Liberalism and NPD: Part II
Why Liberals Hate Capitalism

In my previous post, I attempted to show how the actions and beliefs of liberals fit the diagnostic mould of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. In today's post, I would like to explore how various NPD diagnostic criteria might explain one liberal constant: their utter contempt and hatred for capitalism. The fact that liberals will side with anyone, from communist thug dictators to Islamofascists as long as they are anti or non capitalist is proof enough of their hatred.

You will recall from the previous post that in the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM IV-R), psychiatry's bible for the diagnosis of mental illness, the emphasis for a diagnosis of NPD shifted from grandiosity to lack of empathy.

DSM IV-R, criterion 7 puts it this way: (7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others. While clinicians are divided as to whether or not this lack of empathy is volitional (in other words, whether the NPD actually lacks the mental faculty of empathy or whether he simply refuses to use it) for our purposes, the difference is unimportant. What is important for our purposes is that if liberals really are unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, then they are completely unsuited for life in a capitalist system.

In the political sphere, we vote for our elected leaders every two years. In the economic sphere, we vote for our capitalist leaders every single day, with every single dollar that we spend. More importantly, we vote for our capitalist leaders using a strict criterion: which leader is going to provide us with the greatest marginal utility for our dollars. A successful capitalist is a person who provides not what people say they want, but what they actually want and are willing to pay for. This in turn requires that they recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, in other words that they have empathy.

Imagine if you will what it must be like to live in a system that rewards people for having a mental faculty that you utterly lack or are unwilling to use. Even worse (in a hall of mirrors sort of way), if you lack empathy, than you lack even the slightest basis for believing that empathy exists! But if empathy doesn't exist, if there can be no exchange on the basis of understanding the needs of others, then there is only force, compulsion and coercion. Listen closely to liberals when they talk about capitalism and you will hear those notes repeatedly, from poverty forcing someone to take a low paying job to advertising coercing people into buying things they don't want. If you lack empathy, no other explanation of capitalism is possible.

Further, if you lack empathy, then everyone is just like you and should want precisely what you want. If they don't actually want precisely what you want it must be because a) they are stoopid, b) they have been brainwashed, c) they are being willfully evil.

Against big business

While liberals hate capitalism in general, they reserve a special hatred for big business. Part of this, I believe, can be explained by reference to the third NPD diagnostic criterion: (3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

The textbook case of liberal hatred of big business is Wal-Mart. While liberals claim that their dislike stems from Wal-Mart's lack of unions, low wages or lack of health care, I believe the real reason is that Wal-Mart offends their sense of specialness. Wal-Mart is very successful at providing the masses with what they actually want rather than what liberals believe they should want. The key here is the masses: I, being unique and special, am by definition, not part of the masses and won't associate with them by shopping at the same stores.

Perhaps an even more cogent example is Starbucks. As long as Starbucks was new and trendy, liberals loved them. Now that they have become big business, liberals loathe them. In my own backyard laboratory of NPD behavior, otherwise known as San Francisco, the city has refused permits for any more Starbucks within city limits. One city proposal even went so far as to ban any national chain from setting up new shops within the city. Why? Well because citizens might accidentally choose to become part of the masses by trafficking with a mass retailer. And then where would San Francisco's unique specialness be?

So what kind of economic system would an NPD set up if he could? Obviously, it would be one which rewards not the ability to provide people with what they actually want, but one which rewards the ability to provide people with what they should want. It should be a system that rewards people for their unique specialness rather than their ability to bring people together.
It would be a system that allots rewards not on the basis of understanding what makes people tick, but only what ticks them off.

Now such a system actually exists in America: it's called the university tenure system. Let's think about this for a second. American academia rewards people for their unique specialness regardless of the actual added value of the contribution. You will note that the admonition is publish or perish, and NOT publish, AND BE READ, or perish. It allows people to associate only with others who are special like them. It is said that in the arcane English department world of "critical theory" 3000 people write books that are only read by other members of the same group. Academia rewards people not for providing what people actually want, it rewards them on the simple basis of longevity. And lastly, it rewards Narcissists by re-enforcing their sense of self-importance by giving them a new crop naive students to manipulate each semester.

I hope that I have been able to shed some light not only on why Liberals hate capitalism, but why academia attracts so many of them.

Please feel free to revise and extend these remarks.