Someone does you a good turn. Someone helps you out. Someone gives you a gift.
You know you should be grateful. You know it should be nice, should play nice. You know that the rules of civility, social intercourse, require you to be a bit humble in the face of such magnanimity and altruism and a charitable conduct.
And yet you can't bring yourself to be grateful. On the very contrary, you're annoyed, you're resentful, you're hateful, you're aggressive or passive aggressive.
What's going on? Why is that?
Well, the short and the long of it is it's a cognitive dissonance.
I will break down the two components of the cognitive dissonance and try to explain why no good deed goes unpunished.
My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and a professor of clinical psychology who is doing you a favor by granting you access to 1,000 almost 600 free of charge videos.
Aren't you annoyed? Aren't you resentful for what I've just said? Didn't it trigger you somehow? Didn't it provoke you? Don't you want to just smack my face? Yes, you do.
And why is that? Because, as I said, of cognitive dissonance.
To resolve the cognitive dissonance, you blame me for the dissonance. To resolve the cognitive dissonance, you blame the do-gooder, the person who does good deeds.
You blame them for having created the cognitive dissonance, for having put you in the position to experience discomfort, confusion, disorientation, annoyance, resentment, they become a nuisance. You hate them. Why did they have to invade your world with their largess?
So this is cognitive dissonance.
But what is this cognitive dissonance? What are the two components?
First of all, when people act the way good people are supposed to act, when people are helpful, altruistic, compassionate, affectionate, empathic, when people give you advice, hold your hand, provide you with succor, comfort you and soothe you in time of need, when people are being good people, it shames us.
Our initial reaction is shame, because it reminds us of who we are. It reminds us that we are not good people, or at least not as good people.
We react aggressively. We react with negative affects.
For example, we become envious. We become rageful.
Above all, we feel helpless because we are the recipients of benefaction. We are the recipients of benefits. We are the recipients of a gift, of an advice, of the presence of the other party, of comfort, whatever it is that we may have received, we received it because we lacked it, because we did not have it.
When you receive something from someone, it's because you didn't have it in the first place.
This renders you helpless and inferior.
The do-gooder, the person who does good deeds, she had something that you needed. He had something that you did not possess and this generates automatically destructive envy, the wish to destroy the source of frustration.
And so if we have to put it in a nutshell, good people cause narcissistic injury.
When good people do good deeds, they injure us, they humiliate us, they shame us, they put us to shame, to use the idiom. They remind us that we are needy, we're helpless, we are lacking. They shame us because we are not as charitable, we are not as helpful, we are not as good, we are not as altruistic.
And who likes to be shamed? Nobody likes to be shamed and then you get angry at the do-gooder.
You think that shaming you has been the target and the goal of the good deed.
They did something good because they wanted to shame me. They wanted to humiliate me. They wanted to put me down. They wanted to expose my inferiority and helplessness. And I hate them for doing this.
So good deeds never go unpunished because they are perceived as punishments.
This is narcissistic injury. It's a narcissistic defense mechanism that is in operation, even in people who are not narcissists, healthy people.
So this is the first pawn, the first component or ingredient of the cognitive dissonance.
But there's another one, and this is why this particular type of cognitive dissonance is so powerful, unusually powerful, because it has two ingredients, not one.
The second ingredient is paranoia, suspicion.
You ask yourself, why did they do this? Why have they been so good to me? Why did they give me this gift? What do they want? What's the hidden agenda? What's your ulterior motive? Where are they driving at? Where, when am I going to be presented by the bill? You know?
So you suspect manipulative Machiavellian motivations. You attribute to the do-gooders, you attribute to good people, ulterior not so good motives.
You say they are hiding, they're faking, they're pretending good deeds are manipulative.
Ultimately, it's a give and take. Ultimately, it's a quid pro quo.
One day, I will have to repay the favor. One day, I'll have to give a gift. One day, I will be the one who has to be charitable and altruistic.
It's like a loan that you have to pay back.
And you resent the facade. You resent what you perceive as faking and pretension.
You saydo- gooders are fake. They're fake people.
You distrust their motivations.
Sometimes you consider good people to be lacking in social skills, a bit autistic, the busybody, the nosy parker, the person who is too interested in your personal affairs, who is intrusive, who invade your privacy. These kind of people lack social skills.
And some do-gooders indeed lack social skills.
But it's not malevolent. It's not malicious. It's just who they are.
But you attribute to them malice, premeditation, evil intentions, a takeover maybe, or gathering information and intelligence about you, God knows for which nefarious purpose.
It's a paranoid mindset, which involves paranoid ideation.
You also doubt the mental health of do-gooders. Are they narcissists pretending to be good people?
These narcissists are known as pro-social or communal narcissists.
Are they psychopaths acting as charitable, altruistic people because they're about to manipulate you and abscond with all your money or have sex with you or whatever? Are they crazy people, psychotic people, who are not in control of their actions impulsive and reckless? Are they borderline who may explode on you and go crazy making and become utterly defiant?
You doubt the mental health and mental stability and mental illness and sanity of people who do good deeds because to do good deeds is crazy. It's absolutely crazy in an evil, wicked world.
When you contrast reality as it is with altruism, altruism is always the loser.
Altruism is stupid.
In the reality that we face, a world which is replete with selfishness and wickedness and evil intent and evil actions, when you confront this with being charitable, being helpful, being compassionate, being altruistic, helping people, giving them advice, supporting them, when you confront the world reality with these kind of actions, you are bound to reach a conclusion that these people, something's wrong with them. They're not well. They're no longer with us. They're definitely no longer embedded in reality. And people who are detached from reality are mentally ill, they should be in an asylum, not going around helping people.
So you believe it or not, good deeds provoke paranoid ideation and shame in the majority of recipients and beneficiaries. Studies have shown this.
We react very badly to altruism, charity, hell, sacchar, very badly actually.
We tend to doubt, we tend to suspect, we tend to denigrate and demean, we tend to criticize, we tend to fight back, we tend to become defiant.
We try to overcome the shame and the helplessness by attributing to the do-goods, to people who do good things, attributing to them a really, really demonic, dark mindset.
We resolve the cognitive dissonance by blaming do-gooders, by blaming people who do good for causing usshame, discomfort, humiliation, and for trying to manipulate us.
We resent them, we reject them, and ultimately we punish them.
No good deed goes unpunished.