 My name is Sanbachnin and I am the author of Malignan self-love, Narcissism Revisited. If you ask a narcissist to distill his quotidian daily existence in two pithy sentences, he is likely to say, I love to be hated, and I hate to be loved. Hate is the complement of fear. Narcissists like being feared. It imbues them with the intoxicating sensation of omnipotence. Narcissists are veritably inebriated by the looks of horror or repulsion on people's faces. People know that the narcissist is capable of anything. He is godlike, ruthless, devoid of cripples, capricious and fathomable, and motionless, asexual, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, a plague, a devastation, an inescapable verdict. The narcissist nurtures his ill-repute, stalking it, and fanning the flames of gossip. To him, his notariety is an asset. Hate and fear are, of course, generators of attention. It is all about narcissistic supply, the drug which narcissists consume and which consumes them in return. Consider the narcissistic public intellectual. He is likely to attack sadistically authority figures, institutions, even his hosts. He is likely to make sure that they know about his eruptions. He is likely to pervade the truth, nothing but the truth. Public intellectuals do that, but he tells the truth bluntly in an orgy of evocative baroque language. The blind rage, the disinductions and the targets of his vitriolic diatrize provokes in the narcissist a surge of satisfaction and inner tranquility, not obtainable by any other means. So, the truth and language serve as weapons intended to elicit attention. Intellectuals like to think about their pain, the pain of their targets, the pain of their victims, but this is the lesser part of the equation. It is the horrid future and the inescapable punishment that carries the irresistible appeal to the narcissist, like some strain of alien virus it infects his better judgment and his accounts. In general, the narcissist weapon is the truth and human propensity to avoid it. In tactless, breaching of every etiquette, the narcissist justices and giraites and snubs and offers vitriolic opprobrium, a self-proclaimed Jeremiah, the narcissist hectares and harangues from his many self-made pulpits. The narcissist fully understands the biblical prophets. He understands the Inquisitions talk we matter. He is on a crusade, on a quest, on a mission to rectify the world. He busks in the incomparable pleasure of being right. He is emotionally invested in being right. He derives his grandiose superiority from the contrast between his righteousness and the humanness of the humanity and the fallibility of others. But it is not that simple, it is never that simple with narcissists. Fostering public revolt and the inevitable ensuing social sanctions fulfills two other psychodynamic goals. The first one I alluded to, it is the burning desire, I would say, the need to be punished. It is the protest mind of the narcissist. His punishment is equal to his vindication. He is punished, therefore is vindicated. By being permanently on trial, the narcissist claims the high moral ground, and the position of the martyr, misunderstood, discriminated against, saintly, unjustly roughed, outcast by his very towering genius or other outstanding qualities, to conform to the cultural stereotypes of the tormented artist the narcissist provokes his own suffering, he is thus validated. You suffer, therefore you are. His grandiose fantasies acquire a modicum of substance. The narcissist says, if I were not so special, they would not have persecuted me. They are persecuting me, and that proves that I am unique. The persecution of the narcissist is his uniqueness. He must be different, for better or for worse. The streak of paranoia embedded in him makes the outcome inevitable. He is in constant conflict, with lesser beings, his spouts, his shrink, his boss, his colleagues. Forced to stoop to their intellectual level, the narcissist feels like Gulliver, a giant strapped by lily-pushins. His life is a constant struggle against the mediocrity and self-contentedness of his surroundings. This is his fate which he exits, though never stoically. It is a calling, it is a mission, it is a recurrence in his stormy life. Deeper still, the narcissist has an image of himself as a worthless, bad and dysfunctional extension of others. In constant need of narcissistic supply, he feels humiliated, his dependence humiliates him. The contrast between his cosmic fantasies, his messianic existence, and the reality of his dependence, neediness, clinging, and often failure, what I call the grandiosity gap, is an emotionally harrowing experience. It is a constant background noise of devilish, demeaning laughter. The voices in him say, you are a fraud, you are a zero, you deserve nothing. If only they knew how worthless you were, you are. So the narcissist attempts to silence these tormenting voices, not by fighting them, but by agreeing with them. Unconsciously and sometimes consciously, the narcissist says to these inner voices, I do agree with you, I am bad, I am worthless, I am deserving of the most severe punishment for my rotten character, bad habits, addiction, and the constant fraud that is my life. I will go out and seek my doom. Now that I have complied, will you leave me be? Will you leave me alone? Will you be silenced? But of course, they never are.