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Narcissism
How People Become Narcissists
If you can't make it in this world, make up a world in which you're a genius.
Posted March 25, 2024 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- When a person fails over and over, they'll be tempted to ignore reality checks through self-gullibility.
- One can check out of reality by self-idealizing, imagining that one is a hero by a different standard.
- The different standard is often an imaginary world idealized as where all of one's failures are successes.
- Though many narcissists compensate for failure, many opt for it because it's fun if one can get away with it.
Tomorrow, I’ll do better. I’ve just got to keep my head up high. I can do it. Tomorrow everything will work out.
That’s what he told himself night after night. But the next day wasn’t better. Over and over. Optimistic nights, discouraging days—it got ever harder to stay optimistic.
His failures got worse and worse, as failures tend to do. Now, if you’re not keeping up in school, teachers might slow down for you. If you’re not keeping up in life, problems escalate and accelerate until you’re dealing with problems a genius couldn’t solve.
His reality checks kept coming hard, fast, and disappointing. Something had to give. The intuitive choice was to ignore, dismiss, and deflect the reality checks. It’s too painful to give up on oneself, and it’s easy to give up on reality.
Positive psychology pioneer Martin Seligman coined the term “learned helplessness” to describe the depressed, defeated attitude that, for bad luck or incompetence, besets those who just can’t catch a break. He argued that we can overcome it by interpreting our failures as local. You’re not a failure; you just failed one test—that sort of thing. But what if it’s one failed test after another, day after day? When failure becomes that generalized, one has to face it.
Or does one? To stay positive, we can more readily get in the habit of dismissing the reality checks and believing our own lies about how good we’re doing. Circle the wagons, it’s us against the world trying to bring us down. Blame others for our mistakes. We can lean into self-gullibility, an ability to believe we’re doing fine when we’re not.
Rather than drown in low self-esteem, we can compensate with high self-esteem. Find a master excuse, for example, some vague higher purpose that all our so-called mistakes are serving.
Maybe I’m not suited for this world, but who knows? I’m probably suited for another world, one where I’m heroic. A loss here is actually a win there.
Which other world? Make one up or pick one that’s locally popular, for example, a religious afterlife, a "make-great-again” before-times, or some superhero fan fiction. You’re the ugly duckling here but a superstar in that world.
Keep it vague. All you need to know is that you belong in that world, not this one. That ideal world is permanently good. Since you belong there, you’re permanently good, too, and anyone who says otherwise is attacking the permanently good. Trade in the torture of falling short of the ideal for some vague self-idealization.
The people who escape into such blind optimism are best. Chances are their daily failures are due to their inability to weave their impulses and thoughts into any semblance of a coherent way of being. They’re inconsistent, which makes vague self-idealization easy. They can act on any impulse and claim that it’s the absolutely best move they could possibly make in their vague, idealized world. As such they grant themselves a wild-card trump card, get-out-of-fail-free card. With the wild card, they’re free to act on any impulse. With the trump card whatever they do is ideal in their vaguely idealized fantasy world.
Those people.
Actually, no, it’s us people. To some extent, we all do that, even those of us who assume we wouldn’t, because we experience self-doubt. Experiencing self-doubt is what drives this process. Why would experiencing it mean we don’t engage in such vague, fantasy-world self-reassurance?
Though we like to think we’re consistent realists, consider what we really are. Humans are not born consistent—not by a long shot. Toddlers are born wild, as if granting themselves a wild card. They have multiple personalities and act on whims without any consistency. It takes decades of schooling and enormous effort for any of us to get to where we can stand admitting to and working on our inconsistencies. When someone points out that we’re talking out of both sides of our mouths, we all tend to deflect the challenge: “Me? A hypocrite?? Trust me I’m not!”
Of course, we’d feel that way. Reconciling our inconsistencies takes disappointing work we didn’t expect and would rather avoid.
If we’re all tempted to ignore our inconsistencies, how can we distinguish those of us who do it too much?
I have two suggestions. The first comes from the original quote: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. The same goes for self-reassuring escapism. It only tends to corrupt. It’s seductive and addictive—it’s a power source. Kings, billionaires, and dictators don’t have to be consistent. Indeed, their hypocrisy is often a status symbol meaning “I can get away with it.”
Self-reassuring escapism can be managed. We get the self-reassurance we need without it going to our heads. But when it becomes absolute, it corrupts absolutely, in the original sense. “Absolute” means completely detached from all external influences.
The second comes from the long-view natural history of life’s struggle for existence. Organisms are fragile, not durable. The only reason we’re still around 3.6 billions after our origins is that we regenerate ourselves faster than we degenerate—healing what breaks down and reproducing, which takes energy. But energy tends to degenerate things. Fires and hurricanes don’t build; they destroy. Therefore, all organisms interact selectively with energy, for example, eating nutritious food, not degenerative toxins.
That’s true of us, too, but there’s more. Humans have feelings and thoughts. We interact selectively with them, too. We take in the feelings and thoughts that regenerate our self-esteem and try to to avoid feelings and things that degenerate it. In other words, confirmation bias.
Decent healthy people treat their confirmation bias as a problem they have to manage. Absolute escapists treat their confirmation bias as the solution to all of their problems.
Having a solution to all of one’s problems is both a coping strategy and an addictive temptation. Once addicted, it’s painful to give it up. As with all addictions. Some people start taking heroin for pain relief; others because it’s escapist fun.
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