Not all of us have guts, but all of us have gut instinct, aka intuition.
The difference between healthy and normal people and the narcissist who is not healthy and not normal, the difference is that the narcissist perceives his intuition as coming from the outside.
He misperceives it as objective, as a fact, as a feature of the universe, part of the fabric of reality.
He therefore tends to trust his intuition the way healthy, normal people trust science.
Welcome to a tour of the narcissist tortured wannabe self by who else?
Sam Wachlin, author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism, revisited a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CEAPs, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada, and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria, where else? The narcissist perceives himself as infallible, never makes mistakes, is never wrong, never gets things in an inappropriate manner, is always right, similar to another entity known as the Pope.
The narcissist believes, convinced firmly that he is omniscient or knowing.
Because he is omniscient, he doesn't need to acquire knowledge, information, data, learning from the outside, it's all inside him.
He regards himself as a kind of encyclopedia of flesh and blood, everything incorporated inside his mind.
There's no need to access the outside, there's no need to resort to other people.
Knowledge, as far as a narcissist is concerned, emanates only from his insight.
Knowledge is only internal, never external.
Intuition, confabulation, they are forms of information, they're objective, they're neutral, they're factual, they're scientific.
When the narcissist confabulates, tries to bridge memory gaps with invented concocted narratives, he immediately tends to believe that the confabulation is real.
That's why he defends it ferociously, against any challenge.
That's why he rejects any evidence, any data, any information that are countervading, that undermine the confabulation, that somehow challenge the grandiose narrative, his self-perception or his self-image.
The narcissist also bestows the same ontological status on his intuition.
That was a mouthful, wasn't it? Ten dollar words. He bestows an ontological status means he regards his intuition as referring to the outside.
The referent of the intuition is external, rather than to the inside.
So the narcissist doesn't need the outside, he doesn't need the environment, he doesn't need other people, he doesn't need to study, he doesn't need to invest, he doesn't need any of this.
He knows everything already.
Another problem is the narcissist's inability to perceive objects as external, and that includes people.
The narcissist converts external objects into internal objects.
He has something that I call failed othering, he is unable to perceive others.
He immediately converts them into figments of his imagination.
Nasties in his narrative, partners in his shared fantasy, avatars, introjects, voices in his mind, and so on.
It's all internal, never external.
Therefore the narcissist is unable to discern, let alone partake of information that is coming from outside sources because he doesn't recognize the externality and separateness of outside objects, external objects.
Simply he has no capacity to learn from others because there are no others.
Of course this supports and buttresses his magical thinking.
The narcissist believes himself to be godlike, convince himself that he is godlike.
That is the essence of the false self.
It's a deity, it's a divinity, it's a monarch that requires constant sacrifices, the narcissist's sacrifice and other people's sacrifices known as narcissistic supply.
But this of course generates and engenders a kind of magical thinking.
If you are godlike then you are the creator of your own universe, your cognitions, your emotions and above all your intuition, your confabulations, they are all real because you are the maker and the source of reality.
Not only are you the maker and the source, you are the only maker and the exclusive source of reality.
You are the progenitor of everyone and everything around you.
So everything that crosses your mind, everything, every internal process is immediately perceived as out there, objective.
The narcissist in other words externalizes his internal processes.
The irony is that the narcissist perceives real external objects as internal and he perceives many internal processes as factual, fact-based, evidence-based, realistic, defining reality itself, making it happen.
That is of course magical thinking but it's also a basic element, basic ingredient and component of psychosis. It's known as hyperreflexivity.
That's one of the reasons that Otto Kernberg suggested that borderlines and narcissists, which he regarded as one, are not very far from psychosis. They are on the border of psychosis and neurosis, hence borderline.
Information from the outside as far as the narcissist is concerned is suspect.
It is suspect because people are either stupid, the narcissist is the cleverest of them all, the smartest man or woman in the room, always superior, always supreme.
Other people are inferior. They are without, they are dumb, they are stupid, they are incapable, they are illiterate, they are this and that.
So they are not trustworthy as sources of knowledge and information or they are malevolent, they are malicious, they conspire against him, they hate him, they envy him and of course they cannot be trusted as sources of information, data and judgement and knowledge.
Consequently because a narcissist divides all of humanity into those who are inferior to him, which is the vast majority and those who conspire against him hatefully and enviously, which is a minority but still, because all of humanity is implicated in these twin narratives, he cannot trust anyone as a source of information or knowledge. He cannot even trust things like books or encyclopedias because he always assumes a form of paranoid ideation. He always assumes that something is amiss, something has been compromised, everyone is corrupt or everyone is stupid and doesn't realize what he does.
The narcissist places himself in the position of an all-seeing, all-discerning observer. He's like the ultimate observer. The ultimate observer is of course God and God creates the universe by observing it, the basic tenet in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
So because this is the situation, because there's no benefit in opening yourself up to information from the outside, the outside is compromised, it's corrupt, it's decrepit, it's malicious, it's stupid.
So the narcissist thinks there's no point in being open-minded and being available to learn.
The narcissist therefore lacks curiosity. He is not curious about other people or their lives except when they can fulfill some goal, help him to fulfill some goal, accomplish something or serve him in some way.
The famous 4S is sex, supply, sadisticsupply, narcissisticsafety and services.
The narcissist is interested in other people only when he can convert them into an internal object and then co-opt the internal object to participate in some internal process such as the shared fantasy.
Otherwise he is totally uninterested. He could spend years with an ostensible alleged best friend and never bother to ask, "How are you? What's happening in your life? How things are going?" He could be married to someone and be utterly uninterested in her whereabouts, in her friendships, in her family and so on and so forth.
So there's a lack of curiosity, of course. If the aim is to isolate your intimate partner from her social network, the narcissist would be interested in the social network.
Everything is goal-oriented. Every acquisition of information is leveraged to accomplish something, usually converting someone into a piece of fiction, into an element or ingredient in a narrative, denuding them of life, deanimating them, if not degrading them.
It's all very antisocial in this respect. It is reminiscent of psychopathy.
I call it constricted curiosity. It's curiosity that is awakened and aroused and triggered only when there is a goal in mind and otherwise is dormant or non-existent.
There's no learning in narcissism. I have several videos dedicated to this issue. I'll try to find them and put links in the description.
There's no learning. Narcissists never learn for the reasons that I've just mentioned. They don't need to learn. They know everything already.
So all they have to do is combinatorics, permutations of what they already know. They deal in syllogisms, deductions. They play logical games. This is called internal rhetoric.
The various constructs in the narcissist's personality dialogue with each other. This dialogue passes, as far as a narcissist is concerned, for a scientific theory based on facts and evidence.
He objectifies his internal processes. He renders them objective, objectific, or whatever it is.
The narcissist believes that his knowledge is infinite and utterly precise. As I said, he's never wrong. He never commits errors. He never gets anything inappropriately. He's always right. He has infinite knowledge to draw on, and it's all internalized already. He was born with it as far as he's concerned.
So I learned.
However, in an attempt to cope with the environment, with other people, with demands, with exigencies, vicissitudes, events, crises, you name it, in an attempt to survive somehow, the narcissist does combine, does kind of play around with elements of his ostensibly infinite knowledge in order to create new knowledge.
But it's all, all, all internal. It's nothing external, nor does the narcissist compare the outcomes of his intuition and of his deductions and of his logical games and of his syllogism. He doesn't compare any of the conclusions that he draws with reality. He doesn't allow reality to serve as a gauge or a check on his internal, on the internal outcomes of his cognition.
His cognition is supreme. It supersedes reality.
Einstein was once asked, what if results of the experiment show that the sun doesn't behave as you had predicted? And Einstein answered, well, in this case, the sun is a problem.
I'm not implying that Einstein was a narcissist, although actually he was, but I'm just saying this is how the narcissist thinks. If reality does not conform to his deductions and conclusions, then reality has a problem, not the narcissist. The problem is out there.
Impaired reality testing is the outcome, of course. When you consider yourself a higher source of authority than the universe, than facts, than evidence, than science, than reality, then you can't judge or gauge reality properly. You have an impaired reality testing.
You have to reframe all data and all informations to conform to your own cognitive distortions and biases in order to avoid dissonance.
And this is what I call internal or internalized confirmation bias.
The narcissist does not absorb information from the outside. He simply rearranges reality internally so that there is no contradiction, no mutual exclusions and no dissonance.
The narcissist knows best and he's always right and he does not need to learn anything.
Therefore, other people are an utter waste of time. He's not curious except about himself. He is not invested except in his own internal processes. He does not develop new knowledge except if it's based on what he already thinks he knows.
And he regards himself as comprehensive, all comprehensive, all pervasive, total, in short, God.