How narcissism became everyone's obsession

It's a testament of our time that one of the best movies of 2025, HBO's "The Mountainhead," has a "Dr. Strangelove" level of absurdity in its plotting, and yet feels almost understated in its satire of the ridiculousness of our era. (Short spoiler warning.) It follows four tech bros over a day in which the entire world literally falls into chaos and civil war, due to the release of disinformation-sowing social media tools, with the implication that millions of people are killed in 24 hours. But our billionaire protagonists — played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef — are only interested in leveraging the situation to gather more money, power, and status for themselves. Throughout, the characters routinely name-drop philosophers and authors they've obviously never read while indulging bizarre fantasies of living forever and ruling the universe as benevolent dictators. 

Still, "The Mountainhead" can't compete with reality. After all, an allegedly ketamine-addled Elon Musk callously cut life-saving aid for hundreds of thousands of people by destroying USAID, all while continuing to claim he's humanity's savior because he will someday colonize Mars. (He will not.) The movie works only because it's ruthless in its portrayal of the ego delusion that fuels so much of Silicon Valley's C-suites, as the tech industry enters its snake oil phase. Writer and director Jesse Armstrong never indulges the urge to humanize his narcissistic main characters by giving them secret soft sides or limits on their self-regard. At one point, the Musk stand-in character even asks if other people are real, and concludes they are not. 

Everywhere you look online these days, people are talking about narcissism. TikTok is replete with advice, most of it questionable, on how to tell if someone is a narcissist. The subreddit /raisedbynarcissists has over 1 million members. Social media in general is a place where accusations of the disorder fly wildly, and often unfairly. But it wasn't always like this. A decade ago, narcissism was a little-discussed personality disorder, especially compared to more stigmatized diagnoses, like sociopathy or borderline personality disorder. I'd say many people weren't even aware that it is a psychological condition. Even still to this day, the word "narcissist" gets misused to describe people who are merely snobbish or egotistical. Still, there's value in all this discourse. It's raised awareness that narcissism is a real psychological disorder, and helped a lot of people make sense of abuse or other relationship issues they've dealt with in the past. 

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The immediate and obvious impetus for this trend is Donald Trump living the narcissist's dream of being an inescapable presence for the past decade. I am not a psychologist and cannot diagnose anyone. However, there is no denying that, regardless of what checklist of narcissistic traits you pull from whatever medical website, Trump fits every one to a comical degree. (This is also the case with sociopathy, which often comes along with narcissism.) For instance, narcissists insist they need the biggest or best of everything, and Trump insists he deserves a free private jet from Qatar because the one provided by the U.S. government isn't as "impressive." 

Helpful checklist in graphic form. my.clevelandclinic.org/health/disea...

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— Amanda Marcotte (@amandamarcotte.bsky.social) June 6, 2025 at 1:20 PM

Trump routinely claims to be perfect. "I don’t really believe I’ve made any mistakes," Trump declared in April. During his first campaign, he claimed he was a Christian, but he has never asked for God's forgiveness. When later asked why not, he clarified that because he believes he doesn't make mistakes. He's called himself a king and a messiah. He frequently brags about his looks in a way that is utterly out of touch with reality, calling his body "perfect." His supporters laugh at this, as if he's joking, but if you pay attention to his tone when he says these things, it's clear he is not kidding. 

But it isn't just Trump. The omnipresence of narcissists at the levers of power in our country is the direct cause of so much of our current political misery. Musk's messianic self-regard is not unique to him, but seems to be a quality binding the tech leaders who have taken a hard turn to the right in recent years, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Liberals are right to be worried about this phenomenon because narcissists aren't just annoying, they're dangerous, especially when they have power and money. 

And yet there is little doubt that these dudes have sucked millions of Americans into validating their delusion self-regard. Trump's loyal supporters speak of him as if he were a messiah, often literally claiming God sent him to save them. Musk has an army of blind loyalists online, mostly young men who buy into the myth that he's a super-genius, not seeing that his only real skill is being a B.S. artist who takes credit for other people's work. These men's power depends on persuading millions to believe the narcissist's view of himself. It's a trick used by nearly every cult leader. 

YouTube essayist Lindsay Ellis released an intriguing video in 2021 about why narcissists are often such popular characters in movies and TV shows, with examples like Loki in the Marvel movies or Lucille Bluth in "Arrested Development." Narcissists are fun to watch in fiction because they act out in ways that most of us would occasionally like to do, if we weren't hobbled by concerns like empathy for others or facing accountability for our actions. We get a vicarious thrill from watching the narcissist run roughshod over people's feelings or exploit others without shame. But, as she notes, these characters are almost always villains. If they have a face turn towards the good, they get rewritten as people who have empathy — not narcissists at all, just people with high but non-disordered levels of self-centeredness. 

But the fun that movie audiences have with narcissistic villains goes a long way towards explaining the hold that men like Musk and Trump have over their fans. That they're evil is why their supporters love them. Their followers enjoy the fantasy of being able to treat people with shameless cruelty, without fear of reprisal. When Musk hops on Twitter to defame people with wild accusations, his fanboys thrill. When Trump mocks disabled people or victims of violence at his rallies, his audiences lap it up. Ordinary folks can't treat people like these two, for fear of being fired, sued or shunned. But they get a taste of the sadistic fantasy by rooting for the villains. 

In the face of rising fascism, an internet maxim about the right's incoherent ideology, known as Wilhoit's Law, has become a cliché: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's the politicized version of narcissism, where you're always the boss and also the victim, and everyone else is but an audience or an enemy. 

Social media, unfortunately, makes the situation worse. It puts a gloss of entertainment on behavior that is not fictional. When Musk destroys life-saving programs or Trump deports innocent people to put them in foreign torture prisons, it's mediated for their followers through their screens and online jokes and memes. Many of them might not find it so fun to watch an innocent person be tortured if they had to see it with their own eyes. But watching Trump and Musk do it from afar makes it feel like a TV show. We see this in the increasing number of stories about Trump voters freaking out when family members or friends get deported. It's fun for them when they see it on Twitter, but in real life, it's harder to swallow. Yet they will continue to back Trump for the same reason that audiences line up to see Tom Hiddleston play Loki in the movies: The unreality of social media allows them to feel that real life is just a fun, if sadistic, fantasy. 

As for the rest of us, I think the fascination with narcissists isn't just about surviving an era where we're terrorized by them; it is also about our egos. The fear of being narcissistic understandably haunts so many of us in an era of social media, where the ability to get attention is treated as the measure of a person's worth. How many followers do you have? How many views can you make money for our tech overlords by increasing the engagement on the free content you provided on their platform? It creates a very real worry that we're becoming so self-obsessed we're losing touch with our humanity. 

On one hand, people shouldn't worry that they will develop clinical narcissism, which has causes other than "I spend too much time on Instagram." On the other hand, one doesn't need to be a narcissist to hurt people with your ego. Former president Joe Biden isn't a narcissist — he clearly has empathy for other people — but he does have an ego so large it veers into self-delusion. And that unwillingness to see his own weaknesses caused immeasurable harm, by convincing him to stay far too long in a campaign he could not win. 

Politics probably pushed Biden too far in the ego direction. For the rest of us, there is a real danger from the incentives towards egotism on social media. It is making us more callous and less thoughtful to others. It allows us to rationalize cheating and lying, which is why ordinary people who don't have psychological disorders all too often gleefully share disinformation. Social media was meant to connect people to each other, but it's encouraging people to turn inward in ways that harm them and others. It's probably why voting for Trump got easier for some folks after they spent way too much time online. So yeah, it's good to hate on narcissism. Maybe it will convince more of us to try a little harder to be less self-obsessed.