My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Schizoids, people diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder, tend to avoid meaningful relationships from sex to romance to workplace relations. They do not derive any emotional benefits from associating with people. Few bred schizoids shrug off their disorder.
They claim that they simply do not like being around people. They resent the pathologizing of their lifestyle choice to remain aloof and alone. They consider the diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder to be spurious, a mere reflection of current sociocultural worries, and a culture-bound artifact.
Narcissists, as usual, tend to rationalize and aggrandize their schizoid conduct. They propound the idea that being alone is the only logical choice in today’s hostile, anomic and atomized world.
The concept of individual sadist narcissists exists only in the human species. Animals flock together, or they operate in colonies or herds. Each member of these aggregates is an extension of the organic whole.
In contra-distinction, people band and socialize only for purposes of a goal-oriented cooperation or the seeking of emotional rewards, solace, succor, love, support, etc.
Yet in contemporary civilization, the accomplishment of most goals is outsourced to impersonal collectives, such as a state or large corporations. Everything from food production to distribution to education is now relegated to faceless, anonymous entities which require little or no social interaction.
Additionally, new technologies empower the individual and render him or her self-sufficient, profoundly independent of others. As they have grown in complexity and in expectations fed by the mass media, relationships have mutated to being emotionally unrewarding and narcissistically injurious to the point of becoming a perpetual fount of pain and unease.
More formalized social interactions present a substantial financial and emotional risk.
Close to half of all marriages, for instance, end in a divorce, inflicting enormous pecuniary damage and emotional deprivation on the parties involved.
The prevailing efforts of gender wars, as reflected in the evolving legal milieu, further serves to deter any residual predilection and propensity to team up and bond.
And this is a vicious circle. It is a vicious circle that is difficult to break.
Traumatized by past encounters and liaisons, people tend to avoid future ones.
Deeply wounded, they are rendered less tolerant, more hypervigilant, more defensive and more aggressive.
Trues which both yield for their capacity to initiate, sustain and maintain relationships.
The breakdown and dysfunction of social structures and institutions, communities and social units is masked by technologies which provide very similar truths and confabulations.
We all gravitate towards the delusional and fantastic universe of our own making, as we find the real one too hurtful to endure.
Modern life is so taxing and onerous and so decreased the individual scarce resources that little is left to accommodate the needs of social intercourse.
People’s energy, funds and work within, are stretched to the breaking point by the often conflicting demands of near survival in post-industrial societies.
Furthermore, the sublimation of instinctual urges to peer the libido, associate, mingle and fraternize, is both encouraged and rewarded in today’s society.
Substitutes exist for all social functions, including sex, pornography and childbearing single parental.
And so this substitute renders social institutions obsolete and superfluous and socially give and take, awkward and inefficient.
The individual need has emerged as the organizing principle in human affairs, supplanting the collective.
The idolatry of the individual inexorably and ineluctably results in the malignant forms of narcissism that are so prevalent, indeed all pervasive, wherever we direct our gaze.
It is a sorry sight and a poor prognosis for us as a species.
