Projection

by Kathy Krajco

Projection is a new name for an old thing, scapegoating. In this section I just explain it in general terms, with examples. In the next section, we zero-in on how narcissists project and what is unique about the way they do it.

Projection. We find it everywhere. Which should be no surprise. It's actually the oldest trick in The Book. Really. The Serpent pulled it on Eve in the Book of Genesis when, in the very act of lying to Eve, he accused God of being the liar.

Here's how the story goes. The serpent had just suggested that Eve eat the Forbidden Fruit, and she replied that God told them not to because eating it would bring about their fall. The cunning serpent said, "God told you THAT?"

Slick, eh? In the very act of telling a whopper, the sneaky snake left-handedly called God a liar, through the power of suggestion. Thus the Prince of Lies pulled an identity-switch with God.


Moses ritualized a demonstration of projection in the Book of Leviticus as the prescribed rite for the annual Day of Atonement.

In this "atonement" ritual, all the people had to come forward, one by one, and make the scapegoat (a perfect yearling firstborn male to represent someone unblemished and with great potential) take their sins away from them and onto himself. How did they do this? By accusing him of their sins and laying the blame on his head. Then they had to purge themselves of him and make him atone for their sins. How did they do that? By chasing him away into the desert until he gave up trying to follow them back home, and then deserting him there. Which was the sentence worse than death = doom, because he would slowly die of thirst.

One hardly thinks they enjoyed doing this. Would you?

Wouldn't you instead get Moses' message? More powerful than a sermon, eh? Wouldn't you hang your head a little, thinking, "Jeez, are we that transparent?"

But never underestimate willful obtuseness' power to get things exactly backwards. Soon, people had done just that. Instead of being duly shamed by this ritual reenactment of how they "cleansed" and "saved" themselves (from justice) by scapegoating those who have the most to lose and are the least deserving, they decided that this ritual meant that this despicable behavior is the right thing to do! the way to cleanse yourself of sin!

How convenient.

They didn't get it later, either, when John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth came along and said: "Read our lips: To cleanse yourselves of your sins, don't punish an innocent scapegoat for them! Just R-E-F-O-R-M. Too complex?"

People still managed to just anti-get the message yet again, deciding that this meant they should graduate from animals and sacrifice these two men as the scapegoats to die for/of (in scripture you have this double entente, because the word used can mean either for or of) their sins.

So, then St. Paul gave it a shot. He really tried to make people see that they'd better quit acting stupid and projecting, instead of repenting, their sins. In his letter to the Romans, he basically put it in the plainest terms possible — those of a threat that asked, "Just whom do you think you're fooling?"

You — who steal — preach that other people should stop stealing. You — who commit adultery — preach that others should stop committing adultery. You — who commit sacrilege — preach that others should stop being idolaters. — Letter to the Romans, Chapter 2, verses 21-22
How's that for letting the self-righteous know that you know all their finger pointing is just projection/scapegoating?

Ah, but obtuseness is invincible, and twisted thinking can make black white. So, again this simple message went in one ear and out the other. All three peoples of that Book (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) still got it exactly backwards. They all say that the blood of the innocent victim on them "cleanses" them of their sins.

Projection. We see it everywhere. It's a kind of baptism = a mud bath people give their betters, by rubbing themselves off on them. Here's how it works.

Got a guilty conscience? If so, you've certainly been tempted to say to yourself, "I'm not so bad." To prove that, you must look around for an example of someone who's worse. Then you can say to yourself, "Aha! I'm not as bad as So-and-So."

But guess what? You didn't pick a So-and-So who really has that fault and has it worse than you. You picked someone with very little mud on his name, someone who looks cleaner than you, if possible, someone who has the corresponding virtue instead of that fault.

We're all tempted to pull this stunt. Some of us do, and some of us don't.

For example: If you're stingy, look for someone with a reputation for generosity, because generosity in your neighbor puts your stinginess to shame by serving as a foil that (by contrast) makes your stinginess more noticeable. Then smear your vice off on him. Tell everybody that he's stingy. Make everything he does sound stingy.

Thus you kill two birds with one stone: you rid yourself of your stinginess and him of his generosity.

Not. But looks are everything, and Truth doesn't matter, and this fraud makes you look good by comparison with him. Ah, cheating is much easier than freeing yourself of sin the legitimate way, by repentance.

You can see why narcissists highly prize this device called "projection" and become expert in it.

Projection. We see it everywhere. For example, guess who's favorite portrayal of the President of the United States is as "a Hitler" or "even worse than Hitler?" You guessed it, the Germans. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder did it in campaign speeches to turn the tide and get elected. And guess whose favorite and constant characterization of Americans is as "arrogant?" You guessed it, the French. Projection.

Once you catch on to projection, you do recognize it in a vast amount of the badmouthing you hear.

Magicians call this trick "misdirection." With one hand magicians misdirect our attention so we don't see what they're doing with their other hand.

Finger-pointers do the same thing. They direct people's attention (critical attention, negative attention) away from themselves and what they're doing by accusing someone else of doing the same, or essentially the same, thing. Thus they make themselves seem like people who never would dream of doing such a thing themselves — while in the very act of doing it.

Pointing the finger at others is a red flag of malignant narcissism.

The worst examples of this that I personally know of happened in schools. In one case, a teacher (a malignant narcissist in a private school) took indecent liberties with, and sexually abused, pubescent boys he lured into his home while his wife was at work on the night shift. It was later discovered that many people knew that he invited boys to his home on Friday nights. But nobody had seen anything wrong with that. Over time, many school employees had caught him in his classroom alone with a boy — behind a closed, sometimes locked, door and in the back where neither could be seen from hall. Nobody had seen anything suspicious in that. Many people knew this teacher had an explosive temper that he often had to make excuses to a berated student for, but nobody had seen anything abnormal in that. In fact nobody saw anything inappropriate in the inappropriately patronizing and intimate relationship he had with his students. Even when it came between them and their parents.

And nobody thought anything of it when, every few years, he seized any opening in a conversation to pop off with "What? Are you the only one around here who doesn't know? He likes boys," referring to some unmarried teacher. One unmarried teacher after another.

Thus he play-acted the part of his anti-type, a man who was abhorred by homosexual child abuse = certainly NOT the type who might do such a thing himself. Though people saw plenty to view with suspicion in that unmarried teacher, nobody saw anything suspicious in the accuser failing to cite any evidence or report these allegations he was so sure of.

They didn't even see anything suspicious in the accuser glomping onto that unmarried teacher to become his best friend. Even when his doing this became a glaring pattern.

Indeed, every single unmarried teacher who came to that school got assassinated by this, his best friend. And nobody thought anything of it! Satan polished his halo by being a pillar of his parish, a lector and lay communion distributor. And he got away with this for over fifteen years.

A serial killer is less cruel. He doesn't betray a sacred trust by doing it to people who have every good reason to trust him. And even if he tortures them, he doesn't doom his victims to a life-sentence of torture in Hell.

Notice that the "innocent" people he fooled ain't innocent. They committed the Original Sin, believing an obvious lie just because it was juicy. Like Eve.


To wit: It flew in the face of reason for her to think God might be lying. He was her creator. He provided everything for her and Adam. Which means that he had proved he wanted what was good them. He denied them but one thing, telling them that it was for their own good. So, what was she thinking? She had every good reason to believe that he was telling the truth.


Moreover, what credibility is there in a stranger who slithers up to you like a sidewinder? Why not doubt the serpent — someone she had no reason to trust?


Bottom Line: God has high credibility; serpent has about zero credibility. So, Eve wasn't honestly fooled: she just liked serpent's version of the world better, because it made her able to be as God. Adam's reason for swallowing the lie was even worse: he just did it to agree with Eve.


In other words, to please her he prostituted his mind to her. And thus political correctness was born.


Narcissists and political character assassins are dangerous precisely because people do this. If, say, you have known someone for 10 years, you know a lot about him. Doubtless, you have seen his honesty tested and seen that he proved to be an honest man. So, nobody should be able to slither up to you tomorrow and tell you he's dishonest. If you buy that, you are betraying that honest man. To believe that lie, you must annihilate history and 10 years of evidence to the contrary. You are not innocent.
Here's an example of the finger-pointer being guilty of the moral equivalent: Mr. Self-Righteous union-busts to keep the workers in his shoe factory so poor they go barefoot — and shows moral indignation in loudly condemning his neighbor for "muzzling an ox trampling the grain." He gets all fuzzy looking if you try to explain to him that he's doing the same thing, only worse. That's because he views rules, not as guidelines to be followed, but rather as red lines to catch other people with one toe over so he can condemn them. So he ignores the spirit of the law and obsesses over the letter of it.

Here's another example of projection that camouflages guilt for the moral equivalent. It also shows that even religious institutions are guilty of projection to polish their image.

The Catholic Church points the finger at mothers who have abortions, saying, "What kind of mother does that?" Okay, that position on the issue is reasonable, and it is the type of thing religion is expected to express its opinion on. But why does the Church harp on abortion when it has so little to say about countless other issues?

What issues? Well, for example, why don't we hear the Church crying out against Catholic dictators who mass-murder and torture their own people? You never hear a peep out of Rome about that. Why does the Church declare women who have abortions excommunicated but not these Catholic dictators? Why didn't it condemn the Irish Catholics in the IRA murdering Protestants? Why doesn't it cry out against the Catholic Mafia? Why doesn't it stop taking money from gangsters and burying them as Catholics in good standing? Why don't we hear the Church crying out against the scourge of child-beating and wife-beating, anti-Semitism and other bigotry, drugs, sweat shops, union-busting, exploiting undocumented migrant workers, and so forth? Why don't we hear it preaching against slander and character assassination? Why is it obsessed instead with just gays and women who have abortions?

The answer is obvious. The Church points the finger at others only for "sins" of which IT is guilty. This deflects attention for those sins off itself and onto others. Damage repair for the Church's image. Not to mention misdirection like that of the teacher in the example above.

The Church goes to great lengths to portray an image of itself as our "holy mother," virtually fusing its image with that of Jesus' mother. The harping on abortion is just part of that act. All this holy motherhood posturing tends to make us forget what Holy Mother Church has done to her own children.

Recall how truculently she has waded through her children by the tens of thousands throughout history. She aborted the lives of countless of her children — throughout the 900 years of the episcopal and monastic inquisitions and now by allowing predatory priests and other religious to sexually prey on countless more of her children. She has stonewalled justice, intimidated victims who seek it, and protected criminals — spiriting them off to Rome or to a distant school or parish for a fresh set of unsuspecting prey.

And to be fair, the Catholic Church certainly isn't the only religious institution guilty of using the pointed finger for misdirection to get our attention off its own sins and act like the opposite of what its conduct makes it. In fact, it does at least have something officially on record against many other evils: religious preachers of other denominations don't even seem to know that the other great evils exist.

Paul was in line with the ancient Hebrew scriptures. Scripture has a name for the spirit in which people point the finger at someone crying, "Look what they're doing! It's evil!" The name of that spirit is satan, which means the "finger-pointer," the "name-slayer" (slanderer, character assassin), the "prosecutor/persecutor," or the "accuser." In some places (e.g., the Book of Job) they also call this spirit "the policer of the world."

So, projection is everywhere.

The worst thing about it is that mud sticks best to a clean spot.

I'm sure that people who do this think they're clever, but it's childsplay. Send a muddy child into an unsupervised schoolyard and wait to see what happens. He will rub himself off on every cleaner, smaller child he can find, until they are all crying and he looks good by comparison.

Looks good by comparison. Those are the all-important words. The hypocrite makes himself look good by comparison with others. He does that the easy way — by smearing himself off on others to make them look bad. This is the root of envy. Which is NOT a rare motive for what people say about others. It's an all-too-common motive.


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The NPD Lie Detector Test

Here is a suggestion you can make to a bystander who doubts you, believing the smear campaign of the devil in the group.

I warn you at the top though that it often won't help. But even in failure it does a good thing: it proves that the bystander is willfully believing lies and doesn't really want to know the truth. Then you know the truth about that bystander.

Nonetheless, there are some people honestly mislead among the pack. They should jump on this bit of good advice.

I learned it while caught for awhile in a mini holocaust - a back-stabbing melee in the mud orchestrated by a malignant narcissist.

The wildest stories were circulating about people I had known for years... just before they got thrown out and blackballed. I didn't know about NPD at the time. So, I couldn't imagine why anyone would go to so much trouble calumniating one person after another. The source of this witch hunt had to be spending the greater part of his working day, every day, on private conversations with one person after another, planting lies in their ears to keep this conflagration going.

You'd think that, for purely practical reasons, nobody had that much time to waste on character assassination. So, not knowing that destroying others is vaunting yourself on them and a huge NPD high that no narcissist boss with unchecked power can resist, I was asking myself the proverbial question: "Now, why would anybody do that?"

To judge what I was hearing objectively, I began running a little test on it. Here's how it goes.

When you hear Person A insinuate or tell you something bad about Person B, just compare it with what you already know for for a FACT about Person B's CHARACTER.

(If you don't know Person B and Person A is telling to NOT TO SPEAK TO Person B... make it your business to get to know Person B for yourself for a while before judging them.)

If this is someone in your family, neighborhood, or workplace, you usually know a lot about them and their character. Know that you know it. For, you have seen them in action daily for many years. And actions speak much louder than words.

For example, you have seen them in trying circumstances. Think back. How did Person B react in trying circumstances before? You WILL see a pattern. Does Person B's behavior in all those instances square with what Person A is trying to tell you about him or her today? If not DON'T BELIEVE IT!

You can know with a good deal of confidence that Person A is lying, because you know with a good deal of certainty that Person B is not the kind of person who would do that.

Failing to know what you know about someone IN ORDER TO BELIEVE JUICY LIES about them is hateful. It's a breech of faith. Infidelity. Bad faith. Treason. Because you are betraying that person to character assassination. Indeed, this was the Original Sin the Bible = believing the sneaky serpent's transparent lie that God was the liar.

This is why one of the most ancient and venerable principles of jurisprudence demands that people be tried in their own home town or in the place where a crime was committed. The assumption is that THERE people know the accused. So, no liar can come along and tell them just ANYTHING about him and have them believe it. They would know he is a false accuser, because what he says about the accused doesn't square with what they know about him.

So, we are not helpless when it comes to distinguishing truth from lies. Forget the TALK that blows all weathercock minds in the wind and judge by ACTIONS you have observed firsthand. In other words, don't trust hearsay. Stick to known facts.

For example, you have seen accused Person B happy, sad, and angry many times in the past. Think back. How have they reacted to situations that would tempt people to lie? You have heard how Person B talks about other people, so you know whether they have a bad mouth or a wholesome one. You have seen proof of whether they are sensible or a sarcastic fool. You have seen proof of whether they keep their promises. You have seen proof of whether they overreact. I could go on, but you get the idea.

In your memory, you have a treasure house of evidence about Person B's CHARACTER that applies to whatever Person B is being accused of. Consider it. Weigh it.

When someone with NPD is the accuser, your task is easy, because the accusations are a joke. That's because he or she is projecting their own faults off onto the accused and trying to smear one of the accused person's VIRTUES with it. Therefore, the moment you consider the past conduct of both Person A and Person B, your Irony Detector goes wild.

For example, a red flag of NPD is maligning others all the time. The narcissist will project that off onto the most conspicuously well spoken person in the group, someone who avoids gossip and never spreads vicious rumors about others, someone who often praises and speaks well of other people instead. Therefore, you have to be a complete idiot to believe the narcissist when he tells you that this person is maligning him.

It's a simple matter of having the brain on to examine information before letting it into your head = The Garden.

What's more, if Person B is accusing Person A of abusing her, she has a high degree of credibility, simply because she has never before spoken badly of anyone = she must have a damned good reason to be doing so now.

This process of weighing words is like you do in school when studying the characters in a novel or play. The author doesn't tell you that the hero is "thrifty, clean, and reverent." The author SHOWS you that he is "thrifty, clean, and reverent" through what that character DOES.

In Hamlet, for example, Shakespeare methodically compares Hamlet with Laertes this way. We see how Hamlet reacts to the killing of his father. Then we see how Laetres reacts (starts a civil war but immediately gets happy when bribed not to pursue it). We see Hamlet's true grief at Ophelia's grave and Laertes' grandstanding for attention. Even in death Laertes is a shallow ass thinking only of himself and behaves in a manner sharply contrasting with Hamlet's.

Having enough sense to judge people by their actions instead of by the words of others about them is the key to understanding that play. This thunders at the climax when you have to ask, "Who is crazy here? Hamlet, or this whole gang (the Court of Denmark) stampeding off into the dark crying for - of all things - "LIGHT."

And why? Simply because they are that determined to unknow the truth. Their willful contempt for it shows in the end when they are eye-witnesses to the treason of Claudius and Laertes but cry out that Hamlet is the traitor.

Shakespeare knew the human race well.

Source






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Stalking - An Example. YidWithLid

Please read my previous post on "stalking and why they do it"here

Another victim of a psychopath The Stumbling Block has been through hell and back with "YWL" (The psychopath in her life) but that hell is still ongoing as he refuses to STOP STALKING her. Even though the NYPD is involved in the case.

Here is an excerpt from the entry on her website which you can find here


"Just a couple weeks after [YWL]s extramarital activities were found out and we had our “falling out” (he never contacted me after threatening me, never tried to speak with me or explain… I guess that’s his definition of …uh …falling out), I was checking the hit meter for my personal blog.

I stopped short. My PTSD anxiety hit the gas. I was actually shaking.

I was being watched. Yes, me – the “stalker”! I was being stalked!

By YWL. I double and tripled checked and sent it to a geek friend and yes, he was on my blog. Regularly – maybe once a week at least.

I told my counselor, who knew I loved writing and having a blog. She advised me to find a way to block him from my blog if it was so triggering to me. I didn’t want to take it down and start over. I have been blogging since 2002. I really had nothing to hide. Unfortunately, my blog platform does not yet allow for IP blocking."

Of course we are to cut YWL all sorts of slack for my ‘hurting him, his family, etc.’ but no slack for me being completely traumatized, ending up in the hospital a few times, being unable to drive or do much for weeks thereafter, dismantling my computer (according to him I was supposedly stalking & harrassing him then.) – noooo, somehow he stalks me and reads all my pain & anguish but HE’S THE VICTIM. Scary.

Heaven forbid I was something that was a real human being not some THING that could be clicked off with his mouse or blocked on IM, huh?







Please read the rest of her site, and the rest of the Entry

What astonishes me is even when the psychopath/stalker has been caught out, he still DOES IT! he carries on! it's an obsession! The psychopath doesn't stop thinking about himself long enough to realize his victims are smart! and can call them on their behaviour yet the psychopath will still stand there and in plain sight proclaim that "he is the victim" . It's any wonder why they carry on after being exposed, yet we all know it's a compulsion.

“You are dealing with a totally delusional human being, who builds his own fantasies about his reality and believes his own pathological lies. How can you possibly hope to have a healthy relationship with someone who bases his whole existence on deceit? IMPOSSIBLE! And don’t kid yourself – They know exactly what they are doing – They prey, victimize, and devastate.”"



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