The narcissists won long ago
Have a good rant:
According to new research from Queen’s University Belfast, narcissists are some of the most successful people in the world. If you spend your life marauding around with a bellyful of unearned self-worth, it’s claimed, you’ll soon develop a mental toughness that will drive you to beat your more humble peers in education, work and romance.
That may be, but I’d rather live under a toadstool than spend my life marauding around with a bellyful of unearned self-worth. I can’t stand people like that and I would never want to be one.
Everywhere you look, it’s perfectly clear that the narcissists won long ago. Social media drips with wrongheaded opinion masquerading as violent certainty. The buzziest television programme of the day, Love Island, is essentially just a petri dish of obnoxious self-adoration. Untalented colleagues get promoted above you because they are unafraid to gelatinously network. The world’s sole remaining superpower, for crying out loud, is run by a man who looks like the cartoon you’d draw for a monkey to make it understand the basic concept of narcissism.
Ah that’s good. Well done.
It’s telling that Dr Kostas Papageorgiou, whose brainchild this new research was, had to pretzel himself into all sorts of contortions just to make narcissists seem even remotely decent people. “Narcissism is considered as a socially malevolent trait,” he said. However, he added that things would be so much different if only “we could abandon conventional social morality, and just focus on what is successful”.
Oh stupid conventional social morality, why are you always getting in the way of success? Can’t you see all these subclinical narcissists desperate to gobble up the world and fart it out for their own stupid means? Look into their eyes, and see what your basic expectation for them to be even superficially pleasant people is doing to them. You’re draining them of their life force.
Hooray for conventional social morality subhead treating other people decently.
H/t Lady Mondegreen
What’s interesting about this to me is that efforts to pump kids full of self-esteem empirically seemed to have no benefit, so you’d think narcissists, who have huge levels of self-esteem, would have no advantage. Maybe it works, but only at pathological levels?
A narcissist alone is just … alone. Narcissists need a large group of enablers in order to succeed bigly.
What is the explanation for sycophants?
The Golden Rule did not originate with Yeshuah bar Joseph, aka Jesus Christ. And the formulation ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ implies love of self, which I take to mean ‘happiness with yourself as you are’; which again does not mean egotism or narcissism. Believing that one is intrinsically better than others is one of the biggest traps around, IMHO.
The Indian yogis taught that life is lived on four planes: the physical, the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual (which is more as described above that in the common Christian sense of it, IMHO.) But in that sense, non-narcissistic self-love is essential.
It is interesting how much morality is common to the mainstream religions, with the possible exception of Islam, where how you treat someone else depends on whether they are a fellow believer or an infidel.
I have studied a fair bit of the Japanese sword art, kenjutsu in my time. An interesting seeming paradox in its history was that after Buddhism arrived in Japan and the Zen form of it emerged, samurai would become students, disciples, what you will of Zen masters as part of their training. It was found that those who did so were winning most of the duels. So Zen meditation became recognised as an essential part of sword training.
The key skill was to ’empty the mind’ and focus on the present, and be completely indifferent to the outcome of the deadly duel about to take place. (Takes a bit of doing; or should I say non-doing? ;-)
http://www.thegoldenrule.net/quotes.htm
The thing that gets me with this research is it always looks at getting the job as an end unto itself.
So you have narcissists are very good at becoming CEOs – but you don’t really have them being good at being CEOs.
I mean if you look at Trump objectively so far his results are booming oil prices, North Korea making a fool of the US, war crimes on the border, increased tensions with Canada and Mexico stifling trade with both countries, and you have examples such as Harley Davidson opening factories elsewhere because his trade tariffs had the predicted result.
If he continues, as I believe he will, in the vein of Jacob Zuma, you can expect at a point for there to be massive revelations around state capture. There are already Bell Pottinger style operations dedicated to running distraction tactics to claim the MSM are in a conspiracy to make him look bad.
Sure he got the job, but how’s he actually done at doing it? How do any of these narcissists actually do and doing the job they so successfully got? Isn’t that kind important?
Because if they’re very good at getting the job, but not very good at doing it, well that doesn’t sound to me like we should be encouraging narcissism, that sounds to me like we should be re-looking at how we pick people for those jobs.
CEO’s as celebrities mean that success is reinterpreted largely as fame. Getting the job is the key first step in that – it’s news, it’s a splash, it’s a time for attention. After that, making more splash with Big News and Big Events will get the attention, and the attention is itself usually a bit better than the news’ content is: the hum-drum hiring itself is a mark of grand success; being associated with routine announcements of neutral events is a positive boost to reputation; being associated with failures doesn’t hurt much. And the golden parachutes they’ve got in case of abject failure will themselves be praised for the CEO’s clever negotiating in securing them in the first place. They walk away from their own crashes with no injury and the glow of (personal) success.
For that matter, someone like Trump can turn the poor performance indicators into praise from his dedicated applause contingents. Criticism from responsible, thoughtful commentators means he’s “touched a nerve”, and the liberal tears gratify them. If any of it is overboard (according to his cultists), then they get defensive of him, even if they themselves would otherwise have misgivings about the policy at issue.
It needn’t be a coincidence that we’ve got social structures that reward narcissism. The narcissists have been in a position to make that so.
I’m going to quibble about classification and say we’ve got a narcissistic psychopath, or a psychopathic narcissists in the WH, not just a narcissist.
Psychopaths are really the ones in charge, but they have been for a very long time. There’s an interesting documentary here about psychopaths in society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gg7fyYH0e8 – narrated by Peter Coyote, so it’s easy to listen to.
Point is not the classification, but the reality that there are people who have no empathy, but a lot of drive that will climb to the top over the bodies of the rest of it, literally or otherwise. They are the predators and the parasites of society, the best of the conmen.
It was the rule of the masses – the average person who has some empathy added together to correct for ‘error’ – that was supposed to keep us from being enslaved by these folks, but ‘we the people’ have failed.
Blame the Russians, Social Media or Conservative Think Tanks, but don’t leave out apathy and complacency on the part of the population.
Is there any research into whether narcissists are happier than other people? My suspicion is that they’re less happy. People like Trump don’t strike me as being fulfilled — his life seems to be a constant futile quest to “prove” his manhood, win daddy’s love, get the approval of the Manhattan elites, etc.
Re #7 – Here’s a link:
https://www.notsalmon.com/2016/11/13/good-news-for-karma-seekers/
Apparently narcissists are hobbled when it comes to fulfillment and deeper life satisfaction. Frustratingly, the article does not link to the journal article on which it is mostly based, or provide much citation information (Journal of Positive Psychology, at any rate). It’s still the best I could find on the question quickly through Google. So there’s that.
Certainly Trump doesn’t seem to experience joy or friendly companionship the way we do. That smile is not natural; he prefers to be seen scowling; and he’s most naturally expressive when he’s unleashing anger, bluster, or boasting. His body language with his own family (“loved ones” would be making an unwarranted assumption) seems to take them as possessions or trophies; there isn’t a sense of gentleness or affection – at most, he’s impressed with the women’s appearance. And when he speaks of them, there’s no more warmth.
He doesn’t even seem able to enjoy beauty or simply good food. For pity’s sake, Mill’s pig in mud – losing out in hedonic calculus to Socrates dissatisfied – seems able to enjoy things more than Trump does.
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One bit I strongly dislike: saying narcissists have ‘mental toughness’. It’s actually the opposite of toughness, which is a trait we saw in Obama–the ability to weather ever-escalating attacks without either succumbing or panicking. President Dumpster Fire doesn’t have any mental toughness at all. He’s in a state of perpetual backlash because every minor sting is, to him, the worst sort of torture imaginable. He’s lived so long in a gilded bubble (composed of sycophants and paid courtiers who only sing his praises, if they know what’s good for them) that now that he cannot ignore the outside world, it terrifies and confuses him. A toddler throwing a tantrum is not ‘mentally tough’.
Freemage. I absolutely agree with you. Trump is anything but mentally tough. A trait he shares with many of his supporters frankly.