A strange new pattern of psychological dysfunction has infiltrated our most prestigious institutions, our corporate bureaucracies and the highest offices in the land. In short, we're sick. Our society is out of balance. We've been consumed by a cluster of disorder that appeals to our worst instincts and deranges our most important social functions. We need to recover our sanity, but to do so we must first know exactly what we're dealing with.
Today we are witnessing the emergence of something new. What might be called a Cluster B society. Like the culture of narcissism, our own digital age has a distinct psychological profile: heavily influenced by the power of social media; the cameras are always on; an audience is always watching; and narcissism has transformed into hysteria, moral theatrics, emotional volatility, self-indulgence and outbursts of violence.
Psychologists have captured the spirit of our modern culture in four specific psychopathologies that together comprise the Cluster B personality disorders.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is characterized by a sense of entitlement, of obsession with one's own self-importance and deep feelings of resentment, often expressed through moral self-righteousness.
Borderline Personality Disorder is characterized by an unstable sense of identity, black and white thinking, feelings of emptiness, and recurring self-harm and suicide attempts.
Histrionic Personality Disorder is characterized by excessive emotionality, sexual provocation and attention seeking, often to serve a pathological need for sympathy.
And Anti-Social Personality Disorder is characterized by impulsivity, manipulation, disregard for others and a penchant for violence and aggression that violates social norms.
But this cluster of social pathologies is no longer an individual matter. It has begun to shape the patterns and structures of our entire culture, which is quickly becoming a Cluster B society that replaces disagreement with accusation, uses false compassion to manipulate citizens into compliance, honors victimhood instead of accomplishment, and enforces the whole scheme with the threat of violence.
For most of our history, significant personality disorders were treated as problems and largely relegated to the fringes of society.
But in our emerging Cluster B Society, the narcissist, the borderline, the hysteric and the anti-social psychological types have been elevated into positions of power and celebrated by our institutions. The new status quo is an emerging leadership class that rules through emotional blackmail. Powerful institutions use the cover of various victim groups to impose their agenda on the rest of us. If we dissent, we're branded as hateful bigots, we're accused of lacking empathy, we are ritualistically banished.
While these strategies are contemptible, they're also remarkably effective in controlling what we think, what we say and how we act, and they've slowly transformed our institutions into what psychologist Andre Lobachevski calls "pathocracy," or "rule by psychological dysfunction." This has become our new social order.
If you look around you'll start seeing it everywhere.
A coercive-control society.
