You see, when I was a child, my parents never gave me this:

They did not give me empathy. Which caused the emotional deprivation and self-devaluation that developed into my disorder. But as much as I am tempted to blame my parents for this, I realized, as I was fumbling towards the light, that I couldn’t.

You see, they did not give me empathy because they did not have any to give. They were personality disordered too, because they too were emotionally deprived,

because, I realized, my grandparents were also personality disordered.

You see, like me, they were born in Soviet Russia, where we were all objectified. We were denied the right to express our feelings, denied the right to connect with our own humanity and vulnerability; we were seen as numbers; human capital; agents in the fight for the spread of international communism.

You see, NPD is the result of complex emotional trauma, exactly the same kind of emotional trauma that I, my parents, and grandparents experienced in Soviet Russia.

And then I realized, that they were not alone. And that the emotional trauma of Soviet Communism is its most lasting and devastating blow, that Russia may never recover from.

Current Russian levels of alcohol consumption and suicide are among the highest in the world. Russia has the world’s largest population of injecting drug users. And as mental health professionals know, personality disorders are over-represented among drug and alcohol addicts, and those who commit suicide.

But that is not all.

Extreme sports. Religious fundamentalism. Machiavellianism. Homophobia, antisemitism, and other xenophobias. The most expensive Olympics in history by far, hosted by a country with high levels of poverty and inequality. Wars in Georgia, Ukraine, and now Syria. All of this speaks of a nation plagued by narcissism.

Remember, at this point I am still in the dark and I am crawling towards the light. And as I crawl, and untangle myself from my umbilical cord, I see that it is connected to my parents, and from there to my grandparents, and from there to others and to something much, much bigger than me.

And then I realize, that this is not just happening in Russia. That there are other communities, and peoples, and populations, who are emotionally traumatized and as a result they lose their way.

And I realized that I must write about this.

So on Thursday, February 11, 2016, not long before 9pm Central Time, on a red line “L” train, on my way home from therapy, I began to write. It was going to be a blog. And what I needed was an introduction. An introduction that would encompass everything I wanted to share. And in my attempt to formulate something big enough, I came up with the Metaphor.

And as I was writing the Metaphor, I saw. I SAW.

the love

the delusions

the pain

the fear

the madness

And that is when I became manic.

As Alan Watts observed, in the West, if someone says “I am God”, people think they are crazy. In the East, they say “Congratulations, at last you found out”.

I don’t know, but I have a hunch that what I saw is what Buddha, Moses, and Jesus saw.

What the girl saw, the one who was sitting on her own in a small café in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and then was in great hurry to tell everyone, right when the Earth was destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial express route.

What Arthur Edens saw in Michael Clayton.

What the double rainbow guy saw.

And what Dr. Martin Luther King saw when he spoke of the fierce urgency of now.

I am not going to share the Metaphor here now, because it can seem confusing on first pass. But at its heart, it’s amazingly simple:

To give and receive love and be grateful, (and the basics, like water and food and shelter and meaningful work) is really all you need. And what we must do is learn how to love; and work on strengthening our ability to love (because we easily forget); and then we must help others learn to love, especially children.

That’s it. Isn’t that amazing? I think it’s amazing. And I think others saw it, and thought it was amazing too.

And this, at last, brings me to religion.

I realized, that a Religion is a metaphor that helps people cultivate their love, compassion, and gratitude.

If something that people call “religion” cultivates superiority, resentment, guilt, fear, anger, or hatred, it is not a Religion. It is a Delusion.

So when we speak of religion, we must distinguish between Religion and Delusion.

Between Christianity the Religion, as preached by people like Dr. Martin Luther King, and Christianity the Delusion, as preached by people like Jerry Falwell.

Between Judaism the Religion, as preached by people like Sally Priesand, and Judaism the Delusion, as preached by people like Daniella Weiss.

Between the Islam the Religion, as preached by people like Feisal Abdul Rauf, and Islam the Delusion, as preached by ISIS.

This is a very very important distinction; because Religion is good, and Delusion is bad. And you can’t use the same word for both.

Some people on the Left attack the Religious Right, and that is cruel and deluded. Because by attacking Religion, they are attacking a metaphorical tool that Religious people use to help them cultivate their love, compassion, and gratitude.

What they should really be doing, is attacking the Deluded Right,

which means attacking ideas promoted by people who take Religion and make it into a set of rules that cultivate superiority, resentment, guilt, fear, anger, or hatred. And that is bad, and deluded, because love, and compassion and gratitude, must come from within; and each human must find her or his own way of getting there,

with the help of their Metaphor of choice.

And Religious people should be attacking the actions and ideas of those who would have us forget how to love: Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Martin Shkreli, Lady Gaga, Karl Lagerfeld, Kanye West, and many, many others. These people have broken empathy circuits and are disabled because they cannot love; and as a result they promote delusions.

And we don’t need any more delusions, because we are fast becoming a nation of narcissists, and we are forgetting how to love.

Don’t take my word for it. A record share of the American population has never married. We hide behind terms like “changing attitudes” and “economic forces”, but that is a bunch of bull, because the real reason we don’t marry, is that we are unable to love others, because we are in love with ourselves.

If you really want to know the thinking patterns of a narcissist, read Sam Vankin’s Malignat Self Love. He is a horrible person but he was able to capture his own broken psyche amazingly well. It’s not just about selfies. It’s about debt, broken families, depression, isolation, and hopelessness.

We are becoming a nation of narcissists. A standard psychometric tool that is used as a proxy for narcissism is the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), and Americans’ NPI scores have been climbing for decades (Twenge et. al., 2008).

And as I climb out of my darkness, and see Donald Trump coming within reach of the Republican presidential nomination, and I see Lady Gaga singing our National Anthem at the Super Bowl — and I ask myself…

Will we be the next Russia?

Think about it. The way Lady Gaga sang the National Anthem was all about her.

And compare that to Whitney Houston’s version, that she sang at the 1991 Super Bowl. Whitney radiated love and gratitude. Wow, what a difference 25 years makes. How can we go back to that feeling?

Which, at last, brings me to leadership.

A big part of what people consider leadership nowadays, is having a “vision”, and “executing” it, and “selling” it. That is why people think that Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos have been great leaders. That is why they say that candidates for presidential nominations should be “selling their vision”. But they are very, very wrong.

It’s not about selling your vision. It’s about listening to the needs of the people you lead.

It’s about love.

If you are business leader, you are just there to help your employees do meaningful work. You are not a salesman. You are not a visionary. You are a negotiator. You must understand the needs of your customers, your shareholders, and your employees, and find solutions. That is your job. It’s hard. It’s not about you. And it’s not about your vision. It’s about listening. It’s about your employees. Because employees who love what they do, do great things.

Instead of yelling at each other, and trying to out-do each other, our leaders should shut up, listen, and make sure that everything they do, comes from love.

Because if it comes from love, you are doing it right. Things will start falling into place. First you will notice concern. Concern for the poor, the rich, the fearful, the angry, the deluded, the hopeless. And creative solutions will start falling into place. And some of those solutions will fail, because you can’t control very much. Be humble. You don’t need to project an image of confidence. That is often confused for leadership. But that is wrong. More often than not, confidence comes from blindness or from fear. True leadership comes from love, and it can achieve wonderful things.

Steve Jobs was disabled. He thought he knew better than everyone else, and he had a profound inability to listen. He wouldn’t even listen to his doctors, and that is what eventually killed him. But it didn’t just kill him. His narcissism hurt many, many people around him, including his overworked, stressed-out employees, and in a very cruel way, his family.

And I wonder, whether on his death bed, when he said his last word — “Wow” — whether he saw that.

He had his vision and ideals. But ideals and perfection are antithetical to love. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah”.

It’s the difference between Steve, who created perfect devices that only the rich could afford, and the Android team at Google, and their partners, who created imperfect devices that work for the rest of us.

Unfortunately, many “leaders” in the tech community idolize Steve Jobs and others like him. In their deluded bubble in San Francisco, they are pursuing their visions, and trying to leave their mark on the world.

They, as many of us, grew up controlling computers and cell phones, designed to feed our reward systems and obey our every wish. The trouble with this is that we forget how to love and interact with real, imperfect people. We become idealistic and intransigent, demanding that our (deluded) needs be met, convinced that our way is the right way, that we know the objective Truth, and we treat people like objects, and demand that they pull themselves up by their hair and meet our standards.

It leads to situations like this.

So now, to answer our “leaders’” confusion as to why their leadership style is “good”, there is a new term, “productive narcissism”, that is being applied to Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and other leaders who cannot love. As if by being “productive” their narcissism can somehow be redeemed.

Leadership is not “productive” if it leaves broken people and families in its wake.

Look at Jeff Bezos’ Amazon. People crying at their desks. A woman miscarrying twins and leaving for a business trip the day after, so that she can help build a better Amazon, and help it deliver the next designer handbag to someone who probably doesn’t need it. How is this dehumanization and objectification, reduction of people to numbers, to a means of production, different from Soviet Communism? To Jeff, she is disposable, interchangeable human capital.

And the terrifying thing about complex emotional abuse like this, that I learned through my experience with my parents, is that it can go unnoticed by both the victims and the perpetrators for a very, very long time; and all the while the wounds grow deeper.

Caltrain is a commuter rail system in the Bay Area, that runs from San Francisco, through Palo Alto and Mountain View, down to San Jose. Along its route are the world’s biggest technology companies, two of the world’s top universities, and some of the world’s richest and most intelligent communities.

I was on the train one day, coming home from work, and it hit someone. A suicide. It was not the first time this happened to me. I was sitting next to an Australian couple. They had taken a train down to San Jose for the weekend, and were on their way back up to San Francisco. Their train to San Jose had also killed someone. Two in one weekend. They were shocked.

Many of these suicides are kids. Why are kids, from some of the country’s wealthiest and accomplished high schools, throwing themselves under the train? Are we doing to them, what Jeff, and Steve, and others are doing to us?

And are we going to elect a President who will do more of the same?

Wake up

and See.

This is not pursuit of happiness.

This is Madness.