NARCISSISM

Narcissism could be considered a coping mechanism, or an arrangement of coping mechanisms within a personality. And, now more than ever, people need coping mechanisms --though, we should realize that there’s a better way to cope than by endeavoring to take full control of all the people in our lives.  

In today's world, the stress alone has to be coped with somehow. We have all of us at one time or another (or many times or others) leaned to our own human, low-level tactics in order to cope. We know it’s wrong, we know it’s not fair, but from time to time, we fall short of our best behavior. Therefore, aren’t we all a little narcissistic?  

A little narcissism is a little tolerable. It’s when a person has no fail-safes, no conscience to check themselves in their indiscriminately autonomous behavior that we find ourselves dealing with full-blown narcissism.  

Although we should look under our own hood first, we also have to realize that to solve our deepest problems, we can’t lean to our own understanding. We need help! We need to look up!  Often we want to take things into our own hands to solve problems in our own way so that nobody else need be involved or take a cut. Sometimes the last thing in the world we want is somebody else’s “stupid” opinion.    

But isn’t being human about working together, cooperating, and compromising with other people –family members, sports team players, romantic partners, and governors? Are not leaders elected to make their constituents’ lives easier, not more difficult by putting themselves and their wants and needs ahead of everyone else’s? Some narcissistic leaders take a lot for granted in thinking that they’ll be able to get away with constantly cheating their voters out of their rights and taxing them into the poor house.   

We have recently seen the performance of a certain national leader on the world stage, enacting a perfect definition of narcissism –evading questions, disregarding and disrespecting others, putting himself above everyone, continuing on his own path despite what anyone else thinks, not caring for anyone's opinions, not finding it necessary to cooperate or to listen, having no empathy whatsoever for the hardships of others, particularly the hardships that he inflicts on others for his own agenda and convenience.  

These are all the tendencies of a fascist dictator. Someone with a healthy personality will see this type of calloused narcissist for the weak, sickly, impoverished, socially inept character that he is. Others less intuitive will fall prey to his deceptions.  

It's at times like this that we need to remind ourselves that the meek shall inherit the earth. Particularly at this time in history, it seems that the earth which the meek shall be inheriting is overrun with narcissists. It’s been estimated that 15% of the world's population are narcissists. 

However, that depends on the location of the population. Any given group of CEOs would probably score higher than 70% on the instances of narcissism, as would Hollywood movie stars, professors, high ranking officers, etc. The military runs on narcissism. (You can quote me on that.) You could say it fosters and encourages this personality disorder. 

With all of its exploding exploitive expansion, however, narcissism is not a disease or a virus. It doesn’t spread from person to person and it’s not necessarily contagious. Narcissism is a widespread personality disorder. 

These days it's easy to discover a plethora of information on personality disorders. You can find out if you've got one! You can find out if your parents had them. They probably did. Most of us have some sort of disorder. 

Sometimes it's necessary to have someone point out your weaknesses, like a red flag pointing out the dangers of continuing in a certain direction, or the dangers of reinforcing those undesirable character traits that make life shallow and meaningless.  

And sometimes some of us must realize that the narcissists in our life will probably never change. Yet, at the same time, realize that they are suffering and missing out on the potential and joy that life has to offer people who lose themselves in it and give themselves, their time, their affection, their finances to other human beings and higher causes.