General Petraeus and his mistress Paula Dean Broadwell, the giant ‘killer’...the sad story of a General who conquered all in battles, but unable to conquer himself. Pity! Pity! Pity then, Dave. Photo: Daily Mail.
Former President William Jefferson Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky... Clinton tasted the ‘forbidden fruit’ and died moral death. Sources: usmagazine.com, kingsacademy.com
JFK's Alleged Mistresses
Alleged affair: Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, left, and Mimi Alford, right, as a teenager when claims she had an 18-month affair with the leader .Etut John? Even Kennedy did not take off his shoes at the holy ground of service-the White House.Photo Source: Mail Online
ALL LEADERS hierarchies are a honey pot for pathological narcissism as well as being a natural incubator for some new born narcissism. This is equally true in the military as it is in the corporate or political world.
Why would a successful and popular military leader risk everything? Not because he needed the sex. The world is asking why he did it, how could he be that stupid?
This is a question we hear all the time. And the reason we don’t see them, why we allow them to be elected to positions of power, is that we don’t understand their special brand of motivation; narcissists are not motivated the same way as balanced ordinary people, who are motivated by love and doing a good job. Pathological narcissistic leaders are difficult to understand because we are unable to see that they are in the middle of a life and death struggle to keep a false self image intact.
So what is a false self image and how does it develop? One important source of pathological narcissism can be found along the infant road to maturity. A good way to understand this road is to think about it as the development of different kinds of “intelligences” that the child uses as it grows and learns to make sense of its world. If things are going well, at a certain stage a child will discover the intelligence of “will power” by challenging its parents. If good parenting does not help the child to balance its will, the child will grow up with a secret entitlement that believes it must have its own way all the time. When the child becomes an adult, that entitlement can survive as a very childish part of the personality and that particular intelligence will start to behave parasitically. It becomes a mind parasite - a narcissus parasite - using all the other intelligences found along the spectrum of normal healthy development (such as rule/role intelligence, rational intelligence etc) to promote its own self image.
And this self image is false because nobody is that important.
Another source of pathological narcissism is our current obsession with various kinds of celebrity cultures. The music scene, movies, TV, the everybody-is-a-star movement. All of these are ways in which we actively encourage the culture of narcissism in our society. Ask a kid what they want to be when they grow up. Instead of Engineer or Scientist you’ll be more likely to hear, “famous”.
So how come we don’t spot these dangerous people before they become so powerful? The problem is that both we the public and the people appointing our leaders do not see the big picture. We are unable to detect the two year old hiding behind the impressive uniform and the medals. Narcissistic people in general can look like successful, charming and competent people. After all, they’ve spent a lifetime training themselves in keeping up an appearance. The behaviour of a person does not always tell us what their motivation is. So in fact a balanced leader and a pathological narcissistic leader look pretty much the same on the surface. The difference becomes apparent when their self image is threatened.
And herein lies the core of the matter. We have not yet learned, as a culture, to detect the inability to both dominate and yield, see others as fellow human being worthy of respect, and to focus on getting a good job done instead of being busy with self-promotion the entire time.
This is how you flush them out. Do they treat you as a fellow human? Or do they treat you as a servant, a tool, something to decorate and prop up their own life? Can they yield to you, or do they only dominate?
The question everyone’s asking now is how could such a seemingly powerful person be foolish enough to squander everything – his reputation, his family, his nation’s security – for the short lived pleasure of an extra marital affair? Well, not because it was cool or exciting, but because he desperately needs it. If a narcissist is unable to get his narcissistic fuel, which is the attention and adulation of others, to keep him going, he will end up depressed, feeling worthless, lonely and lower than the low. That is why it is a life and death struggle.
So, to sum up, the narcissist grows up believing that he/she is the centre of the world and he/she is entitled to have everything – on Wall Street its that million dollar bonus. In the case of the current scandal, that lover.
What makes Narcissistic leaders dangerous is that they are not motivated by work and love. They will do anything to keep their self image intact, and that includes charming the pants off you. And in the military that can include genocide, putting the lives of their troops at risk or even pushing the big red button.
***Mats and Karin Eriksson are the authors of The Salamander Club. More information about their book and their work can be found at www.salamanderclub.com