Victimhood Movements Hijacked by Narcissists and Psychopaths

Whenever people organize to claim justice, they become narcissists and psychopaths

This video from my teacher on narcissism, Sam Vaknin was edited for length and clarity below.

Recent studies have demonstrated the prevalence and incidence of grandiose pathological narcissism bordering on psychopathy, as defined by Robert Hare, among social justice activists and other mass movements. One such recent study had been published a few months ago. In British Columbia, there is also a study conducted, actually, three studies conducted by Israelis, and they suggested a new personality construct called the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV).

It seems that when mass movements start and when they are concerned with justice, social justice, interpersonal justice, legal justice, financial justice, or any form of justice, sooner or later, these movements are hijacked, infiltrated, infested with, and contaminated by psychopaths, psychopaths and narcissists, and these psychopaths and narcissists tend to rise to the top because they seek attention, they are concerned with narcissistic supply if they are narcissists, money, power, and sex, if they are psychopaths. These people become the public face of these social movements. They are the outspoken ones. There's a silent majority and the tip of an iceberg minority of psychopaths and narcissists who make it to the mass media, who get interviewed everywhere, who aggrandize themselves and become not only the face of the movement, but the movement.

So they tend to consider themselves as reifications of the principles, ideologies, ideas, stratagems, and attitudes of the movements which they purportedly and self imputedly represent. This is an insidious, nefarious, pernicious, dangerous, and sick phenomenon, and it has been happening throughout history.

The French Revolution was hijacked by the likes of Danton and Robespierre and others, very mentally ill people, psychopaths and narcissists. So the Russian Revolution, the famous October Revolution, had gone through two stages. Initially, it was initiated by middle-class bourgeoisie, well balanced people, but then it was hijacked by total psychopaths like Lenin and Stalin. So, social movements have this tendency. It's nothing new throughout history.

In my own small case in 1995, I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse. And for nine years, my website was the only website on narcissism. And I maintained, ran, and owned the only six support groups for victims of narcissistic abuse. This gradually became a global movement. I launched it years ago, and then I lost control in 2004. And the movement now throughout the world is in the hands of con artists, psychopaths, narcissists, and scammers. I mean it's a cesspool and a cesspit with covert narcissists pretending to be victims, victims pretending to be experts, and experts who know nothing about the condition.

Clearly, I had launched inadvertently a mass movement that had been hijacked later by psychopaths, narcissists, nothing new under the sun. All social justice movements and all justice concern movements go through certain phases. Many of these movements are focused and centered around the concept of victimhood, so they are what I would call victimhood movements.

Victims are entitled to justice. They are entitled to pursue justice by any legal means available. They're also very welcome to organize. It's a good thing. It's a healthy thing in society when victims organize to reclaim what's theirs, to reclaim their rights, and even to undergo a public healing process.

For example, in South Africa, the popular courts tried perpetrators in the truth and justice movements. So, this is in itself, is a healthy phenomenon. The problem is when the movement is again kidnapped and infiltrated by psychopaths and narcissists and changes its character.

Every social justice movement goes through phases. It starts with legitimate grievances, victims, people who are deprived, people who are disenfranchised, ignored, people who suffer or pay the price for other people's actions or inaction, people who are victims, advertent or inadvertent of trends such as globalization, automation, and the transition to the service and information economy.

There are numerous types of victims. People can be victimized, owing to their sexual orientation, to their sex, race, and ethnicity. We discriminate against each other, and we torture each other based on differences. If you are slightly different to me, then you don't belong. You're not in my group, in the in-group, you're an other, you're outside the group.

And we tend, we tend to direct, redirect aggression, individual aggression and group aggression at others. This is the concept of the other. And so, most victims, if not all victims and most groups of people have legitimate grievances. Now, some of these grievances have to do with specific cases, specific individuals, specific institutions, circumstances, and some of these grievances have to do with the system, systemic bias, systemic discrimination, systemic prejudice.

Here is the link to the post on X. The video is also transcribed below in the block quote in purple.

In the past few years of clinical psychology, we’ve been studying victimhood movements and the psychology of victimhood movements. We have studies by Gabay and studies in British Columbia. What we are beginning to find is certain people are prone to adopt victimhood as an identity. Their victimhood is their identity. Victimhood endows their life with meaning and makes sense of the world. It’s an organizing principle. They would seek to be victims even in situations where they would not have been victimized otherwise. When they are not victimized, they push you to become victimized. This is called projective identification. There is something called TIV (Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood). It’s a new psychological construct describing these types of people. You can see these types of people in the empath movement and other nonsensical labels where these people are actually very narcissistic and grandiose, extremely aggressive, and lacking in empathy and yet, they claim that they have been victimized all their lives because they are super empathic, sensitive and so and so forth. And they are proud of their victimhood. They compete with each other. “My abuser was much worse than your abuser!”, “My abuse was unprecedented. I understand that you were abused, and I am sorry for you, but my abuse was much worse.” It’s identity politics. A separate set of studies in Canada show that very fast in 2 to 3 years maximum, victimhood movements like Me Too and BLM get hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths. The infiltration of narcissists and psychopaths is universal in all these victimhood movements and they become the public face of the movement. Victimhood movements are one of the most threatening and pernicious developments. There is a sociologist by the name of Campbell, and he says we have transitioned from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood. It’s very dangerous because if you are a perennial victim and this is your identity, you would tend to develop attendant behaviors, for example, you would feel entitled to special treatment and if you don’t get this special treatment you will become aggressive. This is the irony. This was first described by Karpman, and he described what he called the drama triangle. The drama triangle includes the abuser, the victim and the rescuer/savior. And these roles are not fixed. When the victim is not gratified by the rescuer, she becomes an abuser. And when the abuser witnesses the behavior of the rescuer, he tries to be the rescuer, so everybody cycles. What I am trying to say is that the potential for aggression and violence in victimhood movements is much larger than in the general population. It’s equal to psychopathic movements for example the Nazi movement. Nazism was a victimhood movement. Nazis presented themselves as victims of the Versailles movement, the world order, Germany was discriminated against, and look where it led. Similarly, communism was a victimhood movement. The proletariat was exploited by the landowners, industrialists and so on. They needed to redress grievances, and anything that is grievance-based leads to violence and death. All death cults start as victimhood movements. ISIS is no exception.

Women have been subjected to a systematic pillage and plunder of their gifts and denial of their rights. So have African Americans, so have the Jews through thousands of years, and so on and so forth. Homosexuals, of course. So sometimes the system and its dominant ideology targets specific groups of people, denies them their rights, sequesters them, demonizes them, and then punishes them in a variety of ways, not the least of which is the economic way, as Fukuyama had observed in a series of brilliant works. So there are legitimate grievances. Victims wake up.

They wake up when they compare themselves to others who are not members of their group. They wake up when there is a general tsunami wave of rights and human rights and civil rights, and they want to be included. In this tidal wave of rearranging rights and obligations, societal rights and obligations, they wake up when things really, really become bad, intolerable, unsupportable, when the victim group hits rock bottom, when blacks are massacred by police, for example, when climate change has led to extreme weather everywhere. This is when we hit rock bottom, when the pandemic is raging all over the globe because of its initial mismanagement by governments and so on.

These are all cases of hitting rock bottom, and then people organize. And they try to reverse history, to reverse the trend. And the thing is, they're often very successful. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States in the 50s and 60s was quite successful. So, the precedent is that if you get your act together as a victim, you're likely to become much less of a victim.

It's an incentive. Legitimate grievances often lead to organization. There is a system, an oppressing system, the patriarchy in the case of women, white society, in the case of blacks, Nazi Germany, in the case of Jews, there's an oppressing system and the victims organize in effect a counterculture.

They organize an opposing system, and then it becomes the clash of two systems. The problem is that most of these counter systems, most of these victimhood based systems tend to deteriorate very fast to identity politics, and then what we have is a mirror image of the practices of the oppressing majority.

So you can find today racism among blacks, which is even more virulent, which is even less justified than the racism among whites. Blacks became the aggressors and the racists as a counter reaction counter reformation, if you wish, against the prevailing dominant hierarchy and system. So identity politics is a very powerful tool for these groups because identity creates cohesion.

Cohesion creates a laser focused action, and laser focused action is power. Cohesion is power. And you cannot obtain cohesion unless you foster a sense of togetherness, of “we-ness”, of identity. And so identity politics also relies on intersectionality. Intersectionality is a very fancy name to say that most people are victimized based on more than one parameter.

So, for example, a black woman. She would be victimized as a black, and she would be victimized as a woman. A homosexual Jew would be victimized as a homosexual and as a Jew, let alone a transgender Native American and whatever. Oh, there are numerous combinations of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, place of birth, origin, level of education, level of socioeconomic attainment, and so on and so forth. They're all grounds for discrimination and bias. The bias can be explicit, can be an integral part of an overt ideology, for example, anti-immigration, or white supremacy. These are overt biases and prejudices, totally non-scientific and nonsensical, but the bias can be implicit bias.

Infantilization Of The Apocalypse

The way, for example, medical doctors relate to black patients. In shocking surveys, we find time and again that white medical doctors assume that black people have a different physiology, for example, that they have thicker skin and they experience much less pain. So biases are a poison. They permeate and pervade the social fabric, and the only way to get rid of bias is to get rid of the social fabric.

Then movements adopt identity politics and intersectional ideologies, contra-intersectional ideologies, in ways that render them subversive. They become, in effect, insurgencies in very extreme cases. They deteriorate into domestic terrorism. But even in the more benign cases, these homegrown grassroots movements, tend to become very aggressive, exclusionary, identity oriented, hermetic, schizoid, closed in, defiant, contumacious. There's an attack on authority. And if you're thinking, well, this list sounds like a psychopath, you're right. This is the list of traits of a psychopath. These identity politics groups, these victimhood centered groups tend to become psychopathic as an integral dynamic not related to particular individuals as members of the group or particular individuals as leaders. The dynamic of a group is psychopathy. They develop collective psychopathy. Very often victimhood groups also tend to compensate for their sense of innate inferiority and for the humiliation of having been a victim.

They tend to compensate with grandiosity. So, in the narcissistic abuse movement today, we have empaths. Empaths are angels. They can do nothing wrong. They are wonderful people. They are amazing. They're perfect. They are, in other words, narcissists. So, grandiosity and psychopathy tend to evolve, naturally, as an emergent phenomenon in victimhood-centered social justice movements, long before they are hijacked by narcissists and psychopaths.

Link to Shellenberger's piece, Infantilization of the Apocalypse, where I'm quoted on narcissism. Link to tweet.

Actually, narcissists and psychopaths gravitate to these movements owing to their increasing narcissistic and psychopathic profile. Then we have a Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which is this new construct. We have these studies that show, you know, psychopaths and narcissists as active members, not only leaders, and the whole thing deteriorates into demonizing, mudslinging, partisanship, and aggression in extreme cases, even violence.

Now, there's a big difference between left-leaning victimhood movements, right-leaning victimhood movements and neutral movements. An example of a neutral movement would be the narcissistic abuse movement, because it incorporates people with leftist views, people with rightist views and so on. It's centered around the injustice done to victims of narcissistic abuse by narcissists and psychopaths. It is undergoing the very same process. It had become more and more grandiose and it had been taken over by psychopathic and narcissistic con artists and scammers, all these online coaches and experts and so on. But still, it is neutral in the political sense.

Image from Public’s Infantilization of Apocalypse

Left-leaning, victimhood centered movements tend to focus on entitlement and grandiosity. They compensate with grandiosity, entitlement, and are fantastic in nature. For example, they seek to rewrite history, counterfactually; women are doing this in the feminist movement. They are rewriting the history of the world as though it had been centered around women when actually women had always been since the agricultural revolution, marginal in world affairs. Blacks have African American studies departments where they rewrite history to render blacks the builders of the nation and the greatest contributors to science and literature, which is utter, sheer, unmitigated, counterfactual nonsense.

There is grandiose compensation and a deep sense of entitlement. These are two main features of narcissism, because these traits lead to a lack of empathy. If you talk to blacks in any setting with any conviction, members of these movements or not, they have become much less empathic. They sound very narcissistic, I must say, and I'm sure I'll get a million comments about this element.

So this is left-leaning movements: entitlement, grandiosity. The right-leaning movements combine two different, two other psychological traits: conspiracism, which is the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories as organizing and explanatory principles. Conspiracism coupled with grandiosity, for example, white supremacy, coupled with schizoid tendencies, the wish to be left alone, small government, no taxation, no foreigners, no ventures in foreign lands, actually, so the right-leaning movements, they tend to be more conspiracy minded, they tend to be more monkish, they are centered around withdrawal, around avoidance, much less around entitlement.

They are afraid of entitlement actually, because they translate entitlement to bigger government, more intrusive government, nanny state, big brother, 1984 Orwellian things. Their conspiracism actually prevents right-wing movements from becoming fully narcissistic because they deny the element of entitlement, but they have a pronounced lack of empathy, much bigger than in the left victimhood center movements, and they are much more psychopathic, in the sense that they are much less averse to using aggression, they are much more defiant, they are much more contumacious, they detest authority, drain the swamp in Washington, so they are more psychopathic.

Chart generated by Notion AI comparing left-leaning movements and right leaning movements’ tendencies towards pathology. The Left veers towards narcissism and the Right towards psychopathy.

To summarize, the left is narcissistic, entitled, and grandiose. It's centered around victimhood and translates victimhood into claims on society. They claim rights, they claim money, reparations for slavery, or reparations for the Holocaust. They claim…so it's more entitlement-oriented. And what can I get out of it? And the right-wing groups, entitlement groups are less, they are not exactly victimhood groups. They are victims of conspiracies but not victims of society or systemic because they are mostly white.

Right-wing groups are mostly white. They belong to the majority. They are less likely to present themselves as victims. They may be victims of impersonal forces such as globalization or the collapse of manufacturing in the United States or automation or whatever, but they are more focused on withdrawal, avoidance, and using power where necessary to protect rights, for example, gun rights.

In the middle, we have the neutral movements, the social justice movements. They are not social justice movements. They are individual justice movements, like the narcissistic abuse movement. And these movements in the middle, they have the worst of both worlds, actually. They have entitlement. They have grandiosity, but they also have defiance, contumacious and conspiracy, conspiracy-oriented paranoia.

This is the picture. Observe these groups. What they see, narcissists and psychopaths is a goldmine. It's a new pathological narcissistic space. They can thrive in these settings. They can become leaders. They can become media figures. They can obtain narcissistic supply. They can make money. They can have sex with followers and fans.

It's fun! It's great! It's a playground. It's a haunt. It's a pub. And so, narcissists and psychopaths flock into these movements. And because of their particular personality structure. Narcissists know how to be charming. Narcissists verbalize much better than the average population. Many narcissists and psychopaths are highly intelligent, and all of them are goal-oriented.

They are reckless. They are callous. They are disempathic. They are relentless. They rise to the top. They become the leaders of these movements and this is how all these movements end. Even hallowed, saintly figures like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, or in other ways, gurus like Jordan Peterson and so on, have pronounced narcissistic elements and traits and so on.

When you look, when you listen to the FBI recordings of Martin Luther King, I mean, it's far from impressive. And when you read the autobiography of Gandhi, you come across sections that put your hair on end. I mean, the guy was, you know, near psychopath. There's no escaping this. Victims organize, create a counterculture, a counter, counter system.

It becomes more and more narcissistic, more and more grandiose, more and more entitled, more and more paranoid. And then it becomes more and more psychopathic as it accumulates aggression which is directed by an ideology, interpellated, as Althusser called it, and then it's taken over by narcissists and psychopaths.

I hope I made things clear because last time I mentioned only Black Lives Matter and the MeToo movements and the climate change movement with the Greta. But now I've mentioned also right wing movements and neutral movements. It's all over. Whenever people organize to claim justice, they become narcissists and psychopaths.

It raises an interesting question whether narcissism and psychopathy are not actually misguided, misdirected attempts by individuals to reclaim justice after having been subjected to early childhood trauma. Interesting thought. Narcissists and psychopaths as victims of early childhood trauma claiming what's theirs, regaining their rights and establishing some justice, using an ideology, a personal ideology, which is akin to religion in the case of narcissism, that actually aggrandizes, entitles, and tramples on other people. 

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Acknowledgements to journalist, Michael Shellenberger for his interest in narcissism as it affects politics, culture, and civilization and his role in helping the public understand that victimhood identity is a pathological tell for narcissism. This sentiment that we are living in the age of victimhood is prevalent on the Right and in psychology, and nowhere to be found on the Left.

Thank you, Michael, for inspiring me with your work and providing me momentum for starting this Substack, Concerning Narcissism.

Also, I'm excited to announce that I've been contributing to a Woke Cluster B psychology taxonomy project for authors, Michael Shellenberger and Peter Boghossian coming soon!