Would you invest in cheap south american labour or cheap south east Asian labour for Dota?
If that girl from before changed my perception of character then the next and most recent person to change my perception of character is a good friend of mine that I’ve known for some time.
A good friend of mine changed how I perceive identity in my adult life. I have two conflicting impressions of this person’s personality: his personality during late adolescence when I was first introduced to him and his personality in the present day. When I was first introduced to this person I was given an impression of his personality that is not congruent to how this person now portrays his past.
The social circle associated with this person were quite quick to point out various discrepancies in how this person portrayed himself, both to his face and especially behind his back. He was the punchline to a lot of jokes. I did not understand the hatred and bullying of this individual at the time but in hindsight I can see it was a result of his ego that he kept quite discrete compared to other people suffering under narcissism. He also had a habit in childhood of assaulting other kids in his estate -- which is usually a good indicator of future mental health issues as an adult.
(I have diagnosed this person with narcissism as a result of careful observation as well as some genetic research. I have a relative who knows this person's father due to both residing in the same town and from the reputation that this person’s father has, I can assume that he too suffers under narcissism and as narcissism is passed down genetically, he is likely the source of my friend’s psychological composition).
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You type a lot
The core delusion that this person operated under was a false working-class identity that seemed like the result of going to a school which leaned toward the lower class. My friend however, was not part of the lower class and as result never quite fit in with his peers, embedding in him a deep insecurity which is still seemingly present to this day. Being an only child in one of the more affluent parts of the country, he was bankrolled by his family allowing him to purchase every gaming console, a gaming PC, several gigs, trips abroad and camping music festivals – as well as a drug and alcohol habit throughout all of college. This was all without ever having to work a part-time job.
When he got to college, he began to embellish his accent so that it fluctuated more along the margins of a working-class stereotype, and began wearing these ridiculously tight grey tracksuits, as if he were literally choking under his own delusions. I was quite surprised when I began hanging around with this person again during the college years, as it is unusual for someone to suddenly switch class aesthetics, especially in the academic environment in which he was now subject to. I quickly identified that this was all an act, like the girl with the winged eyeliner.
Change is natural for a human. I’ve never met anybody exempt from that fact. However, I have only met one or two people that have attempted to retroactively alter facts from their past as a way of laying the framework for a new personality. This is the illusion of change – the fact that these people feel the need to lie about their past life is because they know on a deep level that they have not changed enough to claim with confidence a new identity.
They are still the children suffering from arrested development and their own ego that they were in adolescence and so they must make a great effort to erase any evidence that may reveal their true personality.
With his past narrative now going unchallenged with this new social circle in college and the effects of the pandemic (which did wild things to my generation), this person suffered intense delusions of grandiosity without any achievements to back it up. Any conversation with this person was littered with endless judgements and petty critiques on virtually everyone that we knew mutually, including and especially his closest friends.
But I can't judge him for that. However, it is important to the next point I want to make.
Following the revelation that he could reevaluate his own identity, he must then have incurred the subsequent revelation that if it is possible to reevaluate your own identity by altering context and creating fictitious backstories, it would be possible too to redefine the identity of others. And channelling his childhood aggression that I mentioned earlier into this new outlet, this became his preferred method of violence.
There are numerous accounts of witch-hunts and smear campaigns that my friend has executed. One core incident that always stuck with me was a friend of his from college, who had either knowingly or unknowingly stepped on his toes through some vague love rivalry, the origin of which I am uncertain of given the flawed narrative I was offered.
This person had challenged my friend's ego and to counter him, my friend set up a whirlwind of rumours and character assassination painting the person in question as a sexual offender, rapist and serial gaslighter. There was one particular moment during a camping trip that this person was invited solely for the reason to make fun of him behind his back and comment on his advances toward one of the girls who were also on the trip. My friend even messaged this person’s girlfriend around the same time accusing him of cheating and gloated to me about how he drove a wedge in their relationship. He gloated to me too about assaulting this person though I believe he had some shallow justification for it.
Most surprisingly however, is that after creating such a smear campaign, they will still persistently reach out to the victim of such. Because even they do not believe the bullshit that they have contrived themselves – it is only important to get other people to believe it, as to do so is an effective method of triangulation. This former love rival is in a completely different country now and my friend attempted to make plans to visit this person on several occasions, though he was shut down by the other people in the group due to the rumours that he had already spread.
There were several other cases of these smear campaigns conducted by the person. One was an intentional strategic move to break up one of his best and only friends from his girlfriend (I remember him saying to me as an exact quote: "I want him all back to myself."), a campaign which was predicated upon paranoid conspiracies regarding the relationship in question as he believed the girlfriend had set out to ‘undermine his authority’ in some way.
There are also minor smear campaigns always underway which are a way of constantly undermining his friends. His friend group is confined primarily to two friends: one he refers to as an autistic dyslexic and one he refers to as a ‘Beta’ (I’ll probably talk about that term and masculinity later). The ‘Beta’ is interesting: he is from my friend’s old school and according to my friend, he had to be ‘groomed’ (that is the literal term that he employed) in a social sense by my friend: teaching him how to get his haircut, teaching him social-skills and even teaching him what music to listen to. This person apparently has a great ‘repressed anger’ which my friend has learned to ‘tap into’ and manipulate to force his participation into these campaigns. Those words in quotations are word-for-word what I was told.
There is a third friend as well, who my friend seems to hold some special type of both reverence and jealousy toward; the reverence as a result of seeking the induction into this person’s social circle and the jealousy likely as a result of that same social circle. That being said, my friend is quite critical of this person’s drug addiction, citing that he smokes £500 worth of weed a month and as well “hasn’t been sober in months”. My friend is also quite critical of this person’s relationship and has speculated quite often on this person’s sexuality due to some butt-plug incident that I'm a little hazy on.
Something interesting I have noted is that not even my friend’s girlfriend is exempt from these petty judgements. I have been made privy to insights on her mental health, poetry and personal life that I do not believe is normal for other relationships, though once again I am in no position to make judgements.
His social circle operates under a reverse darwinistic law: survival of the insecure – anyone that is not ignorant or socially-challenged will forfeit participation inside the social circle, leaving only those that are easily misled or manipulated. All of my friend’s childhood friends have cut him off permanently citing a manipulative and aggressive personality and so what is left is this pseudo-cult.
The way in which a narcissist creates a cult is that they will gaslight and manipulate the associated social circle to demonise a specific target, the target usually being chosen due to challenging the actions of the narcissist in some way. They will plant a series of distortions, rumours and defects of character into the minds of anyone close and then once he has adequately demonised the person, he can reduce the group to the same shallow level of empathy as himself, as they will believe they are harassing someone under justified means.
Quite a lot of people have caught themselves as the victim to this and I have met other people suffering under similiar mental conditions that typically employ this exact form of harassment. Every sociopath is equipped with this technique.
Understanding this harassment is the best way to psychoanalyze these type of people. These people exclusively define their sense of identity based on public opinion; so the most vicious weapon that their imagination can come up with is an attempt to alter the public opinion of whoever they feel has crossed them. The concept that someone is not defined upon exterior opinion generally does not cross their mind as they navigate the psychological profiles of those around them almost exclusively through projection.
And I cannot refute his practice, as if redefining the personality in itself is an artform, then redefining others is an art too. And by appreciating his anti-social manic tendencies as a case-study, I could appreciate and develop a taste for the fiction that this person was capable of engineering.
You can learn from almost anything. The human mind must be turned to a system that converts bad role-models into lessons and wisdom. Watching this person work was like watching a photographer in a sense – the ability to paint anyone in some way was a lesson that leaned on angles. You get that ‘frame’ right and you can really accentuate any one part of them that best served his interests.
Prob back later