Malicious envy is when you want to destroy someone who keeps frustrating you by being superior to you, someone who is above you intellectually, someone whose accomplishments you crave but can't attain, someone who gets all the beautiful girls, all the wealthy clients and all the academic recognition or whatever. And you want to destroy this object of frustration.
Malicious envy should be distinguished from benign envy and jealousy. They are not the same.
Benign envy and jealousy motivate you to measure up to the object, to the person that you admire, to emulate them, to imitate them, to better yourself.
So malicious destructive envy is when you want to destroy someone. Benign envy, jealousy, especially benign envy is when you want to build yourself up to be like the person that you admire and envy.
Now, is malicious envy a form of sadism? And how are all these connected to narcissism?
This is the topic of today's video, the covert narcissist's sadistic envy and its fantasy.
Because fantasy has something to do with it.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CIAPS, Centre for International Advanced Professional Studies in Cambridge, United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada and an outreach programme in Lagos, Nigeria.
Today's topic is dark. Indeed, sadism is one of the four elements in the dark tetrad personality, as we shall see a bit later.
The topic of today's video has been triggered by a recent study, a study published in the journal, the academic journal, Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 205, April 2023. So it's cutting edge. It's the latest.
And the study is titled, "Pathological Narcissism and Sadistic Personality, the Role of Rivalry and Malicious Envy". It's a mega study conducted on a huge sample of adults in, where else, Italy, where envy rules and reigns.
But before we go into the study, analyzing the study, benefiting from its outstanding outcomes, let me give you a bit of an introduction.
I started this video by asking, is malicious envy a form of sadism? Is the wish to destroy your betters a form of sadism? Does it involve an evil intent to, for example, inflict pain, bask in the agony of others, gratify yourself with their writhing, torturing them to the point of feeling omnipotent?
This is all true in the make-up of the covert narcissist.
To remind you, covert narcissism has several elements. Envy is a major, major thing with covert narcissists.
They display pseudo humility, false modesty. I'm just one of the guys. I'm exactly like you. I can understand you.
They also have victimhood, a victimhood stance. They're always the victims. They never do wrong. They can never do wrong. They always somehow fall prey to unscrupulous people or abusive intimate partners or institutions which are out to get them.
And in this sense, covert narcissism is a closed-kin, first cousin of paranoia. Most covert narcissists entertain paranoid ideation on a regular basis.
The victimhood stance, the victimhood position, being a perpetual and professional victim. This excludes any other explanation to reality except some conspiracy against you.
If you spend your entire life believing that you're a victim, then people are out to get you. There's malign attention and intention focused on you.
Of course, it's narcissistically gratifying. It's a form of displaced grandiosity. If you can't obtain supply, narcissistic supply directly, and covert narcissists are covert because they can't obtain supply directly. They fail. They're kind of collapse narcissists.
Then you can obtain supply by believing yourself to be the victim of your betters, the victim of institutions, public intellectuals, God knows what.
So pseudo humility, a victimhood stance.
But underneath all this, there is sadistic malicious envy. It's the number one characteristic of the covert narcissist in my view. It drives the passive aggressive urges of the covert narcissist, as we shall see a bit later.
Now, the covert narcissist compensates for this with fantasy because he's not self efficacious in reality. He is unable to secure outcomes in reality. He resorts to fantasy and the façade is it could be anything. I'm a good person. I'm a superhero in battle with super villains. I am the power behind the scenes. I am the true inventor or discoverer of this and that I'm a rescuer, savior, a healer, etc, etc.
One of the roles of the fantasy is to make the covert narcissist feel safe. We'll discuss it a bit later.
Okay. Our well being depends on connectivity.
So narcissists of all stripes overt, covert, somatic, cerebral inverted, you name it, all kinds of narcissists are hurtful. They hurt people because they denied the possibility of true connection. They are one step removed. They're behind the glass darkly.
The sadistic component in narcissistic pathologies is related to power, not only to pain. Classical sadism is about deriving gratification from hurting others. Other people's pain is nectar and ambrosia and a wonderful, wonderful thing to behold. Sadistic supply is about being gratified by inflicting pain on others and witnessing their writhing agony.
But in the case of narcissism, sadism is connected to power, not only to pain, also to pain, but to power. More precisely, the sadism in narcissistic personality disorder has to do with the power to inflict pain.
So it's pain one step removed. The narcissist derives a sense of omnipotence, a gratification of his grandiose inflated self image, the buttressing of his fantasy of omnipotence and omniscience. His whole structure lies on the ability to inflict pain on other people who are at his mercy, beck and call.
In other words, the narcissist is more likely to act sadistically with his nearest and dearest.
The narcissist interprets intimacy as the license to inflict pain. Intimacy empowers the narcissist. It grants him the power to inflict pain. It gives him access. It provides him with the levers and the leverage to somehow torture people around him.
And so this is about power, not only about pain and most notably the power to inflict pain.
Now, sadism can be externalized in aggressive, inflicting pain, but it can also be passive aggressive, which is the bread and butter of covert narcissists.
Passive aggressive sadism involves frustrating someone, withholding, avoiding, tantalizingly suggesting something and then going back on your word, breaking promises. All these are forms of sadism.
But of course, narcissists, whether overt or covert, are not totally cognitively impaired and some of them are not even intellectually challenged. They realize that inflicting pain on people can have adverse outcomes, can result in vengeance, vindictiveness, revenge and retribution. Somewhere deep inside they know, narcissists and covert narcissists know that they're playing with fire, that there is karma, that one day they're going to pay the price.
In wary of these possible unwanted outcomes, narcissists withdraw into a world of fantasy.
And in this world of fantasy, they're not hated, they're not derided, they're not decried, they're not shunned. In this world of fantasy, no one wants to harm them, no one wants to punish them for their misdeeds. In this world of fantasy, they can torture other people, they can inflict pain, they can exert power and none of this is going to have any consequences.
Now the sadistic component in narcissistic personality disorder has to do with the power to inflict pain even if this power is not used, even if it is ambient and atmospheric.
But in the narcissist's mind, once he has the power, even if it's not used, it is somehow discernible and visible.
Remember, the narcissist interacts with internal objects, not with external objects. So if he has the power to torture you, in his mind he has tortured you because he interacts with your representation in his mind. So the potential to cause you pain in his mind translates into having caused you pain.
So narcissists are constantly hypervigilant on their toes and anxious because they know that they are hurting people on a regular basis. They realize that some people are going to lash out and lash back. There's going to be payback. They know this.
And the only refuge is the fantasy world.
And in this fantasy, nothing bad is ever going to happen because the narcissist is adulated and loved and adored and corseted and shielded from the consequences of his actions.
Because the narcissist in this fantasy world perceives himself as some kind of treasure, a preciously unique artifact or a childlike entity who's going to punish a child, who's going to hurt a child and who's going to destroy the magnificence and uniqueness of an intellectual treasure, such as the narcissist.
The more sadistic the narcissist, the more evolved the fantasy. Fantasy in this sense is compensatory.
Now, covert narcissists have a much richer fantasy life than overt or grandiose narcissists for two reasons.
Number one, covert narcissists cannot operate well in reality. They're not self efficacious. They fail. They're failures. They're collapsed.
So the only way for them to generate supply is via self supply in a fantastic world, in a paracosm.
The second reason covert narcissists have a much more developed fantasy world is that they hurt people much more.
They are overt, grandiose narcissists are in your face. You see them coming. You can defend yourself and protect yourself against them.
The covert narcissist is a snake in the grass. He's subterranean. The covert narcissist works via subterfuge and stratagems. He's Machiavellian. He is conniving. He's cunning. He's scheming.
And in this sense, the covert narcissist is very much like the psychopath, only without the daring acknowledgement of the psychopath, without the psychopathic facade or the psychopathic defiance or recklessness.
Convert narcissists are poison, slow acting poison and realizing their impact on people around them. They know that retribution and payback are coming and they defend against it with a very well evolved fantasy world.
Now let's go to Italy. Shall we? I mentioned the study. You can find it in the literature in the description or the description is under the video. Children not above the video. Thank you.
And what do they say in this research? These are people from Italy.
Giovanni Roger Alessandro Amore Beatrice Simi and Patricia Melotti. They sound like retired mafiosi, but actually they are psychologists.
And so they were curious if sadism and grandiose narcissism are related and they wanted to find what in narcissism predisposes a narcissist to act sadistically or even to be a full-fledged sadist.
Not just to clarify, only a small minority of narcissists, very small minority, are full-fledged sadists in the sexual sense, in the emotional sense.
Sadism is a mental health disorder. It used to be a personality disorder until it's been removed by the diagnostic and statistical manual committee, but it's still distinct from narcissism.
However, sadistic elements, sadistic artifacts, sadistic behaviors, a sadistic tinge to certain traits, these do exist in literally all narcissists.
And the researchers in Italy asked themselves, how is this sadism mediated? How does it penetrate and permeate narcissism? And how does it interact with the demands and exigencies and ups and downs, vicissitudes of narcissism?
And they found out that sadism is intimately connected to malicious envy and narcissistic rivalry.
These are two dimensions of pathological narcissism and they succeeded to connect pretty convincingly, I think, sadism to grandiose narcissism.
Sadism refers to the tendency to derive pleasure from the suffering of others. As I said before, it's a component of the new construct of the dark tetrad.
TheAs I said before, it's a component of the new construct of the dark tetrad. The dark tetrad is Machiavellianism, the tendency to manipulate people.
Subclinical psychopathy, psychopathy that cannot be diagnosed as psychopathy, but as of the hallmarks and behaviors of psychopathy, subclinical narcissism is subclinical sadism.
Now, the tendency to control other people is common to both grandiose narcissism and sadism. Both of these disorders have to do with control, free-carrying the need to control other people and underlying that an anxiety reaction or even anxiety disorder. So there's anxiety about the environment.
The only way to mitigate or ameliorate this anxiety is by controlling it.
And there are two ways to control it, grandiosely via narcissism or by inflicting pain or threatening to inflict pain.
Sadism. The relationship between narcissism and sadism has to do with narcissistic rivalry and malicious envy, as I mentioned.
So what is narcissistic rivalry? It's having negative emotions when someone else receives attention and having positive emotions when other people fail. So you are elated when people fail, collapse, and you feel bad to the point of suicidal ideation even when other people succeed, especially if they succeed in something or in some endeavor or some undertaking or in some task or in some field that directly competes with the locus of your grandiose.
So as a narcissist, if you feel that you're a genius and then someone else gets accolades and applause for his intellectual achievements, you're likely to experience rivalry, narcissistic rivalry.
And if you consider yourself handsome and someone else ends up getting all the girls, you're going to experience elation, happiness, contentment, jubilation even, cheer and joy. So this is narcissistic rivalry.
Malicious envy is when people compare themselves unfavorably to other people. This is done, for example, copiously in social media. Social media people keep comparing themselves to other people, a phenomenon known as relative positioning. Social media platforms encourage malicious envy and relative position via mechanisms such as likes. So there is malice in social media platforms. They maliciously leverage elements of narcissism and elements of sadism. That's why there's so much verbal abuse and violence and trolling in social media platforms because they want it to be this way.
Okay, social media side in relationships between individuals, people compare themselves to others. And if there's someone who possesses qualities, property, success, a partner, intimate partner or whatever that you envy, then if you're a narcissist, you're likely to experience malicious envy.
Malicious envy involves anger, hostility and aggression. The wish to destroy the object, the person that causes you envy, the object of frustration. The wish to destroy is a critical component of malicious envy.
And in this new study, Roger and colleagues, they wanted to elucidate somehow the complex relationship between sadism and grandiose narcissism and these two traits, rivalry, narcissistic rivalry and malicious envy.
And they found that there are negative and positive aspects of envy. Malicious envy is the negative aspect.
And there is an affirmative link between grandiose narcissism and sadism mediated via rivalry and envy.
They said the following, narcissistic rivalry is a multidimensional construct that includes aggressiveness, struggle for supremacy and joy in response to other people's failures.
Individualism and grandiose narcissism would be therefore prone to experience pleasure when assisting to cause other people pain, and especially when this pain is related to a position of inferiority.
Our results suggest that grandiose narcissism may be related to the seeking of pleasure in provoking or observing pain in others, as it would strengthen the positive self-image the narcissist eliciting positive feelings of self-worth.
Regarding malicious envy, a similar interpretation of our results can be formulated. Indeed, malicious envy, in contrast with benign envy, would be triggered by the observation of other people's success and good fortune.
Theoretically, in individuals with grandiose narcissism, this perception would elicit hostile feelings towards the fortunate other, as its good fortune would be perceived as an ego threat. This would motivate these narcissistic individuals to desire other people's failure in the destruction of the superior status.
So you can see these people, most of them, covert narcissists, but also overt narcissists, trying to take down someone they envy, someone who is intellectually superior to them, more accomplished in their own field, and so on and so forth.
They can't sleep at night. They absolutely possess and obsess with destroying this person, this object, that keeps reminding them how inferior they are, keeps generating constant narcissistic injuries.
And if this person is a public figure or appears in public, this would create a constant state of mortification, which is unbearable and intolerable.
Narcissists, the envious narcissist, has to destroy the person who causes him injuries and mortification on a permanent basis. There's no other choice, no other solution.
Sooner or later, the narcissist is going to erupt in an orgy of malevolent, malicious and evil attempts to take down the object of frustration.
And the findings of this study are implications, because envy plays a role in various psychological and psychopathological outcomes, even, for example, in depression and anxiety.
But I will not go into it.
Many interesting new tools were used in this study, a study which I highly recommend, but I was very impressed.
Italians, would you believe this? No offense.
So they use the benign and malignant envy scale.
They administered self-report questionnaires evaluating sadistic personality, for example, the assessment of sadistic personality questionnaire. They use the pathological narcissism inventory, which is much better than narcissistic personality inventory, although far from perfect. And they use the narcissistic admiration and rivalry questionnaire.
Then they apply structural equation models to test hypotheses.
Very nice work when it comes to statistics. And they found that grandiose narcissism, narcissistic rivalry and malicious envy, positively and significantly, are significantly predicted by the scores on the sadism questionnaire.
It's pretty shocking. It means that sadism is an excellent predictor of narcissism, or even maybe a precursor.
Remember that in early childhood, pathological narcissism has to do with frustration. A child is frustrated by a dead mother, a mother who is emotionally unavailable, not nurturing, not caring, unloving. There's a lot of frustration there. There's a lot of rage, a lot of impotent, helpless, hopeless anger. The child could well become, could well develop sadism in response to this inner turmoil, this volcano of repressed negative affectivity, negative emotions.
The child is unable to attack the mother. The child is dependent on the mother. He is dependent on the source of frustration. Can you imagine the conflict, the dissonance in the child?
So instead of attacking the mother, the child develops sadism.
In extreme cases, the child develops a conduct disorder, which leads later in life to psychopathy in 40% of the cases. And such a child would torture animals or other children, peers.
In less extreme cases, the sadism gets subsumed into the general narcissistic pathology of the self.
Sadism becomes a dimension, an element of the child's nascent narcissism.
The child then learns to hurt people, to cause pain in order to secure control and power over an environment that causes him frustration. The child learns to link frustration with control, frustration with pain.
As the child grows up and becomes an adult, this adult is going to react the same way to any form of frustration.
Dallard in 1939 suggested the frustration-aggression hypothesis. He says that every frustration is converted into aggression. This is true here as well.
The narcissist, when he faces frustration, envy, inability to remedy a situation of inferiority, constant narcissistic injuries, mortification, this narcissist is going to be driven to extremes of psychopathy, he's going to become seriously malevolent and evil, he's going to conspire, undermine, lie his way through, forge, fake. He's going to become criminalized in his attempts to take down and destroy the object that constantly causes him frustration, injury and mortification.
And so, O'Meara defines sadism as a tendency to inflict pain in humiliation on others and to experience pleasure in relation to people's suffering.
But this is an inadequate definition, although it's a fairly new one, 2011.
We need to reconceptualize sadism as a subclinical variable, not full-fledged, not explosive, not criminal.
The sadism in daily life, the sadism of trifles, the sadism of nuance, the sadism of ambience, sadism by proxy, and of course the sadism of the covert narcissist who is maliciously envious and needs to destroy the person that causes him the envy.
And because covert narcissism is one step removed from primary psychopathy, the covert narcissist becomes a primary psychopath and criminalized in effect.
Investigation of sadism conceptualized this way and the association of sadism with antisocial behaviors, including sexual violence, fraud, conspiracy and so on and so forth. These were investigated by Russell in 2017, Russell and Allies 2017.
Subclinical sadism has been linked to bullying and cyberbullying by Van Geel and others in 2017. And it was shown that sadism often leads to unprovoked aggression by Bontva Agaujo and others in 2022.
Some authors argued for considering sadism as a component of the dark tetra, as I mentioned, extension of the dark shryad.
And we have authors such as Bodak and Allies in 2013, Kiyohi and others in 2019, Paul Hoos and Williams in as early as 2002. It's not a new idea, it's more than 20 years in the making.
Most recently, the aforementioned Bontva Agaujo and his colleagues in 2022 performed a meta-analysis. And they concluded that there is a pattern of observed associations between sadism and dark triad components, including subclinical psychopathy and subclinical narcissism.
And there are distinct associations of sadism with certain psychological outcomes that I've mentioned before.
And this supports the idea that sadism can be considered a component of overriding dark personality.
What this implies is that we would be hard pressed to find a narcissist or a covert narcissist who is not also sadistic.
When the covert narcissist attempts to take down a rival because of narcissistic rivalry, when he attempts to destroy someone who causes him unbearable envy because of malicious envy, the covert narcissist takes pleasure in doing this.
There is sadistic pleasure there, hedonic sadistic pleasure.
The covert narcissist feels empowered, he feels omnipotent, he feels capable, he feels self-efficacious when he destroys someone else.
This is his way of regaining control and obtaining narcissistic supply.
Of course, all this is done under the cover of morality or stingy morality, of rescuing or saving someone or a group of people, of ethics and of pseudo-humility. It's done humbly. It's done reluctantly, visibly reluctantly.
Like you know I don't want to do it, but I have to do it because I'm a moral person and I'm a superhero and I'm going to protect people and I'm going to fight evil.
This is the cover of the covert narcissist, but underneath this, this simple, unmitigated, unadulterated, pure, evil sadism period.
Okay.
So this study established the connection between sadism, dark triad components, and rivalry, and envy in narcissism.
And so they tried to understand how is it possible that narcissism, which is a very complex construct, how is it possible that it's linked to sadism, which is very simple concept.
To remind you, the core features of narcissism are an exaggerated sense of personal importance, entitlement, feelings of superiority, lack of empathy, at least lack of emotional empathy. There is cold empathy there.
And individuals with high levels of narcissism are focused on themselves. They are self-centered and they overestimate their abilities.
WU, a study by WU in 2019, substantiated that basically.
Now, today it's established and accepted even to some extent, although obliquely in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It's established that there are two types of narcissism.
One is grandiose and one is vulnerable.
The most recent survey of this is Weiss and Miller, 2018.
Grandiose narcissism is arrogance, self-promotion, immodesty, haughtiness. And vulnerable narcissism involves self-centeredness, hyper-sensitivity, introversion and so on.
And I refer you to work by Miller in 2017.
So how do we associate a single dimension, sadism with these two types which are diametrically opposed, actually overt grandiose narcissism and covert narcissism are so different to each other that there is a serious debate in the profession where the one of these two is actually a form of psychopathy.
And the only real form of narcissism is covert narcissism, which is compensatory.
I have a video dedicated to this debate.
But how can we associate sadism with both the overt and the covert versions if they are almost mutually exclusive?
Because both of them involve pleasure.
In both types of narcissism, there is pleasure that the narcissist feels in response to other people's perceived pain and a willingness to exert dominance on other people. That is worked by O'Meara in 2011.
This is what's common to both types of narcissism.
Beyond the seeking of pleasure, the central feature underlying sadistic behaviors is the willingness to exert power. Dominance in narcissism, overt and covert, is about controlling people, manipulating people, dominating people.
Tendency, the proneness, the propensity to exploit and manipulate other people is a central feature of grandiose narcissism. And it's measured by the pathological narcissism inventory work by Pincus and others in 2009.
So we know this about grandiose narcissism, but it's equally common. And even I would say more so in covert narcissism, because covert narcissists are not self efficacious. They cannot obtain supply or extract supply from the environment by themselves. So they need to control other people to do it for them. And they need to control the environment to avoid narcissistic injuries and modifications which could be lethal, literally lead to suicide in the case of covert narcissism.
Covert narcissists get emotionally dysregulated much faster than overt or grandiose narcissists because they don't have the added layers of defense of narcissistic supply and self efficacy.
And so from this perspective, the tendency to be dominant and to engage in power plays, to try to exert power over other people is a shared component between narcissism and sadism and also explains the association between these two because sadism is a way to gain control and is a way to exert power through pain.
Stalin said that you can motivate people with love or with fear.
Well, if you have narcissism, you have both. You can charm people into loving you, especially if you are a covert narcissist who masquerades as a kind and pathetic loving person. And you can terrify people in and hurt them and torture them into submission.
And this is an integral part of coercive control.
And so this sadism has been overlooked in the past. Even it's a mistake even I have made in my early the early versions of malignant self love narcissism revisit individuals with high levels of narcissistic rivalry experience negative feelings when someone else is receiving attention. They devalue other people and they experience positive feelings when other people fail or or find themselves in an inferior position.
As I said, in this process helps the individual with narcissistic pathology to maintain the grandiose image of himself.
There are studies by Rogozha in others 2018.
The struggle for supremacy, the rivalry itself, the hostile behavior underlie support, buttress uphold the grandiose.
It is grandiose to engage in battle. It is grandiose to act as a superhero. It's grandiose to take down villains. It's grandiose to destroy the object that frustrates you and to prove yourself better than him or her or her. It's grandiose to take your rivals out.
It's this is all grandiose.
What are we talking about?
Sadism is grandiose exactly like paranoia.
Narcissistic rivalry explains why individuals with high levels of grandiose narcissism experience positive feelings when other people fail, when other people are in pain by exerting power over other people, subduing them, subjugating them because there is a sadistic element there.
According to this reasoning, the levels of narcissistic rivalry explain the process by which grandiose narcissism leads to or is connected somehow to sadism.
Same applies to malicious envy. It's a good candidate to explain relationship between grandiose narcissism and sadism.
Envy is a reaction or a disposition towards other people. It's the outcome of comparing yourself to other people. It's related to a sense of innate inferiority or some kind of injustice or discrimination if you're passive aggressive.
When you compare yourself to other people's traits, their wealth, their success, envy is provoked, envy is triggered. That's only human.
But when this envy leads you to act malevolently in order to destroy the other person, that's malicious envy. And it is distinct from benign envy. This is known as the dual envy theory.
Cohen, Chaddash, Larsen, 2017, Van der Wenn, 2016, etc. It's a new theory of envy.
Benign envy is a tendency to improve your life, to change yourself, to better your condition. It stimulates you to work on yourself in accordance with the role models that you envy.
Malicious envy is not about any of this. It's not about you, it's about the other person.
Benign envy is about you and how you could become a better version of yourself.
Malicious envy is about the other person and how you could destroy that other person so that it doesn't irritate you and annoy you and cause you narcissistic injuries and narcissistic mortifications on a permanent basis. It's characterized by hostility, malicious envy, anger, devaluation and harming others intentionally, deliberately, in order to reduce the threat to the ego, if you wish, or to the false self.
Van der Wenn, 2016.
So, both benign envy and malicious envy are motivational, but benign envy causes positive motivation. It motivates you to do positive things.
Well, malicious envy literally drives you to become a psychopath.
Malicious envy supports in grandiose narcissism a positive image of the self.
How?
You construct your positive image of the self in narcissism compared to the negative image of the other.
Malicious envy tells you if you destroy the other, it's because the other is negative. And by destroying this negative other person, you will have upheld and supported and proved your positive self image.
So, it's an exclusionary identity. It's an identity by comparison.
Malicious envy is derivative. Narcissism is derivative. The narcissist regulates his sense of self-worth and whatever sense of self he has via comparison with others. He derives narcissistic supply from others to regulate his internal environment.
Narcissists like borderlines have external regulation.
So, the narcissist who is besieged and consumed by malicious envy needs to destroy the other person in order to feel good about himself.
But to do that, he needs to refrain reality and he needs to say the other person deserves it. He's bad, he's evil, he's a villain. I am moral. I am a good person. I am impeccable. I am the victim. I have a right, moral, ethical and legal to do whatever I want because he had it coming and he should be punished and he should be taken down.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
But of course, all this is bullshit. All this is nonsense, nonsensical narrative, hiding forces inside the narcissist, especially the covert narcissist that are overwhelming and disregarding and ruinous.
Ultimately, this kind of narcissist is consumed to utter destruction and annihilation by his own malicious envy and narcissistic rivalry. They drive him to destruction and then to destruction. Nothing is left of him.
Envy has been linked more to covert narcissism or vulnerable narcissism than to grandiose narcissism.
I refer you to studies by Gold as early as 1996. Christen and Johar in 2012, Neufeld and Johnson in 2016, Lange and others in 2016, it's a literature review and so on and so forth.
Malicious envy is related somehow to narcissistic rivalry, but it's not the same.
Again, there's a study by Dienic and Brankovic in 2021. Some authors argue that rivalry leads to malicious envy. I argue, Lange for example, I argue the opposite. That is rivalry that leads to malicious envy. It doesn't matter. They're connected somehow.
The malicious envy and rivalry motivate the narcissistic individual with high levels of narcissism to become aggressive, to aggress against others in order to destroy their much coveted and unattainable good fortune.
The narcissist wants them gone because they are a constant reminder of their superiority compared to his inferiority. It's unacceptable.
And from this perspective, aggression motivated by malicious envy or the observation of failure in someone envied in the envy object. This may be the source of sadistic pleasure in narcissistic individuals.
Now, the sadism re-establishes the grandiosity of the sense, supports the feelings or sense of self-worth and it strengthens the sense of self-efficacy. It does good things. Destroying other people feels good to narcissists.
As a whole, there is an association between all these elements.
There's a great article by Clough and others in 2019.
And the mediation between narcissism and sadism via envy and rivalry makes sense, eminent sense, study aside.
But sadism in this case leads to aggression and psychopathy and malevolence, malice. To use a very antiquated term, it's evil.