What makes a narcissist a narcissist? Is that how they were raised in a family?
"At it’s core, the causes of narcissism is simple, it’s
- a WILL that regards itself as supreme and will never submit to anyone or anything
- a commitment to walk in lies
A WILL that never submits
Various people have touched on this before, Scott M. Peck calls it the ‘unsubmitted will’. Scripture calls it arrogance, pride. Even selfishness is just another version of it, because the selfishness of the narcissist isn’t ‘not sharing’, it’s ‘disregardance’. The kind of selfishness that utterly disregards your needs, your hurt, whether you are bleeding or not, your very right to exist, is not much different from arrogance or overweening pride. It is a will that silently screams ‘only ME’.
Not sharing isn’t necessarily selfish, you may have grounds for not sharing, after all, what’s your is yours, you retain the right to it. But disregarding to the effect that your stubborn neglect results in harm is inexcusable. And that happens to be precisely the form of selfishness narcissism takes. At the heart of disregardance is a will that refuses to submit to other wills due to any reason whatsoever (‘Oh, did I neglect to keep my promises? I disregard my obligation to keep promises and also disregard my new obligation to apologize for it.’). Or submit to any principle due to any reason whatsoever (‘It is good not to twist the truth? Well, bollocks to that’, ‘It is good to repay good for good and not evil for good? Bollocks to that too’.)
A will that never submits is on a collision course with all other wills it encounters. It is a human wrecking ball upon reality. It is antagonistic to all over wills, all other needs, all other wants, everything else of others. The only thing of others a narcissist can tolerate is if they seize that thing others possess. Otherwise ruining it is the only alternative.
Such a will is the very engine that powers malicious envy.
Such a will also sets itself on a collision course with all truth and with all goodness. Truth and goodness are just principles, they are just things that demand submission. Because truth requires submission. Every time you tell the truth, you are submitting to the principle of truth. Also, every time you practice righteousness, you are submitting to principles of righteousness. A refusal to submit is rebellion against truth or good. And that’s why it is so hard to tell the truth or do the right thing, because each instance requires a submission of will, a denial of self. Denying your self, your will, is the source of the difficulty.
23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.
Therefore, narcissists, being incapable of submitting their will, are committed to a path of rebellion against anything that requires denial of self, chiefly the requirements of practising living in truth and doing the right thing.
Also loving God or neighbor. These are impossible without some degree of submission.
37 Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
Bible Gateway passage: Matthew 22:36-40 - New King James Version
A commitment to walk in lies
No one (except God) is all truthful. No one (except God) walks purely in truth. But that’s an entirely different thing to walking the path of lies.
The path of lies does not start with lying to others. It starts with lying to yourself, self-deceit. What makes self-deceit so dangerous is that it alters your own reality. It is the open door to delusion. And delusion is the path to psychosis, insanity.
3 For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.
Bible Gateway passage: Galatians 6:3 - New King James Version
It is well known that narcissists and reality are enemies. Why? Because the narcissist’s mind is so marinated in self-deceit that there is no space left to perceive anything as it is. Not your words, not the apple falling from the tree, not what the narcissist themselves said five seconds ago. Everything is selectively warped to produce wins and avoid defeat. Self-deceit is corrosive to all truth. And it is ultimately corrosive to all good.
22 “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is [a
]good, your whole body will be full of light.
23 But if your eye is [b
]bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
Bible Gateway passage: Matthew 6:22-23 - New King James Version
You cannot do the right thing when you are delusional. It becomes an impossibility. The proverb ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ describes the narcissist’s mindset very well. Narcissists can have ‘good’ intentions, but bad outcomes always accompany them. Why? It’s because everything of theirs comes from the place of delusion. So they have delusional good intentions, delusional works to perform their delusional good intentions, and finally outcomes that match their many delusions rather than any good sentiment the narcissist imagined they originally had. Narcissists always promise and never deliver. There has to be a good reason for that.
The greatest danger from walking in lies is not telling lies. It is thinking in lies. When someone thinks in lies, you cannot argue with them, you cannot rebuke them, you cannot ever get through to them. Because while they are ‘listening’ to you, they are hearing you say entirely different things to what you actually said. That is why trying to talk sense to a narcissist actually only makes them worse, because they are overwriting your words with things they would have liked you to say, and so they secretly made you say it in their own minds anyway (this is actually one of the many necessary breakthroughs needed to understand why things always go wrong when you talk to the narcissist).
The conclusion
The narcissist made a commitment to walk in lies. Walking in lies corrupts perception to such an extent that reality becomes illusion, and illusion becomes reality. There is no such thing as reality anymore. Effectively for the narcissist, reality is an illusion, they create reality with their thoughts, their WILL moulds reality. This is what makes narcissism incurable. For attempts at cure come from outside. Anything from outside gets delusionally garbled up and lost in translation (they can’t hear you). Nothing gets through the impenetrable cloud of corrupting, perverting, twisting delusional self-deceit.
BUT, before signing the contract to commit to walk in lies for the rest of their lives, the agreed upon payoff for signing the deal is, that the narcissist always gets what they want. Their WILL always triumphs.
Because, the whole point of deceit, really is, to nefariously achieve supremacy through information warfare. Either through deceiving and thwarting others will through destroying their ability to make informed choices with correct information (telling lies), or practising the self-deceit of the narcissist to still win when there is no winning to be had.
In effect, the narcissist declares they won, and so they won, truth is irrelevant. That’s what self-deceit is all about.
The narcissist only wants to win. And they will do anything to win. The chief method is to think in lies.
It has got nothing to do with how they were raised in a family. This is the kind of hard luck, sympathy vampirism that narcissists love to deploy. The kind where they upsell their deservingness. Justifications. Entitlement.
Narcissism was originally a choice, akin to pulling out your wisdom teeth, or surgically removing your appendix. They decided to cut off invisible body parts, the heart, the eyes, the ears.
21 ‘Hear this now, O foolish people,
Without [a
]understanding,
Who have eyes and see not,
And who have ears and hear not:
Bible Gateway passage: Jeremiah 5:20-22 - New King James Version
15 For the hearts of this people have grown dull.Their ears are hard of hearing,
And their eyes they have closed,
Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So that I [a
]should heal them.’
Bible Gateway passage: Matthew 13:15-17 - New King James Version
Narcissists surgically removed their truth organ, and with that, the perception organ also withered, all because they only want to win all the time.
Whenever you don’t use a body part for an extended period, it atrophies. If the atrophy progresses beyond a certain stage, it will be irreversible."
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