CommentsALL THAT MONEY CAN’T BUY-Imagine you were the most powerful person in the world for a second. Yes, really. What would you do?
Would you go out and sail the world on your luxury mega-yacht? A fleet of liveried servants serving you fine cocktails? Or would you, perhaps, try to solve great and pressing problems like climate change and mass extinction? Or would you devote your days — and your powers — to answering the Really Big questions, like “why are we here? where did we come from?”
That question is also a test of your maturity. Your development as a full human being. A psychologist might call it your moral or emotional development. If you are still immature, then you will be concerned, mostly, with selfish things — yachts, wardrobes, toys, possessions. If you are mature, you’ll be concerned with allocentric things — things that benefit others more than they benefit you. Why is that? The selfish things are just indirect routes, to love, meaning, truth, belonging. They are ways to try and buy it. We fail, mostly — and then we learn we must earn it, with allocentric things. Then we mature.
Now — remember the question: you’re the most powerful person in the world. What do you do?
Here’s what the most powerful man in the world is doing. He’s building walls to protect himself from the other kids he’s still afraid of. He’s lashing out as violently as he can when he doesn’t get what he wants — shutting down the government wholesale to get the feeling of power he needs. The only time you or I have ever seen him smile genuinely, by giving anything at all to anyone, is when he can…buy all the McDonald’s in the world. Don’t you think that’s strange? Funny? Weird? I do. It reminds me — eerily — of a child. Doesn’t all the above remind you of a kid trapped in an adult body? It should.
Our President is a child. He is what happens when moral, psychological, and emotional development stalls at childhood, twisting in on themselves — and so adulthood is left stillborn. He is a regressed, distressed, infantile mind in a man’s body. Can’t you see it, even, in his walk, when you really think about it? (Now, there are those who will say that’s unfair to children — or, conversely, that calling a man a child elides responsibility. I don’t think either is the case. An adult can take responsibility for acting like a child — and should. And there’s little that’s more dangerous than a vengeful child given the trappings of adult power — which is my point, in a way: do we really judge the character of our leaders anymore? Or just hand power to the ones who make the most childish promises to us, too?)
The President is not a sociopath. He is a malignant narcissist. A sociopath isn’t interested in your approval, validation, or love. Serial killers aren’t out on the streets mowing down people and posting pics on Instagram (as much as Hollywood wants them to), hoping for likes. They kill in the privacy of sheds and basements. They are satisfying a different need — not love, but the numb, icy rage of those who are literally dead inside, having been murdered themselves. A narcissist, on the other hand, needs to be the center of the world — because he is desperately afraid of his own emptiness. He must have all its attention, interest, regard, concern. Obsessively, relentlessly, perpetually. Nobody else can be allowed to have any at all.
So all narcissists are stuck at a stage of development where, like little children, the must be the only ones. Until they are, they can’t move on. But what adult can be the center of the whole world? And even if you are —even if you are literally its most powerful man — can all its fear and attention ever be enough, since the world will never be your parent? What if it’s not? What if that’s the hypothesis the Trump years are really testing?
When we say that a person is a narcissist, what it really means that they are stuck at an infantile stage of development. When we are little people, and our primal needs for love and respect and dignity are met, only then we can give them to others, since we internalize them for and in ourselves. But if they are not given to us —if we don’t have good parents ourselves — we may well spend the rest of our lives trying to take or seize them, however we can, with money or power or sex. We may go to the ends of the earth seeking the unconditional love and respect we should have had from our parents.
But who will give it to us now? How are we to “get” it? What if it can’t be enough even if we do get it?
(And yet nobody has perfect parents, do they? So one of the greatest challenges of growth is learning how to soothe that wounded child in you — then you become a mature, loving adult, instead of staying an infant, lashing out, envious, enraged, jealous of anyone else who is loved. The truth is that nobody’s adult self doesn’t have a child that isn’t still hurting, deep inside.)
Still, it’s harder for some people than others. Imagine that your parents regard you as a little trophy. They applaud you when you “win” — but when you don’t, they call you a loser, a failure, a disgrace. Such a child is likely to become a malignant narcissist. They are essentially being told they can never be loved —their worth is always held only in comparison to others — therefore, all that they can do is be feared. If you’re told you’re a loser and a failure unless you’re the dominant one, you internalize such an attitude, don’t you? Yet the price is that never learn how to grow. You are still desperately after the love and respect of your mother and father — that is what you will really seek in every interaction with anyone thereafter — but you will only know how to demean, abuse, and vilify people. You will be caught between an obsessive, cloying need for attention — but an equally furious compulsion to belittle and hurt and put down.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
So the malignant narcissist, having foreclosed on the possibility of love, can only now settle for fear. For threatening and bullying people to pay some kind of emotional tribute to him. He must be all-powerful, all-feared, since fear has become a substitute for love. It is in that sense that malignant narcissists are often said to be “emotional vampires” (though as a real-life vampire, I object, we’re nice) — they’re feeding on your fear. But that’s only because they’re terrified, inside, of not even being able to settle for being feared.
All this is why, if you think about it, the President is weirdly obsessed with kids. Not with loving them — with getting us all to fear them, with destroying them, with annihilating them. He talks incessantly about how little refugee children hold the power to destroy whole societies. He displays absolutely no sympathy for kids shot at schools, kids without healthcare, more and more kids in poverty. Why is that? In his mind, they are rivals. They are the loved children that the trapped, unloved child he still is is still jealous of. He envies them so deeply it is his primary motive in life to defend himself against these feared and hated enemies. But who envies a child but someone who never got to be one? Hence, the President’s most feared enemy isn’t Russia (LOL) — it’s little kids. Hence, too, such a person would be easy pickings for any intelligence agency which flattered and adulated and appreciated him as the best one, the only good one, and so on — just like that missing parent. Think about all that for a second. What does it say about the psychology of the most powerful man in the world?
Hence, our President thinks the way to become a “safer” nation is to build walls. To keep little kids. They protect him from these feared and hated enemies — little kids. They are his most dangerous threats, psychologically — that’s why he’s obsessed with them — but they have nothing whatsoever to do with the safety of Americans (a lack of healthcare, for example, does.) But because the President is still competing with all these little kids for the love he will never have — he’ll do anything at all to “protect” himself from them. He’ll build a wall around a whole country if it means the other kids don’t get to come and play. The price, of course, is that we are trapped in that bizarre, upside-down world along with him.
So a narcissist — especially a malignant one — is trapped. He is in in perpetual rivalry not just with the whole world, for its attention — but with its most vulnerable, it weakest and littlest, because no one else, he feels, is ever a greater victim than he is. He will always say that he “got the bad end of the stick” or “never got enough credit” and so forth — because nothing, in the end, can make up for that lack of love that was absent from the very beginning. He always feels scorned, unwanted, rejected. It is the only real emotion there is — fear. And it must be dispelled by being feared.
That is why the President sees himself the greatest victim in the whole country, maybe the whole world — not the poor guy choosing between chemotherapy and his mortgage, or the student struggling to pay off her debts — the President, who owns a gilded tower on Fifth Avenue. It is where his astonishing lack of empathy or respect or dignity all come from: the victimhood of the malignant narcissist. It’s as if the malignant narcissist spends his whole life trying to get the world to see what he himself cannot — he was failed so badly as a child that his whole life long, nobody else is allowed to be one. Or a good parent, either.
(At this point, you might ask — very well, but how does the malignancy, the wish and desire to hurt others, develop? Think carefully about the above. What is a tantrum for, if not to instill fear? Some parents are absent, some parents are cloying — but some really seem to think their kids are never good enough. Such a kid grows up feeling an intense sense not of abandonment, but of inadequacy. Yet if you sense that coldness in your parents, what do you do? You destroy the other, better, kids — and then you destroy all the other good parents, too. If you imagine yourself to be the greatest victim of all, and you are in competition with even the weakest in society — like little children fleeing war and famine — for attention, for validation, for respect, then you will want to hurt many people, all at once — all those that love them, too.)
Who does the President lash out at most, hardest, most violently? It’s eerie when you think about it: it’s anyone who resembles a mother or father figure, isn’t it? It’s Elizabeth Warren, speaking to the country like a healthy adult, nurturing it, one might even say, mothering it. It’s Hillary, who did much the same, in a more commanding way still. It’s Barack Obama, everyone’s favorite uncle. It’s Joe Biden, the country’s bumbling grandpa. And so on. The President’s hottest rage is reserved for those who are good parents to the nation, at an unconscious level — it couldn’t be more obvious when you think about it for just a moment. The moment they ask him to grow up — wham! Out come the insults, the tantrums, the jibes. They are the hated good parents he never had, will never be wanted by, and can never become — the ones who offer unconditional love. He can never have it. They must be destroyed. And that is yet another giveaway that our President is still really just a rejected, fearful, angry child.
When does an abuser — abusers are most often malignant narcissists, since sociopaths don’t really form relationships to begin with — lash out the most violently? When the wife, the girlfriend, the partner makes the mistake of saying “why can’t you just grow up? why are such a child?” either explicitly or implicitly. Wham! When the partner steps into the role of parent, especially if they suddenly seem to switch from the good parent the abuser never had, to the bad one he did have — they set off an explosion of rage. He lashes out, often violently. He becomes pure aggression, seeking to destroy the thing that has hurt him most — not just his own bad parents, but also everyone else’s good parents.
Sound familiar?
If it doesn’t, let me summarize. If you’re a malignant narcissist, you need to a) destroy all the other kids, who are your rivals b) destroy all the other good parents, who reward theirs with the love you can never have c) be the only one left standing in the world, which d) you must empty of love, since why should anyone else have it if you can’t? Hence, the whole world can burn down — and you’ll cheer it on. You’ll welcome the apocalypse — as long as it means you’ll be feared along the way, since you can’t be loved. You’ll hurt and harm and destroy everything you can. Your life’s mission becomes to annihilate all the forms of love — whether dignity, truth, grace, respect, meaning, warmth, kindness— you possibly can. After all — who has ever given you any?
Does that sound familiar yet? It should.
Having a leader of a society who’s trapped in an infantile state of development is a truly dangerous thing — because such a person’s mission in life is to annihilate every last shred of love that they can. Who else was such a leader? Hitler, of course. Stalin. Mao. All sought to become the stern, controlling parents they once had — but all that was just a mask for the child inside who only knew one way to relate to the world: desperate to be feared, if he could never be loved. You see, to have a parent who cannot only treats you as a prize or a trophy can be even more damaging than having an absent parent — the child forecloses on the possibility of unconditional love, of any real self-worth. But a child who is never allowed to be a child will end up an adult who lashes out at the very idea of adulthood, too.
Sometimes, people get trapped in immature stages of development. Malignant narcissism is just one such malady. And when they are elected to high office, the result is disastrous. The onus is on us to be better judges of character my friends — to know when we are dealing with children trapped in adult bodies, and mature, functioning adults. It’s not enough for us to condemn a malignant narcissist. What good does that do? What if all the fear in the world isn’t enough — because the emptiness, the lack of positive self, in the narcissist is insatiable? Do you see the problem?
Remember when I asked you what you’d do if you were the most powerful person in the world — and then pointed out that’s a sign of your level of maturity? What level of development is our President at? At this point, you might laugh. Don’t we all know the President is a child? Perhaps, perhaps. But I want you to see the truth inside that for a moment. Our President is a child —of a certain kind. One who was taught that he would never be able to earn love — but at least he could earn fear. And children like that — who are so deeply, badly wounded inside that they cannot ever leave their childhood behind, forever seeking what they can never have — become malignant narcissists, lashing out at everything around them, destroying whatever they can, just so, that, maybe, finally, someone will say, smiling: “Look what a good boy you are!” Maybe, just maybe, if you destroy all the love in the world — then, at last, someone will think you’re good enough.
(Umair Haque posts at Medium.com.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
