A few weeks ago I came across a very interesting 2023 study written by two academic researchers in the field of psychology. Its thesis, in a nutshell, is that pathological narcissism is associated with greater involvement in feminist activism.

Ha! I hear the male chauvinist crowing and the angry feminist screeching all from my little office here in the UK.

My amusement aside, there were two other very interesting and somewhat more surprising elements to the study. The first was that their findings did not only apply to women feminists. But male feminists as well.

“Paralleling previous research, higher pathological narcissistic grandiosity was found to be statistically significantly related the greater involvement in feminist activism. Unexpectedly, gender did not moderate this relationship. Also, high pathological narcissism was related to stronger self-identification as a feminist.”

This too was not as surprising as the study’s authors seemed to think it was — male feminists are an infamously dodgy bunch. My favourite among this cast of charlatans is a fellow called TherapyJeff, a pasty, squeaky voiced, weakling who makes TikTok’s about what a tremendous ally he is to women, which is why he refuses to sleep with only one. I guess he feels it wouldn’t be fair to all the others.

The authors also wrote: “While pretending to be pro-social, individuals with high narcissistic traits tend to have low empathy and to be primarily interested in satisfying their self-centred needs…Therefore instead of striving for reasonable solutions, individuals with high narcissistic traits will rather be interested in keeping the perception of problems going to maintain their highlighted position. Also, individuals with high narcissistic traits may use the resources of the activist movements for their own private purposes, thereby causing irreparable financial and reputational harm to the activist movement.”

This finding was true across activism in general, not just the feminist subset.

And it explains every single woke cause that we have had inflicted on us since the late 2010’s. The “homelessness crisis” in California — basically an industry of highly paid professionals who oversaw an explosion in the homelessness problem they were being paid handsomely to fix; the BLM grifters who incited Americans to set their neighbourhoods on fire, then used the cash they raised from guilty white liberals to buy big homes for themselves; the gay industrial complex queens who, once they had won the right to marry, needed a new cause to justify their elevated egos, victim complexes, and NGO salaries — so set about creating a generation of eunuch children; etc etc etc.

It’s nice when academic research confirms what you can see with your own damn eyes.

But the most significant finding in this article, for me, was that the feminist movement was not entirely made of narcissists. In fact, within feminist groups there is another consequential personality type: the altruists. As in, people who are driven by a sincere desire to help, not a self-serving desire to be seen as helping, for personal gain.

So, according to their study of nearly 500 people, feminist activist organisations are essentially places where men and women with “dark-ego-principle” motivations work side by side with men and women who sincerely want to do good in the world.

This, my friends, sums up very neatly the whole of the crisis of liberalism that is the focus of much of this Substack.

The report is quite short, and bounded by academic speak that precludes its authors from making sweeping generalisations about the findings. But I am not hampered by academic restrictions, and to me, the authors have (perhaps inadvertently) hit upon the very dynamic that has driven much of western society into crisis. That dynamic is the interplay between malevolent actors and a whole bunch of ‘nice’ people who run interference for them.

I have written about this more times than I can count.

In particular, these findings reminded me of one of the most controversial and exploited incidents this year — the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis, which over the course of a month or so generated a tonne of, essentially, far-left propaganda ops.

When Renee Good was shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis in January, one of the more intriguing elements to her story was that of Renee’s female partner, a woman named Rebecca, or Becca.

Renee was described by her brother as ‘dandelions and sunlight’, a woman who was ‘warm and steady.’

“She believed that kindness mattered, and she lived that belief.”

I take him at his word. You can take all the caveats you want out of that, clearly her own brother, in eulogising his sister, is going to give the most glowing interpretation of who she was. But, it is my opinion, based on the many news reports of her life and death, that Good was an altruist type.

Judging from the video footage from the January altercation that led to her death, widely shared on social media at the time, I believe that her partner Becca, was not.

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I understand that in psychology, altruism is a contested concept. But let’s just take it at face value, how the word is commonly understood.

Obviously I do not know these women personally, so I am surmising here. Also when I say Renee was ‘an altruist type’ — don’t equate that with me saying she was a truly good person, I don’t know that — nor am I saying she was doing what she was doing for good reasons. What I mean is that I believe she was motivated by a desire to help, not a desire for power. That’s my guess.

But there was always something very off about Becca Good.

Shortly after Renee’s death, reports started popping up on social media that Becca had criminal reports filed against her, in the years leading up to the shooting, including for child abuse. If you Google that, you will find a lot of news stories ‘debunking’ those claims — except not really, because actually the stories are reporting that Renee had no criminal record, not Becca. When the claims were not about Renee in the first place. It’s suspiciously murky and confusing.

But whether the claims about are Becca are true or not, just judging from her behaviour toward both the ICE agents who they were confronting, and her own supposedly beloved wife, make it clear — in my opinion— that Becca is a malignant person.

The video footage, in case you missed it, showed Becca posturing and taunting the ICE agents, from outside the car. She can be heard yelling to Renee, who is sitting behind the wheel of their car, to ‘drive baby drive.’ This was in direct opposition to the orders that ICE were shouting at Renee, to get out of the car. In this extremely tense and dangerous situation, Becca’s actions — again, in my opinion — directly led to Renee’s death.

Renee’s death, in turn, served as a major propaganda win for far-left activists, bolstering, in their minds, their claims that ICE was a new Gestapo, wantonly murdering innocents on the streets of America.

So we see that, once again, the do-gooder gives their all in service to an agenda — not a cause.

On a macro level, the narcissist-altruist paradigm described by these researchers, resonates with the endless stream of mostly white liberal women losing their minds over the latest ginned up media hysteria campaigns about imminent fascist takeover by Trump and his supporters.

One of the reasons I return to this topic over and over again, is I can put myself in their shoes. To some degree, I grew up in the same world as they did. A world in which we were all taught from a young age that the story of humanity was one of progress fighting against backwardness; of liberalism and socialism fighting against nazism and fascism — to the point where the terms progressive and liberal and socialist became synonymous with *being a good person.*

Looked at through a very narrow lens, it made sense. But that narrow lens left us ill-equipped to see the sophisticated emotional manipulation the narcissists were carrying out.

It is my belief is that many of these activists are actual altruists, who end up in service to, not the *cause,* but to the narcissists in their organisations/movements. This is a very toxic interpersonal dynamic, which causes high levels of dysfunction or malfunction, that in my opinion defines much of the liberal-left. It also partly explains the levels of emoting and irrational behaviour we see from the activists. Dealing with a narcissist on an individual basis is crazy-making. Dealing with an organisation full of them, while also trying to “fix” the problems of the world, problems with which you are emotionally enmeshed and upon which you have based your own self-worth, is enough to drive a woman utterly mad.

It reminds me of the sadist-masochist dynamic. The question really is: Why is this self-abnegating, self-flagellating, self-destroying impulse so strong in so many white liberal women?

Maybe it’s easier to answer that question with a negative: as in, why are some women not?

For that, I turn to the person I know best — myself. I think that I am, fundamentally, not a particularly altruistic person.In fact, I have long thought of myself as a little bit on the selfish side. I care for the people I love, the people close to me. I protect them and would defend them to the death. However, for the most part, I do not and never have lost sleep over the horrors (real or imagined) being meted out to large groups of people in far-flung quarters of the earth. Which is not to say I am totally indifferent to the suffering of others — but I just instinctively knew that nothing I could do would make a difference. I have always followed the news closely, even as a child, but I have never even volunteered at a local soup kitchen. Hearing reports of human suffering spurs me to gratitude that I am spared from the horrors, it does not spur me into action to somehow try and stop it. This used to seem like a bad thing. Now, I’m wondering if my selfish instincts were actually a protective shield against having my emotions hijacked by malevolent, power-hungry, fake, do-gooders.

It will never stop being strange to me that an era in which society tried to make females into highly educated GirlBosses, actually turned half of them into supine handmaidens for extremists masquerading as crusaders for justice.

The only thing that will fix this — from a personality standpoint — is discernment. Get some. Make sure your kids get some. Use it as your armour, and your ammo.

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