'Nuh uh-he's just an asshole'

Part IV: Common Confusions about Cluster B Personalities

Welcome to Part IV of the series on Cluster B Personality basics. This final essay will include a preview for free readers, with the remainder reserved for the paid subscribers who support Disaffected (thank you).

In Part IV, I address common confusions and objections to the idea of Cluster B personality disorders.

The first three parts of this series are free to read for everyone. Each image is clickable and will take you to the full article.

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Part IV Starts Here!

“Nuh-uh. . . he’s just an asshole.”

That’s a response I’ve seen countless time when I’ve pointed out that someone’s behavior has all the tells of a Cluster B personality disorder. Say there’s a guy named Robert. Robert goes through a revolving carousel of friends because everyone who gets close to him ends up getting mistreated by Robert pretty quickly.

He bigs up his new friends, telling them they’re the smartest people he’s ever known. He’s never had friends like them before; they’re truly smart enough to understand him. This feels good to his new friends. It’s flattering, especially because Robert is a skilled writer with a sharp brain. Being told by such a smart man that you, too, are smart, and you are smart enough to understand him can be an ego boost.

But a few months later things change. Roberts new friends detect a change in the way he responds to them, especially if they ask questions about his current idea. If they suggest a different way to analyze the topic, or ask about whether competing data is a challenge to Robert’s view, he reacts strangely. Robert’s responses get shorter and more curt; they even seem to have an edge of hostility or mocking dismissal in them.

His new friends are puzzled, because they don’t think they’ve said anything that communicates that they think Robert is dumb, or dishonest. They haven’t used a “tone” in communicating with him. But Robert is reacting to what they see as simply honest back-and-forth batting of ideas as if this conversation were an attack against Robert.

A bit more time goes on, and then everything blows up. Robert turns his barrel toward his new friends, accusing them of “undermining” him. He names specific people in his blog, people who have been loyal readers and conversation contributors. Robert compares them to a series of former friends whom he calls leeches and hangers-on. He narrates stories about old girlfriends that he calls abusive, and says that, once again, he finds himself surrounded by people who aren’t at his level and who spend all day stealing his ideas, or tearing them down, and of generally abusing him.

Onlookers are stunned and confused. At first they think it was just a misunderstanding. They try to reassure Robert that they didn’t mean to communicate disrespect, that they thought they were having an open and lively intellectual exchange about interesting topics.

This does not work. Robert gets more aggressive, and starts accusing his new friend group of even worse behavior. He starts screenshotting their comments and featuring them as examples of “stupidity” and worse.

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An aside for context: Anyone who spends a lot of time online will have seen situations like this where there is genuine misunderstanding. Those misunderstandings happen because there are many people online who do act badly, who do steal ideas, and who do pretend that they’re disagreeing honestly when they’re really behaving in a passive-aggressively insulting manner.

Given this artificial online hothouse atmosphere, even calm-tempered and reasonable people can and do get caught up in dramas that result in hurt feelings and sundered friendships. There are cases like this where none of the players are truly abusive or narcissistic above the norm.

That’s not what I’m describing in this vignette. To get the most out of it, assume this fictional Robert is an example of true narcissistic and unfair behavior.

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Let’s say that one or more of these former friends of Roberts describe this situation in an online comment. A number of these end up as comments on my pieces because people naturally want to share their experiences with someone who knows a lot about narcissistic behavior. They want others to look at the situation they were in and give their view. They want to know, “Did I do something to Robert without realizing it?” “Did I misinterpert Robert?” “This really felt abusive to me, but maybe I’m overreacting?”

Then assume that I look at their situation and respond this way:

“That sounds like classic narcissistic personality disorder. The tells include Robert’s obvious sense of intellectual superiority, his refusal to entertain alternative views, his characterization of honest disagreement as abusive behavior. That he publicly took his ‘friends’ to the woodshed and accused them of taking advantage of him so that he could appear to be an ever-wounded victim looks to me like ‘fragile narcissism.’ "

If this is Robert’s usual pattern, I suspect you’re not just dealing with someone with a short temper, but with someone who has narcissistic personality disorder. I don’t think it’s possible to have a normal friendship with him.”

And then a reader and commenter named Jim comes along and objects:

Objection 1: “He doesn’t have a disorder for God’s sake, he’s just an asshole!”

This is where it gets interesting. After years of experience I understand where this reaction comes from. It’s a mismatch between the commenter’s understanding of what “narcissistic personality disorder” really is, and what the term actually means implies.

What Jim thinks he’s hearing in the term “narcissistic personality disorder” is not what the term really means. What does Jim think he’s hearing?

“Robert has a medical disability that prevents him from being able to react to people normally. It’s not his fault. It’s a disability just like diabetes. Like the diabetic whose pancreas doesn’t work, it’s not Robert’s fault that he’s this way. He can’t be blamed because he has a disability. Therefore, Robert is morally excused from his bad behavior and we must all work harder to be inclusive and understanding.”

That’s what Jim thinks people are saying when they label Robert as having “narcissistic personality disorder.” Let’s give Jim his due. Jim may be incorrect, but his reaction is sane and understandable. Like most of us, Jim is tired of a world in which people’s bad and abusive behavior is excused with sympathy and with “disability” diagnoses. He’s tired of watching people scream at fast food cashiers and get absolved by appeals to “structural racism.” He’s sick of watching women throw tantrums (or chairs) at their boyfriends and somehow wind up being seen as the sympathetic victim who must have been pushed to the brink.

Jim is objecting to a real, and pervasive societal attitude that reverses victim and offender. In our modern America, the worst-behaved people (whether they be women, blacks, brown skinned, illegal aliens, LGBTQ+, or any other specially protected identity class) are called “victims” when they are obviously victimizing other people.

I share Jim’s disgust at this dynamic.

But Jim is wrong in believing that the term “personality disorder” is an excuse that morally absolves a person for his bad behavior. That is not what the term means, and it’s not what the term implies.

Here’s what’s really going on.