Mightyist might just be another name for narcissistic personality disorder, but giving it a different title doesn’t bring us any closer to an understanding, or a cure. Researchers generally agree that there’s a spectrum of narcissism, ranging from healthy to criminal, so from the perspective of the soul, it all comes down to free will and our chosen location on the spectrum. But myriad factors of genetics, biology, sociology, and environment lead us to a place where free will seems anything but free.
A person deep in the grips of a narcissistic personality disorder is completely unaware of their disease, and will deny any need for a cure; but the rest of us would probably like some assurance that we’re on the saner side of the scale. We might try to objectively assess our thoughts and behaviors; but there’s no obvious line of demarcation between healthy and sick narcissism, and people have very different opinions about where it falls.
For me, simply becoming aware of the “mightyist spectrum”, and seeing it as a manifestation of the basic yin-yang duality of the universe, has been helpful. Yang seeks to impose itself on its environment, while yin seeks to harmonize with it. A wise person understands that different situations call for one response or the other – that perseverance sometimes furthers, and othertimes does not – and can fluidly move between the two. Perhaps this flexibility is in fact a key element of what we’d call “healthy narcissism”. I’m working on it.
If, observing our fluidity or stuckness, and our tendencies towards aggressiveness or passivity, we don’t like what we see, what can we change? If we find ourself in an environment plagued by unhealthy competition and self-aggrandizement, we can resolve to be neither perpetrator or victim, and find ways to either change the environment or remove ourself from it. If the problem seems to be centered in our own thoughts and feelings, a good therapist might help. Professionals might suggest any number of medications; but though many have found meds invaluable, they generally seem to address symptoms rather than causes. In the realm of medicines, I’d be more inclined to consider trying psychedelics or related compounds – substances intended to facilitate transformative journeys into awareness.
In the light of awareness, needed changes in behavior and environment often unfold naturally. But there’s a specific, often overlooked, realm of change, sitting at the crossroads of genetics, biology, and sociology, which might be worthy of special attention: our diets. It’s obvious that some things we ingest – alcohol, caffeine, etc. – can have a dramatic effect on our personalities, but we tend to overlook the effects of our everyday diets. Healers the world over have studied these effects for millennia, and they’ve even come up with a slogan: You are what you eat.
Traditional healers consider everything we eat as a medicine – our kitchen as pharmacy. Sometimes, either by habit or necessity, our food prescription simply reads: “whatever’s in front of you”. We’re also drawn to certain foods, which, depending on our clarity of judgment, may be helpful or harmful; but as we notice how our choices in diet are acts of creation, deeply ingrained habits may come up for review.
In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and philosophy, foods, and everything else in the universe, can be classified by their yin and yang properties – yang being active, physical, “male” energy, yin denoting the receptive, reflective “feminine” principle. Ideally, we each would have a near-balance of these two energies, some of us manifesting a little more of one, some the other. An excess of either manifests as psychological (as well as physical) pathology, extreme yang leading to intrusive, impulsive behavior, extreme yin manifesting as paranoia and reclusiveness. Science has well-established that these tendencies are baked into our genes, and that a potential violent psychopath can be biologically identified by the age of three; but there are countless environmental variables at play as well, and it’s here that we at least sometimes get to choose.
There are ways in which yin and yang can balance each other out: salty cancels out sweet, and vice versa. But in other ways they don’t cancel – one can be excessively yin and yang at the same time, setting the stage for a “bipolar” mentality of aggressive paranoia. A classic example of a bipolar diet might be one centered on meat and alcohol – a food tradition deeply rooted in northern European and American cultures. I see a correlation between the Mighty Bunch and this very sort of diet. The Righty Bunch, by contrast, can be found dining on vegan quiche and chamomile tea. Is this silly talk? Correlation is not causation, of course, but the connection seems worth exploring.
My sense is that humans span such a wide gamut between yin and yang, and combinations of the two, that, down to our basic physiology and psychology, we’re effectively different creatures. At a cellular level, we’re not all the same; and, whether by causation or correlation, diet seems to play a role, creating a feedback loop between society, our values, and our biology. We eat what people around us are eating, and we eat to enhance aspects of our personality that we, and those around us, value. Our biology is in turn affected by these choices – and then our choices are affected by that biology. In this loop, diet is sometimes the one lever of influence one can readily pull.
America’s response to the pandemic highlighted the importance of meat in our culture – we seemed to have very strong feelings about keeping the meatpacking industry online, even as these facilities emerged as coronavirus hotspots. It’s been noted that we Americans eat a lot more of this very yang substance than many other cultures, and always have; and that we seem unwilling to modify a dietary practice with serious downsides. From my perspective, it’s quite plausible that there’s a link between our country’s extreme fondness for meat, and its long-standing tendency to value might over right.
No, I haven’t run any formal studies; but I’ve run plenty of experiments on myself – as can any meat eater. In popular culture, red meat and carnivore are terms commonly associated, as both the cart and the horse, with aggressiveness. I don’t know if science has a theory to explain this, but Ayurveda (the traditional Hindu system of medicine), classifies meat as rajasic and tamasic – a stimulant for the lower chakras, and depressant of the higher ones. Meat eating can enhance strength and stamina, but these may come with a cost: a numbing of the body, loss of perceptiveness, and blunting of mental clarity. Our choices in diet often involve tradeoffs.
Alcohol, meanwhile, provides a short yang kick, but its actual extreme yin effect becomes evident the next day, manifesting as excessive sensitivity and a desire to hide. TCM and Ayurveda would consider both meat and alcohol to be strong medicines, to be administered with awareness.
As I studied a recent US president strongly associated with hamburgers, something clicked: there appears to be a level of pathological “tamasic yangness” where a person altogether loses touch with questions of morality or rightness – believing that, with sufficient might, questions of right become irrelevant. In their worldview, the most aggressive top-of-the-food-chain creatures deserve to win, and the snowflake vegan pacifists were born to lose. It’s just Darwin, darling – T Rex doesn’t want or need a moral compass. While some struggle to understand why the ex-president enjoys such popularity with his base, one explanation might be that they’re simply drawn to this portrayal of pure yang toughness, even if their personal beliefs are more nuanced.
Of course, reality is more complicated than a single yin-yang continuum: there are gentle people who eat hamburgers, and Hitler was apparently a vegetarian. Meat is not the only consequential substance we ingest, one’s thoughts and intentions surely count for alot, and there are numerous other factors of nature and nurture to consider. But we’ve probably all encountered people who seem built for dominance, embodying aggression down to the cellular level, and had the sense we were dealing with a carnivore. Add in large amounts of alcohol – or diet soda – and you can end up with a person who careens between self-centered belligerence and a vivid persecution complex.
Our country, unfortunately, has a long tradition of over-venerating such people and attitudes. (Oh say can you see….) It seems the United States has been running, right from the start, down two separate tracks – one embracing lofty ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity; the other embracing the ethos of the venomous snake: I’m lawyered and gunned and missiled up, so don’t tread on me.
This second track is a bit foreign for me – possibly the result of ten years of strict vegetarianism as a young adult. While I certainly can be selfish and short-tempered, I’m often at the other end of the scale – worrying excessively about offending people (I wish I could make this blog less offensive!), and having a sometimes agonized concern about what is and isn’t “fair”. For me, “Love your neighbor as yourself” articulates a simple fact of life: that all humans have the same basic needs; and that, considered objectively, the goal of life should be to meet the most needs of the most people. It’s been hard for me to understand that, for some portion of humanity, that’s not the goal at all.
For the extreme mightyist, rule of law and justice are merely tools to be deployed in the pursuit of power – the king of virtues, the focus of ultimate allegiance. Their God is a mighty God – the inspiration and justification for their domineering ways. With circular logic and self-fulfilling prophecies, the mightyist portrays their often ill-gotten wealth as evidence of God’s favor, “manifest destiny” giving a cloak of respectability to animalistic behavior. The mighty take what they want, rewrite history to whitewash their misdeeds, and then build temples to honor a God created in their image.
I’ve never personally met a 100% pure mightyist – someone who’s truly “all me, all the time” – but have come to realize that they do exist – mostly in the upper echelons of society that I never visit. Not all mightyists are wealthy, but it’s at least an aspiration, so they’re often found feeding wherever money is concentrated. We glimpse them getting out of limousines.
An awareness of our mightiest tendencies is helping me understand how we’ve ended up with a country where lying is essentially normalized. A righty, by definition, seeks to know the facts; to the mightyist, a lie is only “bad” if it makes you lose. And so we lie, not just to others, but to ourselves. It’s as if the country’s long-standing habits of aggression and selfishness have been turned inward: the snake is devouring itself. And in the coming age of AI trickery, these lies will become voracious.
Perhaps this is our long-postponed moment of reckoning, when the country – actually, the planet – must collectively decide which track it’s going to continue on – the zero-sum pursuit of power and wealth, or an enlightened dedication to justice and the common good. It’s our choice: over the next few years, our elections will likely play out as passionately confused referendums on might vs. right. Will it be World War III, or would we like to try something different?
So… am I trying to suggest this would all sort itself out if we just became tee-totaling vegetarians? Not hardly. Questions about diet point to larger issues of values, balance, and choice. We, as individuals and as countries, could pay closer attention to our choices – to our reasons for making them, and to their downstream consequences. Through the thousands of choices we make each day, we create ourselves. With a little more awareness, we might start making choices that reflect a more mature and humane point of view: That kindness and fairness are ultimately more powerful than coercion and oppression. That humans are governed by moral verities higher and more fulfilling than the law of the jungle. That the highest human law, and power, is, actually, love.
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