The "Innocent" Bystanders

"Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander." — Israeli historian Yahuda Bauer
as quoted on the wall of United States Holocaust Memorial, Washington, D.C.

People are like sheep. When a wolf approaches, you think they are blissfully unaware of his presence, but they are studying his every move. By showing no alarm, each sheep is just being careful to draw no attention to itself. The moment the wolf sets the evil eye on one of their number, the rest explode in all directions away from that lamb. In other words, they leave the victim to the wolf.

The narcissist relies on this behaviour.

Which is to say that they abandon the lamb to the wolf. They betray (hand over) the lamb to the wolf. They sacrifice the lamb to the wolf. Don't tell me fifty sheep couldn't stand off a wolf, because they could. They just don't. Later, they come back to graze upon that very spot as if Lamb never existed.

The narcissist relies on this behaviour.

History is replete with examples the human race doing the same thing. The most ironic famous example is what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. The same people who thronged to welcome him crying, "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" one day abominated him crying "Crucify him!" the next. All because the wind shifted. So, they couldn't get close enough to him one day, and they couldn't distance themselves from him enough the next.

The narcissist relies on this behaviour.

The same thing happens in every purge, pogrom, persecution, and witch hunt. People behave like unsupervised children do when a school-yard bully sets the evil eye on one of them. In fact, bullies quickly learn to exploit this behavior. The Lord of the Flies is a brilliant, sad, and enlightening novel (also made into a movie) that explores this phenomenon.

The narcissist relies on this behaviour.

Before you know it, the bully is constantly picking on somebody. Why? To periodically make an example of what happens to anybody he sets the evil eye on. In other words, your little school-yard bully is now a terrorist. He is victimizing one kid to control the others. And he does so just frequently enough to maintain the atmosphere of terror he thrives on. He deliberately targets the last ones to deserve his hatred, because that shows the others that they needn't give him any reason to attack. He is so wild that he is likely to just go off at anybody. This makes the other children fall all over themselves to ingratiate themselves to him. They are so anxious to kiss up that they take advantage of opportunities to be seen by him abusing his victim themselves. So, he can sic them like a pack of hounds on anybody he wants.

The narcissist relies on this behaviour.

How do the other children justify taking no action against the terrifying bully and persecuting the victim instead? The same way the terrifying bully does — by blaming the victim. How do they deal with their guilt? The same way the terrifying bully does — by projection. Onto the victim, of course. So, the victim gets to be, not only the victim of their sins, but also the one punished for them to boot.

The narcissist relies on this behaviour.

To "rationalize" (= irrationalize) what they're doing, the bystanders twist their thinking to pervert everything, so that anything the victim does is somehow wrong and everything the terrifying bully does is somehow excusable. They do this by looking on what the wild one does like those three famous apes...

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil

This is the worst form of lying, and to do it one must pervert the very mind to think something utterly absurd. Frankly, I don't understand how people can have so little self respect that they can bear to make such fools of themselves. But they do.

The narcissist relies on this behaviour.


Main text and theme by Kathleen Krajco

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What Makes Narcissists Tick,
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