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Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths–And How We Can Stop!
Bill Eddy (Author)
Publication date: 04/08/2019
Democracy is under siege. The reason isn't politics but personalities: too many countries have come under the sway of high-conflict people (HCPs) who have become politicians. Most of these high-conflict politicians have traits of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial (i.e., sociopathic) personality disorder, or both. This is the first and only guide for identifying and thwarting them.
HCPs don't avoid conflict, they thrive on it, widening social divisions and exacerbating international tensions. Eddy, the world's leading authority on high-conflict personalities, explains why they're so seductive and describes the telltale traits that define HCPs—he even includes a helpful list of forty typical HCP behaviors.
Drawing on historical examples from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Nixon to Trump, Maduro, and Putin, Eddy shows how HCPs invent enemies and manufacture phony crises so they can portray themselves as the sole heroic figure who can deal with them, despite their inability to actually solve problems. He describes the best ways to expose HCPs as the charlatans they are, reply to their empty and misleading promises, and find genuine leaders to support. Eddy brings his deep psychotherapeutic experience to bear on a previously unidentified phenomena that presents a real threat to the world.
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Democracy is under siege. The reason isn't politics but personalities: too many countries have come under the sway of high-conflict people (HCPs) who have become politicians. Most of these high-conflict politicians have traits of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial (i.e., sociopathic) personality disorder, or both. This is the first and only guide for identifying and thwarting them.
HCPs don't avoid conflict, they thrive on it, widening social divisions and exacerbating international tensions. Eddy, the world's leading authority on high-conflict personalities, explains why they're so seductive and describes the telltale traits that define HCPs—he even includes a helpful list of forty typical HCP behaviors.
Drawing on historical examples from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Nixon to Trump, Maduro, and Putin, Eddy shows how HCPs invent enemies and manufacture phony crises so they can portray themselves as the sole heroic figure who can deal with them, despite their inability to actually solve problems. He describes the best ways to expose HCPs as the charlatans they are, reply to their empty and misleading promises, and find genuine leaders to support. Eddy brings his deep psychotherapeutic experience to bear on a previously unidentified phenomena that presents a real threat to the world.
Bill Eddy is the cofounder and training director of the High Conflict Institute and is a senior family mediator at the National Conflict Resolution Center. He is also a licensed clinical social worker with twelve years of experience and currently serves on the faculty of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at the Pepperdine University School of Law. He is the author or coauthor of fourteen books and has a popular blog on the Psychology Today website with over 2 million views.
—Donald T. Saposnek, PhD, author of Mediating Child Custody Disputes and coauthor of Splitting America
“Understanding why people follow and support leaders with behaviours that are extreme and unwarranted is the topic of Bill Eddy's new book, Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—And How We Can Stop! In this fascinating work, the tumultuous and horrific impact of such leaders, how such individuals are shaped, and why they are supported are considered in the context of high-conflict personality and behaviours. From Hitler to Trump, the reader is invited to consider how the use of fantasy enemies, emotion, and media to divide ‘enemies' and garner supporters is enhanced by building relationships based on simplistic and repetitive messaging. The analysis of ten ‘leaders' is based on how such characters are preoccupied with blaming others, display all-or-nothing thinking, have unmanaged or intense emotions, and in Eddy's words have extreme negative behaviours ‘that 90 percent of people would never do.'
Fundamentally, the book invites us to consider the role of ‘Wannabe Kings' who have managed, often despite being considered incompetent or controllable, to be elevated to high positions and cause havoc. Whilst some readers may quibble about the death counts that are attributable to the ‘Wannabe Kings,' there is no doubt that the ten individuals described had a number of common characteristics when considered through the lens of personality disorder and behaviour. How such seemingly unattractive personalities can build emotional connection through simplistic messaging is explored using examples and noting how each ‘Wannabe King' employed repetition, the media, and perhaps the optimism of followers who hope that the behaviour would improve or that the ‘hero' would resolve whatever ‘fantasy crisis' had been created.
Importantly however, this book gives the readers, and those grappling with ‘Wannabe Kings,' tools to prevent their ascension and to moderate the discourse that surrounds their grim reign. From the workplace to the political space, the book will inspire us to think differently about the tactics, behaviours, and personalities of some so-called leaders and revisit our approach to remake our future.”
—Professor Tania Sourdin, Dean and Head of School, Newcastle Law School
“Thank you for this book. I wish I'd had it at the beginning of last year when I was running for Congress! A huge value of this book to me is to be better able to understand people trying to tear down our democracy. I learned several ways where I might have better persuaded erstwhile friends of mine to look objectively at candidates rather than following slogans.”
—Chuck Eddy, moderate Republican candidate, 2018 primary for Kentucky's 6th Congressional District
“Author Bill Eddy has done a remarkable job of assessing the world of modern politics and those who have learned how to use their power to manipulate modern communication tools to influence unsuspecting voters. It is a brave new world. Bill has competently described the characteristics of many individuals who have no business in positions of power or authority but they are because they have learned how to work the system, to the detriment of the community, for their own personal advantage—a sinister scheme that plays out every day.
Bill makes no distinction between partisan politicians, as his observations apply to many of those who seek power. As a long-standing member of the Republican Party and the chairman of the committee to recall the former mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner, I recognize that all of Filner's faults and failures can be directly attributed to the caustic characteristics so eloquently described by Bill.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in seeing how sausage is really made.”
—Michael J. Pallamary, PLS
“The younger generations inherit an increasingly interconnected world, one with global problems that require international solutions. With such powerful world-altering positions being compromised, it is of great importance to know the warning signs and the proper response—else history will continue to repeat itself. In discussing top-ranking politicians that cause harm and controversy, Bill Eddy brings his expertise of psychology and advances a developing theory of high-conflict personalities.”
—Crosby Doyle, recent graduate in political science and sustainability systems
“As a former judge and elected district attorney, I have dealt with several high-conflict politicians and elected officials with the characteristics that Bill Eddy describes in this book. He's right on when he says they create unnecessary crises and conflicts and see themselves as big heroes instead of doing their real jobs. From my experience, his suggestions for what to do make a lot of sense for reasonable politicians as well as voters. This is a must-read for anyone running for or thinking of running for election and even more important for those trying to govern.”
—Bonnie Dumanis, former judge and recently retired longtime San Diego County District Attorney
“Personality disorders are dangerously important today, and it's vital we understand this better. We need this book.”
—Marjorie Kelly, Author, The Divine Right of Capital and Owning Our Future and Executive VP, The Democracy Collaborative
HIGH-CONFLICT POLITICIANS
I wrote this book to tell you about the personality patterns of high-conflict people (HCPs) when they become high-conflict politicians. Warning people about HCPs and how to deal with them has become my life’s work. In this book, I want to tell you about how extremely dangerous they can be, how extremely deceitful (lying and conning) they can be, and how compulsively divisive they always are. Yet their personality patterns can be spotted early on, so you can avoid electing them in any setting and giving them power over your life.
Please note that this is not a book about politics. High-conflict politicians can be Republicans or Democrats or Libertarians, independents, liberals, or conservatives. They are mayors and governors and senators and heads of countries around the world. They are even elected to city councils, school boards, and homeowners’ association boards.
They have high-conflict personalities because they have a pattern of increasing and prolonging conflicts, rather than managing or resolving them. They polarize communities, ruin the lives of thousands of people (sometimes millions), lay waste to shared resources, and go to war against their perceived enemies—verbally, legally, and sometimes violently.
A Worldwide Trend
This is also not a book that focuses on one particular politician, such as Donald Trump, even though he is a classic example of a high-conflict politician and he is included as one of the examples in this book. It’s bigger than him. He’s at the tip of the iceberg of a growing worldwide election trend that has picked up speed over the past thirty years and will continue to get worse until enough voters learn the warning signs of high-conflict politicians and how to stop them.
The Power of Personality
How serious a problem could one personality be? Let’s look at what historians say:
[The] wars and … megamurders of the 20th century can be attributed in part to the personalities of just three men.1
These three men were Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Hitler was responsible for at least fifty-five million deaths (by causing World War II as well as the holocaust), Stalin for twenty million, and Mao for at least forty million.2 Were their wars, famines, and genocides inevitable, regardless of each leader’s personality? Here’s what other historians have said:
But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and—until toward the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself—an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.
“It is one of the great examples,” as Friedrich Meinecke, the eminent German historian, said, “of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life.”3 (Emphasis added)
Other historians concur:
As for World War II, the historian F. H. Hinsley wrote, “Historians are, rightly, nearly unanimous that … the causes of the Second World War were the personality and the aims of Adolf Hitler.” Keegan agrees: “Only one European really wanted war—Adolf Hitler.”4 (Emphasis added)
Similar conclusions were made about Stalin and the genocide he caused in Russia and Ukraine through the forced collectivization of farms, which artificially created famines that lead to the deaths of over four million Ukrainians and more in Russia.5 Even Stalin’s wife committed suicide because she was apparently so distraught over her husband’s ruthless policy.6
There is no doubt that the collectivization drive was ordered by Moscow, imposed “from above,” and that it was Stalin’s personal policy, as first outlined on his trip to Siberia at the end of 1928.7 (Emphasis added)
Likewise, Mao imposed a similar collectivization effort within China, which he called the Great Leap Forward.
Impervious to signals from reality informing him that his Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward, Mao masterminded a famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people.8
This and the Cultural Revolution had one source:
As for China, it is inconceivable that the record-setting famine of the Great Leap Forward would have occurred but for Mao’s harebrained schemes. … [T]he principal responsibility for the Cultural Revolution—a movement that affected tens of millions of Chinese—rests with one man. Without Mao, there could not have been a Cultural Revolution.9 (Emphasis added)
The Causes of Political Conflict
You may wonder, as I did, aren’t political problems mostly caused by simmering historical disputes? Or racial and ethnic hatreds? Or economic troubles? The answer to each of these questions? Much less than you would expect.
For example, in Africa, from 1960 to 1979, when so many former colonies gained their independence from their European conquerors, at least 160 ethnic groups were living side by side with the potential for violence between them: riots, civil wars, genocide. Yet violence broke out in less than 1 percent of them.
After the Soviet Union broke up at the end of the 1980s, 45 ethnic groups had the potential to break out into armed conflicts. Yet historians found that only 4.4 percent of these potential ethnic hatreds burst into warfare.10
The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, when Yugoslavia broke up into smaller countries with the collapse of the Soviet Union, were unusual for one reason: they involved the apparent high-conflict personalities of a few key leaders, who escalated prior co-existence into genocidal violence and who were later tried for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.11 Without these likely HCP leaders, would these wars have occurred at all?
Perhaps you wonder if these were unusual circumstances in which an HCP politician was like a match on gasoline that was already poured—that these countries were already highly dysfunctional. For example, weren’t the economic problems of Germany after World War I and the global stock market crash the driving forces in the rise of Hitler? Not exactly. Here’s how an American reporter stationed in Germany described the typical Nazi in 1932 when Hitler was gaining power:
He was male, in his early thirties, a town resident of lower middle-class origin, without high school education; … had no political affiliations before joining the National Socialist [Nazi] party and belonged to no veteran or semi-military organizations. … He was strongly dissatisfied with the republican regime in Germany, but had no specific anti-Semitic bias. His economic status was secure, for not once did he have to change his occupation, job, or residence, nor was he ever unemployed.”12 (Emphasis added)
So poverty itself doesn’t necessarily drive political conflict, either. Apparently, Hitler didn’t get his followers from the poorest people—or the most prejudiced. Even though anti-Semitism existed for centuries throughout Europe, Hitler taught the German people to hate Jews at a level they never had before. As the cultural leader of the nation, he was able to directly condition the German people to his way of thinking, primarily through his radio speeches, which reached into many Germans’ homes, and movies of his rallies, which dominated the theaters—“playing on their fears, resentments and prejudices more masterfully than anyone else.”13
Three Key Questions
As I researched political conflicts—large and small—for this book, three key questions about the power of personality emerged that are relevant to today’s events:
1. Can one high-conflict politician turn a well-functioning community—or nation—into one that is extremely polarized? If so, how does this occur?
2. In a time of peace, can one high-conflict politician lead a nation into war, famine, and genocide? If so, how does this occur?
3. Can we stop high-conflict politicians before they get this far?
In researching and writing this book, I have attempted to answer these questions. To understand the answers, we first need to look more closely at the personality patterns of HCPs, narcissists, and sociopaths and how they think differently about conflict from everyone else—and what happens when these three personalities combine in one person.
What Is a High-Conflict Personality?
Our individual personality is how we regularly think, feel, and act. When most of us find ourselves in a dispute, our natural inclination is to attempt to resolve it. But for someone with a high-conflict personality, as I have repeatedly observed in hundreds of disputes, the opposite is true. They think all relationships are inherently adversarial; they constantly feel threatened as an adversary (even when they’re not); and they often react in an extremely adversarial manner.
As a result, in almost any situation, they tend to create one unnecessary conflict after another because they think conflicts already exist all around them. They feel at war with the world and project this feeling onto others.
Worse, they have no interest in resolving conflicts. Instead, they usually make them worse—no matter how many other people get hurt and no matter how much their actions end up hurting themselves.
People with high-conflict personalities are intensely driven (although usually unconsciously) to control, remove, or destroy their perceived enemies. They ultimately sabotage themselves, but they can’t see it coming.
Although each high-conflict person is unique, all HCPs share a narrow pattern of behavior that includes four key characteristics:
THE HIGH-CONFLICT PERSONALITY PATTERN
1. A preoccupation with blaming others: their Targets of Blame
2. All-or-nothing thinking and solutions
3. Unmanaged or intense emotions
4. Extreme negative behaviors that 90 percent of people would never do
HCPs also have traits of one or more personality disorders. Personality disorders have been a hidden mental illness that most people have not heard about until recent years, because people afflicted with them can appear to function well some of the time. But they are: 1) impaired in their relationships, 2) don’t reflect on their own behavior, and 3) don’t change. These three characteristics can make people with personality disorders very difficult to be around, sooner or later.
Although research has suggested that those with personality disorders are about 15 percent of the adult population,14 I believe that HCPs are only about 10 percent of the adult population. Not all people with personality disorders are preoccupied with Targets of Blame, and not all HCPs have personality disorders—but they all have some traits of personality disorders such as narcissistic or sociopathic.
HCPs compulsively act in self-defeating ways over and over again. That’s why they stay in conflict, because they don’t try to change or improve anything about themselves even when they are the conflict’s primary or only cause.
They lack insight into their own high-conflict behavior, so when things go badly, they get more and more defensive and attack those around them: their Targets of Blame.
For this reason, they often have no real friends and develop a bad reputation in their communities. They are your lousy neighbors who may physically threaten you or make your life stressful with their endless complaints. They are your most difficult co-workers, bosses, and business owners. And, of course, they can also be family members.
HCPs are everywhere, but most people just think they’re jerks—isolated, angry, poorly adjusted individuals. They don’t see the pattern. They don’t realize that HCPs are at the center of so many of today’s problems and that there are so many of them.
They have a presence in every country and in every culture. HCPs are not an American problem, or a Western problem: they are a human problem—one that appears to be increasing, year by year. Unless you live alone in the wilderness, you cannot avoid them.
Extreme Charm and Persuasion
Another surprising and notable aspect of HCPs enables them to often get what they want. They can be extremely charming, persuasive, and charismatic. At least, that’s how they show themselves to others at first. Then, when they get close to people or conflicts arise, their façade crumbles and they start to show their true colors. If you want to see how predictable HCPs are, refer to Appendix A: 40 Predictable Behaviors of HCPs.
CAUTIONARY NOTE: DON’T LABEL PRIVATE PEOPLE
By now you probably can think of a few people that fit this pattern. If you can, don’t tell them you think they are HCPs! If they have this pattern (and most of us know someone we suspect has this problem), they will hate or resent you for saying as much, and they’ll probably make you their next Target of Blame.
Let me emphasize that HCPs do not choose to be difficult. All personalities are the result of three basic factors, none of which we have control over while growing up. It’s hard to know which played a bigger part in any one person’s development, but it’s usually a combination:
Genetic tendencies at birth. These may be part of the human personality gene pool because certain traits have been helpful over time, such as high-conflict traits during times of war.
Early childhood experiences. These can include child abuse or even indulgence. Loss of a parent, separation from a parent or insecure attachment to a parent at an early age can have devastating effects.
Cultural environment. Some say that the decade you’re born in shapes your personality as much as your family. Over the last few decades, the focus on the individual, electronic devices and the excessive focus on self-esteem have all contributed to an increase in the culture of narcissism.15
This means that we should have compassion for HCPs, but at the same time we need to set firm limits to protect ourselves from their behavior.
The key is to adapt your own behavior rather than to try to change theirs. Avoid trying to give them insight into themselves or endlessly discussing the past. Just focus on what to do now, such as focusing on your own choices going forward. And don’t choose them to be your partner, your team leader, your boss, or your local (or national) leader.
Why Are There So Many HCPs in Politics Today?
I can think of at least two reasons for this:
1. HCPs can be mayors, governors, or even presidents. But some high-conflict people really want to be kings (or, sometimes, queens). HCPs are profoundly attracted to the glory and attention, vindication and validation of being elected—and to gaining, having, and exercising absolute power. In particular, they relish having the power to publicly blame, punish, or destroy anyone they view as their enemy. They love the fight—the adversarial process. But, above all, they want to win and they want to dominate—and they want everyone to know that they won, and to see them as the absolute top of the heap.
They want to be the strongman. The person no one challenges. The person everybody loves—or at least obeys or bows down to. The person with the power and the glory. And they are driven to do everything they can to make this happen, regardless of the consequences to others or even to themselves. They have unrestrained aggressive behavior. They are fundamentally authoritarian, because it’s all about them and their unlimited power over everyone else.
2. They are particularly drawn to the fantasy world of today’s high-emotion media. In their various forms (network and cable TV, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), these platforms do not require politicians to have any leadership experience or political skill in order to provide them with lots of attention. In fact, acting badly gets them more attention than leadership skills do. Those HCPs who lack empathy and remorse are good at creating fantasy images of themselves with no regard for the truth—the charming storytellers who emotionally grab the voters who are already primed for tales of crises, heroes, and villains.
Plus, high-emotion media craves high-conflict personalities. They have the most exciting, dramatic, and expressive faces and voices that work particularly well on screens and speakers, large and small—and they sell the most advertising. With their emotional intensity, all-or-nothing thinking, and seemingly unpredictable extreme behavior, they are natural performers. High-emotion media attracts HCPs like basketball attracts tall players. They are the best in the game.
But which HCPs are attracted to politics? There are five types of HCPs: narcissistic, antisocial, borderline, paranoid, and histrionic. (See my book 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life for more on all five.) But most aren’t interested in being in charge of a community or nation. The two most charming, deceptive, and dangerous leaders are the HCPs with traits of narcissistic and sociopathic personality disorders. Occasionally we see traits of the others as well, but mostly these are the two personalities that seek to be leaders.
Personality Disorders
I’m sure you have met some narcissists and sociopaths. They are everywhere. In their extreme form, these are two of the ten personality disorders in the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5).16 But I will not be determining whether the HCPs we discuss have these disorders. Instead, my goal is to describe the conflict behavior patterns of these personalities so that you can spot them when you are getting ready to make voting decisions. The issue of whether HCPs simply have some traits of these personalities or full-blown personality disorders is less important—either case is a problem when we are choosing leaders.
Generally people with narcissistic personalities are self-absorbed, feel entitled to special treatment, have grandiose ideas, have fantasies of unlimited success and power, lack empathy, and are driven to show that they are superior to others. People with sociopathic personalities (also known as antisocial personalities) frequently violate rules and laws, are routinely deceptive (lying and conning), are highly aggressive, lack remorse, and are driven to dominate others.
However, not all people with one of these personalities are HCPs, because some don’t focus on Targets of Blame. And many of them have no interest in politics. But the ones who are interested in politics and know how to focus their attention (and the attention of others) on their Targets of Blame are the most dangerous. They are the ones who want to get elected and are driven to be in charge to dominate their targets. Let’s look at each of these types of personality, separately at first, and then let’s see what happens when they are combined into one person.
Narcissistic Personality Traits
Narcissists are preoccupied with looking and being superior to others. Narcissistic HCPs make demeaning statements—often in public—against their Targets of Blame, including their spouses, their children, co-workers, neighbors, bosses, or heads of organizations. In order to appear superior, they must put other people down. They do this a lot.
This characteristic makes politics appealing to them: political races provide them with opportunities to show that they are better than everyone else. They can win. And in the process, they can get revenge on anyone who tries to expose that they are not superior to everyone else.
Yet HCPs generally don’t have the flexible political skills they need for the jobs they are running for, so instead they divert attention and keep the focus on their Targets of Blame. They persuade everyone else that they are better than that terrible candidate. But they also have grandiose ideas. They often convince others that these ideas can come true, but only if they are made leader.
The most narcissistic HCPs are attracted to the highest offices, because that proves that they are the most superior. Winning such an office also gives them the power to really demean everyone else, especially their targets.
Diagnosing any personality disorder is generally very subjective and based on the information available. Even experienced mental health professionals often disagree. This is fine for our purposes, because we’re not trying to reach a diagnosis here. We’re just trying to recognize high-conflict behavior patterns that may cause a person to be dangerous and deceptive and therefore not someone who should be elected.
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is an extreme form of narcissism. According to the DSM-5, someone with NPD has internal distress and/or social impairment,17 and exhibits at least five out of nine specific characteristics.18 For the purposes of this book (since we’re not diagnosing disorders but understanding high-conflict behavior patterns), the key narcissistic traits to look for are these:
KEY HIGH-CONFLICT BEHAVIORS OF NARCISSISTS
1. Drive to be superior
2. Grandiose ideas
3. Fantasies of unlimited power
4. Lack of empathy
These four characteristics help narcissists get elected because they help the candidates convince people that they are really superior and that their grandiose ideas are really achievable. Since narcissists truly believe in themselves and their ideas, they can appear very charming, authentic, and persuasive. But they tend to deceive everyone, including themselves. Although they aren’t necessarily lying, they are usually unaware of how exaggerated and unrealistic they are about their own abilities and ideas.
For example, studies have shown that when narcissists are CEOs of companies, their preoccupation with themselves and their overestimation of their own skills creates more volatility for the company’s performance. They are not popular bosses, are seen as below average in leadership skills, and take credit for other’s work. They are usually not very successful when compared to CEO’s who put the organization first.19
A large study determined that about 6.2 percent of the United States population has NPD. That’s about twenty million people. This study found that just over 60 percent of the people with this disorder are male and just under 40 percent are female.20
Sociopathic (Antisocial) Personality Disorder
The DSM-5 lists several characteristics for antisocial personality disorder (antisocial is an equivalent term for sociopath), or ASPD.21 For the purposes of spotting sociopathic high-conflict behavior patterns, look out for the following four traits:
KEY HIGH-CONFLICT BEHAVIORS OF SOCIOPATHS
1. Drive to dominate
2. Deceitful (lying and conning)
3. Highly aggressive
4. Lack of remorse
Research indicates that nearly 4 percent of the population has ASPD. That’s over twelve million people in the United States alone. About 75 percent of them are male and about 25 percent are female.22
Sociopathic HCPs naturally gravitate toward positions in which they can dominate and humiliate others—such as politics, business, organizational leadership, and/or criminality. They may become CEOs of large corporations, politicians, and highly paid consultants; or gang leaders, heads of drug cartels, and leaders of terrorist groups.23 A sociopathic HCP can also be a common criminal; a smiling, friendly, drug-dealing neighbor; or a heartless co-worker. You don’t want to become their target by getting too close to them, joining in any of their schemes, or directly confronting them by yourself.
Some sociopathic HCPs are attracted to politics because they can steal from the public coffers for themselves and/or engage in large-scale schemes of swindling others. They enjoy that kind of dominance and high risk taking. They can also use their political power to boss around large groups of people by fooling them, controlling them, removing them, or destroying them.
They use Targets of Blame as a distraction while they are doing their dirty work. By getting you to look over there at another politician, they are able to take power and whatever else they want without being stopped. It’s just like pickpockets who distract you by bumping into you and pointing somewhere else: “Look up at that over there!” they shout, grabbing your wallet while you’re looking up.
You might wonder what the difference is between narcissistic and sociopathic personalities. Here’s what the DSM-5 says: “[N]arcissistic personality disorder does not include characteristics of impulsivity, aggression, and deceit.”24 So if a politician seems narcissistic, but also lies a lot and is highly impulsive and aggressive, that probably means that he (or she) has traits of both disorders.
Malignant Narcissism
Now it gets really frightening. If someone has both of these personality disorders, they are considered to be a malignant narcissist, which is a disorder that experts say has “no treatment and no cure.”25
The malignant narcissist can be particularly powerful, persuasive, confident, and aggressive. They can look very attractive and charismatic while promoting extremely grandiose plans (their narcissistic side). They are ruthless, heartless, and lack a conscience (their antisocial side). They are also paranoid and sadistic,26 say the experts, so they are more driven than most narcissists or sociopaths to destroy their Targets of Blame—including almost everything and everyone in their path—and, ultimately, themselves.
This diagnosis was identified by German-born psychiatrist Erich Fromm who left Nazi Germany in the 1930s and came to the United States where he had a significant influence on the development of psychological theory and practice. Here’s how Fromm explained this particular disorder:
The Egyptian Pharoahs, the Roman Caesars, the Borgias, Hitler, Stalin, Trujillo—they all show certain similar features. They have attained absolute power; their word is the ultimate judgment of everything, including life and death; there seems to be no limit to their capacity to do what they want. …
It is a madness that tends to grow in the lifetime of the afflicted person. The more he tries to be god, the more he isolates himself from the human race; this isolation makes him more frightened, everybody becomes his enemy, and in order to stand the resulting fright he has to increase his power, his ruthlessness, and his narcissism.27
Fromm says that this narcissism is malignant because it is not restrained in its growth, like a malignant cancer.28
The major study of personality disorders mentioned previously indicated that approximately 0.7 percent of the United States population has both of these disorders.29 Although that sounds small, it’s about two million people. They can be in any walk of life, at any level of society.
For example, Brian David Mitchell, the kidnapper of fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her home in Utah in 2002, was identified as having both narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders during his criminal trial. He apparently wanted to rule a family with many wives and had plans to kidnap more teenage girls because he believed they would be easier to mold to his wishes. He couldn’t stop himself. Fortunately he was captured, and Elizabeth Smart is doing well and is educating the public about how such dangerous personalities can exist anywhere.30
Conclusion
In short, narcissists, sociopaths, or both, when combined with high-conflict personalities, are driven to be the kings (or, to a much lesser extent, queens), the dictators, the supreme ruler over all. I think of them as HCP Wannabe Kings. And these aren’t the friendly Camelot or Disney type of kings. These are the grandiose and ruthless Wannabe Kings who will do anything and destroy anyone to gain power to become the absolute ruler.
Now you have the fundamentals for identifying the patterns of high-conflict politicians, including the narcissists, the sociopaths (antisocial), and the combination (malignant narcissists). Figure 1 is a simple way to summarize their characteristics.
Throughout the rest of this book, I refer to this personality pattern as HCP Wannabe Kings, HCP politicians, or simply HCPs or Wannabe Kings. Consider these terms as equivalent in describing this set of characteristics.
This pattern awareness gives you the ability to predict much of an HCP’s future behavior early on, unlike most people who simply look at each of their actions in isolation and constantly express surprise. With practice, you will find that these patterns get easier and easier to spot. Since HCPs don’t change their behavior, they are, in fact, more predictable than the average person.
FIGURE 1. High-Conflict Politicians. Copyright © 2019 Bill Eddy, All Rights Reserved, Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—And How We Can Stop, Berrrett-Koehler Publishers
Remember, you are not diagnosing anyone; rather, you are watching out for those you do not want to assume positions of power over you—whether this is in relationships, at work, or as your political leaders.
