Hypernormalization and Global Narcissism: The Family System of Empire

We are not just living through crisis. We are living inside a global narcissistic family system. The parents are empires and corporations. The siblings are nations. And the children—most of us—are gaslit into silence while the house collapses around us.

The late Soviet-era concept of hypernormalization, coined by Alexei Yurchak, describes what happens when everyone knows a system is broken but pretends it still works. Adam Curtis expanded the idea to chart the West’s drift into authoritarian fantasy. In 2025, that fantasy is daily life: scrolling past genocide footage while planning a wedding registry. Not hypocrisy—dissociation. The kind empires enforce.

The Narcissistic Family Blueprint

In narcissistic families, silence is rewarded and dissent punished. One child becomes the golden child—praised, insulated from consequence. Another becomes the scapegoat—blamed for everything. Everyone else learns complicity.

Empire maps onto this script:

• Golden Child Nations. Western powers, especially the United States, are cast as moral actors. Their invasions are called “democracy.” Their weapons become “defense.”

• Scapegoat Nations. Palestine. Sudan. Yemen. Congo. Their trauma is reframed as self-inflicted, not the outcome of centuries of colonial extraction.

• Bystanders. The rest of us. Trained to look away, to keep the machine running, to swallow the lie and call it peace.

As Alice Miller argued, scapegoats carry what the narcissistic system refuses to face. Globally, the Global South has become the container for empire’s disavowed grief and guilt.

Dissociation as Governance

This isn’t numbness. It is sensory overload. As climate psychologist Caroline Hickman notes: “People don’t shut down because they feel nothing. They shut down because they feel too much” (Guardian, 2025).

Hypernormalization exploits this overwhelm. It freezes us in place—not through apathy, but dread.

Frantz Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth how colonial subjects live in a “zone of non-being,” internalizing the colonizer’s worldview until rupture becomes the only path to freedom. Paulo Freire called this conscientização—awakening critical consciousness. Oppression works by absorbing its victims into a false normality so they cannot name it, let alone resist it.

Naming is the first act of refusal.

Narcissism at Scale

In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch warned that a society built on spectacle and consumption would produce a shallow collective self—trapped in fantasy, divorced from history, incapable of imagining a future. That is empire today.

There is no interest in memory because there is no plan for tomorrow. Only crisis on loop. Only denial as survival.

bell hooks wrote that domination requires denial: “We cannot be fully human and engage in acts of oppression.” To keep the machine running, we must dissociate—from others, from the earth, from ourselves.

Hypernormalization is not only a political condition. It is a psychic one.

The Four Horsemen of Global Narcissism

Every narcissistic system feeds on fuel. Globally, that fuel has four names:

• Colonialism. As Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks: “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.” Empire reframed theft and genocide as civilizing missions.

• White Supremacy. James Baldwin observed that the price of whiteness is “never being able to imagine the anguish of anyone else.” Whiteness plays the golden child—pure only in myth, preserved by scapegoating Blackness, Indigeneity, and migration.

• Patriarchy. bell hooks called patriarchy “a system that demands of men that they engage in psychic self-mutilation.” Vulnerability becomes weakness. Cruelty becomes control. Families and nations normalize harm the same way.

• Capitalism. Lasch again: “The pursuit of wealth becomes a way of endlessly shoring up a fragile self.” Capitalism teaches us to consume like narcissists—extracting endlessly, commodifying everything, even collapse.

Together, these systems form the infrastructure of hypernormalization.

Why This Feels Like Family Trauma

This is not metaphor. It is structural.

In families, truth-tellers are cast as unstable. In empire, whistleblowers are criminalized.
In families, golden children believe they earned their privilege. In empire, dominant nations believe they are exceptional.
In families, children normalize abuse to survive. In empire, citizens normalize collapse to function.

The gaslighting is the same. Only the stage is bigger.

Toward Psycholiberation

Fanon demanded rupture: “The minimum demand is that the last shall be first.” Freire insisted liberation requires dialogue. Hypernormalization suppresses dialogue by overwhelming the senses.

Psycholiberation begins with reclaiming the ability to name what is real.

bell hooks reminded us: love is not sentiment, but action. Refusal to dehumanize. Refusal to normalize what should never be normal. Audre Lorde warned: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We cannot fix empire with its own logic.

The Dinner Table

Imagine a family dinner. The house is crumbling. The parents insist everything is fine. The golden child smiles. The scapegoat is blamed. Everyone else stays quiet. That is empire in 2025.

But every narcissistic system has cracks. Every gaslight flickers.

As Ursula Le Guin said in her 2014 speech: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

The family script is not destiny. But it must be named before it can be refused. And refusal is the beginning of freedom.