Narcissism Is Good for You. Not.

Narcissus showing his emotional flexibility.

A new study announces that narcissism can be the key to happiness.

This is not an entirely new claim. Alice Miller asserts the same.

It is nonsense.

Look at the original story of Narcissus; it gives the full diagnosis and prognosis. So does much of the rest of the literary tradition. Narcissus dies of grief, then suffers eternally in the underworld.

The legend of Tantalus is also an analysis of narcissism. His fate is proverbially bad.

Tantalus in the underworld.

So is every Greek tragedy; what the classical Greeks called hubris, we call narcissism.

The new study says that narcissism makes one resilient and able to overcome challenges. This is the opposite what is shown in literature: Narcissus is unable to overcome the simplest emotional blow. He cannot even turn his head away from his reflection, stand up, and go and get something to eat. He dies rather than suffer it.

Where is this false claim of happy narcissism coming from?

It is easy to see how any researcher who wanted to could come up with such results. Simply ask the narcissist.

“Are you emotionally resilient?”

Of course; the narcissist will insist that they are perfect. Of course they are emotionally resilient, if this is a good thing.

“Are you unhappy?”

This sounds like a bad thing. So no, of course, they are not unhappy. They will, if pressed, quickly admit to being abused and cruelly mistreated by any or all their intimates, or by the world itself, but if you frame it in such a way that it seems to reflect on them, no, they are not unhappy. Their life is wonderful.

You can get a narcissist to say anything, so long as they think it reflects well on them; and deny anything, so long as they think it makes them look bad.

More broadly, this survey illustrates a fatal problem with the social sciences. They are no more than a cargo cult based on the prestige of physical science. Among extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, they are about the craziest mass delusion ever; and they have persisted for over a hundred years. Because human beings are so complex—as complex as any human observer—they cannot be reliably objectively observed. It is therefore always possible to produce studies coming to any given conclusion.

Just recently, I had to cut a chapter out of a book. I had come across a number of studies showing that a vegetarian and fish-based diet, without red meat, reduced the risk of depression. Looked definitive.

Right then, a new study came out showing that eating red meat was important in preventing depression.

Because the social sciences do not work, what happens is that everyone manipulates studies to make whatever point they want to make. It becomes entirely politics, and dangerously misleading. I expect the “red meat prevents depression” study had a lot to do with politics. But then, perhaps the original vegetarian claims did too.

The most interesting study in the social sciences is this one, which has been repeated at least three times: fifty percent of all study results in the social sciences cannot be repeated.

That means any claim you read in the social sciences is about as useful for decision-making as flipping a coin.

Among narcissists, there is, of course, an inevitable desire to make narcissism appear to be a good thing. And so we are unable, through the social sciences, to ever get a good fix on narcissism.

The researcher for the current study makes his political agenda plain enough:

"This work promotes diversity and inclusiveness of people and ideas by advocating that dark traits, such as narcissism, should not be seen as either good or bad, but as products of evolution and expressions of human nature that may be beneficial or harmful depending on the context.” 

"This move forward may help to reduce the marginalisation of individuals that score higher than average on the dark traits.”

Fortunately, we have the literary corpus. 

Read it.