On Narcissism

From a post on the Monastery, comes this:

Look up "narcissistic personality disorder". Basically, assume that the only way he can distinguish good statements from bad statements is by how they make him feel; if they make him feel important and special, they're good, if they make him feel unimportant or bad, they're bad. "True", in the sense that you probably think of it, is simply a noise without any kind of semantic content in his world. You'll note this trait among many internet kooks; the guy who's basically taken over soc.religion.quaker so he can rant about how it's all his ex-wife's fault and also some crackpot scholar proved Jesus was an ordinary man who lived 100 years later than everyone else thought is the most revolutionary and brilliant scholar ever... Well, same basic traits. We have one on a forum I hang out on, where he's threatened repeatedly to reveal to my employer that I don't understand dynamic memory allocation in C, and one on another forum who has spent several years trying to get people to recognize that it was *very aggressive* of one of the other posters to tell him "don't be silly" when he said something ridiculous.

It's one of the scariest disorders, because it is extremely well-tuned to preserve itself; the disorder consists of being deeply, passionately, sure that there is nothing wrong with oneself, and having an amazing capacity for filtering out any and all data which might seem to lead away from this belief.

—— Peter Seebach in The Monastery.




I thought there are people reading this who might find this interesting.