Predation

First, the need to have it all. An analogy illustrates the threat to others in this attitude. Let's say that you feel a compelling need to have all the dollars in the world.

Then, no matter how many you get, you compete with others for every single one. That's unbridled, avaricious greed, and it makes you an adversary of everyone else in the world.

What's more, if you see a dollar in someone else's hand, you will want to take it away. Just because he has it. That's the desire to plunder others. In other words, you will view the possessor of that dollar as a predator views prey.

Therein lies the "malignance" in malignant narcissism.

Narcissists are predators, but many people fail appreciate the meaning of that term, letting it in one ear and out the other. The word predator seems to mean nothing to them unless you put the word sexual in front of it. As if sexual predators are the only kind. Thinking that makes you easy prey for other kinds of predators, like street con artists, wolves and gold diggers ("love thieves"), false messiahs, wanna be dictators, and crusaders like Osama bin Wanton.

Being predators puts narcissists in a special class with psychopaths, that class of people who don't wish you well, no matter how friendly their facade — that class from which sexual predators and all other kinds of predators come.

In anticipation of those who will attack me for putting narcissists and psychopaths in this special class, I point out that I am not the one who does so: they do. They do this by identifying with their image instead of their true (human) self inside. They despise it. Precisely because it is human. And they consequently despise humanity itself, and all us merely human beings. They view themselves as gods relative to us, who look down on us the way we look down on cockroaches.

There is no changing this about them. At least not now or in the foreseeable future.


Kathleen Krajco