Endo-ideal

The endo-ideal is a position rather than a person, and the four things it holds are the four things everyone else is denied. Virtue, ownership, victimhood and credit accumulate at the centre while vice, guilt and punishment accumulate at the edge, in the negative image, which is the inverse role. Victimhood in that list is the one that surprises, and it is not an oversight. The endo-ideal is the party recognized as wronged, which is why a crime against an endo-ideal produces direct compensation and a crime against anyone else is absorbed by the group. The position is entirely dependent and entirely dominant at once. The endo-ideal does not exist without reflection, since reflectors pointing their empathic conduits at it are what constitute it, and yet nobody else in the group exists without the endo-ideal, since every role is defined by distance from it. What the position confers is the right to define normative and deviant and the right to shun and include, which means law and governance operate by the endo-ideal and for it, and everyone else is an object owned by it. Occupying the position damages the occupant. An endo-ideal has inhibition of empathic conduits, and endo-ideals who avoid becoming endoselves generally do so by expending their accumulated excess through physical activity, creation or altruism.

Freud's group psychology described members of a group substituting a leader for their own ego ideal, which is the closest existing structure and one Marsh's term partly parallels. Max Weber's charismatic authority describes the leader constituted by followers' recognition, and social identity theory has the prototype, the group member who best embodies what the group takes itself to be. Marsh's version differs by making the position a location in a structure rather than a person or a leadership style, and by attaching a specific inventory to it. Virtue, ownership, victimhood and credit are transferable quantities in her account, so occupying the centre is not a matter of status but of where four particular things accumulate.