Narcissism Is Driving Humanity to Extinction

Narcissism isn’t just a personality disorder, but a psychological tendency that has profound impacts on society at large.

Much has been written about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and the impact it has on people and relationships. While that is important to understand and be aware of, NPD only affects a relatively small percentage of the population. In contrast, narcissism in a broader, subclinical sense is a massive cultural phenomenon. Focusing solely on narcissism’s most extreme pathology causes us to overlook the profound affect that milder versions of narcissism have on both the human psyche, and society as a whole.

Many people tend toward having a big ego, but narcissism is more than that. It actually expresses a fragility to the ego - a wounded ego, if you will - that requires constantly inflating one’s sense of self beyond what is reflected by reality.

In order to feel ok about themselves, narcissistic people have a grandiose view of themselves that reality doesn’t support, and as a result they must divorce themselves from what reality reflects back to them. They cannot accept any criticism as valid, so they must believe that anyone who dares to criticize them is actually the one at fault.

This leads to a permanent victim mentality, and a belief that they are never the one to blame for anything. Nothing is ever their fault, and they are always right. This leads to a fundamental superiority complex, where they see themselves as inherently better (and more deserving) than others around them.

Narcissists cannot see themselves accurately, which means they cannot grow.

And that constant ego-inflation causes one of the most fundamental characteristics of both NPD and subclinical narcissism: an inability to self-reflect, or to receive reflections from others.

Ultimately, one’s capacity for self-reflection results from the values they hold, particularly with regard to how much they value personal growth and self-improvement. It is valuing the journey, the process, because growth is not an end goal that one can ever “arrive” at. An orientation toward growth comes from the understanding that every person has strengths and weaknesses, and that we can never totally eliminate our flaws. All we can do is work to strengthen our weak areas, and that requires constant effort, akin to physical exercise.

The belief that we should continually grow and improve ourselves is predicated on the idea that we all have areas of improvement. So in order to grow we need to identify those areas of improvement, and we can only do that by being willing to examine our own behavior through an outside, objective lens.

This means that those who value growth also value self-reflection, and receiving honest feedback from others. In contrast, those with narcissistic personalities and fragile egos that depend on a false sense of superiority assume that they have nothing to improve and that any issue is always another person’s fault. They are almost allergic to seeing themselves in the mirror because doing so would challenge that fundamental self-perception that their entire identity is based upon.

And narcissism is self-reinforcing because that particular character flaw is, by it's very nature, immune to ever being improved - precisely because of how it makes people avoid self-reflection, which is necessary in order to change and grow. Once a person is in that place, they are stuck in it and it is extremely difficult for them to ever get out.

Narcissistic people are unable to admit to their mistakes, and they cannot ever admit that they are wrong. This has profound implications politically as well as personally, because it means that when faced with new information that challenges previously-held views, the structure of their psyche and self causes them to double down rather than shift their perspective. If they do end up changing their minds, they cannot admit that they have done so and will pretend as if they have never held their previous position.

I’ll expand more on what that means for society in a moment, but first I’d like to dig deeper into the psychological mechanisms behind this.

Narcissism is a maladaptive response to shame.

Narcissism results from a wounded ego, and unfortunately all of us experience ego wounds at different times in our lives. This is normal, and even healthy as long as the ego-wounds don’t cut too deep, and we receive enough support and ego-reinforcement to repair the ego and develop a healthy sense of self.

As painful as it is, shame and guilt are healthy and adaptive human emotions. Shame gets a bad rap because of the toxic expressions of it that most of us have experienced, as a result of people tearing us down and making us feel bad for just being who we are. But that isn’t shame’s inherent nature, and people wielding it as weapon doesn’t make it evil any more than a gun or a sword is inherently evil.

We evolved to feel shame because at its core it is a deeply pro-social emotion. It causes us to feel bad when we have hurt others or acted in a way contrary to our own values, and it is the emotion that drives us to want to make amends and make things right. Without shame, we would have no desire to ever say “I’m sorry” or admit fault, because we truly wouldn’t feel that we’ve done anything wrong.

Shame and anger have a yin/yang dynamic when it comes to the ego, and they keep each other balanced in a healthy human psyche. Anger inflates our ego and motivates us to stand up for ourselves (and others), and it makes us feel strong and powerful. (In truth, it actually makes us strong and powerful.) Shame has the opposite effect, of deflating the ego and keeping us humble. It keeps the ego in check, by making us care when we have made a mistake or done something wrong.

So you can see where this relates to narcissism: those who have that affliction feel no shame. Or more accurately, they have learned to bury shame so deeply inside that they never have to deal with it. At some point in their lives, their ego-wound was so deep that their shame became so strong and overwhelming that they completely reorganized their personality in order to deny it.

Narcissism isn’t an inherent quality that people are born with. It’s a self-protective coping strategy, and it’s also a learned behavior that gets passed down in families, as children see it modeled for them by their caregivers. Essentially it is a maladaptive strategy for dealing with the shame that we all inevitably feel, a strategy that the psyche resorts to when it doesn’t see another option. Instead of learning how to live with shame and feel it in healthy ways, shame gets completely rejected and replaced with an inner superiority complex.

This is why narcissists and empaths are so often positioned as opposites in popular culture. At one end of the egoic spectrum are people who feel shame all the time, who constantly feel bad about themselves and as a result consistently put other people first (to the detriment of their own well-being). On the other end of the spectrum are people who feel no shame at all, so they lose their ability to empathize or care about anyone but themselves.

Needless to say, a healthy person feels shame in a balanced, moderate way - in the right amounts, at the right times, and for the right reasons. And it is precisely this healthy relationship with shame that motivates people to seek a path of growth and self-improvement.

Narcissism leads to a hierarchal mindset, and that puts us all in danger.

Because narcissism results from such a profound egoic wound, it causes a person to cling to a belief in their own superiority in order to feel ok. As a result, they can no longer see themselves and others as equals, for their very own self-preservation.

Seeing everyone as fundamentally equal means that everyone has flaws, everyone can be wrong, and everyone can make mistakes. It means accepting that while you will be better than others at certain things, others will be better than you at certain things. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses because no one is inherently better at all things, just as no one is inherently without flaws.

As soon as a person positions themselves as inherently above someone else, as inherently better, they no longer see that person as an equal. And doing so shifts their entire worldview, from one of equality to one of superiority.

Of course, it’s possible to be a supremacist without being a narcissist, but because ego-inflation is inherent to a mindset of supremacy, it is extremely common for supremacists (of race or gender or anything) to be narcissistic. Narcissism is a psychological tendency that both leads to, and feeds into, a hierarchical worldview.

To be clear, by hierarchy I don’t mean hierarchies of status, which shift and change with the tides as some people lose favor while others become famous. I’m referring to a belief in a hierarchy of value based on a person’s intrinsic qualities, and a concurrent hierarchy of who is entitled to what. Egalitarianism believes that everyone is equally deserving of respect, care, and a good life, because no one is inherently better or worse than anyone else. A hierarchical worldview sees those higher up as having the right to “rule over” those at the bottom - to have more power and wealth than them, because they are entitled to it.

How a person views and wields power is determined by which of these perspectives they hold. An egalitarian wants everyone to wield power horizontally, also known as “power-with”. A supremacist wants to wield power vertically, to dominate and control those they see as beneath them just as they obey those above them. This idea of power can be called “power-over”.

A hierarchical mindset is fundamentally authoritarian, because it holds that some people have the right to rule over everyone else beneath them in the pyramid of power. And the corollary of this is that everyone has the duty to obey those higher up on that pyramid. Laws must be obeyed not because they are just and important, but because obedience itself is a virtue and the only correct decision people can make.

I would argue that the authoritarian mindset is the inevitable result of a narcissistic personality, because having a superiority complex inevitably makes a person desire authoritarianism and hierarchical power structures. A narcissistic person can’t help but to constantly seek to elevate themselves above others, and their sense of “specialness” makes them feel entitled to dominate and exploit other people.

Everyone being treated the same isn’t acceptable, because when one’s sense of self is dependent upon feeling superior to others, equality feels like oppression.

For this reason, narcissism is fundamentally connected to all forms of supremacy (such as white supremacy, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, etc) because they are all predicated upon a hierarchy. They all arise out of a psyche that feels both a need to dominate and assert one’s superiority, and an entitlement to do so. A hierarchical social order doesn’t just feel good to people like this, it feels right.

There is a reason why so many narcissistic people support Trump these days. They see themselves in him, and they want to be him: successful, dominating, tyrannical, able to lie and cheat and get away with it all, because he is that special and deserving. And it’s not just Trump - the entire Republican apparatus from politicians to pundits to social media influencers is made up raging narcissists. They are inevitably drawn to the far-right worldview, which is authoritarian and based upon the superiority of certain groups above others.

These people want to create a world in their own image, a world where special people like them have their boots upon everyone else’s neck. Their policies are completely self-serving and devoid of empathy, based on retribution for being “victimized” because they are treated as equals rather than as superior beings.

This is why they hate “wokeness” and “DEI” so intensely, and are working so hard to eliminate any and all efforts to bring about greater equality and fairness in society. They don’t want equality and fairness. They literally see those things as a threat, because those things actually are a threat to their supremacy.

Narcissism is a danger to humanity itself.

These people seizing power puts us all in danger for obvious reasons. Anyone who feels entitled to dominate you is a dangerous person, no matter how they may appear on the surface. The sweet-seeming little old lady who is also a raging white supremacist might not be the one to shoot you or hang a rope around your neck, but they would certainly be in the mob cheering the lynchers on.

And they put us in danger on a societal level, for obvious reasons and reasons that aren’t so obvious. Historically, authoritarianism leads to oppression, and fascism leads to genocides. But hierarchy in general is to blame for world wars, ecological destruction, and the climate catastrophe - because for all of our vaunted democracy, our global civilization has always been hierarchically structured. And it is the few at the top of that hierarchy, controlling the world’s wealth and governments, who are the reason why the Doomsday clock is currently at 85 seconds to midnight.

Trump’s support has taken on the quality of a cult following, because of how immune his supporters are to ever changing their minds about him. Narcisstic people don’t want to change their minds, because doing so requires them to admit being wrong, and as I mentioned before that is intolerable to their very concept of self.

This means that this swath of the electorate will cling to their delusional beliefs even if those beliefs literally kill them. We saw this during the pandemic, with COVID denialists insisting it wasn’t real even up to the moment they died from it. And if they are allowed to, they will take us all down with them. Gleefully.

These people are also dangerous for society because their desire for hierarchy and supremacy means that they will support policies that they know will hurt them too, as long as other people are hurt more (in their minds, at least). They are ok with bringing all of society down because they assume that they will be hurt the least, and therefore their standing relative to everyone else will go up.

And even when the day inevitably comes where they find themselves facing the consequences of what they voted for, they will refuse to change their mind because that would mean admitting that they were wrong. They can justify literally any negative consequence to themselves by simply imagining that other people (who they don’t like) are experiencing even worse. Even if they aren’t.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Hierarchy isn’t a given. Most people have an intrinsic desire for fairness, and most people don’t want to rule and be ruled over by others. We don’t have to accept the dystopian future that the narcissists are trying to create for us.

It may seem impossible to imagine society being structured in a different way, with power truly being shared horizontally not just in government but in workplaces too. But that’s only because we’ve lived with hierarchy all of our lives, and it’s all we know. The normalcy bias is the tendency for people to become inured to what they experience, and to learn to accept even the most egregious and outrageous situations as normal.

Domination, oppression, racism, misogyny, and the like may seem inevitable and part of human nature, but countless cultures have existed throughout history that did not accept these things as normal. In fact, looking at how our human ancestors lived for the vast majority of our species’ existence on earth, it’s fair to say that hierarchies of power were aberrations and not the norm.

The aberration began around 6000 or so years ago, with the rise of the first city-states and the hierarchies that arose with agriculture and the hoarding of grain, and if we only look back at “recorded” history that’s all we’ll see. But humans have lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists (essentially communists, in the purest sense of the word) for at least half a million years. In those societies the only material divisions between people were those conferred by status, not wealth, and that status was willingly granted by one’s peers, not compelled by armies and governments.

Unfortunately, for humanity to rediscover an egalitarian way of co-existing today, we must completely reorganize society on every level. And in order for this to happen, we must heal the collective psyche of its current pathology. This is going to take more than an army of therapists, because narcissists are nearly impervious to therapy along with any forms of self-improvement. And because narcissism is passed down through families, it may simply not be possible to heal our species of this malady before it dooms our societies to collapse.

But one thing we can do, today, is to reject narcissistic ways of thinking and behaving - both within ourselves (where we have the most control), and in our immediate environments. We can limit the impact of narcissists on our lives by letting go of “friends” and acquaintances who are toxic for us, and going low-contact or no-contact with family members who repeatedly cause us harm.

And we can call out narcissistic behavior when we see it in the world, online and in our families and communities. Not to demonize people, but to expose it for what it is and explain why that’s not a healthy way to be. The narcissists themselves won’t change (because they won’t choose to), but we can help others who are on the fence to reject that way of seeing the world, and thus in some small way diminish its power over our lives and our future.