Narcissism as an Orientation: A Socialized Hierarchy of Abusive Entitlement

Narcissistic orientations are a social issue separate and distinct from Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Let’s talk about narcissism as an orientation. In this article, we’ll explore the foundations of narcissistic orientations so in our future chats, we can demonstrate how this immature worldview perpetuates the intractable social dysfunction we’re collectively experiencing.

We must understand this dynamic - individually, interpersonally, and collectively - to heal it. One step at a time, right?

As you may remember from our previous chats, narcissistic orientations are orientations of supremacy and authoritarianism. Narcissism is the root of all supremacist hierarchies of exploitation - patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism (minority control and hoarding of collective resources), the systemic subhuman treatment of children, and patriarchal religious tyranny.

Understanding this root of narcissistic orientation is critical to understanding how to effectively combat authoritarianism and avoid the siphoning tricks of bad faith engagement designed to deflect from real accountability and the work of social evolution for the betterment of all.

Before we dive in, I want to clarify what I mean by narcissistic orientation, as it is separate from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). In all of my work, I speak to narcissistic orientations - not Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Let me explain what the difference is and why it matters.

What is Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

A personality disorder is a class of mental health conditions described by pervasive maladaptive patterns of thought, behavior, mood, and relatedness. Personality disorders manifest as an enduring constellation of belief, interpretation, and behavior that affect the entire scope of an individual’s life experience.

These intense patterns are not contextual or discretionary, meaning the individual cannot decide to “turn it off” - consciously or subconsciously - within a specific environment, situation or relationship.

Those who suffer from NPD generally cannot engage with the work of change even when their choices and actions are creating real problems, dissatisfaction, and conflict within their lives.

Typically, this person will shut down or dissociate when confronted with the reality that their behaviors and perceptions are problematic.

They dissociate by creating and projecting fantasy narratives that displace responsibility for their own choices (and the outcomes engendered) away from the narcissist. Essentially, narcissists pathologically avoid engaging with their own selves and seek to blame the reactions of others as the real issue instead. This is done to avoid shame and their core feelings of fear, insecurity, and inadequacy.

The will to dissociate relies on manufacturing narratives and lies to recruit others into endorsing their desired perspectives. Recruiting others to endorse their version of reality - however divorced from the truth - is about maintaining a false image of self at all costs.

The dedication to this false self makes truth irrelevant - there is no reality beyond the image and status the narcissist seeks to project without the burden of genuine embodiment.

This makes good faith engagement with narcissistic individuals nearly impossible.

There is no amount of support, love, empathy, care, or investment that can inspire a person with NPD to engage with the work of healing, accountability, and creating reciprocity within relationships. Only their own choice and will to do the work can create meaningfully change and healing within their own selves.

I have personal experience being a caretaker to someone diagnosed with NPD, and I cannot say whether they were unable or unwilling to engage with the work of change. I can just say that despite the chronic suffering their maladaptive patterns generated for them and everyone who ever loved them, they shut down completely or viciously lashed out at every opportunity to receive genuine material and emotional support in evolving.

While disheartening, my experience providing care to a person diagnosed with NPD is not uncommon. Such is the enduring nature of the personality disorder. That being said, I do not believe that narcissistic orientations share the same clinically demonstrated inability to change, mature, heal, or evolve. In our last section, I’ll explain why.

But first, let’s review key traits and patterns endemic to both NPD and narcissistic orientations so we have the full scope of what we’re addressing.

Narcissistic Traits and Dispositions

Narcissism involves self-centered, arrogant, and entitled patterns that exist to project a fantasy of innate superiority while distracting from the core woundedness and feelings of deep insecurity, fear, and shame at the root of narcissistic individuals.

Despite the projections of self-aggrandizement and will to exploit others in the name of self-supremacy, narcissistic people have no real core sense of inner self, only unmoored fantasies and the need to consume attention to avoid the despair and alienation of their inner world.

Some key traits associated with narcissistic orientations are:

Self Aggrandizement

They hold an exaggerated sense of self importance and believe they are special, unique, and require special treatment and privileges from others.

Entitlement

They become angry and volatile when their fantasies of superiority, bids to instruct or control others, and demands for privileged treatment are denied.

Entitlement is at the root of abuse, always. While it is tempting to over empathize with people who struggle with traumatic experiences and excuse their abusive behaviors in the name of empathy, that doesn’t actually help anyone.

Plenty of people experience horrors without becoming monsters themselves. The difference is a will to do the work of healing to create new. It isn’t someone’s fault that they’ve been traumatized or victimized - but it is their responsibility to heal.

I do not say that lightly or from an armchair perspective. It has been the truth my experience and every person I’ve ever met who embodied the will to create their own selves and their own life, regardless of the past.

Those who abuse instead of healing do so because they feel entitled to behave and consume any way they’d like without consequence. They feel ENTITLED to punish, to cause harm intentionally, to sabotage, to steal, to lie and manipulate.

No amount of enabling to “keep the peace” or in the name of empathy will change that fundamental entitlement underlying abuse - it will only prolong suffering for all.

Fantasy

They are preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, perfection, and other grandiose illusions that serve as a defense mechanism against feelings of vulnerability, inadequacy, or insecurity by creating a sense of self-worth that isn’t rooted in reality or self.

Left unchecked, these fantasies distort reality so the narcissistic orientation believes their imagined accomplishments or capabilities are obtainable and true even when directly contradicted by the reality of their own experience.

Fantasies replace self-worth and self-esteem and narcissistic individuals expect others to perform according to these fantasies. When others fail to perform according to the narcissistic fantasy, violations are met with sabotage and violence.

Fantasy + Entitlement is at the root of narcissistic abuse.

Emotional Reactivity

Narcissistic people are very sensitive and reactive to perceived slights, criticisms, and disagreements. They seek excessive admiration and attention from others, and are often preoccupied with how other people view them.

While narcissistic people most prefer positive attention from others, they will accept negative attention over indifference as indifference implies that they lack the power or importance to impact another (positively or negatively).

Jealousy

Narcissistic individuals are prone to feelings of envy and jealousy towards others, especially towards another person’s success. This makes it difficult for them to celebrate another person’s accomplishments and promotes a competitive compulsion to win in every domain, no matter what.

Exploitation

They feel entitled to manipulate, use, and exploit others for personal gain and profit whether that involves acting deceitfully to manipulate compliance, or forming performative bonds exclusively to harvest the benefits of attention or access from another person.

They have no shame or guilt about intentionally lying, manipulating, or using others to get what they want because they fundamentally do not value others as equally human with independent realities and feelings that are just as complex and legitimate as the narcissist’s own.

The narcissist is the main character and others only enter their storyline to serve a function on their behalf. The perspective is similar to that of a video game where the main character has agency and all other characters are NPC (non player characters that only exist to serve and advance the main character’s arc and cease to exist outside of serving the main character’s journey).

Lack of Empathy

They are unable or unwilling to recognize the needs, feelings, experiences, and reality of others. In this way, they only perceive others as objects that are either beneficial or threatening to the narcissist’s own goals, feelings, and ambitions.

Lack of Boundaries

Narcissists hold no boundaries between self, others, and the world so they largely externalize their experience of self. There is no separation of interior self and exterior world, the exterior world is only experienced as a projection of their fantasies and reflection of self.

Nothing is off limits for the narcissist, everything belongs to them, and their belief/perspective/values are the correct and reasonable belief/perspective/values that all correct and reasonable people must adhere to.

For example, say your neighbor asks you to drive them to work at the end of the week because they have a big presentation, but their car is in the shop. You congratulate them on their important work opportunity, but explain that you cannot drive them because you’re having oral surgery that day.

Your neighbor responds viciously and accuses you of trying to sabotage their success because you’re jealous and petty. This neighbor is behaving narcissistically and without boundaries or any baseline appreciation that you exist as a separate person with a complex and legitimate reality independent of the narcissist.

Lack of Self-Esteem

Narcissists experience extreme self-doubt, insecurity, shame, fear, and feelings of emptiness. Often, instead of engaging with these uncomfortable or painful feelings, they seek to distract themselves by consuming the energy and attention of others.

This may look like seeking excessive adulation or seeking to manufacture drama or crisis to self-soothe feeling internally out of control by seizing control or influence over another person’s mental/emotional state and behaviors.

MAUDE IS A SNOW WOLF

What is a Narcissistic Orientation?

While narcissistic orientations do embody many of the traits, behaviors, worldviews, and maladaptive patterns as persons diagnosed with NPD, they tend to do so selectively and along socialized lines.

This is the critical distinction that fails the enduring threshold for clinical diagnosis and opens the potential for healing and maturation beyond socialized and enabled entitlements.

Narcissistic orientations function from selective entitlements and dissociative tendencies encouraged by hierarchical socialization that stratify the supposed worth, value, and purpose of various types of people.

This socialization assigns roles and values to groups of people, creating social hierarchies typically sorted by an intrinsic trait that exists outside of an individual’s control or influence like race, biological sex at birth, or location of birth.

Assignments of value will always trump truth and reality within these hierarchies. The higher value social role relies on the image of their role to avoid accountability for their own actions and to protect unearned access to their entitlements.

Within patriarchy, we’re talking about the supposed “innate superiority” of men that requires “inferior” women to serve them. Patriarchy socializes men to feel entitled to narcissistically abuse women for their personal profit and pleasure without recourse or shame.

Within this dynamic, men are socialized to view women as the problem for speaking out against abuse. The abuse isn’t the issue - the problem is how men’s image is tainted by women speaking out against abuse.

Most of these men do not suffer from NPD, but their patriarchal socialization has produced a narcissistic orientation where abusing women feels natural and justified.

Partially, because this orientation has been modeled for them by generations of men before. Partially, because this socialization teaches that only men are human and women are objects to be used for pleasure and profit. And, partially, because patriarchal men project all of their own shame and insecurity onto women, disowning it and punishing women for the projection.

For all intents and purposes, a woman experiences this type of man as a narcissistic abuser because he is. But selectively - he’s not narcissistically abusing OTHER MEN. Only women and identities that are not cishet men.

This same pattern is true of white supremacy, just applied through racial assignments instead of gender.

Entitlements and Supremacy Hierarchies

All hierarchies of supremacy provide default sorting for how narcissistic orientations perceive and relate to others, since they are relying on the image of their social role for identity, worth, direction, and validation - instead of creating individual identity, self-worth, purpose, and inner authority.

In this way, narcissistic orientations relate to self and to others near exclusively by social role images, not as individuals. Their expectations aren’t based on individual experience, connection, capacities, and talents. Their expectations are based on the social role assigned to an individual to perform from a perspective of what they are entitled to receive, consume, or take from the other role.

Entitlements drawn from social roles require next to nothing of the adherent. There are no standards a male supremacist must meet or perform to feel entitled to being perceived and treated as superior by all women.

The responsibility for ensuring he experiences his fantasy of superiority is pushed onto women to perform back for his consumption.

When that fantasy is violated, he feels entitled to destructively lash out. More so, he feels entitled to enact punishment - sabotage, abuse, degradation, or violence - against women when they fail to perform his fantasy back for his own consumption.

This entitlement and will to punish violations to their fantasy of innate self-evident superiority is the true root of abusive patterns within narcissistic orientations.

Shallow Emotional Depth of Field

While I emphasize that narcissistic orientations can value and connect with others selectively, they are not functioning from a state of emotional maturity or reasonable objectivity. You can forge a genuine connection with someone without that connection being rooted in love or reason.

Narcissistic orientations tend to form shallower connections marked by a low tolerance for expressions of vulnerability, emotionality, discomfort, or demand. That being said, the connections can be more substantial and reciprocal than a person with NPD is capable of forging and maintaining.

We see this in our example of patriarchy. Male friendships are typically emotionally shallow and grounded in parallel play - watching sports together, fishing, doing activities shoulder-to-shoulder. It’s well established that men rely on romantic partnerships with women to meet most, if not all, of their emotional and intimacy needs. Women, conversely, tend to rely on a network of intimate friendships and connections and generally forge stronger familial and social bonds than men do.

As we discussed, narcissism is rooted in a fantasy of innate superiority and entitlement. A person with NPD will treat and perceive all people from this space. Their fantasy grows from an individual entitlement of superiority.

While various social roles or collective identities may be employed in service of this sense of individual superiority, at their core, people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder relate to their superiority from a very individually derived perspective.

A person functioning from a narcissistic orientation, on the other hand, ties their fantasy of innate superiority and entitlement to a social role or collective identity.

This identification with being innately superior by virtue of their assigned social role within a supremacy hierarchy is what fuels and internally justifies their selective entitlements leveraged against some, but not others.

Relying on this sense of innate superiority by virtue of an assigned social role also discourages narcissistic orientations from embarking on the work of developing real self-esteem, self-worth, and maturing capacities of emotional self-reliance, reason, and love.

Which, once again, we see clearly within patriarchy. While men rely on women for their emotional needs, they also refuse the work of developing the emotional intelligence and basic life skills necessary to reciprocate the support and care they expect to receive from women.

Despite their proclamations of loneliness, patriarchal men feel entitled to receive love and care without having to learn to perform love and care for women or others.

Which makes sense, right? If you are functioning from a perspective of innate and self-evident superiority by virtue of your social role or class, why invest in abstract self-development like that? Sure, invest in direct and material goals like gaining a certification that will increase earning potential or joining a running club to support body and fitness goals.

But the uncomfortable work of retrieving buried origins of pain that continuously cycle back around wearing new faces in new places is a vulnerable, unknowable, and patient process. Mastering soft skills of emotional regulation and the ability to decenter self to perceive others as they are is hard work without any immediate tangible rewards of pay, praise or pleasure. It’s an investment in the evolution of self, not the attainment of an externalized material or status benefit.

It’s much easier and superficially more rewarding to instead focus on how others are failing to properly play their role within the socialized script of exploitation than to relinquish assumptions of superiority to come home to self as an individual, not an externally assigned role with performance requirements and entitlements alike.

Ultimately, this creates a semi-permeable membrane of narcissistic perceptions and entitlements to abuse that is at odds with clinical diagnosis, although no less socially damaging.

On the bright side, if they choose to, narcissistic orientations are much more capable of healing and evolving out of this arrested development than a person with NPD is.

Mainly because their arrested development and entitlements are rooted in socialized hierarchies and cultural enablement, not a clinical threshold of a fundamentally disordered personality.

The good and the bad of it all is that a person must choose and commit to change and evolution to mature - no one else can do that work for them.

However, we can choose to deny enabling their fantasy entitlements and allow them to experience the unmitigated consequences of their choices and orientations. Some will choose to evolve, many will not.

Such is the nature of free will granted to us each and all.

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