 My name is Sam Bhatni, I am the author of Malignant Self-Lover, Narcissism Revisited. The perpetrators of the recent spate of financial frauds in the United States acted with callous disregard for their employees and shareholders, not to mention other stakeholders. Psychologists have often remote diagnosed them as Malignant Pathological Narcissists. This are driven by the need to uphold and maintain a false self, a co-coctored, grandiose and demanding psychological construct typical of the narcissistic personality disorder. A false self is projected to the world in order to garner narcissistic supply, adulation, admiration or even notoriety and infamy. Any kind of attention is usually deemed by narcissists to be preferable to being ignored or to obscurity. The false self is suffused with fantasies of perfection, grandeur, brilliance, infallibility, immunity, significance, omnipresence and omniscience. To be a narcissist is to be convinced of a great, inevitable personal destiny. The narcissist is preoccupied with ideal love, the construction of a brilliant revolutionary scientific theory, the compositional authoring or painting of the greatest work of art, the founding of a new school of thought, the attainment of fabulous wealth, the reshaping of a nation, a conglomerate of the entire world and so on. The narcissist never sets realistic goals to himself. He is forever preoccupied with fantasies of uniqueness, record-breaking or breathtaking achievements. His verbosity reflects this inner propensity. Reality is naturally quite different and this gives rise to what I call the grandiosity gap. The demands of the false self are never satisfied by the narcissist's accomplishments, standing, wealth, cloud, sexual prowess or knowledge. The narcissist's grandiosity and sense of entitlement are equally incommensurate with his achievements. To bridge this discrepancy between reality and fantasy, this grandiosity gap, the malignant pathological narcissist resorts to shortcuts, these very often lead to fraud. The narcissist cares only about appearances. What matters to the narcissist are the facade of wealth and its attendant social status and narcissistic supply. Witness the travesty extravagance of Tycho's Denis Koslovsky, for instance. Media attention only exacerbates the narcissist's addiction and makes it incumbent on him to go everwilder to everwilder extremes to secure uninterrupted supply from this source. The narcissist lacks empathy, the ability to put himself in other people's shoes. He does not recognize boundaries, personal, corporate or legal. Everything and everyone are to him mere instruments, extensions, objects unconditionally and uncomplainably available in his pursuit of narcissistic gratification. This makes the narcissist perniciously exploitative. He uses, abuses, devalues and discards even his nearest and dearest and he does it in the most chilling and off-handed manner. The narcissist is utility-driven, obsessed with his overwhelming need to reduce his anxiety and regulate his labile sense of self-worth, and this he does by securing the constant supply of his drug, attention. American executives acted without compunction when they raided their employees pension funds, as did Robert Maxwell, a generation earlier in Britain. The narcissist is convinced of his superiority, cerebral or physical. To his mind he is a giant, a gallivant, hamstrung by a horde of narrow-minded and envious lily-pushens, midgets, intellectual dwarfs. The dot-com new economy was infested with such visionaries with a contemptuous attitude towards the mundane, profits, business cycles, conservative economies, doubtful journalists, cautious analysts. Deep inside, the narcissist is painfully aware of his addiction to others, to their attention, applause, admiration and affirmation. He despises himself for being dependent upon other people. He hates people the same way a drug addict hates his pusher. He wishes to put them in their place, to humiliate them, to demonstrate to them how inadequate and imperfect they are in comparison to his rigor self and how little he craves or really needs them. The narcissist regards himself as one who would regard an expensive present, a gift to his company, to his family, to his neighbors, colleagues and to his country. This firm conviction of his own inflated importance makes the narcissist feel entitled to special treatment, special favors, special outcomes, concessions, subservience, immediate gratification of secrecy, obedience and lenience. It also makes him feel immune to mortal laws and somehow divinely protected and insulated from the inevitable consequences of his deeds and misdeeds. The self-destructive narcissist plays the role of the bad guy or bad girl, but even this is within the traditional social roles cartoonishly exaggerated by the narcissist to attract attention. Men are likely to emphasize the intellect, power, aggression, money or social status. Narcissistic women, on the other hand, are likely to emphasize body, looks, charm, sexuality, feminine traits, home-making, children, child rearing and so on. What about crime and punishment? Well, punishing the wayward narcissist is a veritable catch-22. A jail term is useless as a deterrent if it only serves to focus attention on the narcissist. Being infamous is second best to being famous and far preferable to being ignored, as we said. The only way to effectively punish a narcissist is to withhold narcissistic supply from him and thus to prevent him from becoming a notorious celebrity. Given the sufficient amount of media exposure, book contracts, talk shows, lectures and public attention, the narcissist may even consider the whole grisly affair to be emotionally rewarding. To the narcissist's freedom, wealth, social status, family and vocation are all means to an end. He is not invested in them emotionally. The end is attention. If he can secure attention by being the bad big wolf, the narcissist unhesitately transforms himself into one. Lord Archer, for instance, seems to be positively basking in the media circus, provoked by his prison diaries. The narcissist does not victimize, plunder, terrorize and abuse others in a cold, calculating manner. He does it, off-handedly, as a manifestation of his genuine character. To be truly guilty, one needs to intend to deliberate, to contemplate one's choices and then to choose one's acts. The narcissist does none of this. Thus, punishment breeds surprise. He is surprised, he is hurt, he is seething with anger. The narcissist is stunned by society's insistence that he should be held accountable for his deeds and penalize accordingly. If he is wrong, baffled, victimized, injured, the victim of bias, discrimination and injustice, he rebels, he rages. Depending upon the pervasiveness of his magical thinking, the narcissist may feel besieged by overwhelming powers. False's cosmic and intrinsically ominous, he develops persecutory delusions. He may come up with compulsive rights to fend off his bed unwarranted persecutory inferences. The narcissist, very much the infantile outcome of stunted personal development, engages in magical thinking. He feels omnipotent, he feels that there is nothing he couldn't do or achieve if he only sets his mind to it. He feels omniscient, he rarely admits to ignorance and regards his intuitions and intellect as founts of objective data, not subjective ones. Thus, narcissists are hotly convinced that introspection is a more important and more efficient, not to mention easier to accomplish, method of obtaining knowledge, than the systematic study of outside sources of information in accordance with strict and tedious curricula. Narcissists are inspired, they despise hand-strung technocrats, they despise experts. They are divinely endowed with everything they ever need to know. To some extent, narcissists feel omnipresent because they are either famous or about to become famous and because their product is selling or being manufactured globally. Very immersed in their delusions of grandeur, narcissists firmly believe that their acts have or will have a great influence not only on their firm, but on their country or even on mankind. Having mastered the manipulation of their human environment, narcissists are convinced that they would always get away with it. They develop hubris and a false sense of immunity. Narcissistic immunity is the erroneous feeling harbored by the narcissists, that he is impervious to the consequences of his actions, that he will never be affected by the results of his own decisions, opinions, beliefs, deeds, misdeeds, acts, inaction, membership of certain groups, and that he is above reproach and punishment, that magically he is protected and will miraculously be saved the last moment, hence the audacity, simplicity and transparency of some of the fraud and corporate looting in the 1990s. Narcissists rarely bother to cover their tracks and traces, so this is because their disdain and conviction that they are above mortal laws and were withled, they are enormous, they are overpowering. What are the sources of this unrealistic appraisal of situation and events, even in men who are otherwise very practical? The source is the false self. The false self is a childish response to abuse and trauma. Abuse is not limited to sexual molestations or beatings, smothering, doting, pampering over indulgence, treating the child as an extension of a parent, not respecting the child's boundaries, burdening the child with excessive expectations, they are all forms of abuse. The child reacts by constructing a false self, that is possessed of everything the child needs in order to prevail. The false self is unlimited, instantaneously available, and has Harry Potter-like powers and wisdom. The false self, the Superman, is indifferent to abuse and punishment, and this way the child's true self is shielded from the toddler's harsh reality. This artificial, maladaptive separation between a vulnerable but not punishable true self and a punishable but invulnerable false self is an effective mechanism. It isolates the child from the unjust, capricious, arbitrary, emotionally dangerous and hostile world that he occupies. But at the same time it fosters in him a forced sense of nothing can happen to me because I'm not here, I'm not available to be punished, hence I'm immune to punishment. The comfort of false immunity is also yielded by the narcissist's sense of entitlement. In his grandiose delusions the narcissist is sui genics, a gift to humanity, precious, fragile object. Moreover the narcissist is convinced both that his uniqueness is immediately discernible and that it gives him special rights. The narcissist feels that he is protected by some cosmological law pertaining to endangered species. He is convinced that his future, contribution to others, to his firm country, humanity should and does exempt him from the mundane. He should not be burdened with daily chores, boring jobs, recurring tasks, personal exertion, orderly investment of resources and efforts, laws and regulations, social conventions and so on. They are all for other people. He has something much more important to do right now. He should be exempted. The narcissist is entitled to a special treatment. He expects high living standards, constant and immediate catering to his needs. The eradication of any friction with humdrum in the routine and all engulfing absolution of his scenes, fast-track privileges to higher education or in his encounter with bureaucracies or with medical doctors. Punishment, trusted narcissist, is for ordinary people, who are no great laws to humanity is involved. Surely it should not apply to him. Narcissists are possessed of inordinate abilities to charm, to convince, to seduce and persuade. Many of them are gifted orators and intellectually endowed. Many of them work in politics, the media, fashion, show business, the arts, medicine, business. Many of them serve as clergy, religious leaders. The virtue of their standing in the community, their charisma or their ability to find the willing scapegoats, they do get exempted many times. Having recurrently got away with it, they develop a theory of personal immunity, founded upon some kind of societal or even cosmic order in which certain people, they themselves included, are above punishment. But there is a fourth, simpler explanation. The narcissist lacks self-awareness, divorced from his true self, unable to empathize to understand what it is like to be someone else, unwilling to constrain his actions to cater to the feelings and needs of others, the narcissist is in a constant, dreamlike state of denial. To the narcissist, his life is unreal, it's like watching an autonomously unfolding movie. The narcissist is a mere spectator, mildly interested, greatly entertaining. He does not own his actions, and therefore cannot understand why he should be punished, and when he is, he feels grossly wronged. So convinces the narcissist that he is destined to great things, that he refuses to accept setbacks, failures and punishments. He regards them as temporary, as the outcome of someone else's errors, as part of a future mythology of his rise to power, brilliance, wealth, ideal love. Being punished is a diversion of his precious energy and resources from the all-important dusk of fulfilling his mission in life. The narcissist is pathologically envious of people, and he believes that they are equally envious of him. He is paranoid, on guard, ready to fend off an imminent attack. A punishment to the narcissist is a major surprise and a nuisance, but it also validates his suspicion that he is being singled out and persecuted. It proves to him that strong forces are arrayed against him. This tells himself that people envious of his achievements and humiliated by them are out to get him. He constitutes a threat to the accepted order. When required to pay for his misdeeds, narcissist is always disdainful and bitter, feels misunderstood by his inferiors. Cooked books, corporate fraud, bending the rules, sweeping problems under the carpet, pure promising, making grandiose claims, what used to be called the vision thing. They are all hallmarks of a narcissist in action. When social cues and norms encourage such behavior rather than inhibit it, in other words, when such behavior elicits abundant narcissistic supply, the pattern is reinforced and becomes entrenched and rigid. Even when circumstances change, the narcissist finds it difficult to adapt to shed his routines and to replace them with new ones. He is trapped in his past success. He becomes a swindler, a fraudster. But pathological narcissism is not an isolated phenomenon. It is embedded in our contemporary culture. The West is a narcissistic civilization. It upholds narcissistic values, penalizes alternative value systems. From an early age, children are taught to avoid self-criticism, to deceive themselves regarding their capacities and attainments, to feel entitled and to exploit others. As Lilian Katz observed in her important paper, Distinctions between Self-esteem and Narcissism Implications for Practice, published by the Educational Resource Information Center, well as Katz observed, the line between enhancing self-esteem and fostering narcissism is often blurred by educators and parents. With Christopher Lash in his book The Culture of Narcissism, a Theodore Millen in his book In His Tones about Personality Disorders, singled out American society is narcissistic. The teachessness may be the flip side of an inane sense of entitlement. Consumerism is built on this common and common lie of I can do anything I want and possess everything I desire if I only apply myself to it, and on the pathological envy that it fosters. Not surprisingly, narcissistic disorders are more common among men than among women. This may be because narcissism conforms to masculine social mores into the prevailing ethos of capitalism. Ambition, achievements, hierarchy, ruthlessness, drive are social values and narcissistic male traits. Social thinkers, like the aforementioned Lash, speculated that modern American culture self-centered one, increases the rate of incidence of narcissistic personality disorder. Otto Cernberg, an notable scholar of personality disorders, confirmed Lash's intuition. He said, society can make serious psychological abnormalities which already exist in some percentage of a population, seem to be at least superficially appropriate, in other words socially acceptable. In their book Personality Disorders in Modern Life, Theodore Millen and Roger Davis state as a matter of fact that pathological narcissism was once the preserve of the royal and the wealthy and that it seems to have gained prominence only in the late 20th century. Narcissism, according to them, may be associated with higher levels of muscle's hierarchy of needs. Individuals in less advantaged nations are so busy trying to survive that they cannot afford to be arrogant and grandiose. Millen and Davis, like Christopher Lash before them, attribute pathological narcissism to a society that stresses individualism and self-gratification at the expense of community, namely the United States. They assert that the disorder is more prevalent again among certain professions with star power or respect, and in the individualistic culture they say, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectiveist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective. Millen quotes Warren and Capone's The Role of Culture in the Development of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in America, Japan and Denmark. He says, individualistic narcissistic structures of self-regard in individualistic societies are rather self-contained and independent, but in collectiveist cultures, narcissistic configurations of the we-self denote self-esteem derived from strong identification with the reputation and honor of the family, groups and others in hierarchical relationships. In other words, narcissists in collective societies are more likely to be inverted narcissists. Still, there are malignant narcissists among subsistence farmers in Africa, nomads in the Sinai Desert, day laborers in East Europe and intellectuals and socialites in Manhattan. Malignant narcissism is all-pervasive and independent of culture and society. It is true, though, that the way pathological narcissism manifests in its experience is dependent on the particulars of societies and cultures. Some cultures it is encouraged, in others it is suppressed, in some societies it is channeled against minorities, in others it is tainted with paranoia. In collectiveist societies it may be projected onto the collective. In individualistic societies it is an individual's trait. Yet can families, organizations, ethnic groups, churches and even whole nations be safely described as narcissistic or pathologically self-absorbed? Can we talk about a corporate culture of narcissism? All collectives, states, firms, households, institutions, political parties, cliques, bands, gangs acquire a life and a character of their own. The longer the association or affiliation of the members, the more cohesive and conformist the inner dynamics of the group. The more persecutory of numerous, its enemies, competitors and adversaries. The more intensive the physical and emotional experience of the individuals it is comprised of, the stronger the bonds of the local, language and history, the more rigorous might an assertion of the common pathology be. Such an all-pervasive and extensive pathology manifests itself in the behavior and each and every member of the group. So if the group is pathological, its members are being pathologized by virtue of or into the pathology of the group. The pathology of a group defines, though often implicitly and in an underlying manner, a mental structure. It has explanatory and predictive powers. It is recurrent and invariable as a pattern of conduct, melding distorted cognition, anomic features and stunted emotions, and it is often vehemently denied on all levels, the group level and the individual level.