Yesterday, an intrepid person asked me, if narcissists can be loyal.
Now, on the face of it, a loyal narcissist sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. If narcissist, not loyal, if loyal, not narcissists. Get it?
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and a professor of psychology. And today I am going, I am going, to answer your question, whether you want it or not, because I'm loyal to you, my viewers.
Okay, shoshani.
Loyalty is a commitment. It's a commitment to place the interests of someone else above your own, to place the interest of another person above your own self-interest. So there's a whiff of self-sacrifice here.
When you're loyal, you have to sacrifice something.
Generally, I think sacrifices are a seriously bad thing, and they lead to dysfunction and pathology. But loyalty may be the exception, because the self-sacrifice in most cases is either minimal or morally justified.
At any rate, the test of loyalty is the willingness to subject your self-interest to the interest of another person who you love.
Loyalty, therefore, is a crucial element in the most significant intimate relationships, such as marriage or friendship.
But there's loyalty also within groups, to the other members of the group, to the values of the group. There's loyalty which is linked to group affiliation.
But even within the group, there's a lot of intimacy. Intimacy is the glue that holds human beings together. Intimacy is the adhesive that is at the root of interpersonal relationships.
So loyalty is a crucial element wherever there is intimacy. Loyalty requires intimacy, and I would say that it goes the other way around. Intimacy requires loyalty.
But loyalty is not only a state of mind, it's a behavioral pattern. It's a set of choices and decisions.
Loyalty is not entirely there and definitely not proven until it has been tested.
Loyalty needs to be tested.
Loyalty on paper, loyalty by word of mouth, loyalty as an abstract commitment is not loyalty. Only when circumstances conspire to test the vows of loyalty that we can say with any modicum of certainty that loyalty is there.
But what about loyalty to values, loyalty to collectives? Isn't it different to your run-of-the-mill loyalty in a marriage, for example?
No, I don't think so.
I think loyalty to values and collectives is identical to loyalty when it is applied to individuals. It's only multiplied.
Whereas in a marriage, you are loyal to your spouse and if you have children to your children, and if you have dogs and pets and cats, then of course to your dogs and cats. That's in a marriage.
When you're in a group, you're loyal to all the members of the group and to the vision of the group, to the values of the group, to the ethos of the group, to the narrative that unites you all.
And of course, you're also loyal to the belief that the in-group is distinct from the out-group, and sometimes that the out-group is a hostile enemy.
Loyalty could be micro. Microloyalty means you're loyal to your best friend, you're loyal to your spouse, you're loyal to your church or whatever.
But it could be macro, you're loyal to your nation state. You're loyal to the Bible and its edicts and commandments. You're loyal to a vision of how society should be organized, socialism, Marxism, capitalism.
So loyalty starts with the individual in individual interpersonal relationship and then expands outwards like so many ripples in a pond.
People confuse loyalty with fidelity.
Fidelity is an ambiguous word. It has many meanings. Broadly speaking, fidelity means truthfulness, authenticity.
That's why we say infidelity. When your husband cheats on you, he is not being truthful, he is not being authentic, at least not authentic as far as the relationship goes.
So fidelity is about authenticity, about truthfulness, about being genuine, about being, in other words, trustworthy. Fidelity is intimately connected with trust.
Loyalty is not so much about being truthful.
Because for example, your loyalty can drive you to lie in order to protect the person you are loyal to. Loyalty can be associated with lying, not with truthfulness.
And loyalty doesn't necessarily mean that you are being authentic. Sometimes in order to be loyal, you have to deny yourself. You have to not be yourself. You have to become someone else. Not genuine, not authentic.
However, both loyalty and fidelity have to do with trust. They generate trust, they're based on trust, they emanate from trust. They are flip side coins of trust.
Yet fidelity is dramatically different to loyalty.
As I said, fidelity has to do with truthfulness and authenticity, while loyalty often takes you to places which are not truthful and not authentic.
We see that, for example, in loyalty among criminals when they engage in a mutual criminal enterprise.
Loyalty is an either or proposition, there's no compromise. You can't be 99% loyal or 50% loyal. The minute you have been disloyal even once, then you're branded disloyal. That's it. You can never again regain your status as a loyal person.
So it's a take it or leave it. It's a binary state. It's a yes or no. It's an either or.
And in this sense, it's reminiscent to pregnancy.
There's a famous parable of a thousand white swans, and then a single black swan passes, and the sentence all swans are white is falsified.
It's the same with loyalty.
You could be loyal for decades. And then there's a single act of betrayal or treachery and you would never ever again be considered loyal.
With narcissists, loyalty is possible.
As long as loyalty, the choice to be loyal, the choice to remain loyal, the decision to act in a loyal way, in a faithful way, as long as these yield an uninterrupted flow of high-quality narcissistic supply, narcissists can be loyal.
Narcissus, exactly like psychopaths, is goal-oriented.
But whereas the psychopath's goals are multivariate and many, the narcissist's goal is one thing only, attention.
Narcissist is an attention seeker. Narcissistic supply is his or her drug of choice.
If loyalty gets you narcissistic supply, the narcissist is loyal. If disloyalty gets you and treachery get your narcissistic supply, that's what the narcissist is going to do.
Narcissus does whatever it takes to obtain and secure narcissistic supply.
The narcissist's loyalty, therefore, is a form of explicitly transactional approach or state of mind or attitude or behavior.
There's a transaction there. I'm going to be loyal because it brings me narcissistic supply. I'm going to be loyal as long as I obtain attention. I'm going to ostentatiously loyal. I'm going to brag about my loyalty. I'm going to boast about it. I'm going to attract attention to my loyalty. My loyalty is a vehicle in order to secure an uninterrupted flow of my drug, my narcissistic supply.
A narcissist would even sacrifice his or life if he has no other choice, and then only if it guarantees posthumous narcissistic supply.
So we see narcissists sometimes commit suicide because they imagine the impact the suicide would have on world attention, world opinion, or the opinion and attention of people around them whom they consider to be sources of narcissistic supply.
Any relationship that calls for major sacrifices of essential aspects of well-being, identity, or existence is unhealthy.
Loyalty that requires you to compromise your well-being, to feel bad on a constant basis, loyalty that asks you to negate and deny your identity, to be someone else, not you. And loyalty that endangers or risks your existence in any way, shape or form, this kind of loyalty is pathological, is unhealthy.
And actually, it is not loyalty at all. It is codependency, codependencymasquerading as loyalty.
I hope I've answered your question.
Narcissus can be loyal if it pays.