On the myth of the hateful narcissist, or medical psychology's holy Inquisition

What 'mental illness' explains why bad people are so bad (that you have to hate them)? They must, you think, have some metaphysical essence of badness in their personality or character that is the causal explanation for why they do bad things. Or, as the Rolling Stones put it in 'Sympathy for the Devil', "What's puzzling you is the nature of my game."

There is a Facebook group on 'narcissism'. The group is apparently fro people who wind up in bad relationships with total jerks and they have this for their explanation. The pattern is almost always the same: someone who is a real asshole to you must be 'mentally ill' somehow. "Narcissism" is the new name for hubris or arrogant pride. Christianity considered it among the worst of sins. Satan himself was a proud angel and that's why he fell. These narcissism-watchers have rediscovered Sin, which has returned in a big way in medical categories.

The difference between sin and evil is that good people, who have a good will, sin because they make some mistake while pursuing imperfectly the good they desire, typically with confused or mixed motives, including noisy interference by evil impulses that they fail to master.

So far, it's par for the course. Only - and here's the rub - mere sinners can confess, do penance, and get absolution; but this is not possible in the traditional Christian schema for those who deny God or the authority of Church (and a state that is in a way identified with it), nor to the likes of heretics, witches, and Jews, who cannot be saved. That's how it was before religion was replaced by medicine. Now we are 'civilized'. A 'mentally ill' person is the modern witch or heretic. He or she is incorrigible because not responsible for their actions; their illness makes them do it, and the fundamental wrongness is not what they do but what they are. Those who are incorrigibly, irremediably bad, those who are not sinners but evil ones, are damned, or placed outside the society of normal good people. You would be so judged if, for example, you refused to acknowledge the authority of the judges, for then you would be 'outside the church' and so denied salvation.

The narcissism victims group apparently has the function of a support group of victims of evil people who get supported by complaining about them. It's like a 12 step group for people who cannot control their temptation to associate with bad people. Now, as the stories all, endlessly, confirm, bad people will hurt you and that is because they do bad things because they are bad. What a sophisticated explanation. The important thing is that people to whom can be ascribed this medical diagnosis and psychological characterization are evil. That is to say, bad things happen to good people because of the devil. And what's puzzling you is only the details of the game whose nature you know all too well. At last, the suffering you face as a living being now has its explanation; do you feel better knowing this?

One person writes:

"Here’s a list. Can you relate?

1) walking ahead of you

2) talking over you

3) rushing you

4) talking to you like your a child and they are the father

5) having little patience with you

6) driving erratically/road raging

7) becoming a sad victim whenever you call them out on something they’ve done that hurt you."

I'd call this a schmuck. Only now we have psychiatric categories and their function is partly to change what was once 'sin' - wrongful behavior that people who do it could avoid or learn not to do, and so can be held responsible for - and the pure 'evil' of people who are incorrigibly bad because they act out of a 'mental illness.' And so we have categories like that of the new bogeyman, the 'narcissist', which to some extent is everyone and in more marked and noticeable forms is a huge part of the population.

Obviously the new religion of medicine and therapy (and support groups) is protestant, so it uses secular language. It also takes up from our liberal pseudo-left the victimology ideology. The only good people are victims of bad people, and we are good because innocent. This way of thinking reveals its dependency on the tacit presupposition of the primacy of evil. The underlying assumptions of this are Gnostic. Gnosticism, which neither Christianity nor Islam, the great religions of empire and faith that demand assent to an orthodoxy of beliefs, ever completely freed itself from. Evidence of that is the idea of a force of evil (Satan) which transforms Hebraic monotheism into a dualism at best. This yields a militant religion of war against evil. The crime that threatens the good innocent people who are justified in their property. The focus then is and remains on evil, since it is primary.

Some of our social problems are actually less worrisome than the cures and treatments that come with identification of them as the problems that demand our attention. The sin of hubris or pride is not a new idea; the therapeutic ideology just makes it the essence of people who are imagined, unrealistically, as wholly or essentially bad, in which case they can only be either converted ('cured') or eliminated. This was done during the last great war not only to Jews and the modern heretics who are ideological or political opponents of a regime, but also to the physically handicapped and - the 'mentally ill'.

Yes, Virginia, it is true, bad things happen that ought not to, whether because they happen to good people or because they are just bad enough that no one should suffer them. And some people do things so obnoxious we may just consider them bad people, bad not just in an occasionally misdeed but in their essence. Clearly, this way of thinking is a metaphysical fiction. But there are crimes and criminals, the secular concept that perhaps mediates historically between sin and evil on the one hand and illness of mind or soul on the other. And guess what, beloved innocent child that you think you are, some of these people are so bad you can hate them.

The narcissism Facebook group asks members to add their complaints about bad people identified with the syndrome (of pride or selfishness, now called 'narcissism', classically considered the cause of most wrong-doing. And it invites them to declare their agreement with the chorus or crowd here in hating.

Is hating 'narcissists' a good response to the problem, assuming it does exist (and there are many more people with the syndrome than ever before, or even that narcissism is the fundamental moral disease of our time)? Is it a 'healthy' response to hate these bad people? Is it perhaps a form of the same syndrome, a narcissistic response to narcissism? I leave these questions for you.

It’s too bad psychology is the dominant social science in the popular imagination. If there is now a preponderance of narcissistic people as never before, that fact would indicate a sociological rather than psychological problem. But psychology triumphs because it is a secularized Christian viewpoint, and it fits the same conservatism that forms part of Christianity at its core, in which the world is essentially created perfectly and managed thoroughly by a provident deity who is boss of it all, and the only problem marring the perfection of this creation is the individual will to sin through either moral weakness or malice. It also stands to reason therefore that the same murderous exclusions and hatreds that drove both anti-semitism and the persecution of supposed heretics in the name of ideological conformity and enforceable notions of normality, that this is still with us today, and manifest if nowhere else in medical and therapeutic guise.