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4:58

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

The more acute the alienation, the more powerful the narcissism becomes. In late capitalist society with its hyperalienation, the Cartesian fantasy transitions into a hypernarcissism, a state characterised by a complete distrust in all intersubjective intentions other than the purely instrumental. Hypernarcissism is internalised as the subject’s own instrumentality world view, where other people are reduced to isolated bodies, monitored and controlled by an authority with a far-reaching mandate and with the aid of game theory calculations. This is a subject whose libido is obsessed with strategic planning, conquest, colonisation, plundering and displacement. When the libido tries to adapt itself to hypernarcissism’s instrumentality view of humanity, the result is not only a consistent sexualisation of all intimate relationships, but also a powerful fetishisation of sexuality per se. The hypernarcissist – whose own sexual activity ironically can be both manic and minimal, often oscillating violently between extremes – sees reproductive organs everywhere and in nearly everything. Culture is filled with them to the extent that it almost becomes parodical. In this paralysed libidinal state, no living fellow humans remain, but only dying bodies drenched in disdain for their lack of Platonic perfection. The alienation is complete, and the living religion is conspicuous by its tangible absence.