Cults of Personality

Toxic Tyrants

“You’ve gathered a bunch of high-paid narcissists into a room and this is the result…These people are just so disconnected from reality.” - Comment from unnamed CNN staffer to Vanity Fair (February 10, 2022)

Grandiose narcissists like the spotlight. They like it a lot. They need to feel powerful and in control. They form strong alliances with people who share their agenda. It doesn’t matter if the context is an elite club of power-mongers, a group of health-care professionals, political parties, or some other organization that represents a tribal identity and exercises control over others. Both grandiose and vulnerable narcissists only recognize their own self-serving perspective and cannot appreciate a world with different perspectives.

Reality doesn’t matter when it contradicts their idealized world-view. All narcissists, like psychopaths, need to win and do not handle defeat well.

For those of us who have to deal with these tyrants, it is complicated. Narcissists and other toxic personalities are very good at brainwashing people. It’s both a recruitment tool for their personality cults and the way they manage their image of themselves.

This is why the CNN staffer referenced in the Vanity Fair quote is so dismissive of the ‘talent’ and others in upper management. They may have been working side by side, but the false world-view as interpreted by those in the upper echelons is not the reality of the majority.

I suggest keeping a tight hold on your own identity and recognizing that the real world is not necessarily the world represented to you by power structures. Consider perspectives.

I am reminded of a parable:

The baboon leaders sitting on the top branches of the tree looked down on the grinning baboons looking up at them and congratulated themselves by saying, “Look how well loved we are by everyone.” The baboons on the bottom branches looked up and thought, “What a bunch of baboon asses they are!”