How Narcissists Can Be Instantly Revealed Via Projection

IRL Cheat Code Analysis Lab: Psychological defense class #1 supplemental.

CNI does require a tiny bit of alchemy, wizardry and magic.

For those very familiar with Projection and can find comfort in laughing at its tragic comedy extremism, the following CNCC IRL lab supplemental will hopefully be as instantly clear and as amusing for you as it was for me. If you have experienced something similar, you will quickly recognize the example as yet another obvious attempt of a likely narcissist on their natural troll default, or it is a sociopathically designed bot. Either way, the goal is to trigger and gaslight via Projection.

A solid but imperfect definition

Ideally you have also been learning to factor in how these behaviors are consciously and unconsciously being used on each of us to further the contagion of what is now a global malignant narcissism epidemic.

The nature of this contagion is it compulsively tries to take over the world like an antisocial personality disorder virus. This virus is toxically transmitted via division, hate, fear, chaos, trauma and narcissism. In this lab, we will explore an obvious example of someone narcissistically trying to do exactly that.

It is a binary choice

Since we now know that most of the greatest threats to humanity’s extinction come from bad choices made by the most selfish and greedy humans among us, and no other humans are better at making more selfish, greedy and existentially dangerous bad choices than malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, it needs to be clear to all that it is suicidal to have these kinds of insecure egomaniacs and/or cold-blooded predators running our countries now that so many countries have the potential to destroy humanity all by themselves.

This means we have a binary choice. We stop them and save humanity or they take over the world and likely end up extinguishing humanity by accident or on purpose, because it is pretty clear with the trajectory that the world’s most powerful narcissists are on, one of these egomaniacs will be stupid enough to think they can cut funding for assisting global labs studying deadly viruses (oh wait, trump did that in China = Covid), they can safely create Skynet - The Terminator scenario, (Oh wait, Elon’s on it) they can win a nuclear war (trump), or will start a nuclear war to throw a tantrum when something does not go their way, or they enter into some form of narcissistic collapse (trump). Putin likes to threaten nuclear war but unlike trump, he knows it is unwinable, so it is just sabre rattling.

Our best hope is to somehow stop and contain this global problem before it is too late to change the dark road the malignant are compulsively taking humanity down. That starts with being sure the malignant narcissist trump goes away in 2024 instead of becoming Commander-in-chief of America’s military, security services and nuclear arsenal, because there has never been anything more dangerous in human history than a malignant narcissist with dementia having command of the greatest military the Earth has ever seen.

The A.I. learns nobody wins a nuclear war.

When you study history and learn that humanity and especially Mother England and America have been very lucky at several key turning points that could have ended us before we really began, it gives one faith that we will find or stumble upon a way to reduce and contain the malignant narcissism epidemic that can potentially kill us all, which is why CNI is dedicated to doing everything we can to make sure our luck does not run out before we can save ourselves, so please support these efforts however you can.

The last thing we ever want to do at CNI is cause you any additional stress but this malignant narcissism epidemic will not go away on its own. In fact, it never really goes away at all as we explored in What is Evil? However, we can manage and contain this kind of psychological evil to keep our stressors down if we are smart and strategic.

We must do this because as we have already seen far too much in recent years, when narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths are in charge of countries, they are more than willing to shamelessly kill or let thousands of innocents die, or however many it takes to stay in power and get their way, if they are able and allowed to do so. There is a reason Machiavellianism is part of the Dark Triad that is often used to define the narcissist psychology of trolls, among others.

For those still learning about the recognized and less recognized nuances and layers that projection reveals about narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, the hope is the below lab example will serve as a useful, clear and memorable lesson to share with others as well, because our goal is this cheat code lab serves as a reminder and touchstone of how trolls often immediately or quickly reveal themselves as the disordered and often highly disturbed narcissists that they are, via Projection.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them”

I have often suspected that with Maya Angelou’s famous phrase, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” she was really talking about various forms of pathological narcissists, because when malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths show or tell you who there are, you best believe them.

It is also true that most malignant-type narcissists “lie like breathing,” so you definitely want to take advantage of the opportunities Projection presents you in learning what a narcissist is really up to and thinking. It may only be part of the answer, but at least it is almost always an accurate piece of an answer to the questions you seek, which is far more than most on TV give us when they cop out with, “I’m not a psychologist, so I cannot answer that.”

Once fully processed, any reasonably intelligent person should be able to understand and begin to recognize daily projections if they choose to notice them. The next step is to factor in the implications of what narcissists are really saying and doing, and what that means for you, your life, your family and your country, because if you let them see an opening, they will compulsively take a running start in sneaking up on you with their completely shameless and self-serving plans, always at your expense.

Too much? Malignant narcissists have surprisingly been able to ride their compulsive behaviors all the way to the top of far too many of humanity’s most historic cultures who should know better, so if they can fool ancient civilizations and the newest ones like America, these are not the statistical aberrations too many in the halls of power pretend they are. What this proves is it can happen to anyone or any culture that is not prepared to psychologically defend themselves from narcissists. We all are after all, only human.

Sadly, regarding the Earth’s future, it truly seems like we are standing at the crossroads of humanity and inhumanity because far too many of these disordered minds narcissistically control and rule over hundreds of millions if not billions of people, depending on how we measure.

Therefore, we need to help every decent person understand that there should be no doubt that if the orange clown mafia lies or steals their way to the Presidency again in 2024, American democracy and humanity’s future will both fall down a very dark and likely unrecoverable hole that will end our time on Earth much sooner than expected. Remind me, who does division, hate, fear, chaos, trauma and narcissism serve again, because they certainly do not serve a positive and survivable future for humanity.

To paraphrase George Carlin, “The Planet has survived many things and will recover. Now as for us humans, we aren’t going to be here very long” if we continue to let compulsively self-serving narcissists keep profiting off the destruction of the human habitat and war because they are psychologically incapable of truly caring about anyone but themselves.

For reference, if roughly 200 sizeable nuclear weapons were exploded in a war, the fallout and debris in the atmosphere would block out the sun for two years, thus ending most life on Earth that requires sunlight to survive. I suppose we can all go to Mark Zuckerberg’s emergency underground luxury cave in Hawaii and wait the two years of no sun out. I am sure Mark will help provide transport to his cavern and resources to live, so the few billion post-nuclear holocaust survivors can keep the human race going.

Projection cheat code lab objective

In a small but key step towards every good person’s psychological defense, the overall Projection cheat code lab objective is to recommend and show how one can train their mind to quickly recognize and likely correctly interpret a narcissist’s projections, because once you can do that, at least a few great things should happen for you and society.

1- The gaslighting and general triggering effects of narcissists’ projection begin to lose their power over you, because you then know that whatever nastiness they are saying is not really about you, or even about what they are condemning. The purpose itself is to be their psychological release valve and to trigger understandable righteous outrage and anger to such outrageous lies. This way, they can point to you or someone else and say, “You see their anger. They are unhinged.” They will then proceed to calmly and smarmily continue by saying, “You see, they are the crazy one, not me.

Of course this is stupid behavior if people know the context, but when people do not know context, we have learned that far too many can be easily tricked into falling for “big lies” in culturally isolated communities with oligarchic controlled media supplying propagandized narcissistic information. Indeed, we have been reminded in recent years of how those of many stripes can be easily tricked into believing or falling for “big lies.”

Apparently, the general psychology behind it is that it goes against human nature to believe that someone would so brazenly, confidently, convincingly and completely without conscience tell 100% opposite and outrageous, cruel and totally self-serving lies to our faces. It makes sense. It is natural to want to trust yet verify with any non-friends, but it is clearly hard for most to see the lies and manipulations behind the charm and charisma narcissists develop over a lifetime, to fool, trick, deflect, hide and acquire.

2 - Regardless of the motivation, you should gain a strong idea of what a narcissist is thinking and what they are really all about, if you learn to observe the phenomenon, because almost “every accusation is a confession” when it comes to narcissists and Projection.

CNI IRL lab

Location: Substack Notes

Warning: Minor vulgarity

To set the scene, I had just heard that trump demanded the Republicans kill the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act because, as he claimed, it was used to spy on his campaign. As someone with a background in international relations who takes American and global security very seriously, I find trump’s complaint ridiculous in itself.

Oh, not because I know how our security services were spying on trump or not as he ran for President in 2015. In fact, my complaint has always been that they did not spy on him enough, collect the evidence that he is a foreign agent, asset and/or useful idiot to more than a few of the world’s most cruel, corrupt and evil dictators and wannabe dictators, aka all the leaders trump calls his friends and keeps telling us he wants to be like. As I have said several times elsewhere, I kept waiting for James Bond to save us from trump but he never came, so we are back again to, “when people show you who they are, believe them.”

Right off the bat, it was easy to recognize this entire sentence is just someone trying to trigger and gaslight me, they are a true believer, they are a complete imbecile, they are a complete lunatic, or all of the above. The way the attack is structured, my suspicions heavily leaned towards the all of the above category based on the obvious evidence presented.

The first clue is the accusation that I made an ignorant post for clicks. This made me laugh because while I certainly want my posts to spread far and wide, it is because the information needs to go far and wide. In this endeavor, click counts are meaningless. What has more meaning than a million clicks is one person finding CNI useful in their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

The second clue was this was the exact opposite of an ignorant post. No President or perhaps any American citizen has ever even come a tiny bit close to working so comprehensively against democracy and shifting America’s national security away from our enemies out to destroy us as much as trump. In the Cold War, he would have been jailed in 2016 for treason long before he got the Republican nomination where their party platform mysteriously shifted to pro-Russia.

So, since I had total certainty that I was not being intentionally ignorant or posting ignorance for clicks, because I have never had any interest in doing either, my projection alarm instantly turned on and told me this was likely a Dunning-Kruger narcissist who was almost certainly either unconsciously or consciously projecting his confessions that he acts intentionally ignorant and posts ignorance for clicks, likely because he was, “just born a congenital moron with chickenshit where normal human brains would be.”

One can certainly disagree with going with such obvious projection conclusions, but unconscious Projection is usually surprisingly that obvious and simple, because a person’s subconscious is normally very accurate and brutally honest about its rival conscious mind.

I am certainly not saying I know 100% for certain who or what this Scott is, but the probabilities highly suggest that this is a very unintelligent narcissist, trying to feel big by triggering others. What other type of person would spew such obvious stupidity unless they were “born a congenital moron with chickenshit where normal human brains would be?” Remember, psychological projection is done unconsciously so if Scott is real, he does not even know he is confessing what his subconscious mind thinks of him.

Fortunately, decoding Scott’s slightly amusing and pathetic projection took no more than a few seconds so before I blocked him, I figured I would test my working Projection theory by trying to trigger a response, thus seeing what more evidence he would provide one way or another, so I think I originally responded with one of my old favorites, “Sometimes Projection is such a delicious self-own.” However, it quickly seemed wrong to use the word “delicious” for such serious subject matters so I changed it to “Projection is such a telling and hysterical self-own sometimes.”

Then I realized I was wasting time on this narcissist idiot, but also realized this very simple exchange could be a good little Projection lesson in an amusing Note for CNI Substack subscribers and followers. As always, the hope is never about clicks. The hope is that those in need of more insights and cheat codes on how to better understand and deal with narcissists will find CNI’s clear and easy lessons in the archive useful in helping them defending themselves and others from those constantly trying to further toxify the goodness in our world, often just to feel better about themselves.

Remember, these are people who usually try to make everyone else as miserable as they are, thus terraforming humanity into the dark dystopian narcissistic mindset they know best, so they must be countered. Other than that, they are certainly not worth wasting any of your valuable time and energy on, unless you have a point to make. Of course, the CNI points to make are always about countering narcissistic behavior by either exposing narcissists, or by helping others learn from them, or both.

The Substack Projection Lesson Note

“Projection is such a telling & hysterical self-own sometimes.

Definition - “Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unpleasant impulses by denying their existence while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It can take the form of blame shifting.”

For example, someone who is ignorant intentionally accuses others of that, being born a congenital moron, chicken shit for brains, but my $ is on Scott just unconsciously admitting he is or does all of the above.”

That was the Note. My original post about trump telling the GOP to kill FISA, Scott’s unhinged and telling narcissistic response, me clowning his projection, a favorite definition, and a summary of what he did. Short, sweet and to the point. Oh, and it was very hard not to conclude that when someone’s very first comments to you are such an obvious projection, there is a good chance are narcissist has revealed themselves.

How can you be fairly certain it is an obvious projection?

One of the clearest ways to be sure that Projection is happening is when someone accuses you of something you know is ridiculous, and/or you are certain it is something not the slightest bit true, as Scott tried to pull with me, almost all signs point to that person projecting.

My IRL lesson: It is not quite the same but prior to my narcissism studies, I once thought I was having a nice conversation with a friend. Out of the blue they said to me, “You seem really depressed. You should probably see someone about it.”

For context, I know the value of good therapy in no small part due to the less than adequate therapy my sister received, but I personally have never “seen” anyone, or more importantly felt the need to “see someone” because I have generally know myself well. Bonus. With a CNI perspective, once I become well versed in the war between healthy and unhealthy narcissism, I saw well-defined lines and had no doubt which side I wanted to be on.

Ironically, I was very happy to see my friend, had several good things going for me and was in a very good place with lots of love, friendship and kindness in my life, so needless to say, I was a bit stunned by the comment and suggestion.

My visceral response was, “You have a fundamental misunderstanding of who I am and what is going on in my life, if that is what you think of me.” Of course with the gift of hindsight, my friend was clearly telling me the truth about themselves via Projection.

The troll returns, temporarily.

I did not hear back from Scott for several hours so I figured he probably realized via my clowning and exposing of his projection that he was not going to be able to troll me, so I assumed I must have sent him packing without even needing to click block.

However, a few hours after the Note lesson post, he responded not to my response to his insults but to my Note dissecting him. Comically, it was more of the same and provided the further evidence I was hoping for with my own response trigger.

Strangely, he repeated his kind of “chickenshit for brains” line. Is this some regional expression because “a chickenshit” is “a coward” in California slang? I am pretty sure he was trying to say I was stupid for what I posted. Not that I was a coward for it, although his next lines confused matters even more, because there he did try to build up some fantasist fear card. Once again, he was both trying to manipulatively trigger me into anger, but instead he showed the world how ultimately stupid he is.

In fact, it does take a special kind of shameless stupidity to say what he said. One could even call the behavior being “intentionally ignorant, for the clicks.” How else can you explain someone trying to argue that because we will never meet trump personally, we have nothing to fear from him.

That is definitely some of the most moronic logic I have ever heard, and now that I have been able to give it a little thought, what a massively narcissistic thought it is. As long as you never meet someone, they have no effect on you, even if they were the American President for four years and are now trying to lie their way to the Presidency again. Yes, the three Federalist Society extremists trump put on the Supreme Court have no effect on us because we never met trump. What lunacy! Got it!

Once again ironically, right after I screenshot his second Note and was deciding what to do next, I think what happened was he finally processed what I was saying about how he was confessing via unconscious Projection, did the math, and realized I had him pegged in every way including being someone who needed to “Go outside! Breathe air that isn’t infused with” his own grossness, because the Note above was quickly deleted, and I never heard from him again.

However, I did try to respond with the following meme that I did not think went through because he deleted his Note, but then I saw it had actually posted the next day, so it also could have caused our non-rocket scientist narcissist troll to run away too, as it has worked that way before.

A few days later, I saw that he had blocked me, so I of course blocked him as well, which should always be everyone’s toxic narcissist troll end game.

Usually takes more than a response & a Note to lose a troll.

Conclusions

Again, the positive in sharing this real life online trolling experience is because we rarely get to see such simplistic examples of Projection, stupidity and narcissism all wrapped up together in such an obvious bow. It certainly is possible this guy is paid to be a gaslighting chaos agent or a bot but chaos agents usually do not have such moronic concepts and bots don’t simulate certain levels of narcissistic stupidity human dum dums try to sell to others as confident certainty.

The Great Gazoo knows the caveman mind we are talking about.

Bottom line - It really does not matter what subject I posted as long as it was reasonable, well rounded, and in reality. Once you receive some projection of this nature from an acquaintance, a stranger or especially someone online, it should be a loud and clear signal that there is no point in wasting one second of time on this person unless you are a patient saint or feel the need to troll them back a little before you block them.

The Tell - Instant or totally off-base projection is almost always a confession.

Look, I am all for bringing people around to the truth but as covered in the most fundamental misunderstanding about narcissists, there are a-holes who can change and there are people with a disorder-level amount of narcissism, sociopathy or psychopathy, who rarely can. There are even some like trump who appear to be a hybrid of all three, with some extra portions of sadism and paranoia thrown on top, but hey, according to brain genius Scott, he is no threat to anyone he never meets.

It is sad how non-brain geniuses like Scott have likely been somehow groomed by superior narcissists to feel powerful by constantly confronting regular folks online, and are trying to trigger and gaslight us through the stages of anger, hatred, exhaustion and confusion, because that causes the logic parts of our brains to take a back seat to our outraged emotions.

The Big Takeaway: So from now on, you will hopefully always remember that if someone instantly starts throwing nasty, ridiculous and completely false accusations at you, the rules of Projection highly indicate they are a badly struggling person telling you about some things they are going through, and/or are some form of pathological narcissist revealing themselves.

If they are paid to spread and perpetuate that kind of nastiness or are a sociopathically programmed bot, it is their employers or owners who are giving near perfect impressions of malignant narcissists. Either way, someone is revealing themselves to be on, or at least very near the spectrum of disordered clinical-level narcissism, via projection.

At CNI, we know if we train ourselves to see such over-the-top projections as reflections on the projector rather than on ourselves and retrain our brains to laugh at the narcissist’s predictability instead of being triggered by it as intended, the world can become a much clearer, simpler and more enjoyable place.

To be fair to most narcissists, they did not choose to be the way they are and can rarely improve beyond the margins because they are usually incapable of sincerely caring for anyone other than themselves. This is why containing them from negative temptations such as political power or “public service” is not only helping save the world, it is helping them stay away from the most dangerous areas of self-serving temptation they are psychologically incapable of resisting, even if they wanted to.

If you have important further questions about Projection after reading and processing the Projection cheat code and this lab, or you have a good projection example that you think would be worthy of a translation, you are welcome to put them in the comment section and we will see what we can do. All the best and happy narcissist hunting with your new balanced calibrations.

If you are interested in understanding the psychology behind Scott and much more complex online trolls, you are in luck. There is a CNI psychological profile for that because previous editors wanted to understand the method behind the madness of all the trolling they were experiencing, and once again, time moves on but narcissist psychology rarely changes, so it is as on point as the day it was written.