this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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So, ive been thinking about how my trauma effects my politics. This may shock some of you, but a lot of my radicalizing experiences were pretty fucking traumatizing. Resistance is part of how i cope, how i keep from killing myself, how i get up in the morning after all the shit I've survived. I am under no illusions that I am emotionally healthy.

But that doesn't just go one direction. How do we define and explore the pathology of boot licking, of continued obedience, of feeling perfectly fine and like it's 'just another day and wow yeah something scary must be on if the US marines are deployed down the street, i hope they get the bad guys soon!'?

Because this is a dangerous delusion. It is blatantly and violently counterfactual. So what the fuck? Pathologically stable attachment? Hypersucceotability to delusion?

How do we figure out what a healthy person and healthy context for them to exist in would even fucking look like?

I don't just want to call the pathologically compliant names here¹. I want to figure out what breaks a person like this so we can fucking fix it. I want theories with actual utility in something adjacent to the situationist tradition.

¹'boot licker' is perfectly suitable and requires no further theorizing. Not that I don't also want to call them that.

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[–] an_angerous_engineer@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

You want to learn about narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and, in particular, what happens to the victims of sustained narcissistic abuse. The victims end up suffering from 'codependency' or 'self-love deficit disorder' depending on who you talk to. Your mention of 'pathologically stable attachment' is pretty close to talking about one real aspect of codependency. There are attachment disorders (like anxious attachment disorder) that will cause people to hyper-attach to others (especially abusers).

I do not say this to name-call, per se - but rather to give you some keywords that you can use to learn more about what's going on. I will also recommend this youtuber, and in particular her Glossary of Narcissistic Relationships playlist. She's also written books if you would prefer that format instead. Most information on this topic focuses on interpersonal relationships (intimate ones, especially), but it is trivially applicable to other (larger) contexts.

One of the best things you can do for someone who is suffering from codependency is to help them learn about narcissistic abuse, so that they are even able to recognize what is being done to them. A big part of the apathy that you are observing in people is just plain normalization. They literally don't even recognize that they are being abused. Once you get past this barrier, helping them heal from the trauma and develop far healthier responses to abusive situations becomes a whole lot easier.