I am Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Should the narcissist be held accountable for his actions?
Well, narcissists of all shades can usually control their behavior and their actions. They simply don’t care to. They regard it as a waste of their precious time or a humiliating chore.
The narcissist feels both superior and entitled, regardless of his real gifts or accomplishments. Other people to the narcissist are inferior. They are his slaves. They are there to cater to his needs and make his existence seamless, flowing and smooth.
The narcissist holds himself to be cosmically significant and thus entitled to the conditions needed to realize his talents and to successfully complete his mission, which by the way changes fluidly and about which he has no clue except that it has to do with brilliance and fame.
What a narcissist cannot control is his void, the emotional black hole at his center, the fact that he doesn’t know what it is like to be human because he lacks empathy.
As a result, narcissists are awkward, tactless, painful, taciturn, abrasive and insensitive. The narcissist should be held accountable for most of his actions, even taking into account his sometimes uncontrollable rage in the backdrop of his grandiose fantasies.
Yes, it’s true that at times the narcissist fails or finds it hard to control his rage.
But at all times, even during the worst explosive episode, the narcissist can tell right from wrong and he simply does not care about other people sufficiently to refrain from expressing his rage.
Similarly, the narcissist cannot control his grandiose fantasies. He firmly believes that they constitute an accurate representation of reality, but he knows that lying is wrong and should not be done. He simply doesn’t care enough about society and others to refrain from lying and confabulating.
To summarize, narcissists should be held accountable for most of their actions because they can tell right from wrong and they can refrain from acting. They simply don’t care enough about others to put to good use these twin facilities and capacities.
Others are not sufficiently important to dent the narcissist’s difference or to alter his abusive conduct. They are not worth the effort.
