Narcissism is cardioid-shaped

When bodies in orbit around a center (x) are drawn as if they are in orbit around one of the orbiting bodies (i), i is situated at the center, x appears to move around i in an elliptical path and all the other bodies appear to move around i in a cardioid path. Only displacing i to orbiting x permits all the bodies (of which i is only one) to move in an elliptical path.

So, let’s be flaky and play with symbols: if i is viewed as I (ego); the other bodies in orbit around x are viewed as Others; the centering of i is narcissism; and the displacement of i from the center to orbiting about x is the Golden Rule… what is x?

One thought on “Narcissism is cardioid-shaped

  1. I’ve been fascinated with the idea of using the Mandelbrot set and Julia sets as a metaphor for objectivity and subjectivity. Each Julia set is a perspective on a mathematical world from the perspective of one subjective point on the complex plane. Mandelbrot set is an objective map of the mathematical world made by summarizing and compiling all these subjective points. But the Mandelbrot set is a cardioid, which in my new geometric myth is the shape of narcissistic distortion, a subjectivity that has placed its own relative position in reality at the center, at an objectively central point of view. This is all nonsense, but it has a meditative charm to it, at least for me.

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