Now that Elon Musk has ascended to become the real President of the United States, I decided to re-read his biography by the best biographer ever, Isaacson.
It's a hefty tomb, and it goes into great detail about Elon Musk the man and Elon Musk the entrepreneur.
And no, this video is not about Elon Musk.
And I do not envy Elon Musk. I pity Elon Musk.
I wouldn't trade places with him for all the riches in the world.
He has had a wretched childhood and he is having a horrid personal life.
To be Elon Musk is to be entombed in a torture chamber, regardless of his accomplishments.
I truly, honestly, pity him.
I don't envy him.
I know what mental illness is like.
In this biography, Elon Musk's biography by Isaacson, it is shocking that Isaacson did not consult a diagnostician, a psychologist, a clinician, with some experience in autism spectrum disorders and personality disorders.
Literally everyone in the book, everyone interviewed for the book, keeps telling Isaacson that Elon Musk is mentally ill. Elon Musk himself admits to it. He self-diagnoses as someone with Asperger syndrome at some point he even admits to being bipolar.
And so I would have thought that consulting a mental health professional or mental health practitioner would be a normal course of action for a biographer and that is a major omission in a book that is otherwise attempting to be balanced, although Isaacson's admiration for Musk and all is clear throughout the text.
I have read this biography twice, not an easy task, not an easy feat.
And of course I have never met Elon Musk, nor interviewed him, nor am I qualified to diagnose people, professionally or otherwise.
I'm a professor of psychology. I am not a clinician or a diagnostician.
But I do consider myself to be an expert on narcissistic personality disorder.
And Musk strikes me as an extreme case, perhaps the most radical case I've ever come across, of an overt sadistic narcissist.
Now, Musk self-diagnoses as an autist, someone with autism spectrum disorder.
Asperger's syndrome is no longer used. We today say that it is level 1 autism spectrum disorder or just autism spectrum disorder according to the ICD 11. Level 1 is DSM language.
And so it is Musk who decided that he is an Aspie, someone with Asperger's syndrome.
He has never been diagnosed.
And self-diagnosis and a staunch refusal to attend therapy or to be inspected or investigated by a diagnostician. These are in themselves markers of grandiosity.
Everything in the book tells me that Elon Musk has narcissistic personality disorder. That's at least my opinion.
Again, I haven't met him and everything I'm saying should be taken with a mountain of salt because of this lack of direct accessand because of my focus on teaching and studying the personality disorders.
But the preponderance of evidence in the book is overwhelming.
Musk regards himself in messianic terms as a savior of humanity, charting the course to a problem-free multi-planetary future. Problem-free, because Musk is out to solve all of humanity's problems and predicaments and protected from incipient threats such as climate change and artificial intelligence.
This is the kind of grandiosity that borders on psychotic disorder.
But this grandiose fantasy in the case of Elon Musk is coupled with real accomplishments.
They fall short of his pretensions and his fantasies and his self-concept, of course. There's a grandiosity gap there between the way he sees himself and the way he really is, but he is an accomplished person. No one can take this away from him.
Musk is driven, he is detail-oriented, he is knowledgeable, daring and visionary.
And this leads us to the core question that I'm going to tackle in this video.
Can high functioning narcissists, so-called, can they be productive, constructive, positive?
Even we do have the construct of prosocial or communal narcissists, a narcissist that is a pillar of a community that is essentially moral and ethical and altruistic and charitable and helpful and compassionate and caring and so, or at least pretends to be, because this is the locus. This kind of narcissists obtains narcissistic supply is charity and altruism ostentatious.
But is there a class of narcissists that really have their act together, high functioning, and could these people be useful? Could these people be good for society? The greater good. Could they be leaders who are trustworthy and should be followed? Are they productive and constructive and positive? Is narcissism even the next evolutionary stage? Are narcissists what Nietzsche called the Ubermensch, the future supermen?
Believe it or not, there are voices in academe that glorify and glamorize narcissism. They suggest that narcissism is very positive. That what we call pathological narcissism is merely an adaptation to a changing environment. And that we need narcissists, both as society and as individuals, we need narcissists in our lives because they guarantee our survival and our well-being.
There's a Neo-Lamarckian theory that epigenetic changes are later consolidated at gene level with no changes in the DNA.
In other words, an environment can induce certain genes to express themselves, and this expression is passed on intergenerational.
And narcissism could be just one such epigenetic change according to some scholars.
And there are others, as I've mentioned, who regard narcissistic traits and even psychopathic traits and behaviors as conducive to survival, and not only surviving, but to thriving.
It is all based, of course, on a misconstrual and misunderstanding of the concept of positive adaptation.
First of all, narcissism is found universally, so it cannot be a reaction to stressors in specific environments.
In other words, narcissism is not a reaction to changes in the environment, because it can be found in all environments, all cultures, all societies, all natural settings, all ages, all genders, and so on.
So this casts in serious doubt the belief that narcissism is some kind of adaptation.
But even if it were a positive adaptation, as I said, it's a misconstrual.
A misconstrual because positive adaptation is on the individual level.
Individuals can adapt positively. If a sufficient number of individuals adopt the same way, you could have a positive adaptation on a population level, on cohort level or on a species wide level that much is true but it starts with the individual.
The misperception that evolution is linear, that it is error free, is a misperception, of course. Evolution is not linear and it is replete with many errors and mistakes. One step forward, two steps back. Two steps forward, one step back. Two steps back. Two steps forward, one step back. That's the way evolution works.
Narcissism could be an evolutionary experiment that failed, like so many other mutations.
What may be detrimental to an individual may be beneficial in the long run or may be beneficial on the level of the species. That much is true.
So we could say there is an argument that narcissism, pathological narcissism, may be bad for the narcissist, but it's good in the long run and it is conducive to the survival and thriving of the human species.
That's another argument.
And these are the alleged advantages of narcissism.
Number one, narcissists are supposed to be charismatic and self-confident and therefore natural-born leaders.
But that is not what the studies show.
The studies demonstrate that the superficial charm of the narcissist and the psychopath wears off.
Narcissists antagonize people. Antagonism is a major characteristic, diagnostic and clinical feature of narcissism. They antagonize people, they're conflict prone.
Even the covert narcissist is passive aggressive. The overt, grandiose narcissist is often outright aggressive, externalizes aggression. The psychopath is defiant.
And the charm wears off pretty fast.
What remains behind is an obnoxious personality which cannot or who cannot interact with people in a meaningful way, let alone lead them anywhere.
So there are of course exceptions to this rule. There have been numerous leaders in human history who can safely be remotely diagnosed across time as narcissists or psychopaths. Hitler comes to mind, Stalin, Mao to some extent, currently Erdogan, Donald Trump, you know, Netanyahu. I mean, these people are clearly narcissists or psychopaths and they are leaders and they are self-confident.
So this seems to uphold this theory.
But look at the outcomes. Would you like to have been led by Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mao or even Netanyahu?
So we'll deal with the outcomes a bit later.
Number two, the alleged advantages of narcissism, I remind you.
Second advantage.
Narcissists are visionaries. They have vision. They have a goal focus. They're goal oriented.
That is more true of malignant narcissists than psychopaths.
And their vision and their goal orientation has to do with their grandiosity and fantasy.
The very pathological elements in narcissism predispose the narcissist to have a vision or to be a visionary and to set goals and to push people to accomplish these goals.
And Elon Musk is a prime example of this.
And so maybe grandiosity and fantasy are not such bad things. Maybe they're good on the species level.
It is true that narcissists often set unrealistic goals that result in waste and self-defeat. Again, Elon Musk is a prime example of this.
But they set goals and they get people, they motivate people. They get them to do things and to accomplish the impossible, and they have a clear vision where they're going and they're self-confident with it, they're charismatic.
That's allegedly the second advantage.
Again, this is a way, this is kind of idealizing the narcissists. All narcissists believe that they are cosmically significant, all of them perceive themselves as godlike, even covert narcissists. And yes, many of them have a vision or their visionaries.
The vision thing, many of them are goal oriented and so on and so forth.
But in the overwhelming vast majority of cases, narcissists are failures and losers.
And it's precisely because their goals are unrealistic, grandiose, fantastic, inflated, detached from the constraints of reality.
A vision has to be grounded. If it is not, then it's not a vision. It's a dream. It's a fantasy. It leads nowhere, except to a waste of resources, many disgruntled people, pain to go around and devastation, which is the case 99% of the time with narcissists.
The next supposed advantage of narcissism is a lack of empathy.
You see, in this topsy-turvy world, which involves quite a few academics, quite a few scholars, everything that we consider to be bad or deficient with narcissists is actually an advantage.
They lack empathy or they lack affective empathy. They have no emotional empathy.
And that's a good thing. It's a good thing according to these scholars because it allows the narcissists, this deficiency, this lacuna, this lack, allows the narcissists to make tough decisions.
Because when you don't have empathy, you don't care about people. When you don't care about people, you are clear-eyed. You can see the situation exactly as it is. There's no interference. Empathy is a kind of interference. It degrades performance.
And this doesn't happen to narcissists. They're objective. They're neutral. They don't take other people into account because other people don't exist and that's a good thing, especially when you're a leader or a business tycoon or whatever. Then you need to ignore other people, their fears, their emotions, and so when you send people to battle as a commander-in-chief you cannot think about their pain, their families, and so on. When you're a business tycoon, you need to fire people, as Elon Musk says, mercilessly and relentlessly. You need to do that.
And the lack of empathy is an asset.
The problem is that because the narcissist lacks empathy, they are unable to read people properly.
Narcissists misread the room. They misread people. Social cues, body language, even.
And in this sense, it is true that narcissists resemble people with autism spectrum disorder.
And because a narcissist lacks empathy and is unable to decipher and decode other people, the narcissist most frequently makes decisions which are wrong, ineffectual, lead nowhere, and are very damaging.
When you go through the biography of Elon Musk, you realize how wasteful this man is.
Despite all his claims to efficiency and parsimony, this is an exceedingly wasteful man.
The bulk of his decisions are absolutely wrong because he has no clue what makes people tick. He has no theory of mind, according to him.
The next advantage is the lack of access to positive emotions.
Again, this is perceived as a disadvantage by mainstream psychologists and professors of psychology.
But this niche of narcissism glorifying and psychopathy glamorizing scholars say that a lack of access to positive emotions is an asset, it's an adaptation, because it renders decision making less clouded.
So if you don't take more emotions into account, if you are not hampered and impeded by emotions, then you're likely to make decisions which are much more objective, much more in tune with reality.
Exactly like empathy, emotions are a form of perturbation, a form of disturbance.
Take away, take out of the picture, empathy and emotions, and you're likely to become a much better decision maker.
That is so dramatically untrue that it makes me doubt the credentials and the knowledge of these alleged scholars.
The inability to decipher emotions creates impaired reality testing.
People are motivated mainly by emotions.
What makes people tick is emotions.
The effective landscape of people, their internal work, matters much more than any cognition or any textbook.
To understand people, to work with people, to accomplish things, you need to be attuned to their emotions. You need to be empathic.
And if you are not, your inability to decipher emotions, to read emotions, creates impaired reality testing.
Because people are part of reality. If you're unable to gauge emotions, it creates impaired reality testing because people are part of reality. If you're unable to gauge people, your reality testing sucks.
And to compensate for that, narcissists distort their cognitions. They have cognitive distortions.
It's a little like a blind person. A blind person has no access to colors, to visuals, to shapes.
And so what the blind person attempts to do is compensate for this lack, for this deficiency, via the sense of hearing, or sense, or smell, or touch.
The narcissist does the same. He's unable to grasp people. He's unable to glom them. They are unable to understand. People don't make sense to the narcissists. They don't even exist as far as a narcissist is concerned. They are production units. They are objects. They are totally interchangeable.
And so narcissists, exactly like someone with autism, keep failing, keep failing with people.
And to compensate for this, the narcissist distorts his reality and his cognition.
To convince himself that he is actually very good. That he is actually efficacious or self-efficacious. That whatever it is that is wrong with him is actually efficacious or self-efficacious. That whatever it is that is wrong with him is actually a positive evolutionary adaptation.
And he is the Moses who is going to lead the tribes of Israel through the desert and to the promised land.
The need for narcissistic supply renders narcissists, some narcissists, prosocial and communal. And that part is true.
The need for narcissistic supply pushes people like Elon Musk to accomplish things, and that much is true. There's no debating this. It's an engine. It's a driver of actions, behaviors, combined with other traits. It leads to outcomes.
But there is a caveat here. There is a flaw in this theory.
The need for narcissistic supply renders narcissists prosocial, communal, accomplished only if this self-enhances the narcissists.
It's about self-enhancement. It's not about the accomplishments. It's not about other people. It's not about anything. It's about the narcissist.
It's self-referential, it's self-directed, it's internal, it's not external. As long as the self-enhancement continues and only if the self-enhancement and self-aggrandizement continue, the narcissists goes on.
But the minute the self-aggrandizement continue, the narcissists goes on.
But the minute the self-enhancing and self-aggrandizing aspects of the activity ceases or reverses, there's negative supply and so on, the narcissist abandons everything and moves on.
He's peripatetic, he's itinerant. itinerant, he's not reliable. The minute there is a collapse, the minute there's mortification, the narcissist turns destructive, including self-destructive. He becomes punitive, he becomes vengeful.
And in a way that is totally divorced from reality, in a way that is detrimental to the narcissists himself and to his goals, let alone to the environment and the human milieu.
Narcissists are fools. They are fools. They can learn only from their own experiences and mistakes and the majority of them never learn at all because they consider themselves omniscient or endowed somehow or above other people whom they hold in complete contempt.
The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence. The opposite of stupidity is wisdom.
Narcissists can be intelligent, never wise.
I repeat this. A narcissist can be intelligent and even accomplished, but never wise. I repeat this.
And narcissists can be intelligent and even accomplished, but never wise.
Often extremely intelligent people are also inordinately dumb.
Remember in the phrase idiot savant? Remember the the idiot in idiot savant? There's an idiot there.
It never ends well, never mind how long the illusory facade is maintained.
The facade of success, the facade of accomplishments, the facade of genius, the amazing facade of uniqueness and unprecedentedness.
Never mind how long the narcissist maintains this convincing facade that deludes and deceives everyone, it always, always ends in a devastated and dangerous wasteland.
Others pay the price and the narcissist as well.
I repeat this, it always do you understand the word always?
The word always implies there is no exception.
You could be a tycoon, you could be a president, you could be a writer, you could be end for a while, for a year or two or 10 or 20. You could be considered the eighth wonder of the world.
Ultimately, it all comes tumbling down and crumbling.
The Wizard of Oz. The curtain, what you see behind the curtain, is the true narcissist.
A Machiavellian, dysempathic, reality-deprived, insane, manipulative. Reality deprived, insane, manipulative.