Taken together, my last few posts make an important point:
- If people suffering from NPD can keep themselves from abusing when there would be witnesses, they can keep themselves from abusing when there wouldn't be witnesses. They just don't.
- By going to great lengths to abuse on the sly while portraying themselves to the outside world as the very antithesis of what they are, NPDs prove that they know that their behavior is wrong and shameful = something to hide.
- Most children of narcissists do NOT choose to imitate the parent who hurts them so and therefore do NOT become narcissists themselves.
This is why the courts (in the US) don't regard NPD as a defense. That's because it isn't insanity. The insane
- attack people in broad daylight, in front of God and everybody, like that tiger I mentioned in this previous post.
- are NOT cunning; they don't do evil on the sly; they don't cover up their true character with an impressive facade; they don't plan (premeditate) how to sneak around and get away with wrongdoing on the sly.
The insane show by the way they go about a crime that (a) they don't know what they're doing, (b) that they don't know it's wrong, something to hide and be ashamed of, and (c) that they can't control themselves to keep from doing it.
Does any of that fit the NPD modus operandi? No.
This is why NPD is legally a CHARACTER disorder, not a mental disorder that leaves a person free of responsibility for what he or she does.
In other words, NPD is NOT insanity. NPDs are twisted, not insane.
Are they then just evil?
Nobody needs anyone to tell them the answer to that question. Just follow simple logic: Add 2+2 = ?
NPDs don't do evil to do evil: they do it because it makes them feel good = because doing evil is like a drug, a pain killer.
So, we cannot get on a high horse of moral superiority, because we aren't tempted as they are. We don't have their predatory urges.
But that doesn't mean that we should close our eyes to what they are. If hurting others makes you feel good, you like hurting others. Sorry, there's just no getting around that.
If you want to hurt others, you're malevolent. Sorry, there's just no getting around that.
It's DANGEROUS to be in denial of these facts. Dangerous to regard NPDs as people of goodwill, as suffering victims who can't help it.
That just plays right into their hands. That's what they want -- for you to be a sucker and feel sorry for them. To make excuses for them. To assign them a lower set of standards to live up to.
There's a sucker born every minute. Before you know it, they have you regarding THEM as the victim, feeling sorry for THEM instead of their victims. All hell must be laughing their heads off at this joke. What a travesty of justice. What a perversion of Truth.
It's a false choice -- that suggested choice between hating them and sympathizing with them. The sensible choice is simply to regard them as what they are:
predators. In other words, STAY AWAY FROM THEM. NEVER TRUST THEM. AND DON'T GO INTO THEIR CAGE.
If you lie, you are a liar. If you kill, you are a killer. We are the sum total of what our CHOICES to date have made us. Narcissists too are the sum total of what their choices to date have made them. Adult narcissists have passed the point of no return long ago.
Perhaps some day psychiatrists will learn some way to help them pay the toll to that
demon at the door, so narcissists can return to the human way of life. Let us hope for that day, but let us not, in the meantime, be dangerously naive.
