Narcissism is Good

bee urself

We need to start bullying and socially ostracizing the ankle-biting losers who frivolously throw around the term “narcissist” at anyone they dislike.

The folks who do this are pretty much always engaging in a modern day witch hunt against people who are objectively far more accomplished and interesting than them.

At times they’ll try to establish a pseudoscientific pretext for their witch hunt using epistemically unsound nonsense like the DSM, and sometimes they’ll merely shriek at you behind their double digit subscriber count, but either way these people are never acting in good faith. Scratch below the surface and you’ll always uncover that same impulse to dehumanize and the same wretched stench of insecurity and failure.

These people are contemptible enemies of greatness and vitality and civilization itself, and their ideas ought to be relentlessly purged from the discourse space.

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In my experience there are two types of people who throw around “narcissist.”

The first type is the tedious woman who uses it to describe an ex-boyfriend. Typically the dude was a bit above her in SMV and she wasn’t used to having less power in the relationship, or he was skilled at holding frame through rhetoric / redpill heuristics / neurolinguistic programming, and that felt like gaslighting to her because she was used to bullying simpleminded chuds with her pussy. Or perhaps she was merely a hysterical BPD nutjob who practically forced him to adopt stereotypical narc behaviors just to stay sane. Whatever the case you need to keep a wide berth from dames like this, because they’re almost uniformly crybullies with zero agency.

The second type is the untalented and uncharismatic feller who’s eternally at the bottom of every status hierarchy he tries to ascend and is chiefly animated by an impotent rage toward men who actually accomplish things in the real world. Judged by firm quantifiable metrics these guys are clearly unenviable nothings, so they adopt the undignified life strategy of constantly nipping at the ankles of their betters in hopes of ripping off a flap of skin for nourishment. Typically they’ll find one popular and successful “narcissist” to fixate on and constantly circle him looking for any vulnerability that can be publicly exploited for clout, invariably repackaging their transparent jealously into pretentious moralization. And then if their idol ever truly fucks up they get to have their fifteen minutes of fame and say they knew it all along.

Pathetic.

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What I find most odious about this trend is that all of the “negative” traits people associate with narcissism—grandiosity, risk taking, lower empathy, a tendency to manipulate and instrumentalize people—are basic requirements for lots of critical roles.

Why else would CEOs and surgeons have such high rates of narcissism? Past a certain point it becomes incredibly hedonically inefficient to accept any more stress into your life unless you specifically derive an enormous hedonic return from status and don’t get bothered by shit like approving mass layoffs or cutting someone open.

Narcs are sort of like itinerant lettuce-picking Mexicans—we genuinely need them to do the jobs the rest of us don’t want to do!

You also need a certain level of narcissism just to be an effective leader. If you aren’t at least a little grandiose you aren’t going to have the chutzpah required to blast past the impostor syndrome that inevitably accompanies power and influence. If you don’t have some basic sense of your own right to rule and destiny for greatness you aren’t going to roll the dice in high stakes situations and will never have the balls to seize what’s yours. If you’re too empathetic you’ll constantly get played by grifters and fibromyalgia aunts and won’t have the brutality needed to cut dead weight. And if you aren’t willing to instrumentalize your non-equity employees and more fungible subordinates you’ll create a rotten and flimsy incentive structure ridden with principle-agent problems and all kinds of inefficiencies ripe for exploitation.

Anyone who has actually led anything knows this. But the sort of people who constantly bitch about narcissists are inevitably bottom-feeders who couldn’t lead their way out of a paper bag, and to them having the sort of personality that can actually achieve things at scale seems inherently nefarious, probably because it reminds them of everything they resent about their manager at Chick-fil-A.

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Another disturbing thing about this trend is the constant insistence that “narcissists” have no genuine interiority. The people carrying the pitchforks and torches really need you to believe there’s a certain class of person that has no legitimate feelings, because that’s what makes it acceptable to dehumanize, mob, and torment them.

But press them on this and you’ll quickly discover their model of the narcissistic mind is basically devoid of substance and takes whatever shape is necessary to sustain their vulgar dehumanization tactics. And they always shift the goalposts—i.e. maybe narcs actually do have feelings but they don’t count because they’re “performative.”

What the fuck does that even mean? Speaking for myself as a high functioning autiste, pretty much everything I do is performative, because whenever I act purely in accordance with social intuition and without any strategic mediation I come off like Chris Chan.

Literally all my achievements in life—professional, romantic, social, whatever—came from developing a set of formal heuristics for understanding human behavior like

Richard Hanania

talks about in The Autism Horseshoe and leveraging my formidable verbal IQ to juice asymmetries that normies don’t notice. In practice this behavior is always somewhat calculated and performative by definition, but it doesn’t feel inauthentic or manipulative when you’re doing it. It just feels like survival.

But you can’t win either way, because when you think too explicitly or instrumentally about power dynamics and status hierarchies you inevitably provoke a lot of fear and disgust in normalfag peasants whose precious feefees depend on everyone paying lip service to gay leveling platitudes. And whenever these peasants are surpassed by someone like Hanania or Elon or poor Uncle Walt they inevitably fall into a rage.

Because guys like this are WEIRD. They’re OFF. They’re not supposed to have any genuine status and respect in the world, let alone be in charge of anything!

When guys like this get rich and famous it has to be because they’re a grifter.

If they have any success with women it must be because they’re a groomer.

And if they have any self-esteem it’s obviously because they’re a narcissist.

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A fun game I like to play whenever someone throws around “narcissist” is imagining them in medieval peasant garb talking in hushed tones about vampyrs or Baba Yaga. Try it for yourself sometime and you’ll see it pretty much always tracks.

It’s pretty old hat in these circles to observe that cultural archetypes of monsters almost certainly emerge from primordial experiences with “personality disorders,” but interrogating how legitimate this impulse is seems surprisingly uncommon.

For instance, vampires famously don’t see themselves in the mirror, and a lot of people will trace this back to the “unstable sense of self” associated with NPD¹. But this kind of imagery seldom reflects how people with personality disorders actually experience their own dysfunction, and seems a lot more reflective of the fear and disgust response that gets these people burnt at the stake by normie peasants.

Obviously this is a feature and not a bug; social norms ought to form around the rule and not the exception. But it also makes sense that weirdos naturally identify with witches and vampires and enjoy creating their own myths to sanitize these archetypes.

Because in real life we do see ourselves in the mirror.

And sometimes we genuinely like what we see.

1. technically it maps better to BPD but that’s less stigmatized these days (I wonder why…)