My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

Narcissists are cursed, or perhaps blessed, with mental x-ray vision. Narcissists see through other people’s emotional shields, through their petty lives, their pitiable defenses, and their grandiose fantasies.

The narcissist knows when people deviate from the truth and exactly by how much. Narcissists intuitively grasp other people’s self-interested goals and accurately predict the strategy and tactics these people will adopt in order to achieve them.

In truth, narcissists cannot stand self-important, self-inflated, pompous, vigorous, self-righteous, sanctimonious and hypocritical people. They rage at the inefficient, the lazy, the hapless and the weak.

But why?

Perhaps it is because the narcissist recognizes himself in this kind of people. He tries to break the painful reflection of his own flaws and shortcomings in theirs.

The narcissist hones in on the chinks in the laboriously constructed armors of others. He spots their Achilles’ heel and attaches to it. He pricks the gas bags that most people are.

The narcissist deflates people. He forces them to confront their filletness and helplessness and mediocrity. He negates their sense of uniqueness. He reduces them to proportion, to size, and he provides them with perspective.

The narcissist does all these things cruelly and abrasively and sadistically and lethally efficiently. He has no compassion. He has no empathy. He prays on other people’s vulnerabilities, however microscopic, however well-conceived, however painful. He exposes their double talk.

Then he rides the double standards. He refuses to play the games of prestige and status and hierarchy that everyone else plays. He draws people out of their shelters. He destabilizes them, deconstructs their narratives, their myths and superstitions, their hidden assumptions, their polluted language.

He is in your face and he is always there. He forces people to react and by reacting to confront their true, dilapidated selves, their dead-end careers, their mundane lives, the death of their hopes and dreams and wishes, their shattered illusions.

And all the time, the narcissist observes people with the passionate hatred of the outcast that they dispossessed in the outsider.

So, the narcissist outs the truths that people are trying so desperately to conceal, especially from themselves.

The facts denied so ugly and uncomfortable are these raw materials. Those things that never get mentioned in proper company, the politically incorrect, the personally hurtful, the dark, ignored and hidden secrets, the tumbling skeletons, the taboos, the fears, the atavistic urges, the pretensions, the social lies, the distorted narratives of life, piercing, bloodied and ruthless.

These are the narcissists’ hallmarks of revenge, the settling of the scores, the levelling of the battlefield.

The narcissist lances these boils, high, the mighty, the successful and the happy people, those who possess what the narcissist believes that he deserves, entitled to and never had, the object of his green-eyed monster.

The narcissist envies and in his envy, he seeks to inconvenience people, to make them think, to reflect on their own misery and wallow in his rancid outcomes.

The narcissist coerces people to confront the zombie state, their own sadism, their unforgivable deeds and unforgettable omissions. He dredges the sewer that is other people’s minds, forced into the circus, long-repressed emotions, oft-suppressed pains, their nightmares and their fears.

Yes, the narcissist is Halloween. And he pretends to do all this selflessly for their own good, tough love, as it were. Preaches, any hectors, any pours forth vitriolic diaphragms and he exposes and imposes and he rides and foams in the proverbial mouth.

And all this for the greater good. He presents himself as righteous, true, geared to help, meritorious. His motives are unassailable. He is always so chillingly risen, so algorithmically precise. He is a frozen vat. He plays the alien game of other people by their very own rules.

But he is so foreign to humanity. He is so foreign, so alien, that he is truly unbeatable.

Only they do not realize it yet. People, they don’t understand.

The predator is in their midst, and there is no escape.