On Saying No To Narcissism

Manifesto(es)

One of the books that affected me most - not a best book but a book that stayed with me more than anything else - is called Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited by Sam Vaknin. Vaknin identifies as a narcissist - he had gone to prison for a complex financial scheme and a court-appointed psychologist gave him the diagnosis of narcissism, which Vaknin really took to heart. And then, in true narcissist fashion, Vaknin created a cottage industry slash empire dedicated to warning of the perils of narcissism - a dozen books, endless web videos and talks, and all with the premise of a certified and reformed narcissist whistle-blowing on his own kind. “How many others like me are there?” runs the introduction to Malignant Self Love. “More than you might think, and our numbers are increasing.”

I can remember exactly where I was reading this for the first time - I had taken the book off the shelf of a woman who was convinced that her ex-husband was a narcissist and had amassed a healthy library to bolster her hypothesis - and something about it made me really queasy, the feeling of coming across a vantage-point on the world that is both horrifying and true. 

I read this around 2012, had it in my head for a long time, wrote a play about it, etc, and then there were a whole sequence of events, most conspicuously Trump’s election, that made it clear to me that Vaknin was absolutely right about everything, and that malignant narcissism really was a potent social force, if not the dominant attribute in public space. Vaknin’s point, basically, was that in our society narcissism served as a tremendous competitive advantage. The narcissist, by their nature, was able to draw attention to themselves, and, by manipulating that attention, to distort their surrounding reality to suit their deeply selfish goals. And in a society in which physical violence was de-emphasized, in which civility prevailed, there were insufficient countervailing forces to curb narcissism - everybody might hate the narcissist, but that wasn’t enough, they were free to keep sharking forward and could even turn the hatred accorded to them to their advantage.

Sam Vaknin - narcissist whistle-blower

Everything about the Trump phenomenon seemed like such a textbook case of narcissism that I found it staggering to believe that there would be anyone who wouldn’t see through it, who wouldn’t equate Trump’s narcissism to the narcissists and bullies they had in their own lives. But there it is. And Trump was, like Vaknin, somewhat self-aware about the potentialities of his own narcissism. There’s a story in Politico about the launch of Trump’s 2016 campaign that I’ve quoted before and likely will quote many times again because it so perfectly encapsulates what Trumpism is about and where the weak points in the media-political landscape are. “I’m going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy,” Trump told a group of political operatives in 2013 of his plans to run for president. “I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me.”

What Trump was communicating - with all the clarity of a movie villain giving their summation-of-self to the held-captive-hero - was that something had really gone wrong in the culture and that he fully intended to be the symptom of the underlying, problematic condition. 

The problem was three-fold. There was a can’t-look-can’t-look-away mentality that was taken as fact by the media and passed on from there to the public-at-large. There was a presumption of winner-take-all, the premise that the society, and the political system, was, fundamentally, a competitive activity and all that mattered was finishing first in the race, by any means necessary. And there was an idea of totalization in public space, the idea that once somebody was covering something then everybody else had to cover it, that there was a certain porousness within the discourse and that, as a result, the entire media and public sector could be led on a string by a canny operator like Trump. 

In a sense the solution to all of these problems was really very simple. It was the ability to look away from whoever was hogging public space; it was an ability to see life and specifically politics as something other than a sport and to view ‘winning’ as being commendable in certain circumscribed activities but as being actually a ridiculous attitude to take to life in general; and it was a turn away from conformity and an ability to create mental bulwarks against the totalizing tendencies of the culture. 

The trauma of Trump’s election victory notwithstanding, it seems like none of the crucial lessons from it have been internalized. The media is just as reactive as ever - and claims, as its justification, that this is what the public wants. The gameification of the society continues in the form of ‘likes’ and in all of adult life somehow configuring itself along the lines of a high school popularity contest. And the sense of totalization continues - an emphasis on ‘we,’ an eradication of meaningful difference, a sense of a streamlined code of conduct and a center that everybody must attempt to occupy. The term ‘Maoism’ keeps popping up unexpectedly - Jordan Peterson and Jaron Lanier have both talked about it - and in circumstances that aren’t necessarily political. It’s maybe an odd choice of phrase but it does fit a hard-to-describe phenomenon, that feeling of totalization, of the granularity of life being stripped away, of everybody using the same devices and the same platforms, of everybody sounding and thinking like each other. 

In the discourse about narcissism there was a very clear, very simple, and very difficult-to-execute antidote. It was all about setting boundaries and keeping to them. Narcissism wasn’t understood as being an evil, it was just a flaw in childhood development, and the narcissist, incidentally, was often as miserable as their victims. The narcissist simply hadn’t developed theory of mind, hadn’t differentiated themselves from their surroundings, and as a result never achieved anything like emotional maturity. There was something captivating about the narcissists in the same way that children are captivating - the way they were in touch with their desires, the way they needed things from their interlocutors, their gift for making themselves the victims. 

And for anybody dealing with narcissists it was basically the same method as dealing with difficult children - don’t get drawn in by them, don’t let yourself be manipulated. In this case, of course, it was a bit more difficult given that the children were adults and had, in some cases, obtained real incontrovertible power. This was what the Trumpies were discreetly trying to communicate to the world - people like Anonymous, Bill Barr, Mike Milley - the idea that while it was impossible to ignore or to wrest power away from a duly-elected president, that there was a path to, as Barr put it, “viewing them as their own worst enemies,” keeping their hands away from the nuclear missiles and setting boundaries whenever possible. It’s hard to know with any of that crowd whether they really were responsible actors or not, whether they were just depicting themselves as high-ranked babysitters and were just as power-hungry as anybody else, but they did actually seem to do a real service - kept the Trump regime from being even more destructive and demonstrated a hard-earned lesson about the perils of dealing with malignant narcissists. 

The rest of the culture has something to learn from that. These are all the qualities that have been eroded away over the last thirty or forty years - the qualities of self-restraint, of asserting autonomy, of tuning out, setting boundaries, etc. It’s not really a surprise, given the manipulations of pop culture and then of digital technology, that we’re no good at any of these things - that we were basically sitting ducks for somebody like Trump. The trick with narcissism, as Vaknin argues, is first of all to recognize it for what it is and then to exert all of one’s energy to not be subsumed by it. That means doing the opposite of everything that the narcissist takes for granted about human nature. It means being a grown-up, having a sense of dignity, having the wherewithal to not get pulled in by whatever the shiniest object is in one’s surroundings.