Welcome to part 2 of our series on how to spot a narcissistic system – this time via it’s patterns of tactics. From gaslighting, blame-shifting, triangulation and all the other famous mind games, to their less well-known cousins, like moving goalposts, and painting non-compliance as pathology.

If you’ve ever found your head spinning, your self-esteem plunging, and your entire sense of what is real being totally undermined, this episode might help you find your feet again. It will also help you see if all this seriously crummy behavior is part of something larger. Something beyond the nastiness of a few horrendous people.

This pattern recognition can be applied to any size of narcissistic system—be it a workplace, an institution, a family, or even a social circle. Because narcissistic systems go beyond just your boss being a shithead. Narcissistic systems SCALE – beyond the household, or head office, to whole societies.

Now the tactics aspect of narcissistic systems likely will be horribly familiar to some of you. Namely, to anyone who has experienced narcissistic individuals. Those who manipulate for fun or sport or power. And even though a narcissistic system doesn’t necessarily require narcissistic people, the way the classic tactics work is the same. Whether gaslighting, blame shifting, triangulation, stonewalling, or whatever, they distort your perception of reality – so that those doing the distorting, maintain some advantage at your cost.

So if you have ever found yourself suddenly burdened with blame, in ways that seem bewildering, destabalizing, or unfair, then this episode will help you regain clarity. Together with last weeks episode, it will help you see and name what’s going on. I will also be giving you a simple for identifying whether or not you are inside a narcissistic system, so that you don’t have to hold all this in your head. The background is important though, because it helps you understand the mechanisms – along with why you are not the issue here, despite the fact such systems rely on your thinking that you ARE.

Let us start with an example. It brings together what we learned last week, with what we are dealing with today.

An Everyday Example

Picture yourself in a shiny new job with a firm called “Synertech Solutions.” They are all about synergy. And solutions. They say.

On your first day, your manager tells you:
“We’re like a family here. You know, we make sure we all cover for each other.”

It’s not entirely untrue.
It’s just that this family has… missing members.
People who were never actually hired. Shadow siblings — planned, but never born — and still somehow your responsibility to assist.

This “covering for each other” thing means you end up with the workload of roughly three people.
You’re reassured it’s an opportunity — a chance to be recognised as “rising to the challenge.”
Just like Daniel does, who waves at you from his cubicle and comes over.

Like everyone around him, Daniel looks exhausted — yet weirdly upbeat about it.
He informs you, with an unsettling grimace:
“Yeah. It’s intense, man — but the time-management courses really help.”

They’re on the weekend.

You attend one all the same. Because, obviously, what you need is more efficient allocation of your time — especially between the hours of 2am and 4am on Sundays.

You start staying late. Because, let’s face it, you want to make this work.

Your manager, Sue, seems happy. For a while.

But two weeks later, she calls you in to ask why you’re not “taking more initiative.”

A questions you are puzzled by.
Sue’s brow furrows:
“Taking initiative is about anticipating the needs of other team members.”

You tentatively ask “which needs?”

And get the reply:
“Well… if you have to ask, that’s already a concern.”

Now, of course, you could theoretically spend your weekends conducting psychological profiles of your colleagues on the sly.
And if you did, you might discover that their needs are, respectively: twice as much sleep, a divorce, a two month stint in a burnout clinic, and corrective surgery for an anal fistula.

But of course, that’s not the point. The point is not that you qualify as a surgeon, or a marriage counselor, or a magician who can bend space and time in order to create more hours in the night.

The point is that you feel you are to blame, for not doing enough of the right thing — while having absolutely no idea what that right thing actually is.

This is where we start to see a pattern. Not just a pattern of confusion, but in the values and tactics that work together to cause it. Because none of this is random. And if you’re well versed in the tactics side of things you’ll have spotted the blame shifting we’ll be delving into soon, and perhaps the triangulation, with Daniel, the model worker.

The values were what made the tactics possible. The values set the stage for those tactics to actually work. And it’s a two way street, because the tactics re-enforce the values too.

And whether you noticed it or not, that whole work-based circus was bought to you starring the following values – for the tactics to pick up and quietly skewer you with: Radical individual responsibility — which helps you swallow the idea that the failure of an understaffed system is actually due to your own personal shortcomings. Meaning, radical individual responsibility (as a value) makes the tactic of blame-shifting very very easy.

Our story also starred Self-regulation—because everyone smiling despite their exhaustion, makes you think you’re the only one not coping. That “coping” is the norm, and you’re the weird one. So this value sets the stage for the tactic of pathologising non-compliance.

Then we had Image management— because everything was framed as “opportunity” and “growth,” no matter how unsustainable it was. And when people pretend to be magnanimously doing you a favor, you can only look terribly ungrateful, when you point out their gift is a turd. This wonderful, multilayered value that sets the stage for blame shifting, pathologising non compliance, and makes “image REPAIR” a walk in the park.

Lastly, we saw Competition—because somewhere in the background, there was always a Daniel…
Daniel and that uncanny grin that gets chalked up to his “thriving,” rather than a likely cocaine problem. And paints YOU as a failure for frowning.

The only real “synergy” in this whole workplace system, is the seamless collaboration between your burnout and everyone’s denial.

At synergistic systems, the values set the stage. They define what counts as the right behavior, What counts as being reasonable, or even admirable. But the values don’t enforce themselves. Not always. So those tactics that you spotted then step in. The tactics we will go into more depth on in just a second.

The important thing to notice first, is that what you just saw was NOT just crappy working conditions. It was a system correcting you. A system distorting the reality of the crapness going on. Through confusion. Through shifting expectations. Through making you responsible for things you cannot possibly define — let alone control. In other words:
The values set the stage — and the tactics are what ensure you follow the script.

A Quick Recap

As Lasch, Miller, Bowen, Foucault, and Ahmed helped clarify last week, the tactics and values, in narcissistic systems, have a pattern of ENDS. Meaning, the tactics and values and have two notable effects.
1. reality is distorted to preserve the systems IMAGE (benefits those with advantage in the system)
2. and those with less power bear the burden of harm for those distortions

This is what distinguishes narcissistic systems from merely dysfunctional ones. In a narcissistic system, it’s not just that harm occurs — it’s that harm is explained and redistributed to maintain the image of those running the system.

In our example, you could see that in full swing. The harm of your being overworked, for someone else’s advantage, is twisted into a story about your failure. Via you being blamed, for a problem the system causes, the system itself maintains it’s innocence. Those with existing advantage, get to book more flights to Bali... while Daniel keeps disappearing to the toilets with what he insists is just a bladder issue.

The Tactics Narcissistic Systems Use

So lets look at the tactics that typically appear in narcissistic systems, as per the research we have on them. Some of these, like triangulation and blame-shifting, were outlined early on by Minuchin and Bowen. But many of the others come from later work by people like George Simon, Lundy Bancroft, Patrick Carnes and the Gottmans. You might recognize at least a few of these.

• Blame shifting — meaning, shifting the blame away from whatever or whoever is responsible, onto those who actually aren’t. This tactic shifts the focus away from those doing actual harming, and invokes shame through self blame.

• Triangulation — a divide-and-conquer tactic that pits people against one another. This creates fear of inadequacy via comparison to others, and a focus on pleasing the person doing the triangulation.

• Gaslighting — this is the direct and deliberate distortion of reality to undermine self trust and maintain control of perception.

• Stonewalling / silent treatment — this tactic is about withdrawal to destabilize and punish. This is linked to conditional belonging and closely related to...

• Withholding — be that withholding of information, approval, or communication, in order to isolate, punish, or render helpless.

• Intermittent reinforcement — unpredictable reward and withdrawal to keep people hooked on trying to please those in power.

• Moving the goalposts — shifting expectations so compliance is never enough, and you are always required to try harder to please those moving said goalposts.

• Image Repair. This is a set of tactics aimed at reputation control, meaning, managing how others perceive someone or something. It includes things like Smear campaigns, so that another’s reputation is degraded in comparison to those seeking to maintain advantage.

• Pathologising Non-Compliant Behaviors. Here we start to level up. Where the aforementioned tactics act to DISCOURAGE non-compliance, this tactic labels non-compliance abnormal, irrational or defective. This also includes marking out those who challenge the system as non-credible witness, so their perspective no longer needs to be taken seriously.

• Scapegoating — this one can be covert or overt and is similar to pathologising non-compliance. The scapegoat is a sacrificial person onto whom blame, conflict, or shame is projected so that others in the system can preserve their self-image, cohesion, or sense of innocence. We deal a lot more with this one when we get to roles, cos here the role comes very clearly out of the tactic itself.

• Lastly, Intimidation — this is the most overt tactic on the list, and is often used when all the aforementioned, covert tactics fail. This non-stylish tactic is pretty terrifying and aims to make you feel helpless and fear being cast out. So very related to the value of conditional belonging. When we delve into this at the end though, you will see why it can indicate the death throes of a narcissistic system – and meet the differently terrifying monster that can come to take it’s place.
  
  
  

But first a quick extension of our earlier example, to see if you can guess which tactic is in play.

Daniel comes out of the lavatories for the 5^th time today. He might look like he is suddenly the king of the universe, but he still has not compiled the “synergistic colon cleanse proposal,” which you need to plan a presentation for. When you tell him you need it by the end of the day, he snaps
“I put it on your desk last week. Are you sure you are up to this job? I mean, you’re already forgetting everyday events.”

As you likely guessed, that’s gaslighting in action. Daniel has not given you what you need, and is trying to make you doubt yourself instead of doubting him. He will get a big kick out of watching you rummage through your drawers, and questioning your own sanity. How this produces the distortions we talked about is clear. Daniel said he did something when he didn’t. He painted you as unreliable, so he would not be seen as the issue. The advantage to him is that you will likely start to see yourself as flawed instead of him.

Many Values Needed, But Just A Few Tactics

Now a small distinction. When assessing whether or not you are in a narcissistic system, there IS a difference between values and tactics, even though they operate together.
As a recap, the values don’t operate alone. They get in bed with one another, in a massive mutual groping session where each one keeps on grabbing at the other, in order to “facilitate” themselves. So self-regulation, hanging about on its own, for example, will not constitute an orgy. No one value is diagnostic, but conversely you also don’t need to see EVERY value fully getting off for the pattern to be present.
With tactics, however, a few really will suffice. A couple of maneuvers, within this orgiastic context, is enough to create a very real risk of chlamydia.

But when tactics do cluster — and they often do — the effect is psychologically unmistakable. It leads to what is known as “walking on eggshells,” where your constant hypervigilance shifts your whole focus onto not upsetting those in power.

As Judith Herman shows in her work on trauma and coercive control, prolonged exposure to destabilizing environments — meaning, environments where reality is repeatedly distorted, where goalposts shift, and responses become unpredictable — exactly this kind of hypervigilance is produced.

Your attention shifts away from reality itself, and towards anticipating what those in power want.

Imagine that part like a film set. When you are so focused on pleasing the director, you never even notice that the props behind you are no longer the collection of miserable children this play was all about. While you were desperately singing and dancing, to please those in charge, the starving kids have been dressed up as felines, like you’re on the set of cats, and your background memory of hungry mouths to feed has been replaced with an urge to buy kitty litter.

When your attention shifts away from reality, to focus on pleasing those seeking advantage, those same advantage-seeking people have no trouble making you believe a reality they have invented. From there, things can really intensify.

More severe still is when it leads to a kind of chronic destabilization, where you are kept off balance, constantly reacting, never quite sure of your footing.

You see this called brinkmanship, or “crazy-making.” Because it’s about being kept right on the edge — the brink — of clarity, of confidence, sometimes even of your sanity — and never quite being allowed to step back from it.

This is where R. D. Laing becomes relevant. Decades ago, Lang showed that it doesn’t take personal insanity to produce madness — just a system of relationships that constantly contradicts and destabilizes what is real.

And one reason this works so well is that most of the tactics we will delve deeper into now, are covert. They don’t look like control. They look like misunderstandings. Like your fault. Like something you just need to handle better.

As Michel Foucault points out, power works best when it doesn’t look like power at all —
when it looks like a choice you made yourself. Which means you end up participating in your own containment. Very efficient for those who hold advantage. A whole lot less efficient for your nervous system.

Time to look at how these tactics will show up in different-sized systems. We’ll also explore how they link to values to create distortions and keep the system uninterrogated, at your expense.

1. Blame Shifting

Blame shifting is widely recognized. Researchers like George Simon and Lundy Bancroft describe it directly under that name, while others like John Gottman identify the same mechanism in the form of defensiveness and refusal of responsibility.

Blame shifting thrives in the soil of radical individual responsibility — which we covered last time. If you already believe that outcomes are down to you, then it becomes very easy to convince you that failures are too.

That’s where the distortion comes in. If the system causes a problem, blame is shifted away from where it actually belongs — onto those who didn’t cause the problem. The system might look dodgy for one second, but you become the explanation for that, and the systems image is restored.

Jennifer Freyd observed this at the institutional level, calling it “institutional betrayal” —which reminds us that narcissistic systems scale. So a fun one from my all-time favorite culture, Germany! Around 15 years ago, I ended up jobless after the English school I worked for was bought out. I went to the job center for income support.

When I couldn’t find work through them, I arranged to volunteer at a women’s refuge — experience that, with my qualifications, might actually lead to a job. The job center told me I wasn’t allowed to do this, because I had to be immediately available for work. Work I was already being turned down for. A few weeks later, I was called in, harassed, and threatened with being cut off — for “not being proactive enough.”

But lets look at some more amusing examples from industry. Namely, the self help and western spiritualism industries, with their “think positive” and “manifesting” movements. The promise is that you can invoke the ideal life, if you think the right thoughts, and don’t let “negative emotions” raise their ugly heads. Here we see how the value of self-regulation and control makes for fertile soil for blame shifting too. Because anyone who tries this, fails to manifest a money tree, and calls “bullshit” on the system, is told by everyone else buying into this stuff that their thoughts are the problem — not the model.

The distortion here is not just that structural conditions are ignored. It is that the entire UNIVERSE is presented as YOU-focussed, and geared towards rewarding you for thinking happy thoughts. The advantage, to those at the top of these cult-like systems, is that the theory never fails — only the people using it do. Which is very convenient, if you make money from all this.

Here is one from education systems. Students are placed in underfunded schools, overcrowded classrooms, or taught with inadequate support — and when they struggle, it’s framed as a lack of effort, discipline, or ability. Sometimes it’s even attributed to their background, their culture, or their supposed “natural limits.”

The distortion is that structural inequality is rewritten as personal failure — and then fed back as evidence that those who succeed deserve to.

All of these examples show the same pattern. The scale is what is different.

2. Triangulation

Murray Bowen described triangulation as what happens when tension between two people is managed by pulling in a third. Instead of resolving the conflict, it is redistributed — so the person creating the triangle doesn’t have to deal with what’s actually going on.

The link to values here is competition.

Because instead of addressing the issue, attention is redirected sideways — onto comparison, performance, and where you stand in relation to someone else. The distortion is more of a sleight of hand, because your statement of “here’s a problem” is spun around, until you find yourself asking “how do I measure up?”

For example. Bob is your boss, and he doesn’t like that you keep raising issues about the stock labeling process. Instead of addressing it directly, Bob brings in a third party:

“When Katarina finds a problem, she doesn’t complain to the bosses — she fixes it herself.”

Now you’re in tacit competition with Katarina — trying to prove you can handle things alone. The actual, company-wide issue is not resolved, but Bob gets to go off and play golf instead of doing actual work.

Alice Miller shows how this plays out in narcissistic family systems, where a child who doesn’t behave as the parent wants is compared to one who does — encouraging them to conform to the idealised version.

Such as:

“Other children would never write that their parents were three-eyed, slime-covered incarnations of Josef Stalin. There are children out there whose parents don’t even have eyes. I bet they don’t bring home purple prose about dictators.”

The comparison isn’t about accuracy. It’s about correction. It stabilizes the emotional environment for the parent, allowing them to maintain their image, at the expense of the child.

In each of these examples, the image of the system is preserved by ensuring that those in less powerful positions compete with each other for praise, approval, or inclusion — instead of questioning the system itself. The distortion here is that those in power have nothing to fix, and that it is down to those who are not in power to alter their behavior to fit what is required of them.

3. Gaslighting

Gaslighting is what happens when your perception of reality is persistently denied or reinterpreted, until you begin to doubt your own experience. Where blame shifting tells you that everything is your fault, gaslighting goes further — it makes you doubt whether what you’re seeing is even real.

In a narcissistic system, this serves a function: because if you can be convinced you are an unreliable witness, then you cannot challenge the system’s version of events.

The distortion here is that what is actually happening is replaced by a version that protects the system — and you are made to question your own perception instead. Here is an example that has a few echoes from the film this term was coined from, which is called “gaslight.”

You’re living with a partner who has issues with electricity, so everything runs on gas. There’s no Netflix — so this is your chance to finally read the collected works of Tolstoy.

But each night, it gets harder to read. So you ask:
“Are the lamps on full?”

And your partner replies:
“Of course. You turned them on yourself.”

You don’t remember doing that.

When you say so, they add:
“I did warn you Tolstoy might be beyond your mental capacity. I mean, it isn’t dark in here — and you’re forgetting what you did ten minutes ago. I think Ms Karenina’s psychological state might be…. contagious.”

What is actually happening here, of course, is that the partner is deliberately lowering the light, as per the film — and you are being taught not to trust your perception of it. Because the implication is, you are a nut job, whose madness is curiously amplified by overly-dense Russian literature.

Now, we saw a workplace example already, via Daniel, who really did NOT give you that report he said he did. Daniel too tried to make you second guess your own perceptions. Cos gaslighting is not just denial or lying. It is combined with an attempt to destabilize self trust.

So here is an example from the fractal of an interest group:

Where you say to the leader of your spiritual circle
“You know, the other night when you said you were the reincarnation of Louis 14^th? It raised a few … doubts for me.”

and you are met with:
“Oh, that would raise doubts for anyone. But I’m concerned about your misalignment here. This isn’t the first time your energy field has interfered with your memory of events. I would never claim to have been Louis XIV. I was Princess Leia.”

And just like that, your perception is the problem — not the person claiming she was once Luke Skywalker’s sister.

4. Stonewalling / Withholding

Stonewalling and withholding are tactics centred around communication shutdowns.
They use silence, withdrawal, and exclusion. If you’ve ever experienced the silent treatment, you’ve seen this in action.

John Gottman identified this in relationships, where one partner either refuses to engage on an issue — or withdraws from communication altogether. It can be framed as “preventing conflict” — but what it actually prevents is resolution. And in doing so, it quietly establishes a power dynamic.

As Judith Herman shows, in her work on coercive control, withdrawal is not neutral.
It destabilizes your sense of what is happening — and forces you to orient yourself around the person who has withdrawn. The result is simple: the person who withdraws gains control, and the person seeking resolution becomes destabilized.

John Bowlby’s work on attachment helps explain why this is so effective. Withdrawal threatens connection itself — which makes you far more likely to abandon the issue, just to restore the contact. And as Donald Winnicott shows, when responsiveness disappears, so does a key source of psychological stability.

In short, humans are wired for connection — so abrupt withdrawal is inherently destabilizing.

Which is why this tactic relies quite heavily on the value of self-regulation and self-control. Because if you’re expected to remain calm, composed, and “reasonable,” then your reaction to being shut out becomes the problem — not the shutdown itself.

That’s where the distortion comes in. Conflicts will hang in the air, like some suffocating, destabalising gas — but it can be claimed that nothing is wrong, because nothing is being acknowledged. You raise an issue — and it disappears. You react — and your reaction becomes the issue.

Institutions are wonderful at this. You write to raise an issue — and no answer ever comes. So you end up chasing them for a response, which, if you ever manage to catch them, is met with mild irritation and some kind of brush-off involving forms… for which the link they send you is either broken, or requires several passwords, sent to you by snail mail, which expire in 7 days.
Not hypothetical. That one is Elster, for the German tax department.

Bosses can have a similar talent. You email them about a problem, and they simply never mention it again. Not in meetings, not in passing, not even when you catch them swiping left on their own wife on Tinder during a meeting. The only change you MIGHT see is subtle — they avoid you more often, or sigh when you speak in their presence, or treat you like anything you say might clog the company pipeline of procedure.

Which leaves you not with an answer — but also not with anywhere to go.

And that’s the point. Because when there is no response, there is nothing to grapple with, no WAY to resolve via this act that there is nothing TO resolve. The pressure just shifts quietly onto you – to wonder if you are being petty, or unreasonable

5. Intermittent Reinforcement

On to intermittent reinforcement — which sends people, rats and monkeys totally mental.

Intermittent reinforcement is what happens when a reward is given unpredictably — sometimes you get what you’re hoping for, sometimes you don’t, and there’s no clear pattern. And pattern interruption turns out to be pretty distressing. More distressing than no reward at all.

B. F. Skinner’s objectionable experiments on rats showed that when reward was inconsistent, reward-seeking behavior doesn’t switch off — it escalates. Harry Harlow showed something similar in attachment research. Those also objectionable experiments were done on monkeys, and it was care and comfort that were offered inconsistently — sometimes there, sometimes withdrawn — the result was not detachment. It was fixation.

Very tellingly, Lundy Bancroft shows that similar patterns turn up in abusive relationships, where periods of warmth and approval are unpredictably interspersed with withdrawal or hostility. Bancroft noted the effect — which is precisely the advantage of this tactic — it keeps people invested, trying to re-invoke the “good” side of the person doing it.

Lenore Walker’s work on the cycle of abuse adds weight to this. She shows how intermittent periods of kindness and reconciliation maintain attachment — even in harmful environments. In other words, environments where the same person repeatedly bears the cost of someone else’s inconsistent behavior. Both Bancroft and Walker reveal a power imbalance, where one person is hooked on trying to please the other, never knowing if it actually will work.

The distortion here is that instability starts to look like promise — that the occasional return of warmth means there is hope this might become something mutual. But the point, for whoever holds the power, is that it won’t. Because the advantage lies in keeping one person engaged — trying to be pleasing, trying to re-invoke that “good” side — rather than stepping back and recognizing the pattern for what it is — which is not promise, but control.

This is also why things like unpredictable praise from a boss, or inconsistent attention in dating, can be so compelling — once it starts, you keep trying, because it looks like “oh, maybe they are starting to see me as someone valuable.”

6. Moving the Goalposts

The next tactic is called “moving the goalposts,” which is when expectations shift the moment you actually meet them. What counted as “enough” yesterday suddenly isn’t today. This is relational hyperinflation. Yesterday, four euros would get you a beer — enough for everyone to smile at each other. Today, that same four euros won’t even get them to turn up.

Alain Ehrenberg shows how modern performance cultures constantly raise the baseline — so that what once counted as an achievement quickly becomes the minimum everyone is expected to meet.

Karen Horney described something similar as the “tyranny of the shoulds,” where expectations constantly escalate — so that what counted as good enough yesterday no longer counts today.

You see this clearly in self-improvement culture. The ever-expanding list of “shoulds” includes journaling, meditation, exercise, optimizing your diet, cold exposure, tracking your sleep, processing your emotions, exposing yourself to daylight — all of it, ideally before 8am. And even if you get up at 4am to do it all, it still isn’t quite enough — because there is always a newly branded “should” trending somewhere between faux science and TikTok.

The function here is pretty obvious, and would make Byung-Chul Han say “told you so” and Karl Marx despair and re-die. If people are kept busy self-optimizing, they become easier to exploit — both by extracting more work from them, and by selling them things that promise to make them even more efficiently exploitable.

The values that set the stage for all this are, pretty clearly, competition — not just with other people, but with your former self. Self-regulation and control come in here too, along with radical individual responsibility. Because it is you who are meant to make sure you keep getting better — not an actual problem with those shifting the goalposts.

The distortion is that what you can easily achieve is not enough. That success is not yet yours, but will be, if you just keep self-optimizing — all the while the problem appears to be you, not the shifting criteria. You are the donkey, locked into chasing the carrot on a stick — while whoever is on your back holding it profits from your constant fixation on it.

In case the self optimization market isn’t enough of an example, a few more:

In both work and social circles, this can show up as a kind of competitive inflation around effort. People compare how many hours they’ve worked — and the numbers quietly creep up. Fifty hours a week becomes normal. Sixty becomes “wow,”for a while, then it’s expected, if you want to say you do long hours at all. Before long, the only way you can claim to be hardworking is by inventing a machine that bends space and time, so that you can somehow work 60 hours in a day.

7. Image Repair / Reputation Control

Image repair, aka reputation control, is about controlling how things appear after something has gone wrong. Not by fixing the problem — but by reinstating how things were perceived before the breach. The goal is not to change reality, but to preserve the appearance of competence, fairness, or moral integrity. This links directly to image management as a value, so the line between the two can be a little blurry. An easy way to think of it is this.

Image management is the day-to-day performance — like a boss who keeps their desk spotless because it makes them look organized, while at home their place looks like mine: covered in dog hair, half-done repairs, and piles of receipts from overdue tax returns. Then Piotrek — the only person who’s actually seen their house — casually mentions this in a staff meeting.

Now image repair is required, because the long-maintained illusion of being organized is under threat.

The boss might respond by inviting the whole team over for dinner after hiring industrial cleaners. Or they might go for something more efficient — painting Piotrek as an anally retentive pedant, pointing to his model train collection and the fact he goes to a nail studio. The latter is a smear campaign — restoring their image at Piotrek’s expense.

The distortion here is that the issue itself disappears, replaced by a narrative that protects those in power. Appearance takes priority over reality. The function is straightforward: accountability is avoided, while reputation remains intact.

As Erving Goffman showed, social life already involves performance. But when image management and image repair combine, that performance stops being harmless — and starts protecting power. PR language, moral signaling, carefully curated narratives… and when appearance replaces reality, what people believe about a system becomes more important than what it actually does.

8. Pathologizing non-compliance

Pathologising non-compliance is where behaviors that challenge the system — or out it as unfair, harmful, or untenable — are labeled as abnormal, irrational, or disordered. Where the earlier tactics discourage dissent, this one paints failure to comply as evidence that you are defective.

Michel Foucault helps us understand how this operates. In Madness and Civilisation, he shows that what counts as madness shifts depending on what those in power define as acceptable. Which means madness is not some fixed, objective thing — it moves. When the church was dominant, seeing angels wasn’t madness — it was a blessing. Hallucinating statues bleeding from the eyes? Still fine. The Enlightenment rolls in, rationality becomes king, and suddenly those same experiences are a fast track to the psych ward.

R. D. Laing showed something similar at the level of family systems. The person not following the mandates of those with power gets labeled irrational or unstable — even if those mandates are completely irrational and unreasonable. The response to dysfunction becomes the problem, while the dysfunction itself quietly disappears.

But this doesn’t stop at family systems. Thomas Szasz points out that, even today, there is no clear yardstick for what counts as mental health in the way there is for physical health. Which means what gets called “mental illness” often functions as a label for socially unacceptable behavior. In other words, dissent gets medicalized.

And this is where the link to values becomes really clear. Because systems like the DSM and ICD rely heavily on behavioral criteria. Meaning “health” is often defined by whether you can regulate what you show. If you can keep it together, look functional, and not visibly crack under pressure, you’re fine. If you can’t — you risk being classified as disordered.

So what you are really being asked to do is self-regulate. To manage what you display. To perform stability. Which is just image management — via curating behaviors.

We saw this in our very first example. The people on the synergistic systems team did NOT display despair, lack of concentration, lack of joy or the very reasonable urge to fling themselves out of the nearest window rather than open another spreadsheet. They didn’t exhibit those things, because doing so might invite an actual label – like “depressive” or “anxiety disorder.” Labels that would rendering them the problem, when the reason for their behaviors is the sickness of their workplace system.

Daniel, of course, was already breaking. Yet he was still trying, with every tool at his disposal, to keep up with unreasonable expectations.

Sara Ahmed helps us understand the final twist. What gets recognised as “healthy” behaviour in institutions is not neutral — it’s patterned. It aligns with what the system needs. Remaining composed, agreeable, productive — regulating your distress and continuing to function — reads as health. Even if what you are doing is suppressing very normal human responses to a terrible environment. Screaming, crying, raging, having problems with authority — these show up on diagnostic lists. Being fake, toxicly positive, and brand-compliant do not.

So certain forms of over-adaptation and emotional suppression become normalized — even rewarded. They don’t register as pathology, because they fit. Over-functioning, self-silencing, constant self-regulation — become the standard of being “well.”

I see this on a daily basis here in Germany, where you are never an actual person anyway. You are your job. If you ask most people here if they like what they do, it is almost like seeing a foreign program taking over, as their eyes glaze over, and their vocal cords choke out
“It’s really great” or
“It’s a lot of fun” with as much conviction as possible.

And here’s the thing. If you’re not already going slightly mad on your own, this creates an actual mindfuck. Cos if you fail or refuse to adopt the ever-smiling, lunatic behavior the system deems “healthy” — you risk being officially classified as pathological for despairing at all this.
In other words, you perform one kind of pathology to avoid being labeled with another.

The distortion here is actually very simple. Responding or reacting to dysfunction — instead of pretending it doesn’t affect you — is re-framed as dysfunction itself.

The function is just as simple. If the person raising an issue, or failing to cope with systemic dysfunction, can be framed as defective, then whatever they are saying or embodying no longer needs to be addressed. They can be rendered an unreliable witness, and their evidence is dismissed.

The system carried on, looking fine — at their expense.

10. Scapegoating

Now we get to scapegoating. And if you want a deeper dive into how pathologising non-compliance feeds into this — particularly in the mental health industry — I do recommend checking out the episode “Not So Well Adjusted to a Sick Society,” which I’ll link at the end, just after the simple tool for recognizing whether you’re stuck in a narcissistic system.

The shorter version for now: René Girard and Alice Miller both show how systems resolve tension by placing it onto a person or group. Miller observed this in family systems, Girard at the level of whole societies.

The scapegoat is a sacrificial figure onto whom blame, conflict, or shame is projected, so that others in the system can preserve their self-image, cohesion, or sense of innocence. In narcissistic systems, the scapegoat is blamed and punished in order to protect the image of whoever is in power. Their suffering — their questions, their fear, even their resistance — becomes proof that the problem lies in them. Which allows everyone else to continue looking “good,” innocent, or superior.

You can see how this links to conditional belonging — an in-group / out-group dynamic. And this tactic will come up again in the next episode, when we get into the roles people end up occupying in these systems. Because scapegoating isn’t just something people do — it’s something someone becomes.

The unsettling part is this: what Miller observed in families, Girard shows at scale. The same mechanism applies to whole groups. So you might be the scapegoat — or you might be part of a group that has been assigned that role.

You see this in workplaces, where everything somehow becomes Tomek’s fault — no printer paper, broken coffee machine, boss in a mood. Tomek becomes a convenient outlet for tension, and a way for everyone else not to think too hard about their own role in things. Or Tomek — along with anyone else from Eastern Europe — becomes the target, based on some recycled, German cliché about who is or isn’t hardworking. Which is particularly absurd, when in other countries, this stereotype runs in the exact opposite direction.

You see it operate in societies as well, as René Girard shows. One of the clearest historical examples is Nazi Germany, where the Jewish population was constructed as the cause of the country’s suffering — allowing wider structural and political failures to be displaced onto a targeted group.

The distortion, for every size of system, is that the issue appears to be located in one individual or group — instead of in the system itself.

The function, in narcissistic systems, is the usual. The system gets to look like it isn’t the problem. The system gets to look like it isn’t the problem. The problem is Tomek — and everybody knows it. The thing is, when there is no Tomek, the system has to find one. Someone — or some group — has to fill that role. Otherwise, people might start to notice that the problems remain.

This is why the roles we’ll look at in Part III are such a strong indicator that you’re in a narcissistic system. Because the scapegoat role is often required to keep it functioning. But a quick reminder — no single value or tactic confirms a narcissistic system on its own. These patterns work together, reinforcing each other, and moving in the direction of distortions that protect those with advantage — at the expense of those without it.

Scapegoating, for example, can also occur in systems far more extreme than narcissistic ones — as we are about to see.

But before we do, a shout-out to the family scapegoats out there — you likely already know this. If a scapegoat manages to leave a system, what Miller and Bowen both observed comes into play: the system tends to find someone else to take on that role, to carry the dysfunction of a system that refuses to change.

11. Intimidation

Intimidation is what happens when the more subtle tactics stop working. Where the previous tactics distort reality, intimidation openly imposes a far harsher one. It tends to appear when those using these tactics believe they are untouchable — that their image cannot be challenged, or that no one would dare challenge it.

This is why intimidation often shows up most clearly in the smaller, family-sized versions of these systems, where children or partners may not be able to speak out. But there is also evidence of it at much larger scales, including political systems. Think Stalinist Russia and potentially, something more modern and orange.

The link to values here is conditional belonging — the threat of exclusion, punishment, or exile. But it also draws on something more fundamental: fear of harm, loss, or survival itself. In that sense, it marks a shift. Narcissistic systems function best through covert power — where control is hidden, normalized, or mistaken for choice. When intimidation appears, that subtlety is breaking down.

This tactic functions less to distort, and more to enforce. It is a kind of death-throes signal — where compliance is no longer secured through confusion or internalization, but through fear. If these tactics continue, long term, we aren’t looking at a narcissistic system any more. Cos at this point, the system stops pretending. When that fog clears, we see, we are looking at something closer to totalitarianism.

You will not need help to see that. As Hannah Arendt shows, when systems move in this direction, power no longer needs to hide. It doesn’t need to persuade, or confuse, or manage appearances. It just... enforces.

A Simple Tool For Recognizing The Tactics Narcissistic Systems Use.

Now it is time to give you a tool for recognizing all this. Though if you are dealing with intimidation, no tools are required. What’s required are fast legs, to get the fuck out of there. But for the rest, lets put it in context first.

Where values, covered last time, are what the system tells you is good, tactics are what the system does to make you go along with it. Values set the stage, and tactics ensure you follow the script. Together, they ensure the system does not have to change, just your interpretation of it. This is the distortion – that the system is fine, and you are the issue.

Which means the quickest way to spot the tactics is not to analyse everything in detail, but to notice what keeps happening to you. When something happens, asking “why” requires 3 hours worth of podcast. So a quicker way to do this is to check what is going on for you. With three questions:

1. Do you feel confused, ashamed, or unsure of yourself?

2. Are you the one adjusting, backing down, trying harder, or always having to take the blame?

3. And does this seem to happen on an ongoing basis, within the system you are dealing with?

Because that combination is important. If you consistently walk away from interactions feeling disoriented, at fault, and like you need to try harder, you are probably not looking at a one-off misunderstanding. You are looking at a pattern, and that pattern is what these tactics induce.

That basic tool is meant for use with the other basic tool from part one. Part one helped you identify the ideals being promoted around you. This part gave you a way to recognize how those ideals are enforced in practice. And when you combine the two, knowing whether you are in a narcissistic system becomes a whole lot clearer.

If you didn’t catch the tool for values, it’s in the previous post.

The reason this weeks tool is so simple is because it has to be. Most of these tactics don’t announce themselves. They don’t look like control. They look like misunderstandings, personality quirks, or even your own failure to handle things properly. So instead of trying to decode every situation perfectly, you pay attention to the effect. Because the effect is much harder to disguise.

In other words, you don’t need to work out exactly what’s happening. You just need to notice what keeps happening to you. Becuse when you put it all together, something important becomes very clear:

If you are in a narcissistic system, you are not the problem. The system is.

And once you see that, your isolation might start to make sense. The self-blame will likely start to loosen. The question will stop being
“What’s wrong with me?”
and become
“Where are the people who can see this too?”

Because these systems don’t just distort reality. They separate you from the people who would confirm it. Which makes the counter-move as follows: finding each other. In spaces where you don’t have to compete to belong. Where you don’t have to perform to be accepted. Where naming what’s real doesn’t cost you your place.

That’s what we’re building via the podcast that these posts are essentially the transcripts of.

So if something clicked when you were reading—if parts of your experience suddenly made sens—then you are exactly who this is for. An example of such a place is our Discord community. It’s where people step out of those systems, and start relating differently. No image management. No conditional belonging. No quiet punishments for being human. Just people who’ve seen it—and don’t need to pretend otherwise.

If that’s something you’ve been missing, come and find us by heading to https://www.patreon.com/c/TheLonelinessIndustry and supporting what we do. You get to the discord group from there.

I hope to see you soon, and til then, thanks for reading.