oppressed. The class or set or group of persons globally who stand in terms of their own interests against the things that most oppress anyone are simply the 99%. But this roommate is not alone in thinking that America is oppressive basically not because it is capitalism (or patriarchal, as most societies until now have been, or anything else), but because it is ‘white,’ it is.a racial system of domination. There is much truth in this, but it is not the only truth, and precisely where such theories should be most questioned is where they are most readily placed in force, and that is at the boundaries and edges where other phenomena not clearly explained in your pet social theory are at play. The mere fact that someone like me, despite being Caucasian, of entirely European ancestry, middle-class, the university educated son of university-educated professional parents born in a major first world metropolis, could, and credibly, claim to be or have been oppressed sometimes or by some persons or things (discourses, practices, institutions) ought to be taken at least as evidence to be examined, and especially in a situation like the one this roommate and I were finding ourselves in. For why wouldn’t he want to be open to thinking that I might be his natural ally, though not necessarily on terms exclusively defined already by him? This was impossible because he sees the world in black and white, and needs, apparently, to see me as his potential oppressor. I think the politics of this is that of a somewhat paranoid narcissism which gets off in a way on social antagonisms that can be exploited in order to have some entertainingly explosive dramatic conflicts. He could have said, and admittedly I could have thought too, that maybe I could learn some useful things from him. He never had any doubt that I consider myself politically on the left, at least until he started to see that I was distinguishing myself from some kinds of left-liberalism that I think are largely mistaken politically and in terms of what we may presume to be their own goals. I think he needed to see me as the actual or potential enemy. But this also derives of necessity and as a matter of course from the assumption that politics is the struggle against oppression of people like him who share his demographic and social attributes (he presented himself as their representative). And it must be noted that much of the world of black intellectuals and political leaders in America do say things like this. I have been abused by police officers, wrongful imprisonment, and other things. Sure, I’m luckier than he is in some ways, but I’ve always been happy to share with others whatever resources I have available to me to help in understanding better the world that we do in fact share, even to the point of being at least legally citizens of the same country, not to mention speakers of the same native language, English. Why did he need to believe that I am or might be his adversary? He wanted an adversary. He is a fighter. Of course, we could micro-oppress each other in some ways, perhaps just by saying nasty things when we are annoyed and angry, and doubtless like any two people we did, just as micro-aggressions are in every social relationship. They are present in every marriage and between every parent and child, or two siblings, or two neighbors or friends, even best friends. So what I come to in the end is that this man wanted to fight. And partly it’s because of his own malaise, whose full causes I do not understand, though I am sure they may include interesting and important social problems. But partly too it is because of something I am fully convinced is a horrible mistake, politically and ethically: that many people are inclined to say, when a cop beats up or kills a black man or woman or boy or girl, that this is white America doing its thing. It may be, surely we can presume it is in part. I have nothing to quarrel with in thinking that way, but if the next reflex is to hate or oppose not the police and whatever keeps them going, but your white neighbor, then I start to wonder that there is some mistake here. Yes, I know it’s complicated, but at the very least there is not just race involved but also capitalism. I prefer to say capitalism than class because I think capitalism today oppresses people in ways that go beyond simple class divisions. Though those are real too. So you could say it’s capitalism and its state apparatuses (or authoritarianism, which is how their logic appears when considered as a psychology or ethics, an ethos or manner of living), and it’s also the subordinations, the bad social hierarchies: by race/ethnicity/nationality, by gender and sexuality, and other determinants and markers of distinctions between people. We could add parents and their children, for certainly the family as we know it is an institution that involves, transmits, and constructs compliant personalities and useful identities, and mediates and performs all kinds of social oppression, which people who identify as most people do with the parental authorities, then map onto other things. Anyway you look at this, it simply stands out as not only wrong because of what it obscures and aims to prevent our noticing of thinking valid, other forms of oppression, and notably, the possibility that whatever he is struggling against politically or thinks he is, and what I might be, are quite possibly on the same side of whatever barricade or barrier and not necessarily on opposite sides. I think that the leadership of the American black world after the King assassination turned in directions that simplify social injustice in ways that benefit these leaders and fit their own social and class aspirations, but that occlude a lot, and ultimately are substantially false. Because I am not this man’s natural born enemy; why would he think I must be, why would he want me to be? That is a puzzle. But one clue I have to resolve it is in looking at a dirty secret that my own experience has rendered at least for me quite conspicuous: there are plenty of people wielding forms of oppressions against other people, like them and unlike them, who a humanist ideology championing certain identities or subjectivities in terms of the historically oppressed or marginalized character they have had, and who seem to be much more on the side of continuing oppression, wielded now in their own name and their identity or vanity or honor and dignity, than you would think if society divided neatly into the oppressors and oppressed, and you could tell at a glance, and tell yourself the lie that real Serbs never oppress anyone, only the Croats do, or some similar nationalist or identitarian stupidity. In part, my thinking here is Althusserian: we must be theoretically anti-humanist, because theories empowering people through dignity and identity are usually rather delusional and mistaken, but practically humanist, because we do and must care about the various struggles people do have against real oppressions. Only if a black security beats me up viciously in the name of opposition to the whiteness of the police who beat up him or his brother, than I think there is a mistake being made here. There are also political moralisms that actually are not very ethical, because while morals say what the law is and so what you must do or not do, ethics is about subjects and how they understand themselves and their own desire. As I see it, there are lots of little ways people can be oppressed, and they mostly have to do with either money or power, and some forms of either capitalism or the authoritarianism that so often sustains exploitations with dominations. In the end, a critique of capitalism is quite unique in what it enables people to see. One such thing is that while the world’s increasing wealth generated from the enormous productivity of the laboring classes as organized by the managerial ones, and with all the barbarism that has involved, can make possible something that is today very palpable as a possibility in its absence: that most people could live very meaningful and fulfilling lives doing interesting and creative work, and caring about and being cared about by their neighbors and fellow citizens. And we don’t have that society. And hating the privileged is no answer in part because some privilege will enable you to see this. Moses was brought up privileged, so were Lenin and Che. Identity politics in the end wants to change nothing, but only put more minorities in positions of relative power. That is not a politics, it is a lie.

But to return to the person. Even having established that even if he were a police informant, this man clearly is also fucked up himself in some ways, what seems to motivate him? In part, he seems to me the kind of person who feels deeply his own very real needs and problems, even if he tends to only see them, or only step outside of this frame when in a posture of mastery so that he feels validated, - and someone who will really suffer sometimes if he fails to get what he wants and needs. I could eventually see that he is a needy person, including emotionally. Though he handles anxieties with aggression. I suspect he really feels badly about the rent, and doesn’t fully realize that unconsciously he decided that he would not pay it, because he didn’t feel like it, even if he wanted to, he didn’t feel like it, and the thought would at best be depressing. And when he complained that employers and others let him down, this is how it seemed to him, and it is possible, of course. He also would sometimes complain about former room mates, all of whom, it seems, were crazy fucked up people that he, as Master, would have to deal with, and he managed somehow. But he understood that the people around can be very fucked up, and he would tell me this as part of his gaslighting of me, implying that he was also talking about me. I think the money thing really is a small detail for him. Would he want to pay it if we could clear the air about everything else that he may appear to be legitimately needing or complaining about? I think the answer is not so likely, because he has a hair trigger for judging, and with great anger, that the other person is in the wrong somehow and is wronging him (it could be something as small as a few dirty dishes, anything he can complain about), people like him very quickly and easily start to see the apparent moral flaws in the people around them, and because of their deep personal traumatic woundedness that left them, like all narcissists, feeling unloved yet somehow believing they can count on or even extort somehow the regard for their vanity that they confuse with being loved unconditionally, which they obviously failed to quite get from their parents. I think I can conclude that because of this, and he doesn’t seem to know that this is his problem, he will remain a dangerous person, likely to hurt me if I say anything, because he will feel slighted or insulted, he expects or has a hair trigger for that. And so probably will never pay what he owes me. And certainly believes that even though this is a legal obligation, he’s not really obligated, morally, because why should he owe anyone anything when the people he owes are so cruel to him, who was never rightly loved. The conclusion here is hopeful: If he is not feeling threatened in his vanity or emotionally, he will very likely not do anything else, though he also won’t pay. If the police have employed him to mess with me, he will do everything he can to. If I have figured out and understand his modus operandi, they might prefer to let him go and try something else on me. I suppose the smarter you are with people, the fewer things you are likely to fall for, and there is everyone reason to make it difficult for anyone who doesn’t like you to try to harass you or take you out.

In any case, his cause is himself and what he needs, and beyond that is not so political a one, though that can help sustain a certain sense of pride and vanity.

And what about the claim of the mirror stage situation? This claim is always one of hypocrisy based on projection, and of saying, but you do this yourself. The thing is, such claims are made from within the mirror stage point of view, and they reinforce it. That is exactly how someone caught up in its logic will react, not by saying “I’m innocent because what you say is not true of me,” but “You’re guilty (and therefore I am innocent), because this is what you do.” That claim can be true or false, or more or less true. Note that this latter claim, which is commonly made, fails logically on one point: It assumes that if you are guilty, I am innocent. That is the mistake of every kind of political or moral Manichaeanism, and there is much of this in social and political life today. Do I think I may be guilty of some of the same things he does? Oh, sure. Though I did not threaten or harass him, nor did I try to gaslight him. What I did that he couldn’t stand was to in my fast-talking, and somewhat ‘bitchy’ way, tell him sometimes that I thought he was completely in the wrong, and let him know that I was angry about his bullying and harassments, and also about not wanting to pay the rent (or not paying it, anyway). His response was first of all to feel insulted. You must be careful with someone who is irascible in that way, because if they are very concerned about their vanity or being respected, then they will be very sensitive to feeling insulted, and will try to punish or hurt you for doing so. This could mean that with someone like that you must be very gentle in what you say, but it could also mean that they can never be criticized, nor asked to do anything, because of their hair trigger for thinking themselves insulted. He never responded to the content of what I would say if I was angry or demanding in any way, or seemed to him to be, and his not thinking the matter of the rent really important is consistent with this. If someone like him likes the way he’s being treated, he might be a bit more inclined to chip in and even pay what he owes, but a large path would have to be cleared away of every possible obstacle that could engage the person’s narcissistic sense of primal woundedness.

There is a bit of the narcissist in all of us. We want people to be kind to us, and would like the world to be. We want to feel important in our own eyes, and those of the people who are in a position to confirm that importance with their admiration. We would like both to have the maternal love that is unconditional and the paternal or fraternal kind that is earned, and we might even confuse these two. I think that confusion is much of the story with narcissists. I could come to see in this man potentialities of myself. But I would to change those things to have better relationships and be happier, not just angrily dig myself into a foxhole and fight for my dear emotional life with everything I’ve got. Narcissists live in a world of mirrors of their own problems, and they are intolerant of others while demanding great empathy for themselves. They need that. They need someone to love them. The problem of the narcissist is not wanting to be loved but the damage that is done when one fights others for their cruelties without having a very effective way of getting what they really want. Warrior types, whether for social justice or their own money or power or esteem, never really do, and leave themselves with the consolation prize of either winning some battles or losing them honorably. If a man like this is challenged to a sword fight, he’ll win, of course. He’s very likely prepared if he’s smart to win every kind of argument. I find this sad.

No one is free of resentments, and we should not be. We get angry at injustice, especially when it affects or threatens ourselves or people we identify with. And the virtuous person identifies in a way with lots of people, even people unlike himself. The thing to do when you notice you don’t like a situation is of course to try to get out of it, or if you cannot, minimize your engagement, which can also mean de-escalating situations if you find yourself in them. But with people who are determined to fight and win, there’s not much you can do besides avoid them. They will fight you if they can, and angrily try to wound you while fearing that they themselves will suffer, and they resentfully blame you for it. But the fools of resentment look for fights and try to win them, while wiser people just try to get out or avoid the person.

I think sometimes in respect of this man of people like Simone in Visconti’s “Rocco and his brothers,” a man who moved with his family (mother and brothers) after the death of a father, never shown in the film, to the big city in the North (Milan), where he becomes a professional boxer but really seems to want both the approval of the boxing promoter (who is a bully who needs to adopt a son who wants his love so that he can deny it because the son isn’t good enough) and otherwise to get the things he wants, maybe whatever it is just because he wants it, driving both his petty kleptomania at a shop run by a stuck-up bourgeois lady where his saintly brother works, and his needy clinging to Nadia, the beautiful street walker whom he comes upon by accident when she is fleeing both her father and the police. He is not a bully himself, but is bullied by other men, including the promoter and a “friend” who wants the pleasure of watching him fight someone else, win, and then lose. Nadia winds up being the casualty in a film that partly turns around a love triangle. This poor young man becomes a criminal because he cannot stand not getting what he wants, or, which amounts for some reason to much the same thing, being insulted. The promoter insults him, the friend (who of course is no friend) plays with him, understanding all too well what he wants, the brother pities him and demands that Nadia, who loves him, whom Simone desires, and whom he sacrifices to Simone. In despair, she insults Simone, and that proves to be her end. The tragedy of Simone is that, like all of us, he would live to have some success, and some enjoyment, either of which would make him pound, and maybe please some imaginary father figure. It’s as hard not to like and identify with Simone as it is to understand his saintly brother Rocco, who is perhaps the enabler. What does Simone need? In any case, he doesn’t get it. Yes, that is tragic, yes that is sad, and the world should be gentler, than the boxing-centered world of Milan seems to be for this displaced soul. Rocco’s tolerance doesn’t help him, it scarcely touches him. Some men like Simone become bullies, he only gets enraged and fights back horribly at the symbols of what he cannot have in his world.

I find it very hard to understand the seeming perversity of people who will not only look to start fights and exploit whatever they think is the other person’s weakness, but who are able to do this, and somehow persuade themselves that they are wholly in the right because, and only because, of how much the other person is in the wrong. Hegel called this stance of the “beautiful soul.” The beautiful soul is a person who sees the faults of others, but is impervious to his own, because he considers himself uninvolved, not responsible for what he does, in the manner of a boss, whose job involves managing others, and so judging them. If you are child who has an angry parent taking you to task, you don’t say, but look at you, what you are doing, because that is irrelevant, since it is your behavior alone and not theirs that is in question. This may seem like the attitude of the hypocrite, but it is also that of a certain kind of boss or master. I think this quality is a feature of the authoritarian personality. To me, it has long seemed that many black Americans are strongly afflicted by this. It manifests itself frequently as an angry moralism. In this case, it meant someone trying as hard as they could to pick a fight, by bringing his habit of harassing me into play in a conversation that was a relentlessly persistent attempt to provoke me to an angry reaction, by making accusations such as that I am not worthy of respect because I let a couple of other people in the neighborhood, which he was now trying to claim as belonging to him and his people and so as to exclude me, ironically as “gentrifying” his turf. I was not moved so much by this particular argument as by recognizing that this man was carrying out a campaign of hatred, and trying to get me to understand that I am really so evil and bad, because why else would he have the duty to hate me? In a conversation with a mediation service that I managed briefly to get him to participate in, he went on about how I repeatedly acted to escalate the conflict, when actually that is exactly what he did. I would have preferred to be left alone. So this man not only projects his faults onto me, but is now incapable of recognizing his own involvement. Eventually, he managed to steer the conversation in the direction he really wanted, which was to get me to say something racist, so that he could then punish me violently while pretending to be engaged in a police action, since of course he believes, like many people, that racist thoughts are so unacceptable that responding to them with violent suppression is not only permitted but actually required. But I find that less puzzling than the mere fact that he is apparently unaware of his own role and responsibility in what happened,. As if he were merely responding to what I was doing. I’m the bad guy, the fall guy; that’s the setup. This makes sense given one simple assumption, perverse as it is: that a reasonable and virtuous person can enter a social situation with the notion that because they must be the boss, and fight to reclaim that status if they don’t appear to enjoy it uncontested, they are not responsible for what they do in the interaction, as only the other person is. This stance supposes merely that one is not involved as an actor but observing as a spectator. And the boss of it all is then above it all, because what matters is what the other person does, which they then react to. My hypothesis is that the moralism of the authoritarian personality is sustained in part, at least in many cases, by this assumption, which, though clearly mistaken, is perfectly common. Indeed, it has been shown by various historians of ideas that the modern scientific way of thinking typically includes an assumption like this, which is sometimes traced to the philosophies of Descartes and the British empiricists of the seventeenth century. The sufficient premise is that to be a person in social relationships of whatever kind is to apply the perspective of an observer, who ex hypothesi is, as knowing subject, not involved. If you are involved in the situation and responsible for what you do in it, then your behavior is also observable. In that case, you cannot just react. If you are observing, in one sense that is a posture of a master, but in another sense this is a weak position, because it forces one to be reactive, and it actually gives the other person, even if he is treated like the underdog, the initiative, because if you only act with me by reacting to me, then you are requiring, and therefore allowing, me to make all the initial moves. In fact, you wind up expecting me to lead the dance. And indeed, as Hegel saw, masters are dependent on their servants because the servants, because the servant does the work, and this work transforms the world he lives in, while the master merely commands, demands, and appropriates and consumes. Of course, since he owed me money for rent, and started the altercation as a way of defending against the sense of vulnerability imposed by an obligation he did not believe he had a way of meeting, and may not have wanted to, all of this in a way was a reversal. Even though I always made it clear that I believe that situations where people share a space with each other should and can be managed cooperatively, rather than with one person being the boss. He must have understood from his life experiences, his familial upbringing, and experience as an enlisted man in the military, that someone must always be the boss. Though I suspect he doesn’t really just confidently believe he can command and get what he wants, which is why he is a fighter, and his profession is creating images of fighters. These fighters are individuals who may be essentially cornered and trapped; it doesn’t matter, and may even be a source of excitement, since the ideal fighter as private individual will fight like mad his way out of it, in a competitive world where in order to win you must not lose, and to not lose you must either command securely or fight and win. It is too bad that he did not feel empowered by trying to successfully handle or manage business problems. I have some talent there, which is moderated by the fact that I am not always as nice to people as I doubtless should be, a fact that he endlessly reproached me for, doubtless in part because he projectively imagined that I was mistreating him or people like him by proxy. I would rather much of the time get what I need and want than give in in order to be nice, and he obviously has the opposite preference, which may mean, as it seemed to, that employers who owe him money he has earned are given the nice treatment, which of course is not that of a master so much as a servant, and one who fears offending. He also was able to make sense of reproaching me for all of my mostly petty interpersonal sins, including messiness and leaving lights on (that I paid for), all the while not seeming to care about one thing that obviously mattered to me: paying the rent so that I and whoever is living in the apartment with me can continue living, working, and engaging in whatever enjoyments are facilitated by having a place to live and work and relax, and not being homeless. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to see that there is a real imbalance here. This man is very sensitive to how he is treated by other people, and eager to cry wolf or racism if he thinks I am not nice enough to him, but then what happens when I indicate that I need to be paid his share of the rent? It seems that that isn’t nice. So I was sharing an apartment with someone who is inattentive to his own obligations but cares a great deal about the lesser, in the eyes of most people and anyone who gives it much thought, obligations he assumed I had to make him feel comfortable and not insulted or slighted. He would get greatly angry about any and all such things, and one can think of what they will, but did it not occur to him that failing your own financial obligations and rather consistently and spectacularly, is actually endangering the other man to the risk of becoming homeless, and out of his material and moral failure, not mine. My own failure, most people would say, is just to not have seen how much I was being taken advantage of. And without meaning to do me harm out of malice (perhaps), he was so exclusively focused on his own needs and wants that taking advantage of a situation so that he would get what he needed was important enough to allow him to take advantage of me. Though if I ever said anything the least bit angry or imposing because of this, I would get the abuse of being judged as psychologically at fault, by this person who thinks he is boss of it all, and must be, or fight to be. In the end, I can only wonder if a person might do that because they desperately believe that if they are not the master (and you their slave - though to their credit people like him do not notice such consequences of their own acts, being like most people most of the time more aware of the justice, or rather importance, of their own needs and intentions), then they are your slave. Authoritarian people are moralistic and angry. They fear being hurt, and may be quick to fight to not be. I think his tendency to be a political left-liberal social justice warrior was more consequence than cause of that. He would very angrily make clear the apparently obvious truth that whatever he wanted, even if it was a risk or liability for me, like his bringing in an illegal long-term guest so that he could put the moves on her, that all such things are just so clearly important, you can’t argue with them. The principle invoked might be “family” or, in the case of household matters, “science,” in whose name he, who seemed to know everything about how to solve any household problem, there simply could be no disputing it.

Today, many people talk about narcissistic people. I am not sure if thinking this man mentally ill, which is what that amount to, is the best explanation. Actually, it seems to me that calling people that, which means placing them outside the society of normal people, is not only a way of harassing people, which is why he tried to gaslight me, but also lets them off the hook. He thought, or said, that I am crazy, and reminded me continually that he has lived with various fuckups and losers, to the point that I think he actually appears to only have lived with such people, and is proud that he managed always somehow to remain the master. What I think is that a man like this is dangerous for the very banal and not at all abnormal reason that when angered by not getting something he wants and doubtless needs, he forgets the demand of conscience that one always consider not just what the other person is doing (wrong), but the question of what they ought to do. He appeared to ponder such a question in a way when he finally got the racist insult out of me that he was looking for; then he stood up and made quite a show of thinking for a minute about what to do, before lunging at me, throwing me to the floor, and reaching for my neck. I think in fact this man never liked me and is the kind of person who manages to get on with most people most of the time, but has few real friends. He is a fighter, a man of war, not peace, and in a situation of conflict will not ask what should he himself do, but why the other person is being so awful. I think a man like this is very dangerous, and he probably could kill me, and very well might, but I don’t know that that is abnormal. Having the moral courage to instead ask, what can we do here to solve this problem, and what should I do, and what is my obligation or what I owe, that would be the better thing to do, whether or not it is normal. I also think this man is a warrior with an honor code and a morality of shame more than guilt. Such people may challenge or bully others, to see who is stronger, since weakness is shameful to them. That would explain why he likes samurai. I don’t think in the end any of this has all that much to do with race, except that there are left-liberal social justice warrior ideologies, and they have had some appeal to people who think they belong to a people who are not only oppressed but embattled. He talked constantly about race and racism, more than makes sense in relationship to me unless for some reason he needed to believe, or it could make sense to think, that I was oppressing him. Yet how would I do that? Economically? Renting a room on a financially equal basis is not exploitation of labor if one is not making a profit on it, and in fact I was stuck paying the rent and in effect bailing him out, when he showed that he was both apparently helpless and unconcerned to do so. What is left then is that something about my personality is “white” and he is oppressed by that. It seems to me that idea has some of the character of myth. In any case, he chose to live with someone he thought that of, doubtless because it was in his interest materially to do so. And what did the notion of racial oppression of big black man by older, smaller, over-educated, and un-athletic “white” people like me with a class “privilege” that is more of a legacy than a reality, what did this have to do with our relationship, if not merely a matter of his needing extraordinary assurances of respect and esteem from me, that resulted not from any tendency of mine to say anything insulting so much as the resentment that fears and defends oneself by any means necessary, against the mythicized specter of being insulted? No one is privileged morally by being oppressed or having been or being capable of being. If the oppressed have a moral privilege, it is not so much the ability to not be oppressed as to not oppress in turn. In fact, much of what passes in our time for hatred of oppression, and hatred is certainly the word, is a resentment that mistakes for real oppression mere insult, which one then can have a hair trigger for feeling and declaring, which is to say that some people think other people owe them their own self-esteem. This is the difference between the political struggle against oppression and the moralizing hatred of the other person who may always suspected of not giving one the respect or love they need. The root of this is probably in being brought up with certain insecurities and an unmet need for some kind of parental solicitude. The narcissist needs unconditional respect because he can never sort out his need to be treated with kindness enough that he doesn’t have to work overtime to win it as esteem. This man is estimable enough, and he knows that I respect him, but maybe not always or unconditionally, as is appropriate if we are adults. Was I unkind to him, and is it a moral obligation for me to be kind? Yes, it is. Does that mean he should act as if that excuses him from paying rent? No, it does not. Is he like a bastard or an orphan, who needs special kindness and to not be spoken to harshly? Yes, and so am I. I don’t hate him, and I know I should be compassionate. That’s not easy for me; do you know many people for whom it is? I would still like to be paid the rent he owes me, so that I don’t have to support him, which makes no sense to me, nor do I think any unkindness on my part cancels his obligations to me. In what kind of world can people live as neighbors who have responsibilities to the other and legitimate expectations of them at the same time? The answer of course is in our world, approached rightly. In the end, it was not about race or anything so grand. I apologized to him, and he remained outrage. That puzzles me, but it shouldn’t. I write, by the way, more for myself than my (not very large) audience, and I do so in the first place as an effort to understand.

Maybe the most important thing to understand about narcissists is that they are over-invested in relationships. (As our culture perhaps is generally.). They are so focused on how other people treat them, so often seemingly wrongly, and in ways that are registered more in affect than thoughtful judgment, that an adult-to-adult business relationship with them is impossible. To contrive to run up a huge debt (which this man did during the pandemic, merely by doing nothing, refusing to either pay or clear out, ostensibly because he could not make arrangements to get and move his stuff, and could not trust a friend to do it for him, which would only have saved him thousands of dollars in a debt to me that he could care less about either having to pay or acquiring bad credit for not paying) and be insouciant to the consequences of this to the other party, is something a mature and virtuous person would not do to anyone, friend or enemy. But he had made clear that he only views responsibilities to others in terms of not obligation but prudent self-interest. (A perfectly capitalist ethical position, of course, since it is how businesses tend to operate, though not always how they should.) A narcissist will do this to his frenemies because he only thinks about what he himself needs. If he thinks you have wronged him emotionally, he will not feel like paying his debt to you or meeting any other obligation. And then, (surprise!), he won’t. You might hope that you could clear away the emotional debris and then make the kind of demand one would not fear making to another adult. But narcissists confuse the love they need with the esteem they would earn, and so will destroy business and other relationships (including political ones; as Jodi Dean explains in her recent book Comrades, political activists will work with others who are not necessarily their friends, because it is the work and getting done, just as in business, that matters). Justice, rare perhaps, is for grown-ups. Let everyone else think it suffices to live in a world that contains in it no real practical goods or needs that can be approached out of a desire to do what is just, but only Relationships, to be managed through Feelings. In that case, we could well have, or want, a society in which everyone is engaged in endless, infinite “therapy,” perhaps on the grounds of “spirituality,” and there is nothing to be done, besides maybe resentful “compliance” with the demands of the bosses, and otherwise minding one’s own business. As is often the case in California, the possibility of justice is replaced by the demand for niceness. This may partly reflect a world in which those who have the power to get what they want approach all resistance with endless emotional management. What is lacking in such cases is (that which is the very basis of all justice), a certain thinking.