Projection Projecting Projection

By Leo Gura - September 27, 2019

The trickeries of the mind never cease to amaze. Case in point, this article by David Kupelian:

Democrats And The Dark Art Of Projection

Which is a master class in how to project one’s own projections onto others by accusing them of projection! The boldness of it is impressive.

In this article a stage Blue worldview is projecting it’s limited cognitive, moral, and spiritual development onto a stage Green worldview, thereby seeing Green as lower than Blue — which is precisely backwards. Green appears to be lower than Blue when seen from Blue’s limited POV. But since Blue doesn’t acknowledge that POVs are relative, Blue isn’t aware of itself as a POV, thereby confusing itself with truth. A big part of what it means to be at stage Blue is that you cannot see your POV as just one POV among many others. If you were conscious of that, you’d grow out of Blue.

Notice that the reason this can happen is precisely because all points of view are relative, so there is no baseline to ground any point of view. So if you imagine that your opponents are projecting, they are! — according to your projection, which you imagine you are not doing. If you imagine you aren’t projecting, that’s enough to make it seem like you’re not projecting. But of course all points of view are imaginary to begin with. Which is precisely what projection is trying to deny: “No, I’m not making stuff up, I’m just stating the truth while you’re making stuff up!” << Yeah, that’s something you’re making up! “No I’m not! You are!” << You made that up too!

The #1 rule of projection is: the more you project, the more you accuse others of projecting, the more you deny your own projections.

To be really effective at projection you must attack the person you’re projecting upon for projecting onto you before they’ve even made that accusation. By accusing them first, you deny them the ability to call you out for your projection. This is classic, classic gas-lighting.

So, for example, if you’re cheating on your spouse, you must accuse your spouse of cheating on you before he/she accuses you. This makes it much harder for him/her to accuse you, even though you’re the one who’s cheating. You’d think that the cheater wouldn’t be so obnoxious as to accuse the person he’s cheating on of cheating on him (only a shameless asshole would do that), but its precisely because you think he wouldn’t do it that he does do it! Because he can use your expectations of decency to cloak the truth from you. That’s devilry 101. Devilry is all about finding bold ways of presenting falsehood as truth and truth as falsehood.

Projection is one of the trickiest mechanisms of self-deception. A Spiral Dynamics stage Blue mind especially tends not to notice its own projections.

Do liberals engage in projection? Of course. Most people do. But conservatives engage in it far more. And conservatives are much more likely to deny that they are projecting. Part of what it means to be more cognitively and spiritually developed on the Spiral is that higher stages are more aware when they are projecting while lower stages are totally in denial about it. It takes a lot of consciousness work to escape projection entirely. 99.9% of people cannot escape projection because they simply haven’t done enough serious self-reflection. Transcending projection requires a profound understanding of how Self-Bias works, which again, most people are in denial about.

We’ll talk more about projection in a future video since it’s such an important topic.

Click Here to see ALL of Leo's juicy insights.