The perpetrators of the recent spate of financial frauds in the USA
acted with callous disregard for both their employees and shareholders
- not to mention other stakeholders. Psychologists have often
remote-diagnosed them as "malignant, pathological narcissists".
Narcissists are driven by the need to uphold and maintain a false self
- a concocted, grandiose, and demanding psychological construct typical
of the narcissistic personality disorder. The false self is projected
to the world in order to garner "narcissistic supply" - adulation,
admiration, or even notoriety and infamy. Any kind of attention is
usually deemed by narcissists to be preferable to obscurity.
The false self is suffused with fantasies of perfection, grandeur,
brilliance, infallibility, immunity, significance, omnipotence,
omnipresence, and omniscience. To be a narcissist is to be convinced of
a great, inevitable personal destiny. The narcissist is preoccupied
with ideal love, the construction of brilliant, revolutionary
scientific theories, the composition or authoring or painting of the
greatest work of art, the founding of a new school of thought, the
attainment of fabulous wealth, the reshaping of a nation or a
conglomerate, and so on. The narcissist never sets realistic goals to
himself. He is forever preoccupied with fantasies of uniqueness, record
breaking, or breathtaking achievements. His verbosity reflects this
propensity.
Reality is, naturally, quite different and this gives rise to a
"grandiosity gap". The demands of the false self are never satisfied by
the narcissist's accomplishments, standing, wealth, clout, sexual
prowess, or knowledge. The narcissist's grandiosity and sense of
entitlement are equally incommensurate with his achievements.
To bridge the grandiosity gap, the malignant (pathological) narcissist resorts to shortcuts. These very often lead to fraud.
The narcissist cares only about appearances. What matters to him are
the facade of wealth and its attendant social status and narcissistic
supply. Witness the travestied extravagance of Tyco's Denis Kozlowski.
Media attention only exacerbates the narcissist's addiction and makes
it incumbent on him to go to ever-wilder extremes to secure
uninterrupted supply from this source.
The narcissist lacks empathy - the ability to put himself in other
people's shoes. He does not recognize boundaries - personal, corporate,
or legal. Everything and everyone are to him mere instruments,
extensions, objects unconditionally and uncomplainingly available in
his pursuit of narcissistic gratification.
This makes the narcissist perniciously exploitative. He uses, abuses,
devalues, and discards even his nearest and dearest in the most
chilling manner. The narcissist is utility- driven, obsessed with his
overwhelming need to reduce his anxiety and regulate his labile sense
of self-worth by securing a constant supply of his drug - attention.
American executives acted without compunction when they raided their
employees' pension funds - as did Robert Maxwell a generation earlier
in Britain.
The narcissist is convinced of his superiority - cerebral or physical.
To his mind, he is a Gulliver hamstrung by a horde of narrow-minded and
envious Lilliputians. The dotcom "new economy" was infested with
"visionaries" with a contemptuous attitude towards the mundane:
profits, business cycles, conservative economists, doubtful
journalists, and cautious analysts.
Yet, deep inside, the narcissist is painfully aware of his addiction to
others - their attention, admiration, applause, and affirmation. He
despises himself for being thus dependent. He hates people the same way
a drug addict hates his pusher. He wishes to "put them in their place",
humiliate them, demonstrate to them how inadequate and imperfect they
are in comparison to his regal self and how little he craves or needs
them.
The narcissist regards himself as one would an expensive present, a
gift to his company, to his family, to his neighbours, to his
colleagues, to his country. This firm conviction of his inflated
importance makes him feel entitled to special treatment, special
favors, special outcomes, concessions, subservience, immediate
gratification, obsequiousness, and lenience. It also makes him feel
immune to mortal laws and somehow divinely protected and insulated from
the inevitable consequences of his deeds and misdeeds.
The self-destructive narcissist plays the role of the "bad guy" (or
"bad girl"). But even this is within the traditional social roles
cartoonishly exaggerated by the narcissist to attract attention. Men
are likely to emphasise intellect, power, aggression, money, or social
status. Narcissistic women are likely to emphasise body, looks, charm,
sexuality, feminine "traits", homemaking, children and childrearing.
Punishing the wayward narcissist is a veritable catch-22.
A jail term is useless as a deterrent if it only serves to focus
attention on the narcissist. Being infamous is second best to being
famous - and far preferable to being ignored. The only way to
effectively punish a narcissist is to withhold narcissistic supply from
him and thus to prevent him from becoming a notorious celebrity.
Given a sufficient amount of media exposure, book contracts, talk
shows, lectures, and public attention - the narcissist may even
consider the whole grisly affair to be emotionally rewarding. To the
narcissist, freedom, wealth, social status, family, vocation - are all
means to an end. And the end is attention. If he can secure attention
by being the big bad wolf - the narcissist unhesitatingly transforms
himself into one. Lord Archer, for instance, seems to be positively
basking in the media circus provoked by his prison diaries.
The narcissist does not victimise, plunder, terrorise and abuse others
in a cold, calculating manner. He does so offhandedly, as a
manifestation of his genuine character. To be truly "guilty" one needs
to intend, to deliberate, to contemplate one's choices and then to
choose one's acts. The narcissist does none of these.
Thus, punishment breeds in him surprise, hurt and seething anger. The
narcissist is stunned by society's insistence that he should be held
accountable for his deeds and penalized accordingly. He feels wronged,
baffled, injured, the victim of bias, discrimination and injustice. He
rebels and rages.
Depending upon the pervasiveness of his magical thinking, the
narcissist may feel besieged by overwhelming powers, forces cosmic and
intrinsically ominous. He may develop compulsive rites to fend off this
"bad", unwarranted, persecutory influences.
The narcissist, very much the infantile outcome of stunted personal
development, engages in magical thinking. He feels omnipotent, that
there is nothing he couldn't do or achieve if only he sets his mind to
it. He feels omniscient - he rarely admits to ignorance and regards his
intuitions and intellect as founts of objective data.
Thus, narcissists are haughtily convinced that introspection is a more
important and more efficient (not to mention easier to accomplish)
method of obtaining knowledge than the systematic study of outside
sources of information in accordance with strict and tedious curricula.
Narcissists are "inspired" and they despise hamstrung technocrats.
To some extent, they feel omnipresent because they are either famous or
about to become famous or because their product is selling or is being
manufactured globally. Deeply immersed in their delusions of grandeur,
they firmly believe that their acts have - or will have - a great
influence not only on their firm, but on their country, or even on
Mankind. Having mastered the manipulation of their human environment -
they are convinced that they will always "get away with it". They
develop hubris and a false sense of immunity.
Narcissistic immunity is the (erroneous) feeling, harboured by the
narcissist, that he is impervious to the consequences of his actions,
that he will never be effected by the results of his own decisions,
opinions, beliefs, deeds and misdeeds, acts, inaction, or membership of
certain groups, that he is above reproach and punishment, that,
magically, he is protected and will miraculously be saved at the last
moment. Hence the audacity, simplicity, and transparency of some of the
fraud and corporate looting in the 1990's. Narcissists rarely bother to
cover their traces, so great is their disdain and conviction that they
are above mortal laws and wherewithal.
What are the sources of this unrealistic appraisal of situations and events?
The false self is a childish response to abuse and trauma. Abuse is not
limited to sexual molestation or beatings. Smothering, doting,
pampering, over-indulgence, treating the child as an extension of the
parent, not respecting the child's boundaries, and burdening the child
with excessive expectations are also forms of abuse.
The child reacts by constructing false self that is possessed of
everything it needs in order to prevail: unlimited and instantaneously
available Harry Potter-like powers and wisdom. The false self, this
Superman, is indifferent to abuse and punishment. This way, the child's
true self is shielded from the toddler's harsh reality.
This artificial, maladaptive separation between a vulnerable (but not
punishable) true self and a punishable (but invulnerable) false self is
an effective mechanism. It isolates the child from the unjust,
capricious, emotionally dangerous world that he occupies. But, at the
same time, it fosters in him a false sense of "nothing can happen to
me, because I am not here, I am not available to be punished, hence I
am immune to punishment".
The comfort of false immunity is also yielded by the narcissist's sense
of entitlement. In his grandiose delusions, the narcissist is sui
generis, a gift to humanity, a precious, fragile, object. Moreover, the
narcissist is convinced both that this uniqueness is immediately
discernible - and that it gives him special rights. The narcissist
feels that he is protected by some cosmological law pertaining to
"endangered species".
He is convinced that his future contribution to others - his firm, his
country, humanity - should and does exempt him from the mundane: daily
chores, boring jobs, recurrent tasks, personal exertion, orderly
investment of resources and efforts, laws and regulations, social
conventions, and so on.
The narcissist is entitled to a "special treatment": high living
standards, constant and immediate catering to his needs, the
eradication of any friction with the humdrum and the routine, an
all-engulfing absolution of his sins, fast track privileges (to higher
education, or in his encounters with bureaucracies, for instance).
Punishment, trusts the narcissist, is for ordinary people, where no
great loss to humanity is involved.
Narcissists are possessed of inordinate abilities to charm, to
convince, to seduce, and to persuade. Many of them are gifted orators
and intellectually endowed. Many of them work in in politics, the
media, fashion, show business, the arts, medicine, or business, and
serve as religious leaders.
By virtue of their standing in the community, their charisma, or their
ability to find the willing scapegoats, they do get exempted many
times. Having recurrently "got away with it" - they develop a theory of
personal immunity, founded upon some kind of societal and even cosmic
"order" in which certain people are above punishment.
But there is a fourth, simpler, explanation. The narcissist lacks
self-awareness. Divorced from his true self, unable to empathise (to
understand what it is like to be someone else), unwilling to constrain
his actions to cater to the feelings and needs of others - the
narcissist is in a constant dreamlike state.
To the narcissist, his life is unreal, like watching an autonomously
unfolding movie. The narcissist is a mere spectator, mildly interested,
greatly entertained at times. He does not "own" his actions. He,
therefore, cannot understand why he should be punished and when he is,
he feels grossly wronged.
So convinced is the narcissist that he is destined to great things -
that he refuses to accept setbacks, failures and punishments. He
regards them as temporary, as the outcomes of someone else's errors, as
part of the future mythology of his rise to
power/brilliance/wealth/ideal love, etc. Being punished is a diversion
of his precious energy and resources from the all-important task of
fulfilling his mission in life.
The narcissist is pathologically envious of people and believes that
they are equally envious of him. He is paranoid, on guard, ready to
fend off an imminent attack. A punishment to the narcissist is a major
surprise and a nuisance but it also validates his suspicion that he is
being persecuted. It proves to him that strong forces are arrayed
against him.
He tells himself that people, envious of his achievements and
humiliated by them, are out to get him. He constitutes a threat to the
accepted order. When required to pay for his misdeeds, the narcissist
is always disdainful and bitter and feels misunderstood by his
inferiors.
Cooked books, corporate fraud, bending the (GAAP or other) rules,
sweeping problems under the carpet, over-promising, making grandiose
claims (the "vision thing") - are hallmarks of a narcissist in action.
When social cues and norms encourage such behaviour rather than inhibit
it - in other words, when such behaviour elicits abundant narcissistic
supply - the pattern is reinforced and become entrenched and rigid.
Even when circumstances change, the narcissist finds it difficult to
adapt, shed his routines, and replace them with new ones. He is trapped
in his past success. He becomes a swindler.
But pathological narcissism is not an isolated phenomenon. It is
embedded in our contemporary culture. The West's is a narcissistic
civilization. It upholds narcissistic values and penalizes alternative
value-systems. From an early age, children are taught to avoid
self-criticism, to deceive themselves regarding their capacities and
attainments, to feel entitled, and to exploit others.
As Lilian Katz observed in her important paper, "Distinctions between
Self-Esteem and Narcissism: Implications for Practice", published by
the Educational Resources Information Center, the line between
enhancing self-esteem and fostering narcissism is often blurred by
educators and parents.
Both Christopher Lasch in "The Culture of Narcissism" and Theodore
Millon in his books about personality disorders, singled out American
society as narcissistic. Litigiousness may be the flip side of an inane
sense of entitlement. Consumerism is built on this common and communal
lie of "I can do anything I want and possess everything I desire if I
only apply myself to it" and on the pathological envy it fosters.
Not surprisingly, narcissistic disorders are more common among men than
among women. This may be because narcissism conforms to masculine
social mores and to the prevailing ethos of capitalism. Ambition,
achievements, hierarchy, ruthlessness, drive - are both social values
and narcissistic male traits. Social thinkers like the aforementioned
Lasch speculated that modern American culture - a self-centred one -
increases the rate of incidence of the narcissistic personality
disorder.
Otto Kernberg, a notable scholar of personality disorders, confirmed
Lasch's intuition: "Society can make serious psychological
abnormalities, which already exist in some percentage of the
population, seem to be at least superficially appropriate."
In their book "Personality Disorders in Modern Life", Theodore Millon
and Roger Davis state, as a matter of fact, that pathological
narcissism was once the preserve of "the royal and the wealthy" and
that it "seems to have gained prominence only in the late twentieth
century". Narcissism, according to them, may be associated with "higher
levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs ... Individuals in less
advantaged nations .. are too busy trying (to survive) ... to be
arrogant and grandiose".
They - like Lasch before them - attribute pathological narcissism to "a
society that stresses individualism and self-gratification at the
expense of community, namely the United States." They assert that the
disorder is more prevalent among certain professions with "star power"
or respect. "In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is 'God's
gift to the world'. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is 'God's
gift to the collective."
Millon quotes Warren and Caponi's "The Role of Culture in the
Development of Narcissistic Personality Disorders in America, Japan and
Denmark":
"Individualistic narcissistic structures of self-regard (in
individualistic societies) ... are rather self-contained and
independent ... (In collectivist cultures) narcissistic configurations
of the we-self ... denote self-esteem derived from strong
identification with the reputation and honor of the family, groups, and
others in hierarchical relationships."
Still, there are malignant narcissists among subsistence farmers in
Africa, nomads in the Sinai desert, day laborers in east Europe, and
intellectuals and socialites in Manhattan. Malignant narcissism is
all-pervasive and independent of culture and society. It is true,
though, that the way pathological narcissism manifests and is
experienced is dependent on the particulars of societies and cultures.
In some cultures, it is encouraged, in others suppressed. In some
societies it is channeled against minorities - in others it is tainted
with paranoia. In collectivist societies, it may be projected onto the
collective, in individualistic societies, it is an individual's trait.
Yet, can families, organizations, ethnic groups, churches, and even
whole nations be safely described as "narcissistic" or "pathologically
self-absorbed"? Can we talk about a "corporate culture of narcissism"?
Human collectives - states, firms, households, institutions, political
parties, cliques, bands - acquire a life and a character all their own.
The longer the association or affiliation of the members, the more
cohesive and conformist the inner dynamics of the group, the more
persecutory or numerous its enemies, competitors, or adversaries, the
more intensive the physical and emotional experiences of the
individuals it is comprised of, the stronger the bonds of locale,
language, and history - the more rigorous might an assertion of a
common pathology be.
Such an all-pervasive and extensive pathology manifests itself in the
behavior of each and every member. It is a defining - though often
implicit or underlying - mental structure. It has explanatory and
predictive powers. It is recurrent and invariable - a pattern of
conduct melding distorted cognition and stunted emotions. And it is
often vehemently denied.
