Social DARVOnians

A twisted dome defends the power structure’s psychotic projections

⬆︎⬆︎ This essay was originally recorded LIVE on the This Is Hell! radio show/podcast. Visit the website for long form interviews, Rotten History, hangover cures, and more.

Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis? "A man has got to see his face!" -- Willis (Richard Lawson) in Scream Blacula Scream

What makes one person a victim and another an abuser? The question is not intended to get the reader to examine motivation or intention, it’s not about the forces of family or society that sculpt us. It’s only about definition and social position. We live inside a socio-economic hierarchical arrangement of power differentials. So who’s who?

Those who pretend the arrangement is natural and just are known by many names: Social Darwinians, Meritocrats, Libertarians, jerks, Elitists, a-holes, Elitist a-holes, Playas, Jordan Peterson, Abusers, Nazis, Exploiters, Capitalists, Narcissists, Highly Effective People, Technocrats, Geniuses, Innovators ... the list, for the purposes of space allowed, is endless. DARVONians is simply another word, but it has specific connotations and highlights specific aspects of the offending system.

AI, the wealthy boosters of which so often play the victim while siphoning power and money from their victimized society, gives this definition: DARVO is an acronym for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim/Offender,” a common psychological manipulation strategy used by abusers to avoid being held to account.

Defenses of the carceral state, of offenders in the Epstein files, of police abuse of authority vis-à-vis the poor, homeless, and people of color, rightwing and centrist abuse of socialists, mainstream analysis of the 2008 cratering of the economy, the belittling of women’s, workers’, disabled people’s, and all marginalized communities’ concerns – all of these have DARVO in common.

The 2008 economic disaster is a classic example. Until Donald Trump’s current term, it was the worst worldwide economic disaster since 1929. The abusers at first were clearly labeled. Predatory lenders are called predatory because they prey on the borrower, specifically borrowers who can not afford to enter a loan agreement but can be persuaded to ignore their fiscal disabilities because they are desperate to own a home or establish any kind of asset in an economy with innumerable barriers for most people to gaining financial independence.

Economists outside the abusive psychosis rightly warned that the practice had left banks holding those loans drastically undercapitalized and vulnerable to collapse. But the psychotics dreaming the dream, and supporters enjoying, it denied there was anything wrong. When the comically rickety edifice of mangled mathematics propping up towering stacks of improbable financial instruments finally crumbled, and panicking banks called in the credit that was so generously but temporarily doled out to sustain the prey (in lieu of decent wages won through labor power), the prey or victim defaulted on the predatory loan, and the mockingly offered asset proved to be a rug pulled out from under its would-be owner.

It would have been simple and kind and harmless for the governing powers to give money to the victims so they might pay off the banks and retain their homes. But that would have been insulting, apparently, to the definition that those without were without because they deserved to be. So the money was given straight to the predatory lenders by the government, excluding the victims, who were then painted as the “real” offenders in the entire affair, allowing them to suffer the consequences and take most of the responsibility for collapsing an enormous system complicit in its own demise.

Along the way the banks Denied their assets were toxic, Attacked as alarmist and ridiculous those who insisted on pointing out the bubble was getting ready to burst, and then painted the weakest links in the chain, the Victims, as the immoral cause of it all. And still, to this day, the dominant narrative of 2008 remains the DARVOnian one.

The Iranian theocracy, itself abusive of its power over its people, takes advantage of Israel and the US’s mass victimization of Palestinians, as well as the victimization of its own population by outside actors, to advance its interests. In this, the Israeli, US, and Iranian states are more alike than they are different. For each, DARVO serves as a valve to control dissent from every opposing faction.

During her epic fail in her Congressional hearing, Pam Bondi’s deflection to The Stock Market away from the victimization of trafficked women and children was DARVO. And it’s just the most recent in a long historical traditional that goes back before the nation’s founding. Originally the companies trading in humans, manifesting the abusive power dynamic of slavery, were among the first in capitalist history to sell shares to the public. It took some time before such power even felt the need to justify itself, and those toward whom it felt that need were very few at the beginning. How much DARVO they indulged in against objections they couldn’t ignore has been fodder for countless historians.

Duplicating or parroting the abuser’s rhetorical strategy is to be expected from supporters of the pathological narcissist prone to abuse. The pathological narcissist weaves their dream, invites one inside to dream it with them, and then cuts all avenues of escape. Therefore, unless one awakens to the abusive nature of the situation, one accepts the stakes the narcissistic abuser defines. So it’s natural that the follower employs the abuser’s strategy to shore up the dream wherever and whenever it shows signs of weakening.

MAGA is a DARVOnian machine. DARVO in, DARVO out. DARVO from Trump’s mouth into their brains, DARVO in defense of their own brains out of their own mouths.

Now we come to pathological meta-narcissism

“Meta” once meant “after.” Metaphysics was the book Aristotle wrote after his physics. But meta has come to mean a level beyond. So when I say the Democratic party as a centrist engine practices meta-DARVO, what I mean is they shore up the dream within which Trump dreams his own. Trump dreams a dream within a dream. That outer dream is the abusive capitalist oligarchy we are all expected to accept as fair and reasonable: the “norms.” Business as usual.

Up until the advent of a President Trump, the Democratic Party as an institution, surely since the middle of the 1970s, but even since after the First World War if not before then, has seen as its task painting capitalist democracy as preferable for the working and downtrodden classes to socialist or communist state usurpation of industry, as well as to fascism. From the 1920s through the present, however, mixed socialist-capitalist economies and various types of socialism have evolved to surpass in socio-economic and even technical progress a US run by a capitalist oligarchy that has become ever more publicly austere, unequal, carceral, anti-intellectual, and draconian.

The Democrats, seeing labor’s power, once offered it buy-in into the system. That led to cost-of-living increases, to help workers keep pace with business demand for swelling profits. Eventually business demand overwhelmed labor’s power, and even the Democratic Party joined, furtively at first, in efforts to see that labor stop winning concessions.

As US workers’ wages stagnated and their buying power waned, instead of real money in the form of cost-of-living increases, the people were given more access to credit. Credit is money you rent. Credit is a movie you buy from a streaming service that the service takes away at its whim. Meanwhile, the bifurcation of the people into a minority of haves and a vast majority of have-nots gapes wider as time passes.

The poor Democratic Party continues to protect the psychotic fantasy of a fair and equal US democracy within which Trump is portrayed as an extreme but discontinuous aberration rather than one of many malignancies to be expected in such an unhealthy body.

But now that the Dem leadership has seen what a malignant cancer tens of millions of white and wannabe white people are willing to vote for and even tolerate, maybe there’s leverage for progressives to demand that they don’t run weak campaigns at the last possible minute or hang onto senile candidates long past their sell-by dates. And maybe stop primarying to sabotage popular progressive Democrats’ campaigns.

Or maybe establishment Dems will realize that the people are stupid enough or wild enough to reliably vote for fascists if the alternative is just fascism-lite. Maybe the Dems will quit chasing the GOP on toxic policies like immigration “enforcement” and welfare “reform” and “public/private partnerships” that are giveaways to private contractors, and bankrolling billionaires and “law and order”/military slush funds.

But that’s a big maybe. It would require establishment Democrats to relinquish the psychotic dream that everything would be fine without Trump. And I don’t see Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer taking the hints. They strategically maintain their calculated weakness because it’s in their interests to stay in power without upsetting the status quo into which MAGA has inveigled and interwoven itself, in part thanks the Dems’ own inaction.

Alternatively, a real democratic force, known as the people, could simply wean all would-be statespersons away from their DARVOnian ways. We, the people, need to take on the difficult task of confronting abusive power, no matter what it says or how it acts on its DARVOnian claims. And it will say and do anything to remain in place, and we must ignore its lies and brave its slings and arrows and put it down.

But that can’t happen until we’re through and past the stage of waking up from the layers of dreams in which the pathologically narcissistic power structure has wrapped us. We’re only now shaking off the shrouds of a disrupted slumber. If writers in general and journalists in particular have anything to contribute toward that end, it’s to demystify the dream layers we’re buried under so they can burn off like mist under the rising sun.