He’s a malignant narcissist. It takes a long time to escape that kind of programing. Being in a relationship like that is basically like being in a cult.
spot on. doesn’t help that he’s a household name with lots of fanboys. actual notoriety of a malignant narcissist partner can easily amplify the self doubt that gets spurred on by gaslighting and other manipulative methods. not to mention she has children with him so she can’t just cut him off completely. can’t say i feel for her, but i sure would want to be in her place.
He’s not a narcissist. pwNPD are a vulnerable minority of disabled people. Elon Musk is a bigoted asshole. Those are opposites.
Abusers are often victims first. You can’t really look at Musk, or any billionaire, and think, “yeah, this person is totally fine.” He’s not. None of them are.
Patriarchy and capitalism reward the unhealthy coping mechanism he uses to protect his ego. Patriarchy specifically asserts that those coping mechanisms are not only normal but optimal.
He’s absolutely a victim of this system and in a functional one he would be given help instead of power, which is literally the opposite of what he needs to be able to recognize his problems and heal.
He is who he is because the only way he can see himself as valuable at all is if he’s basically the savior of the world. Anything less than that is unacceptable garbage. Anyone who believes differently must be manipulated or destroyed.
There’s no way he can ever be happy. He needs help. It’s tragic that we live in a society where he can’t even see how much he needs help.
None of that takes away from the behaviors he expresses. The fact that his manipulation of others comes from his insecurity doesn’t take away from the manipulation, the feeling of unreality, that comes from experimenting that manipulation. Both of these things can and do exist at the same time.
That’s fair. I was using a quick and simple soundbyte to push the idea that insulting people with mental illnesses is bad. When I take a nuanced and patient approach, people usually accuse me of defending abusers and go off on a wild tangent. I’ve found it’s important to cement people’s ideas of who I am and where my criticism is coming from within the first 10 seconds of the interaction. If it takes any longer than that, they assume since I dared to disagree with them that I must be the enemy, and they project everything they disagree with onto me.
Since you’re clearly appreciative of nuance, I’ll use the nuanced argument with you. While Elon Musk may have NPD, it would be medical malpractice for a registered psychiatrist to make that judgement without having had a session with him. There are regulations against that sort of behaviour for good reason. It’s called the Goldwater Rule. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule
The danger of diagnosing public figures without the proper rigour is that people’s idea of what a pwNPD is are informed by stereotypes, and those stereotypes inform future armchair diagnoses. It becomes an ouroboros with no actual grounding in science. That’s why everyone thinks psychopaths are killers, narcissists are abusers, and obsessive-compulsives are neat freaks. These stereotypes can encourage abuse by the public of people with mental disorders.
I would suggest that narcissists and borderlines are vulnerable minorities solely because they almost always refuse treatment until it is no longer their legal choice to do so.
An adult with untreated narcissism is almost certainly going to be the least vulnerable person in all of their chosen relationships at any time.
No, that’s a harmful stereotype based in no kind of scientific inquiry.
Consider the fact that NPD and BPD are caused by child abuse. Isn’t it common knowledge that abused people are more likely to be abused in the future? Abusing a child doesn’t turn them into a superior, less vulnerable ubermensch. It turns them into someone who falls apart and cries because they tried to learn the violin and weren’t immediately great at it. After all, psychologists are doctors, and a doctor’s job is to help people who are suffering. Doctors don’t deal in morality, and they don’t label people for hurting others. What you’re thinking of is philosophers and priests, not doctors. Doctors are interested in helping the patient suffer less, not in imposing morality. This idea that a mental disorder is when you hurt other people is really bizarre. That’s not how medicine works at all.
Also treating someone as a threat their whole life is oppression. As any black man who’s been stopped in traffic by the police can tell you. Here you go treating people as a threat because of a mental disorder, the outcome is obvious.
