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May 25, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:31
1670 Narcissism

Suffocation through self-obsession...

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Hey everybody, Steph, how are you doing? Well, so a listener asked for a podcast on narcissism, and now that it fits entirely into my schedule, we shall provide the usual caveats.
Of course, this is just amateur hour.
My thoughts about narcissism, I have no competence to make any kind of diagnoses or anything, but these are just my thoughts about it as a guy with no training.
So let's look at some facts.
A narcissistic personality disorder, NPD, is a personality disorder defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM, used by the U.S. as a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.
The narcissist is described as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power, and prestige.
Narcissistic personality disorder is closely linked to self-centeredness, and this is from Theodore Millen identified five subtypes of narcissism.
Any individual narcissist may exhibit one or more, none or one of the following.
Unprincipled narcissist, including antisocial features, a charlatan who is fraudulent, exploitive, deceptive, and unscrupulous as an individual.
An amorous narcissist, including histrionic features, the Don Juan of our times, its erotic exhibitionist, compensatory narcissist, including negativistic passive-aggressive avoidant features, elitist narcissist variant of pure pattern, corresponds to Wilhelm Reich's phallic narcissistic personality type,
fanatic type, including paranoid features, a severely narcissistically wounded individual, usually with major paranoid tendencies, who holds onto an illusion of omnipotence, These people are fighting the reality of their insignificance and lost value and are trying to re-establish their self-esteem through grandiose fantasies and self-reinforcement.
When unable to gain recognition of support from others, they take on the role of a heroic or worship person with a grandiose mission.
The ideology of this disorder is unknown, according to certain researchers.
However, there is a list of the following factors identified by various researchers as possibilities.
An oversensitive temperament by birth or at birth, overindulgence and overvaluation by parents, valued by parents as a means to regulate their own self-esteem, Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic feedback, unpredictable or unreliable caregiving from parents, severe emotional abuse in childhood, being praised for perceived exceptional looks or talents by adults, excessive praise for good behaviors or excessive criticism for poor behaviors in childhood.
Some narcissistic traits are common and a normal developmental phase when these traits are compounded by a failure of the interpersonal environment and continue into adulthood.
They may intensify to the point where narcissistic personality disorder is diagnosed.
Pathological narcissism occurs in a spectrum of severity.
In its more extreme forms, it is narcissistic personality disorder.
NPD is considered to result from a person's belief that they are flawed in a way that makes them fundamentally unacceptable to others.
This belief is held below the person's conscious awareness.
Such a person would typically deny thinking such a thing if questioned.
In order to protect themselves against the intolerably painful rejection and isolation that they imagine would follow if others recognized their supposedly defective nature, such people make strong attempts to control others' view of them and behavior towards them.
Pathological narcissism can develop from an impairment in the quality of the person's relationship with their primary caregivers, usually their parents, in that the parents were unable to form a healthy empathetic attachment to them.
This results in the child conceiving of themselves as unimportant and unconnected to others.
The child typically comes to believe they have some personality defect that makes them unvalued and unwanted.
Narcissistic personality disorder is isolating, disenfranchising, painful and formidable for those living with them, and often for those who are in a relationship with them.
Distinctions need to be made among those who have NPD, because not each and every person with NPD is the same.
To the extent that people are pathologically narcissistic, they can be controlling, blaming, self-absorbed, intolerant of others' views, unaware of others' needs and of the effects of their behavior on others, and insistent that others see them as they wish to be seen.
People who are overly narcissistic commonly feel rejected, humiliated and threatened when criticized.
To protect themselves from these dangers, they often react with disdain, rage and or defiance to any slight criticism, real or imagined.
To avoid such situations, some narcissistic people withdraw socially and may feign modesty In the case of feeling the lack of admiration, adulation, attention, and affirmation, the person can also manifest wishes to be feared and to be notorious.
Though individuals with NPD are often ambitious and capable, the inability to tolerate setbacks, disagreements, or criticisms along with a lack of empathy make it difficult for such individuals to work cooperatively with others or to maintain long-term professional achievements.
With narcissistic personality disorder, the person's perceived fantastic grandiosity, often coupled with hypomanic mood, is typically not commensurate with his or her real accomplishments.
The exploitive sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, disregard for others, and constant need for attention inherent in NPD adversely affected into personal relationships.
It has been suggested that narcissistic personality disorder may be related to defenses against shame.
Glenn Gebhard suggested NPD could be broken down into two subtypes.
He saw the oblivious subtype as being grandiose, arrogant, and thick-skinned, and the hypervigilant subtype as easily hurt, oversensitive, and ashamed.
He suggested the oblivious subtype represents a large, powerful, grandiose self to be admired, envied, and appreciated.
This self is the antithesis of the weakened and internalized self that hides in a generic state of shame.
This is how the internalized self fends off devaluation, while the hypervigilant subtype neutralizes devaluation by seeing others as unjust abusers.
The hypervigilant type does not fend off devaluation.
He is obsessed with it. Jeffrey Young, who coined the term schema therapy, a technique originally developed by Aaron T. Beck, also links shame to NPD. He sees the so-called defectiveness schema as the core schema of NPD, next to the emotional deprivation and entitlement schemas.
All schemas... Okay, I don't know what the hell they're talking about, so...
Sorry, let me just... You can look that up in wiki if you like.
So DSM-4, this is the diagnostic manual.
The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, either in fantasy or actual behavior, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of situations and environments.
In order for a person to be diagnosed with NPD, they must meet five or more of the following symptoms.
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance, e.g.
exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love.
3. Believes that he or she is, quote, special and unique and can only be understood by or should associate with other special or high-status people or institutions.
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e.
unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
6. Is interpersonally exploitive, i.e.
takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
7. Lacks empathy, is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
And there's a little bit more, but I wanted to talk about, I mean, this is a little hard to get through.
It's just a skim, of course, and I'm going to give you my own theories about what is going on with these kinds of behaviors.
And I will try to bring as much clarity as I can to, of course, my theories.
So, I think the first thing to understand is that healthy parenting, and I think we can all agree on this, right?
That healthy parenting is designed to point the child towards the world, right?
That's the ideal behind healthy parenting, right?
I mean, you want your child to focus on two things when they're young, right?
You want the child to focus on exploring the world and The outside themselves and mastering their own physical competence within the world, right?
So you want them to go and walk up the street and look and explore.
I mean, Isabella's going through a phase where she loves wind chimes, right?
Wow, they're cool!
And so you want your child to explore the world and to feel comfortable exploring the world And you also want your child to gain competence in their own physical abilities, right?
So in their manual dexterity, their balance, and their self-confidence with their physicality.
And that's good parenting.
I mean, that to me is the bare minimum of good parenting.
What you don't want, and this is what's so strange for people who expect that children are going to fulfill their own emotional needs as parents, is What you don't want to do to be a good parent, in my opinion, is you don't want to have the child focus on you, right? You don't want your child to focus on you because your job is to train your child to be a competent adult.
In the world, right? To do right, to have strength, to bend where bending is necessary, to stand tall where standing tall is possible and all those kinds of good things.
And you want the child to focus on their growing competence within themselves, within their own bodies and within their own thoughts and within the world itself.
That's what you want. In the same way, if you're a good teacher, what you want is for people to learn things, right?
Not to sit around and go, wow, what a great teacher, you know, because that's, I mean, that's nice to hear.
I guess I hear that from time to time, daily, which is nice, right?
But I really want people to focus on philosophy.
And if I'm a good means to an end, if I'm a good archway through to that view, fantastic.
You know, if you want to look at the archway and say, hey, nice archway to a view, great.
But the poet persists to go through and look at the view.
And so... As a teacher, your satisfaction, your gratification is in the mastery of your students of a particular subject, not of their appreciation of you as a teacher.
Their appreciation of you as a teacher is something that will occur as a result of them mastering the topic.
I remember when I was younger, I had a lot of problems with Algebraic Division.
And I did finally master Algebraic Division.
And I remember being very gratified and very happy with the teacher who helped.
And so I thought, wow, what a great teacher.
Because that's a result of the teacher helping me to learn and understand this.
I was a tutor, actually, of course. It was nothing to do with the public school system.
And so, parents who think that children are going to be interested in them, well, I mean, I know that Isabella likes me, and she has very strong attachments and affections towards me, but she's certainly not interested in me as an individual.
I mean, that's not even close to where she should be focusing her energies and attentions, right?
Sorry for that long ramble, but I think that's really important.
So she's going to appreciate me as a teacher, as a parent, or whatever as she gets older, but only as a result of the things that I'm able to impart to her that are of use to her, that are of value to her.
And so her appreciation for me as a parent is going to be years and years down the road.
And that's exactly as it should be.
To focus on allowing and encouraging excellence to develop in somebody else means that they have to focus on their own thoughts, their own processes, their own experience.
They have to internalize the mastery, right?
So Isabella, she's just figuring out how to jump, right?
So she's obsessed with learning how to jump at the moment.
And because we're doing Pop Goes the Weasel and there's a big jump and And so I want her to look at me when I'm jumping to see what I'm doing, but I don't want her to wonder if I'm a good jumper.
I want her to see, well, there's a good jump, so if I do this and I sort of put my chest out a little bit and raise my arms, then I can jump well.
That's what I want her. I don't want her to sit there and go, my dad's a great jumper.
What sense would that make?
I already know how to jump. There's no point, right?
If you put aside your need for ego gratification, which to want ego gratification from a child is, I don't know, I think it's pretty weak and verging on contemptible because it is exploitive and it's not your job as a parent to try and get ego gratification from your kid.
But there are, of course, some parents who will do this, right?
Who will focus on Facilitating the child's mastery of the world and their own bodies and their own minds.
And that's great. That's fantastic.
And those children, I would guess and imagine, completely predict, would never go on to become narcissists.
Now, a narcissist, I mean, what I'm getting out of the literature and what I've sort of gotten out of the stuff that I've read and thought about over the years and the people that I have known, is a narcissist is very much focused, obsessively and to a large degree exclusively focused on what other people think.
What do other people think of me?
Am I admired? Am I perceived to be competent or intelligent?
It's all about other people's.
What's a What the objective is, or what Rand would call the second-hander.
Not what is true, but what do people think is true.
But it's more focused around personal grandiosity rather than actual achievements.
And there's only one way that I can imagine that that would come about.
Which is, if you're a parent and your child who is designed to go out into the world and figure out the world and discover the joy of competence within that world, it's competence of their own mind and body, If you interrupt that process by demanding that the child focus on you and meet your needs, then I believe that a terrible, terrible damage is done to the child's soul.
Because the child's attention is going to swing, is going to devolve from exploring the world to pacifying and managing his parent.
And I'm just going to use mom here because women are the majority of abusers and women are the majority of the caregivers, right?
So we'll just use mom here, right?
So if your mom is not blankly facilitating your exploration of the world and yourself, but rather is unpredictable, is moody, can be dangerous, can be withdrawing, can punish you for things that you don't understand or can't figure out, withholds can punish you for things that you don't understand or can't figure out, withholds food or affection,
terrifying, right? Well, what happens is your, you know, finely tuned brain and body radar, which is really designed to go out and explore, explore, explore, collapses inwards and focuses on managing the emotions of your mother, on protecting yourself against the negative consequences that Can and seemingly inevitably do occur in this situation,
right? So if your mom is verbally abusive or manipulative or, you know, withdraws or whatever, right?
Or if your mother is a tattletale, so to speak, or an enabler of abuse that comes from your father, you know, the wait till your father gets home kind of thing.
Then what's going to happen is all your finely tuned radar designed to go out and ping the planet and develop your delight in exploring and becoming competent in the world and with yourself, all of that collapses.
The world becomes something that you really can't afford to explore because you...
You have to spend all your time managing the possible negative repercussions that are coming out of your mom, right?
The punishment, the moodiness, the withdrawal, and the threats, both explicit and implicit.
You have to manage all of that.
And so, with a terrible, heartbreaking sigh, you kind of give up the world.
You give up the world and you devolve into managing Your mother.
Because her moods are, you know, the imperative, of course, my friends, we know this, right?
The biological imperative is screw the world.
The important thing is to survive, right?
And if you're in an environment where exploring the world is a good thing for you to do and is supported and so on, right?
Then you'll go and explore the world and you'll develop in a healthy manner.
But if you're in a family where exploring the world brings punishment and moodiness and criticism and so on, where your internal Stability is not there or certainly not guaranteed.
Why? You can't focus on the world.
You have to, like, you can't focus on the world any more than somebody in the middle of an earthquake can focus on his taxes or doing his taxes, right?
He can't because it's like, well, shit, I better get out of this building because it might collapse, right?
So, to grow up having to manage your mother's emotions...
is something that completely interrupts, impedes and destroys, I think, in the long run.
It destroys the world-seeking natural muscles within the child's soul, the desire to go out and master the world, the desire to go and explore and to figure things out.
And it's replaced with a depressing kind of bedside nursing that goes on because, you know, mom might get upset, mom might get mad, mom might punish me, mom might get moody, mom might slam the door, mom might express displeasure to the point where I'm afraid of not getting food and shelter in the long run.
I mean, the moods of adults are so enormous to the minds of children that it is something that I think parents need to be amazingly sensitive to, just how loud we are to our kids, right?
We've got so many concerns going on in our minds, thoughts and ideas and impressions and anxieties and desires and so on.
We've got all these things going on in our minds, but children have, you know, five toys and And us, right?
I mean, all of the processing that goes into our world, which extends, of course, way beyond the family home, well, the kids are almost entirely focused on the family home.
And that's why they're so amazingly perceptive, right?
Because they're like, you know, they're like a...
I guess they're like a biologist studying one ape.
Well, that biologist is going to learn a hell of a lot about that one ape.
And so I think that's really, really important for parents to understand just how large we loom in our children's minds' eyes.
Now, what happens is, if you then, you grow up with this inflicted need to manage other people's emotions, what happens is that your survival mode, which, you know, as I said, and sorry to repeat it so often,
I really want to make sure that I'm following the thread, your survival mode, which is originally designed to learn about the world and to go out into the world and conquer the world, Your entire radar gets reoriented so that you become a people manager, a people reader, a people manager.
Now... One of the things that is true in the literature around narcissism is that narcissists are more focused upon the effects than the causes.
So, a narcissist wants to be perceived as great regardless of the cause, which is why some narcissists, of course, become so dangerous and some even become murderous because they just want to be known and it doesn't really matter for what.
And this is very important.
They want the effect. They don't want the cause.
And that's because, as children, they have been told that if they do not provide the effects of love, they will be punished.
If they do not provide the simulation of love, right?
So, you know, it's the old thing...
I'm mad at mom. It doesn't matter.
Go kiss your mother. Go make up.
Go sort it out.
Or parenting, the bad parenting, which is where you just tell warring children to shake hands and stop fighting, which is the effect.
of a negotiated resolution, but it doesn't cause the problem to go away.
It's just you want the children to behave as if the problem has been solved.
You want the children to behave as if you are worthy of love and respect, even if you're not, right?
So when parents are moody and abusive, they get really angry at the inevitable results that that has on their children, right?
So the children then get frightened and they get Anxious and they get hostile and when they get up to be teenagers, they become often disobedient or maybe even oppositional.
And yet, the parents will say, you know, you owe me respect, right?
And they want the effect, they don't want the cause, right?
So they want to be mean parents, but they want then their children to love and respect them.
Although, of course, love and respect does not flow from abuse.
In fact, quite the opposite.
And so, when you have children who are put into this environment where it is a constant, like, you give me the effect of virtue, you give me the effect of love and respect, and I'll punish you if you don't give me these things, which is, of course, to demand the psychologically impossible, right?
You're demanding the empty effect of virtue through aggression against children.
This is contemptible and despicable and vile and hideous, right?
I mean, this is the counterfeiter, right?
The counterfeiter demands the effect of productivity without the actual work of being productive and trading, right?
The thief demands the effect of property acquisition without the actual work of developing value and trading and so on, right?
The rapist demands the effect of sexuality without love or desirability or even sexual attraction.
Quite the opposite, right? So, this desire for effects in the absence of cause, in the same way that the state, of course, demands money, as if you have signed a social contract, right?
We understand that the state is just another one of these things that are enforcing the effect rather than earning it, right?
So, the state says, well, you owe me obedience because you were born here and it's part of the social contract and this and that, which is all, of course, complete nonsense, but...
That's how this stuff works, and the state is, in this sense, narcissistic to the core, because it wants the effects without the cause.
It will force you to pay, and then it will tell you that your payment is voluntary and the result is a virtue, and you have a vote, and all this sort of stuff, right?
And so to me, it's not at all surprising why narcissists would focus on manipulating the effects rather than creating the honest causes for emotional states and why they would react with rage when those emotional states fail to materialize, right?
So you sort of take the stereotypical example of, you know, some guy makes a lot of money and he then thinks, oh, you know, now I'm going to have a nice, great car and a sexy girlfriends and great parties and everyone's going to love me, right?
And in the typical, since the dawn of time, F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of way, he does all It's a great car, gets a great pretty girl, and throws great parties, and so on.
But he finds, of course, that this is not.
People will come, but they don't respect him, and they don't respect what he's doing, but they will say what he wants them to say because he's given them free booze and drugs or whatever, right?
So, that is the effect, right?
I mean, if I do these things, I would get the effect of friendship without actually having to be a good friend, but rather just being a guy who spends a lot of money on people.
And that is very sad.
The effects also, I mean, in the industries like Valentine's Day or whatever, right?
Birthdays or anniversaries, these are all predicated on the effects rather than the cause, right?
So, a guy... You shouldn't actually need to get the woman that you love anything special on Valentine's Day, in my opinion, because it should all be implicit in the relationship every day, right?
And that, I think, is sort of important.
But people want the effect, right?
They want, oh, give me a big thing.
The woman with the ring, particularly women with the ring, the engagement ring, is the engagement ring big?
Does that mean that I'm... It's all effect, right?
It's not actual cause, right?
If you have the cause... You don't really care about the effect.
If you actually have the thing itself, you don't really care about the effect.
If you have the love of a good woman, you don't really care if people think your relationship is good or bad.
You just don't care. Whereas if you don't have the love of a good woman, if you're just with someone that you want other people to envy your girlfriend because she's pretty or whatever, right?
Then you really do care what people think of her because that's really all you're going for.
Whereas if you have the actual thing itself, if you have real love, you don't need the car.
You don't need to buy people off with drinks and drugs and be a host and all that kind of stuff, a permanent host.
You don't need that stuff because you have the actual thing itself.
So this desire to have the effects of virtue and competence and excellence and so on without the actual cause...
of these things is entirely comes out of how these children are raised and how their parents were raised to children and so on and so on ad nauseam ad infinitum until someone puts their goddamn foot down and stops this depressingly repetitive pattern.
So, when you are forced to manage your mother, you will end up managing everybody else in your life forever.
You will end up attempting to gain the effects without having to work for the cause, and that makes you unstable and often aggressive and manipulative, and you lack that core and that competence and that sense of self-esteem that comes from being competent within the world and within yourself.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I look forward to your donations.
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