Narcissism Like Rich Girls With Herpes

Look to your left, now look to your right.

If there's a human being both on your right & on your left, statistically speaking, you just looked at, on average, at least one person with Herpes.



You also saw at least one Narcissist.

In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Jean Twenge says that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism in the US has increased in the population at the same rate as obesity.

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Which I guess helps explain a study I found quite unbelievable upon first blush -- a study published in 2010 by Brad Bushman, Scott Moeller, & Jennifer Crocker. As part of a series of self-esteem experiments, they had college students rate a variety of things the average person desires -- food, sex, money, friendship, compliments. They then asked the students how strongly they wanted those things & how much they tended to like them.

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They say the clear winner was what I thought would be the last place finisher: Compliments. Perhaps this explains a lot about me, because I thought I was in the process of changing my mind, but now, as I re-read the words of the study, I'm ever more baffled. I just don't give many fucks about compliments I guess.

But I'm going to start treating people like they're the ones in the study. It makes a lot of sense, when I think of the endless array of y'all donkeys -- that you're actually just diseased mentally. I used to think you were all dumb bots, but now this theory works better.

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In 1980, Narcissistic Personality Disorder first appeared in the DSM-III as:

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.

David McRaney explains things this way -- "In studies of high school & college-age people, boosts to self-esteem were found to be usually more attractive & beguiling than the sort of things older people see as proper rewards. When you ask a person in the first quarter of her life what she would rather have -- sex, pizza, or a positive comment about her -- the majority go for the kind words, even if the subject had not enjoyed the other options in a very long time."

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The researchers used another study to show that this tendency to prefer self-esteem boosts diminishes over time, but not completely.

They say Grandiosity is the hallmark of narcissism, but I think most narcissists hear this & say to themselves, "No worries, no grandiosity here, look at how poor and wage-slavey hipster I am!"

(Like these University of Indiana sorority girls & their recent homeless-themed party)

The best excuse the Rich have, for not giving a shit about the rest of the world, is that they're ignorant.

If, however Rich people are going to pull back the curtain & start taunting the rest of the world, how does that not end in a lot of Rich people whose faces look like these girls, but not from digital blurs?