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One of the surest ways to ruin a life is to live with a narcissist — and worse is to become one. This lecture from Academy of Ideas dissects the modern epidemic of narcissism. At its core are two things: a grandiose, inflated self-image and a deep lack of empathy. It shows how the narcissist runs from shame by building a false self, and how that mask must be endlessly fed with attention and praise. And it warns that our culture — with its demands for wealth, beauty, and status — is the very machinery now mass-producing this fragility.
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One of the surest ways to ruin our life is to be in a close relationship with a narcissist.
Whether it be a narcissist as a parent, husband, wife, colleague, or friend, if we are forced
to deal with a narcissist on a daily basis, we suffer.
But even worse than having a narcissist in our social orbit is being a narcissist.
In this video, we explore the character disorder of narcissism, looking at what it consists
of, what causes it, and why increasing numbers of people are becoming narcissistic.
Narcissism is based on two primary factors.
Firstly, a narcissist has an excess of self-admiration or a grandiose, or inflated, sense of self.
Narcissists, in other words, judge themselves to be superior to most other people and consider
themselves better looking, more intelligent, higher in social status, more powerful, or
more creative than they really are.
When we say that someone is narcissistic, writes the psychologist Donald Nathanson,
We imply the presence of beliefs about the self that cannot be substantiated.
The second primary characteristic of narcissism is a lack of empathy.
When the narcissist considers what actions to take, the feelings of others rarely factor
into their calculations.
Narcissists view other people as tools to be used to help them attain their wants and
needs.
And one of their primary needs is to obtain what is called narcissistic supply.
supply consists of undue attention, adulation, and praise, and it is the fuel that helps
the narcissist maintain their inflated self-image.
Like most personality disorders, narcissism exists on a spectrum. At the extreme end of
the spectrum are the malignant narcissists. Malignant narcissists are the personification
of evil. They exploit, manipulate, gaslight, and lie to attain what their grandiosity leads
them to believe they deserve, and they do so without feeling the pangs of conscience.
The malignant narcissist is so convinced of his superiority, so in need of narcissistic supply,
and so lacking in empathy that he submits to nothing but his own will. Or as M. Scott Peck
wrote in People of the Lie, malignant narcissism is characterized by an unsubmitted will. All
adults who are mentally healthy submit themselves one way or another to something higher than
themselves, be it God or truth or love or some other ideal. They do what God wants them to do
rather than what they would desire. They believe in what is true rather than what they would like
to be true. What their beloved needs becomes more important to them than their own gratification.
In summary, to a greater or lesser degree, all mentally healthy individuals submit themselves
to the demands of their own conscience. Not so with malignant narcissists, however. In the
conflict between their guilt and their will, it is the guilt that must go and the will that must
win. It is estimated that only a few percent of the population are malignant narcissists,
but the number of people who can be characterized as mild to moderate narcissists greatly exceeds
this rate. These individuals possess an inflated self-image, have a diminished capacity to empathize,
require the admiration of others, and lie and manipulate to obtain their fill of narcissistic
supply but to a lesser degree than the malignant narcissist what are the factors that give rise to
narcissism many psychologists have suggested that at the heart of narcissism is psychological pain
or as the clinical psychologist joseph burgo writes whether they show it or even realize
it themselves narcissists are always in flight from pain the primary type of pain the narcissist
flees from is shame the psychologist andrew morrison went as far as to call shame the
underside of narcissism while the psychologist donald nathanson wrote that narcissism is the
system through which personal attributes are exaggerated in order to avoid shame chronic or
severe shame is debilitating and reflects a negative evaluation of the self often this
negative evaluation is a result of a perceived failure to live up to the expectations of our
family peer group or society at large in contrast to guilt which arises when we believe we have
acted in an inappropriate way shame arises when we feel our entire self to be inadequate
or as nathanson put it shame seems always to involve a more or less sudden decrease in
self-esteem a moment in which we are revealed as somewhat less than we want to believe
shame can be useful in enforcing social norms and maintaining group cohesion but all too often
individuals suffer from shame not because there is anything wrong with who they are but because
they interact with cruel people who ridicule or reject them. Malicious or neglectful parents,
for example, are a common cause of shame in children. Other people experience shame because
they live in a sick society and refuse to adhere to its value system or fail to live up to its
unreasonable demands. But no matter the cause, if feelings of shame are persistent or severe,
a defensive reaction is elicited. Some people use shame as motivation to better themselves,
Others withdraw from the world and descend into the depths of depression.
Some numb themselves through addiction, while others practice a narcissistic avoidance of shame
by creating a grandiose self-image and then deluding themselves that such an image,
rather than the one that is eliciting the shame, is a true representation of who they are.
This inflated self-image acts as a sort of psychological armor that protects them from
their pain and as nathanson explains narcissism is a term that must be reserved for that part
of our self-image that would be relinquished were we to accept shame it is an ill-fitting
mask or a badly made toupee a girdle or corset designed to show us as we wish to be rather than
as we are a swagger meant to disguise the slump of disgrace a house full of imitation fine art
in fake jewelry, a phony accent, anything we do to call attention to the self we wish to assume
rather than the person we are. Or as Burgow writes,
Almost everything narcissists say and do is intended to avoid the experience of shame.
The narcissistic defenses they mobilize against shame are so extreme and pervasive
that they color everything about the person’s personality, relationships, and behavior,
creating a kind of shell or armor against the threat of shame.
When observing a narcissist, it may be difficult to believe they are infected by shame.
They come across as confident and high in self-esteem and they seem to truly
believe in their superiority over others. They don’t appear to be plagued by self-doubts,
self-hate, or insecurities and they often move through the social world with confidence and
swagger. But a man or woman who is truly confident doesn’t require constant doses
of narcissistic supply. Psychologically healthy individuals who possess high self-esteem are
resilient to criticism and are not hyper-focused on the reactions that their self-image elicits
in others. Narcissists, therefore, cannot be said to be high in healthy self-esteem,
rather they possess what the psychologists Brad Bushman and Roy Baumeister call
unstable self-esteem. The unstable self-esteem of the narcissist rests on the shaky foundation
of their inflated self-image and requires narcissistic supply to be maintained if
narcissistic supply is not forthcoming or even worse if the self-image of the narcissist is
threatened by criticism their unstable self-esteem gives way to reveal the insecurity that infects
their true self or as nathanson writes occasionally some accident of life will deny the narcissist
the privilege of narcissistic avoidance or a ruthless foe may strip him from the layers of
covering that provides solace. Then he is left both bare and unloved and suddenly endangered.
As it is impossible to go through life wearing a narcissistic mask of grandiosity without
occasionally bumping up against the hard wall of reality, narcissists deploy another form
of defense to escape from feelings of shame. They learn to repress any negative feelings
that conflict with their mask of superiority and they focus more on the image they project
to the world than on the feelings that radiate from the body they inhabit. Or as the psychologist
and medical doctor Alexander Loewen explains, narcissists are more concerned with how they
appear than what they feel. Indeed, they deny feelings that contradict the image they seek.
And according to Loewen, the more narcissistic one is, the less one is identified with one’s
feelings. The longer a narcissist identifies with a false image, the better he becomes
at repressing negative feelings. But this ability comes at a cost. As to successfully
repress feelings, the narcissist must disconnect from the body, as it is from the body that
the affects of feeling and emotion arise. Over time, this disconnection from the body
and the impaired ability to feel genuine emotions destroys the narcissist’s capacity to empathize.
Or as Loewen explains, the denial of feeling characteristic of all narcissists is most
manifest in their behavior toward others. They can be ruthless, exploitative, sadistic,
or destructive to another person because they are insensitive to the other’s suffering
or feeling. This insensitivity derives from an insensitivity to one’s own feelings.
Empathy, the ability to sense other people’s moods or feelings, is a function of resonance.
We can feel another person’s sadness because it makes us sad. We can share another’s
joy because it evokes good feelings in us. But if we are incapable of feeling sadness
or joy, we cannot respond to these feelings in another person and we may even doubt that
they have such feelings. A lack of empathy, along with a constant need
for praise and adulation, makes the narcissist a plague on the social world. Those who interact
with a narcissist must support the narcissist’s fantasy of superiority. Anyone who fails to
inflate the narcissist’s self-image or even worse causes the narcissist to doubt their own
superiority must deal with their dark side a dark side that is notorious for the anger and rage it
can unleash as the narcissist considers himself to be better than most other people he often views it
as only natural that he exerts control and power over those in his social circle the best way to
deal with a narcissist therefore is to avoid them and if someone close to us is a narcissist we
we should consider cutting ties with them if their narcissism is anything but mild.
For narcissists are notoriously difficult to change,
and their lack of empathy makes them capable of destroying lives
with little to no thought of the suffering they leave in their wake.
Their disorder may be rooted in pain,
but it does not follow that we need to allow them to bring pain into our life as well.
For as Gene Twenge and Keith Campbell write,
a recent psychiatric study found that the biggest consequence of narcissism
especially when other psychiatric symptoms were held constant, was suffering by people close to
them. While we lack studies indicating whether the rate of malignant narcissism is increasing,
the number of people moving the wrong way down the narcissistic spectrum and developing mild
to moderate levels of narcissism appears to be rising. Or as Twenge and Campbell write in
The Narcissism Epidemic, which was published in 2009, in data from 37,000 college students,
narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980s
to the present, with the shift especially pronounced for women. What can account
for this rise in narcissism? One explanation is that our modern value
system promotes unreasonable measures of success, setting people up for shame,
while at the same time technological and economic factors have made it easier
than ever to identify with an inflated or narcissistic self-image to escape
from this shame. Most contemporary societies hold wealth, beauty, social status, and fame
as preeminent values. The ideals of self toward which we are encouraged to aspire are the beautiful
celebrity or the ultra-wealthy entrepreneur. If we cannot reach these ideals, then we should at
least be an attractive person, live in a big house, drive a nice car, have a high-status job,
and associate with other high-status individuals. But these are unreasonable standards. For the
The accumulation of great wealth is as much a result of connections and chance as it is
hard work.
Beauty is mostly contingent on the genetic lottery and age.
Social status is a relative concept which automatically excludes most people from its
higher echelons, and fame is usually bestowed on those who create a spectacle or achieve
notoriety rather than reflecting true greatness of self.
If we are led to believe that we must attain these things to be considered a success, many
Many of us are destined to feel ashamed.
To escape from feelings of an inadequate self, social media, in conjunction with a debt-based
economy has made the narcissistic avoidance of shame easier than ever.
Like a moth to a flame, those who feel shame turn to social media, as through the curation
of profiles we can easily create a new self-image to replace the ugliness and failure we feel
inside.
By sharing only the most flattering parts of life, posting the wittiest of thoughts
in the best of pictures, the creation of a profile tends to be an exercise in the narcissistic
inflation of self. And basking in the glow of the likes and comments that a post elicits
is the quenching of a need for narcissistic supply. But the ease with which we can create
an inflated self-image is further promoted by our debt-based economy. Low interest rates and
easy access to credit allow us to pretend we are richer and more successful than we are.
We can use credit to purchase a luxury car go on an expensive vacation
Mortgage a dream home or even finance plastic surgery
We can then go on social media to show the world what our credit has allowed us to purchase and thus further inflate our self-image
Or as Twenge and Campbell write the inflation and credit leads to inflation and self-image
Helping the narcissism epidemic spread far and wide take a culture that promotes self admiration and material goods
words, add the ability to realize this self-admiration through buying things you can’t really afford,
and many people live the narcissistic illusion that they are wealthy, successful, and special.
The more we inflate our self-image through social media and the use of credit, the more
the other symptoms of narcissism infect our character.
As we identify with an image instead of our true self, we disconnect from the body as
we repress any feelings that make us aware of the lie we are projecting into the world.
With the repression of our feelings, our ability to detect the emotional resonances of others
diminishes and with it our capacity for empathy.
The narcissistic avoidance of shame, therefore, is a devil’s bargain.
It may numb us to our pain, at least temporarily, but at a great cost as we lose the ability
to share in the warm emotionality of loving relationships and we lose the capacity to
cultivate a strong sense of self that is rooted on the firm ground of reality.
narcissism imply freedom from shame? Of course not, writes Nathanson. Humiliation always lies
immediately beneath the surface of deceit. Like the towns built for western movies, it is all
front and no depth, a situation constructed to give the appearance of normality with a little
or nothing behind it. Narcissism, in its more extreme forms, can be viewed as a form of insanity.
It represents a split in one’s personality between the false self of grandiosity and the reality of who one really is, flaws, shame, and all.
The purpose of the narcissist’s life is to live out the lie, which is to disconnect from reality and to suffer from potentially extreme delusions that alter how they perceive others and the world around them.
Or as Loewen writes,
all other respects, the individual may appear to be oriented and fully in contact with reality,
but there is in his or her personality a fracture, maybe only a hairline break, that constitutes
a tendency to insanity. As the degree of narcissism increases, the break becomes more pronounced.
When we recognize the dangers that come from an inflated self-image, we may choose to adhere
to values that are more attainable, more likely to promote psychological health and less likely
to infect us with shame.
We may also choose to abstain from sharing our life on social media in the recognition
that it is very difficult to do so without becoming at least slightly narcissistic.
But so long as the majority of people in our society hold wealth, beauty, status, and fame
to be preeminent values, while at the same time social media and a debt-based economy
offer an easy means of inflating the self, modern society will only become more narcissistic.
wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity,
when success is more important than self-respect. The culture itself overvalues image and must be
regarded as narcissistic. The goal of Academy of Ideas is to empower the individual and promote
freedom. The best way to do this is through ideas, as it is ideas, not politicians, money, or weapons,
that shape the fate of society. Become a supporting member to help us in our mission
and access over 100 membership videos, including our latest membership series on Big Pharma and
The Big Lie. Sign up for only $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year by visiting academyofideas.com
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