Do you think that cawk purposefully ignores his failures and subsequently employs these silly mental gymnastics as a cope, or is he genuinely incapable of understanding?
Genuinely incapable. He's been tested and even fed some solutions, and it reads more like ego-based blind spots around an illusory know-it-all's core. Anything he reflects as an improvement is closer to a temporary modeling based on how appeased that figure currently makes him feel.
His grounding in reality is nearsighted, and those he can see within his line of near-sight cause him to enter weirdly spun delusional variants of reality. His presence of contradiction also seems more accident-prone than purposeful based on how he behaves during what few times that he's faking his support compared to when he's more desperate.
This guy lacks the means of seeing the big picture from how constantly shifting his smaller pictures are, and the only consistency he can support is how he "isn't losing", at any cost. As long as he cannot fathom his own losses, he will fall into the same traps and mistakes.
It's a shame, he's his own worst enemy. The delusional hype man in his head is single-handedly doing the most damage to him, more than any of us could hope to do on our own.
Is it possible that the realisation hits in those honest moments between going to bed and falling asleep, when a person is all alone with their thoughts?
Any chance he has to realize his mistakes are followed by thoughts twice as loud to drown it out. The more he's pushed, the louder the compensatory voices will become for him.
His inability to face personal blame justifies both how bullied he feels by others and his propensity to try to bully others "back". If he could humbly accept personal responsibility over his failings and could attribute accomplishments from others as not being competition versus his believed ones, he'd be more capable of seeing beyond himself.
As is, he lives a life of it never truly feeling to him like it's his fault... no matter how many faults it costs to do it. He loses his former mindset too quickly to create a comparison between them that'd allow for true growth.
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