People Who Play God

We naturally assume that people look out for Number One. People tend to be egotistical, self-serving, preferring freedom, individuality, and self-determination over oppression, subservience, and slavery. The struggle for individual survival that drives all organisms is operative in humans and enhanced because, with language, we humans have the ability to rationalize our self-serving behavior.

Still, there are surprising exceptions—soldiers willing to die for God and country, suicide bombers and martyrs dying for abstract ideologies, gurus and demagogues. Short of death in the service of some higher-cause, many people become cultists, in effect slaves to crusades.

Why would people give up their autonomy like that? Why would people surrender their egos voluntarily to become humble and often humiliated pawns?

The human capacity for language explains how we do that. With language we gain the power of abstraction. People can identify with virtual communities, for example, folding their identities into religions, nations, or sports teams, because, with words, humans can conceptualize such things in ways other organisms can’t.

But what’s the motivation? Why would people surrender their autonomy like that?

First, though they’re surrendering their selfhood or egos, they experience as an ego upgrade. A pawn in a larger game feels larger. To a two-dollar person who becomes a one-dollar person in a million-dollar movement, the exchange feels profitable. Becoming the humble servant of some lofty lord, one can lord that lord’s power over others.

Second, though we cherish our ability to exercise our free will, it’s also a burden. Left to our own devices, we experience existential angst, or what I call the “free willies,” fear about whether we’ll make the wrong choices. Many people are happy to surrender the reins to some reigning authority. “Please take the wheel. My life is too confusing. Just tell me what to do.”

Third, once we’ve surrendered our autonomy it’s hard to get it back—hard to even want it back. Emancipation from slavish devotion is a return to the free willies. Besides, when people become pawns in larger crusades they often do things that they can’t justify without the crusade. Furthermore, the crusades often punish defectors. In for a penny, in for a pounding; if you try to exit a cult, you’ll pay.

Cultists are characteristically robotic. They’re mindless swellheads. They take up a lot of space but there’s no one home. They don’t listen to anyone who isn’t a member of their cult, and when you talk to them all you get is their dogma.

I call my research “psychoproctology,” a deliberately light name for a serious subject. The symptoms of cultists and a**holes are so similar that I operate on the assumption that cult is plural of a**hole, which raises an interesting question:

Cultists surrender their autonomy to causes. A**holes claim no higher cause higher than “'cause I said so.” They’re just as robotically absent as cultists, but to whom is it that they have surrendered their autonomy?

To put it another way, when someone self-deifies or “play’s God,” which are they, the God or the God’s disciple? I would say both. Self-deification is a self-splitting whereby one becomes the slavish devotee to an imaginary idealization of oneself. It’s like “I’ve found God! It was me all along!”

Source: Created by author.

I’ve known people who proudly pray to what I’ll call their “almighty gut.” They insist that their gut is never wrong—in a word, omniscient. They blame all of their mistakes on not listening to their gut.

I’ve known people who act as though they’re in the equivalent of purgatory, the Catholic waiting room for those destined to get to heaven, just not yet. Such people claim to know the path to enlightenment and are confident that they’re on that path. They haven’t arrived yet, but it’s inevitable that they will. They’re just purging their remaining faults. They have their eyes on the prize, their enlightened omniscient selves. They’re faking it till they make it. By acting as if they’re already their idealized selves, they’ll become their idealized selves sooner.

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It’s possible to get so enthralled by an idealized image of oneself that one surrenders one’s autonomy to it. Self-deification is also self-sycophancy. One plays God and God’s biggest fan and recruiter. Being an a**hole is like becoming a one-member cult of personality, on a mission to recruit more members. A successful cult leader often starts out as a self-deifying personality cult of one who gradually recruits others willing to surrender their autonomy to them.

One of the symptoms cultists and a**holes share is a freewheeling oscillation between two postures: Sometimes they act out like impetuous, impulsive tyrants. Sometimes they pose as prudish, priggish pedants. They scold you from atop their high horse for not living up to their exacting moral standards and then they laugh at you for caring about moral standards.

There are rhetorical advantages to such toggling. In the framing of transactional analysis, they alternate between playing puritan parent and petulant brat, thereby avoiding adulthood altogether. They can use the trick that Socrates’ spin-doctor opponent Gorgias recommended "to destroy an opponent's seriousness by laughter and his laughter by seriousness." That’s the slippery advantage of playing both god and disciple to oneself.

Dealing with the self-deifying, you’re no longer talking to a human. You’re talking to an imperious god or their biggest fan. They enjoy the god-like advantage of total freedom to follow their impulses, and if you challenge their impulse you’ll be set straight by their strict and zealous top-enforcer.

Slavish devotion to one’s imaginary ideal self, almighty gut, soon-to-be enlightened being, is a way to have it both ways and a paradoxically “humble” ego upgrade. One humbles oneself before the lord one imagines being, and then lord’s that lord’s authority over everyone.

If you’re dealing with a tyrant, a personality cult of one, look for signs of self-sycophancy. “Hey don’t hold me responsible. I’m just following orders from the imaginary God I fantasize that I am.”

Here's a short video I made in which I imagine the process by which someone imagines surrendering to the higher power within them:

Another short video on how easy it is to self-deify:

And finally, a short video explaining the Dark Triad personality in the context of both biology and theology: