Transcription
One of the things that people always find weird, or generally find weird, about psychoanalysis is the concept of the death drive. They think that's crazy. We're all primed to live. We love life. We don't want to die. We want to be alive. But the more you look at history, including current developments, there does seem to be some sense of being drawn to annihilation. Maybe there's just something about human life that's so anxiety-producing for most people. They do what they can to avoid the real questions, and in avoiding the real questions, they are creating a future of massive problems and threats to our continuity. This is not going to be a bestseller. This is too grim.
What you have in malignant narcissism are people who, with this underlying, although not fully conscious, sense of their own inadequacy, inferiority, emptiness, their response is an aggressive one. They envy anybody who has anything that looks valuable. Perhaps the most central part of this is that the only satisfaction the malignant narcissism seems to get, since they live a life that's totally deprived of love, their satisfaction seems to be in triumph over others, defeating others, and even making others suffer. So there's a sadistic quality to this. The irony is that somebody, even a very successful person who has all the outward attributes of success in the world, can envy somebody who just seems to have a meaningful life because they don't have that. So they come into contact with an ordinary person, and envy takes over, and then they strike out one way or another. They can be really destructive. This can happen in individuals. They can lead their life that way. Others become victims of their grandiosity as it's played out in the need to triumph over others.
This can be treated in psychotherapy. I am personally more concerned when this kind of pathology begins to get manifested at the societal level, in groups. People with malignant narcissism can become very powerful people because they offer false grandiose promises that are appealing to large masses of people who feel deprived, who are downtrodden, and who need some hope to hold on to, and don't see that it's all based on something that's extremely shaky and not realistic, and it's based on the vilification of an outside group. And it leads to a cult-like mentality in which the malignant narcissist controls the group, has the group in his or her thrall, and leads the whole mass like lemmings over a cliff, where everything ultimately gets destroyed.
Let's think about, was it Jim Jones? I think that was his name, and the cult that he organized around him in San Francisco. He needed admiration. He had to be worshiped. The government got to be on to his suspicious activities. He retreated to Guyana, created this world of which he was the center there. Government officials go to investigate. Does he respond in any way that would respect normal human decency? No. He would rather that all of his followers, as well as he, die than have his fantasy, his grandiosity, questioned and taken away from him. And that's an incredibly dangerous part of narcissism. The individual self-esteem counts, literally counts more than the whole rest of the world. They'll bring down anything if it means escaping from a humiliation.
And if you don't see two things, you're in trouble. If you don't see number one, the disconnect with reality, and if you don't see number two, the aggression involved and the need to organize not only in terms of a positive and inflated sense of self, but a hated and depreciated outside group, then we're in trouble. It's just an unbearably painful experience to see this repeated again and again in history. One would hope that we could learn from history. Unfortunately, it seems like the world needs repeated reminders. I mean, I grew up in the post-war generation, and when people said "never again," they really believed "never again." It was too horrific to imagine ever again. But there seems to be sort of a dulling of that awareness, and I fear we might need another "never again" moment.
So what's the antidote to that? There's no antidote that I know of that's successful. I used to believe that educating the public would help avoid these kind of developments, but it's very hard to educate people who are functioning on kind of very basic emotions. Let me just put it this way: we went through the Enlightenment, otherwise called the Age of Reason. The Age of Reason had a lot of optimism to it. The 20th century and the first part of the 21st century seemed to be evidence that the Age of Reason was an illusion, that reason is only the frosting on the cake. What really drives people are raw emotions and the need to feel good about oneself, often facilitated by the need to criticize or vilify an outside or an outside group. So I don't see an antidote. I wish I could. I think there still is the capacity for people to think, and we have to try to appeal to that. The question is, how much damage needs to be done before people come to see the risk involved of these developments?
Well, memory is short. Yeah, I mean, memory is short, and one's day-to-day emotional and material needs are immediate. So it is kind of depressing how the immediacy of the moment can take over and be stronger than what might unfold in the future, like climate crisis. Yeah, I mean, frankly, I mean, I don't know if this is for the tape, but climate crisis is an astonishing example of the narcissism of the individual. Don't people care about their children? Are they truly so involved in having a good life in the moment that they can't make sacrifices for future generations? There's a certain group narcissism, egocentrism, I'm not sure the right word, but it is literally horrifying to have the knowledge that we have and not to be more active. I think our Achilles' heel is our need for comfort, to have what's comfortable. It makes me think of the kind of terrifying experiment where guinea pigs were put in a cage, and they could tap and receive, I think it was cocaine. They just kept getting the immediate pleasure until they died. They didn't take time out to go and eat. So I think that's perhaps a scary allegory for us to think about. Are we, as a people, so interested in just feeling good in the moment that we're ignoring what the challenges are for us to survive as a human race?
I mean, I have immediate needs that feel very dire. They're not, by the way, but they feel dire. And so I will act in ways that are ultimately like, not good for the long-term health of me, other people, anything I do. Yeah, the consequence of that now has seemed to come to roost. Yeah, I agree with you. But the other way to see it is that the problem is so massive that the way the population as a whole is responding is through group denial, with the exception of the activists who are trying so hard to be heard. But I think it's really too scary for people to think about, which is not a good situation for us to be in. Things can be done. When you think about it that way, you could think of certain leaders of industry as malignant narcissists because what is it? We learned recently, just last week, that the coal industry knew about this decades ago. We've known for a long time. The oil industry knew about this. What is it for people to be putting their own self-interest above the interest of the human race? Sometimes I think narcissism will just be our undoing as a species.