Up to this point, most of my responses to this Attack On America that happened at the US Capitol this past week have just been snarky tweets on Twitter. I’m not out to be the next Chris Hayes or something with angry liberal commentary about how everything right wing in this country sucks, but I know the Trump demographic. Disagreeing with them even the slightest will lead to some very hotheaded people either storming away from my channel or outing themselves so they can be banned, but in either case I don’t want them in my audience. I’ve spent 15 years in corporate America learning the value of levelheadedness in business. Some angry populist sales pitch wasn’t going to change that.
There are some people in life that you just need to grab the popcorn and watch them self-destruct, usually folks with more extreme Cluster B issues such as malignant narcissism where they’re full of themself, paranoid, and have anger control issues all at the same time. You won’t be able to tell them anything, and no matter how empathetic you are even though you know where they’re going is going to be bad for them, you need to let them do it and understand that not all people in this world are going to make sense.
When that nonsense happened at the Capitol, it wasn’t surprising to me. Much like President Biden, I definitely believe America should have seen this coming, or as it’s described where I grew up, we reap what we sow. Congress, law enforcement, and the FBI should by all means conduct all kinds of investigations and administer discipline and justice to all guilty parties involved, because quite frankly, this was a national embarrassment.
In terms of Trump, my skepticism towards Donald Trump pre-dates his involvement in politics. The way he was in the private sector, the way he was in The Apprentice, etc., all pointed towards a guy who would attract a huge crowd if he ran for president with the right sales pitch but ultimately be one of the most malevolent chief executives of all time, and here we are. Truth be told, I think Trump has done a America one heck of a public service by escalating folks’ existing disagreements to the point where the nutjobs in our society outed themselves and can now be marked and avoided. Want to know who the anti-vaxxers or mask-haters are who will be bad for your business as someone trying to hire and fill jobs? Want to know who not to be friends with if you don’t want to get Covid? Want to know who you can’t trust? It’s quite easy right now. Just hang out on Facebook in local media comment sections and make note of some names and faces blowing up about every little thing that goes against what the unquestionable anointed god emperor leader has spewed out of his mouth in the last 4 years.
Perhaps the biggest thing we have to realize with narcissists though is that they’re not special. This behavior pattern from this president is something you can run into with the local barista at the Starbucks or whatnot, and one of the first ways to counter the destructive effects of narcissism is to realize that none of these people are special. It’s a documented behavior pattern in the DSM. Literally *anybody* can do this stuff. It’s that old rule about the depravity of human nature. If you can imagine it, some nutjob out there is probably trying to do it, no matter how sick, twisted, disgusting, or illegal it is.
Getting back to the point about how none of these people are special, since we have our grand example of how men can do this let’s talk about some local examples I’ve seen with women showing similar Cluster B behaviors although I have seen men exhibit narcissism in the workplace too. Quite frankly, I shouldn’t have to disclaimer this stuff at all because people are people. The plumbing you’re born with has no bearing on whether or not you can be a jackass to your fellow human beings. It is absolutely learned not earned.
For our first example, I can talk about letting people destroy themselves if they won’t listen in a synthetic academic sense, but when I really think about it I’ve already seen this demonstrated a long time ago with someone who was just plain abusive in the workplace. If I had known company policy then like I do now I could have probably gotten her fired via HR for workplace retaliation because she retaliated against me for bringing up a good faith issue related to her behavior, but that would have been the easy way out for her.
I talk about how abusive people transactionalize their behavior, hoping against hope that levelheaded civil human beings will let abuse slide if they make up for it by doing good stuff the rest of the time (pro tip – abuse is always bad – never fall for this nonsense). She was a big example of this. She worked hard, learned a lot of stuff, and made herself very valuable to the team… and then turned around and cashed out that value by acting like a petulant colicky baby to her teammates. I say colicky baby because of the whole “won’t stop crying” thing. She was easily the most immature and negative person out of the group that she worked with, and it was just pathetically immature to hear her constantly airing her dirty laundry at work and badmouthing everyone that slighted her in even the tiniest amounts.
…and then there was the day I was walking through the warehouse and she threatened to quit if she wasn’t promoted, quite brazenly to one of the building managers’ faces right in the middle of the shipping dock. I thought that was quite cheeky of her… but she got promoted and started being trained to join the leadership team. I went home that evening feeling like the managers were a bunch of spineless cowards. She didn’t have the emotional temperament to handle being in charge. What kind of idiots were these people to let her bully her way up the ladder?
The answer? Not idiots at all. We were all right. She couldn’t handle it and left the company not long afterwards. Never thought I’d see malicious compliance from the old folks we have as managers who probably almost never look at Reddit, but needless to say things were a lot nicer at that place afterwards with the big baby no longer working there. 🙂 …and of course word eventually wound up getting back to me that she’s one of those people who airs her grievances publicly on social media, so more recently hey whaddya know? She’s a big Trump nut. She’s a control freak with her kids. Mask hater. Pandemic downplayer. Full-on Covidiot. Ha-ha-s at people getting coronavirus in local news stories. Recently she stopped listing that she was working anywhere after years of billboarding it. Hum de la hum, but we’ll leave it at that. 🙂
Our second example is far more recent, and is the person who I went no contact with when I learned what covert narcissism was after leaving my last tech-related job a few years ago. Quite a sharp turn of events because we got along so well in the office and worked together on so many things that some folks might have called us work spouses at one point, but you have to stand for what you believe in, and when someone outs themselves as dark, brooding, manipulative, and the most cloak-and-dagger person you’ve ever worked with, no amount of friendliness makes up for that. Again with the whole transactionalizing behavior thing.
Keep in mind, she never did anything bad to me. I was just privy to all the times she was in and out of HR until she got someone fired, and when we had worked together long enough she started letting her guard down and I got to see just how dark and vengeful she really was. She wanted managers fired and thought there was a sexist conspiracy to keep women like her out of getting promoted even though she thought she could outshine one guy who’d been with the company for decades. The one thing she never seemed to understand is this rather basic concept when it comes to social skills that if you can gossip to me you can gossip about me.
Now just swap out gossip and this rabbit hole gets quite deep quite quickly. 🙁
The happiest I ever saw her was when I talked about 90s stuff and Grunge. She absolutely lit up. Never did tell her that I was an enemy of 90s Grunge Culture though. One of the things you’ll see with covert narcissists is that their grandiosity towards others is obscured via a professional victim narrative. They’ll think they’re better than everyone else… in the context of someone else always getting in the way of their greatness. That’s one of the things to remember with these people. They always have a target they’re trying to destroy. I’m just lucky it was never me.
I got to watch as she took things the worst way possible and constantly tried to tear others down. The administrative assistant wasn’t energetic enough for the job – she had to go. Of course I knew the admin was in over her head and barely had the Excel skills to handle her job. She’d been hired for a lesser clerk position and thrust into the role when the admin retired so this was just a mean attempt to bum rush someone onto a performance improvement plan. Then there was the trainer who was a professional victim, so I agreed with her being slated to leave the company, but when I think about what the trainer went through nearly getting laid off via a position elimination but accepting demotion instead but still often having to do her old job’s duties too much I often wonder if it’s a chicken and egg situation where the behaviors were cultivated and then held against her. She also was a bit older but good looking so if she were the same age as our narcissist there might be women’s rivalry issues with jealousy over looks and whatnot in play. Don’t try to pretend that I don’t know what that is. I’ve been around it a lot over the years. 🙂
Those were the high profile examples, but there were other examples where she targeted someone to be fired, was in and out of HR until they were within an inch of their job, and then HR of course was always the one who pulled the trigger. Always a target to be eliminated. Always tearing others down instead of building others up. Always dark and brooding if she let you see past her facade of actually trying to be friendly.
I found out more recently that she left the company too, and I’m sure the place I left is a much better place to work without her. You can’t really field a competent team if your people can’t trust you, and I can think of no better way to stunt the trust in a workplace than to engage in this much cloak-and-dagger behavior. All of this by the way masking an insatiable ego that just expressed itself in non-traditional ways.
Covert narcissism at its finest. Oh and also with the outing herself on social media thing. The pandemic became a thing… oh look. Big Trump nut. Denies the pandemic. Hates masks. Full-on Covidiot. How’d I guess?
These are just two examples of people I’ve known locally, in addition to what we’ve seen from President Trump. All of these examples though are great examples of how some people in life just need to be allowed to march on to their fate. They’ll never listen to you. In many cases they’ll retaliate against you for trying to help them out or do the right thing, and the part that will hurt the most with the ones closer to you are that you feel like you could be the one to save them or change them, a classic abuse victim’s mentality.
Here’s how it really works – People are not the way you wish they were. They are just the way they are.
Let’s close with some relevant YouTube video embeds and an old Rich Mullins CCM song about being our brother’s keeper which was where I first heard that idea of people not being what you wish they were, but being who they are. 🙂
MultimediaJay - A Geek's Perspective 