The initial thought for this analysis was “How narcissists leaders always fail” but then realized the “why” comes before the “how,” because it changes the focus from abstract disordered behaviors to “real world” answers.
Ergo, instead of focusing on the mechanics of a narcissist’s failure, we are examining what is psychologically broken and why that causes these “leaders in name only” to inevitably fail.
Who could do such a thing?
Simply put, malignant narcissists inevitably fail as leaders because their primary purpose in life is built around the disordered premise that their psyches must be protected, soothed, and served at all costs, even if reality, institutions, and human lives must be sacrificed to do so. Does that sound like the psychological make-up of someone who should lead anything that concerns the welfare of others?
Why they do it
A healthy leader wants to make good choices so their decisions are based on what their experiences have taught them and what the experts they trust say are their best or least worst options.
A narcissistic “leader’s” psychological disorder (usually driven by trauma) always directs them to make the most self-serving choices or to save themselves by submitting to any fear or firm barrier they are forced to take.
To make matters worse, malignant leaders cannot learn because they believe they already know everything, and their irrational fears cause them to perceive any differing opinion as a personal insult, and they choose loyalists over experts at almost every opportunity.
Caveat: When they do hire competent people, it is because they are often children of narcissists conditioned to take their abuse.
A leader with healthy narcissism accepts they will make mistakes, learns from them, revises their plans, and moves forward.
Most leaders with unhealthy narcissism can barely handle being wrong about minor things, so you can imagine how well they handle messing up an economy or losing something big like an election or a war they started but could never win.
Why they consistently fail
A narcissist’s inability to accept any reality in which they are wrong or fail is why their lives turn into chaotic soap operas, every criticism is viewed as a personal attack, and anyone trying to limit their power to do whatever they want is portrayed as stupid or an evil enemy.
It’s never about good or bad leadership. Again, the fundamental inescapable problem is that every narcissist believes good leadership means doing absolutely everything within their power to protect, soothe, and serve their own psychological dysfunctions.
This egomaniacal antisocial mindset is why malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths are so dangerous in any leadership position, let alone as a leader of a people or country.
They never govern with reality in mind unless forced to do so. They “lead” based on maintaining and glorifying their self-image, and a narcissist’s deluded self-image is the worst possible operating system for an individual, people, or country to be led by.
Because a narcissist needs admiration to fuel their fragile and/or primal ego, they are, of course, attracted to power and function well in dysfunctional political environments not designed for truth.
It is only a matter of when and how often narcissists will fail in leadership positions. What else is possible when experts are replaced with loyalists, propaganda with transparency, and competency with performance art?
What else can occur but inevitable disasters when a delusional narcissist gains power and exacerbates their dysfunctions by living in a psychological echo chamber to feed their ego’s needs?
Once one processes the “why,” the reasons begin to connect us to the “how.”
How they consistently fail
Essentially, a narcissistic leader in power surrounds themselves with those who tell them what they want to hear instead of the truth. This level of compulsive self-soothing behavior never has and never will be any kind of good leadership.
The sad fact is that to malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, their people are not citizens or even human beings. They are just pawns, tools, assets, obstacles, or leverage to be used however it serves them best and that they can get away with.
Clearly a way narcissists often use to gain more national power is to destroy truth and trust. Destroying truth is an observation Orwell made about the nazis, because once the truth is destroyed, it becomes whatever the leader says it is.
Somewhat similarly, a civil society runs on trust, so once trust is destroyed, the institutions begin to fall apart. Not coincidentally, the results are exactly what toxic predators want. Loyalty is transactional, and fear of how they will retaliate eliminates most questions about their legitimacy.
Seeing past the illusion
The mistake that most people make is seeing a narcissist’s absolute confidence as a sign of “telling it like it is” and strength of conviction, because the exact opposite is almost always true. There’s a reason that one of the most important books in the study of psychopaths is called the “Mask of Sanity.” Every toxic predator has one or more masks to fool normies with.
If a leader is incapable of genuinely caring about their people, system of government, or long-term consequences for their country, can that ever be considered a sign of strong or good leadership?
The CNI conclusion is that compulsive, self-serving domination never has and never will lead a people, civilization, or species down a healthy, sustainable, or survivable path. In the short run, hard-driving dominance can produce seemingly positive results, but in the end, the benefits are never worth the costs put on society.
Patterns
These disorders are self-defeating because leaders who exhibit such toxic traits undermine and remove the competency and expertise around them. How else can they hide their own incompetence and lack of expertise?
Fear and compulsion are also why such pathological “leaders” create alternate realities, punish dissent, and reward those who flatter them. To a narcissist, obedience is intelligence, questioning them about their mistakes is nasty, and disobedience is treason.
When reality hits the fan
Eventually, the public begins to see malignant narcissist patterns, such as far more lies than truth, purges of experts, blame shifting everything, constant hollow false victories, endless vanity projects, and rapidly growing instability and hardships for the people. Sound familiar?
Typically, a narcissist leader can only respond in ways their disorder allows them to, which is with more denial, lies, grasps of control, aggression, and manipulative and meaningless imagery and spectacle, but symbolic gestures and imagery are not governing, and aggression, authoritarian control, and denial are not leadership. They are merely the pathological signs of a failing, fragile ego trying to escape reality.
The reasons mentioned above primarily explain why malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths in leadership positions fail. Obviously, it is certainly not about political talent or ambition. A toxic predator’s ability to convincingly lie is unmatched, and their ambitions to serve themselves are bottomless pits of need.
Sadly for them and us, these clinical symptoms that make them such shameless and relentless grifters are also why they will never be satisfied with anything, ever.
Bottom line: Malignant types of narcissists always epically fail in leadership roles because they cannot accept any truth or live in any reality that doesn’t serve their disordered minds, and any nation, group, or organization led by someone who cannot accept reality is being driven off a cliff whether they see it or not.
Conclusions
Of course the best way to stop a malignant type of leader is to keep them from power, but without a greater implementation of Counter-Narcissists measures at every level of society, it is far easier said than done.
Unfortunately, due to a lifetime of practice in lying, cheating, superficially charming, and manipulating to get what they pathologically want or need, these toxic predators are well-designed for modern politics.
They also sneak up on most people in most situations, because the vast majority of humans can’t compute that roughly 10 - 15% of us “can lie like breathing” because they lack a conscience.
Not surprisingly, the best way to avoid the biggest tragedies of narcissistic leadership is to have checks and balances in the form of firm barriers that constrain these megalomaniacal idiots’ abilities to capture institutions, steal everything not nailed down, start unwinnable wars, and weaken a country’s ability to be smart, strong, or serve its people.
Once again, the main “real world” reason narcissist leaders inevitably fail is that they can’t handle any truth or reality that doesn’t serve, protect, and glorify them personally 100% of the time, so they make up and lead by alternative facts that give them what their disordered mind needs.
That is why CNI’s solutions start with helping people recognize such behaviors and to fully understand that malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths are only capable of caring about themselves, so they are terrible leaders by definition. What else is it called when a leader’s every move is focused on serving, soothing, and protecting only one person, themselves?
From a foundational Counter-Narcissist perspective, until most of humanity truly understands that this dysfunction is at the core of every toxic predator in the world, we will keep losing the human race.
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