Narcissism is Humanity's Greatest Threat

We must do more to stop and prevent the spread of narcissism.

I'm not going to put a single disclaimer in this post about not being a medical doctor. Why? Because I believe narcissism is a big enough threat to our existence that I feel the need to call it out whenever I see it, even if it risks feelings and correctness.

Why? Because malignant narcissists don't get diagnosed and start working on doing better; they deflect, they gas light, they manipulate, they blame-shift, and do everything else that they can to make you responsible for their harmful behavior. But they don't often willingly go get better.

People with unaffected senses of empathy usually apologize and say thank you if harm is pointed out, even if they don't fully agree that they're responsible, even when they're not overly-empathetic. I think we need to culturally embrace pointing out narcissistic behavioral patterns way more often than we currently culturally do.

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash

Why am I so wound up about it? Because I've been directly harmed too many times by narcissists because of their narcissism. I believe Narcissism directly enables and makes intractable terrible things like pedophilia and more, because very few are able to confront and overcome narcissism enough to admit or even realize that they've hurt and are hurting people.

Narcissism doesn't just incentivize doubling-down on behavior that harms others, narcissism demands doubling-down on harmful behavior, because narcissism has a constant credibility problem in most of its victims' inner-monologues.

I truly am beginning to think narcissism could be what's behind the extremely high re-offending rate that plagues offenders of the more heinous and violent crimes. And, narcissism is more prevalent in culture than ever before. This keeps me up at night, because I'm also all too familiar with how it's acquired.

Of Course not Every Self-Absorbed Evil-Doer is a Narcissist

There are a bunch of metaphors that I could reach for to better express this, but I'm taking extra care to not inadvertently suggest any false equivalences. We can and should point out when behaviors start to resemble something that we know to be extremely bad without having to accuse anyone of anything.

When we see patterns in people that we depend on and have to interact with, we tend to act more toward their benefit, it's a part of human nature. It's also a part of human nature that narcissists have gotten very good at exploiting.

We need to set the expectation that telling someone you're behaving similarly to a narcissist is as helpful to them as it is to ourselves; we need to behave as if it is a condition that can be remedied if we're able to make the leap to not accepting it at all.

Alerting someone to red-flag behavior is the right thing to do, even if it just helps the cause of normalizing the act of doing it.

Comparing Narcissism to Other Things is Tricky, Sometimes Harmful

Thinking about Narcissism in a way that's similar to how we think about Malware, or even cold and flu germs can be helpful when framing how to think about prevention being better (or even entirely more possible) than a cure:

Symptom / Feature	Narcissism	Malware
Spread By Everyday Use Or Social Engineering	Yes	Yes
Conceals Itself And Evades Detection	Yes	Yes
Changes How The Host Behaves	Yes	Yes
Attacks Others	Yes	Sometimes
Returns If Not Removed Properly	Yes	Yes
Spreads Parent To Child	Yes	Yes
Infected Hosts Show Symptoms	Usually	Sometimes

A child who spends only a few years under the care of a malignant narcissist can require an entire lifetime to identify and overcome those qualities and traits themselves, if they're fortunate enough to spot it. I often refer to narcissism as the original gangster of family curses.

Biblical references to narcissism are generally unhelpful in 2025 conversations, at least as far as I've found, and for mostly good reasons: we've gotten past trying to couch misogynist scapegoating in moral lessons, mostly.

Jezebel became an amalgamation of couched misogyny in history, and while she was regarded poorly, she lived under very different standards than we have today when it comes to everything from consent to worth. Her story even influences AI image creation of abstract representations of narcissism, if you want to experiment. I doubt this has been fixed at the time of this writing. It's just that rooted in our culture.

My point is, everyone who has these traits needs to be made aware, but be careful of your own biases if you have a tendency to see these traits in women more than in men, because you're missing quite a bit of it if you don't see it everywhere.

I know it's common in Christian circles to say "Jezebel Spirit", but it's so much better to articulate specifics rather than gesturing at the "ambition" of dead bronze-age queens. Not a good look.

Billionaires are a Symptom of Narcissism

You have the power to end world hunger ten times over and still have enough money to buy whatever you want for the rest of your life and the next ten generations of your descendants. Sounds good, right?

The fact that we have billionaires and still have the problem of world hunger should alert you to the fact that billionaires, like good and evil, are more of a symptom than a class of people.

Aspiring to such a role is not a symptom of a compassionate adult human being, but it's the biggest wish of so many. We don't really think about other people's feelings, even when we're aspiring to have them ourselves, and that's scary.

Some just call it "being authentic." Authenticity doesn't come at the cost of harm, but bullying does.

Narcissists are Never Really Proud of You; Don't Feed Them for Praise!

Charisma and affection can be indistinguishable from sorcery in the hands of someone who cares less about the dangers of really f***ing up people's heads than the dangers of losing their delusion of themselves.

It took me years of becoming wholly enraged when my parent, a malignant and often abusive narcissist, would express pride in anything I've done. Most children of similar parents have a hard time getting them to express pride at all, I had the reverse problem. When my parent would say the word "proud", I'd feel a visceral rage and completely lose interest in whatever it was they were complimenting.

For the longest time, I could not figure out why I was like that. It wasn't until I became a parent that I finally realized it:

When you take pride in something that someone else does, you're basically saying "I can see slivers of my own greatness and mentoring in what you've done."

If that sounds harsh, then maybe pride is something that you struggle with. By saying she was proud of me, she was taking something from me, because most of my accomplishments were in spite of her chronic abuse, not because of her mentoring or nurturing.

I'm sure deep down somewhere they were really pleased with what I had managed, but the pride was fake, and used like a tariff on my win, not as a sincere compliment.

I'm not saying don't take pride in your kids, I'm saying don't take it from them, which is a hallmark narcissist move.

The World Still Needs Selfish Jerks And Villains

Everyone still gets plenty of turns to be the biggest possible jerk that they can be (among many other turns to be many other things). What we can't do is continue to teach it as a survival strategy. "Them OR you!" is stupid, if we don't learn how to be vulnerable to each other we will never get off this planet.

We need to burn inside in order to achieve. If we're not challenged, we'll quickly optimize for our own comfort and stop growing. Whether you're yearning for higher pay or higher levels of consciousness, we're put on this planet to receive.

We need to be selfish. We need to be indulgent. We need to be evasive and even deceitful. We need to be manipulative. These traits are also some of our bare survival skills.

But we also retain the ability to be conscious of the fact that we're using them, that we're responsible for other people's outcomes from our interactions as much as our own, and that life isn't about any single one of us, it's all about what we do together.

The world probably even needs a fair share of narcissists, because it takes a very specific kind of person to occasionally rise up and change the world order, for better or worse.

But the current amount of people in its grasp is dizzying, and getting worse.

We're Running Out of Room to Escalate

Have you noticed a sharp uptick of people in prominent places who simply will not back down when confronted with reason and facts? Right now, it's manifesting as dysfunction like shutdowns because no one will compromise on the budget, or allowing software companies to hire lobbyists to keep our tax code as complicated as possible so they can charge for software to simplify it.

Pretty soon, the degree that we accept people getting hurt as collateral damage to the pursuit of greed or just plain ole' egotistical grandstanding will increase. Maybe we'd even be okay with the idea of preemptive war because we're just too exhausted to fight the gas lighting they're giving us as reasons any longer.

Then what would we accept from ourselves? What can we expect from ourselves when we allow lies to replace truth? It can't be good, and it's closer than I fear most people want to believe.

TL;DR - Closing

"Stop calling me a narcissist" is almost only something a narcissist says when called out for narcissistic behavior. Normalize calling out specific behavior examples in conjunction to telling people "that's something narcissism can cause" just like you'd point out a problem-looking skin legion on their back where they couldn't see it.

Once someone actually falls into self-feeding narcissism, it takes a huge amount of intervention to pull them out of it. The sooner we teach kids to look for and control the impulses that lead to it, the sooner we'll be able to stop healing from having so many of them with power over all of us.

It's starting to feel like a zombie apocalypse that only some people can see. I just hope that means we're immune.