Suffering the low-functioning grandiose

I’ve met a few of these types in my life. Not as a carer though, fortunately.

Trying the fathom them, I’ve read a bit here and there and studied the DSM, but have never quite got a grasp on how to deal with them, or really of what’s going on inside their head.  I probably shouldn’t be trying and just save my caring nature for my caring. Possibly they don’t deserve it.

What do I mean by the low-functioning grandiose?

Usually, they seem somewhat more innately talented in a narrow range of skills, or a single skill than those around them. This leads them to at least in this respect, garner a kind of malignant self-respect.

Although unlike the narcissist, their self-respect seems more unstable. It can collapse on them and give way to a deep self-loathing that I’m not sure narcissists are even capable of.

And to say that they are innately talented is to say that they could learn to be quite good in an area, if only they applied themselves. They seem quite happy to rest on the laurels of something they have inherited through circumstance or accident of birth – or at least an inflated approximation of their raw talent.

This is often all they have to be proud of and it isn’t much, sadly.

They seem quite able to lie to themselves and everyone around them about their ability, either explicitly or through assumption. Often presuming to lecture professionals in their own area of expertise, even while not necessarily even having the necessarily basic aptitudes to do well in such an area.

They aren’t psychopaths. Indeed, they can have more focused (fixated) attention, and more intense emotion than others around them. Shallow, yes. But intense. Extremely immature.

Their opportunities in life don’t seem that stunted. Not an easy life, but not a particularly traumatic one. Although you wouldn’t know that if you took their accounts at face value. The smallest difficulty is inflated to an explanation for anything that has gone wrong in their life.

They couldn’t possibly be responsible for their own lives!

Often, they will revise their success criteria downward while eliminating their own criteria for failure. Their success criteria resembling most other people’s failure criteria. Most other people with more or less the same opportunities.

And they’ll justify this downgrading of standards on the grounds that they’ve been too hard on themselves. Being too hard on themselves, apparently not being at odds with the empirical fact that they’ve spent most of their life sitting on their hands (not literally).

Mental gymnastics is their sport of choice.

Knowing quite what is going on in their head at any one time isn’t easy. Knowing how to deal with them is hard. But their outward behaviour is utterly predictable.

They become an expert on your life. They grant themselves administrator access to your time and your resources. They’ll sort out your problems for you even if you don’t have problems. All while they can’t even solve, let alone avoid the problems they create for themselves.

They tell themselves that they are good at whatever they have done for you. They pat themselves on the back for it. They perhaps unintentionally exploit the fact that if you told them just how unhelpful they are, they’d get angry or abusive or self-destructively sad. You put up with them because you feel sorry for them. You’re human. A better one than they.

You throw them a bone. You say “thanks”.

Then they go and tell all and sundry what a nice job they’ve done for you. That they are a special asset to those around them. That in seeking to placate their need to administer and talk down to you, in doing something for you that you didn’t really want or need, that this makes them an altruist. All because you said “thanks”. Or even if you didn’t. You don’t need this paternalistic crap in your life.

Even if you pay them to get off their backsides and do you a job on request, where possible, they’ll promote themselves to your shared social network in exaggerated terms. To prop up their flagging standing in the broader group. Even if the task is obscure and nobody else will need it, and even if you had the time, then you or your friends could do it yourselves.

You are dependent on them. Except you aren’t. Not many, if any, are. You and others just don’t want to make the poor saps feel useless by telling them the truths they can’t handle. The truths your personal history with them has shown sends them off the deep end.

So you won’t tell them anything like what I’m writing here. And you won’t show them what I’m writing here, because it’ll look to them like it’s been written about them specifically. “Have you been talking to this Bruce person about me?”, they’ll ask you. Despite the fact that I could be writing about a number of people I’ve known, or a couple I currently know, they’d ask me “are you writing about me? Because it looks like you’re writing about me.”

I’m writing about people like them. None of them are individually so special to me that I’d write in such detailed terms about them specifically. But self-obsession has a way of making them see thigns a certain, flattering way. Sad really.

Their lives are lonely. Not lonely-in-a-crowd lonely, but socially-isolated-even-when-they-have-a-long-list-of-phone-numbers lonely. As patient as their few lasting friends may be, these friends still have better things they could be doing.

Having dealt with everyone in their lives, bar maybe a couple (usually their parents) in such bad faith, they have been cut off. It’s not that they have withdrawn from the world – their friends have withdrawn from them. Existential bad faith of Sartre’s formulation (hard choices aren’t choices at all to them, and easy choices are sometimes exaggerated as hard). Bad faith ressentiment of Nietzsche’s description – especially of those not attracted to them, for not being attracted – and bad faith in the usual, disingenuous manner.

You should hear them whine when sex is involved. They self-assess themselves as great, sensitive lovers, almost preternaturally aware of the needs of their desired partners, as if these desired sexual partners weren’t capable of divining their preferences for themselves. Naturally this self-assessment of sensitivity is expressed in the most self-centered manner. The self-contradiction obscured by their needy egos.

Why can’t they find the sex that they need?

“People must be so shallow, judging me like that!” “Oh, they are just unenlightened about their sexuality!” “Is she really going out with him?”

Never mind that their self-obsession, poorly disguised desperation, delusions of grandure and poor mockery of empathy are usually all powerful contraceptives each by themselves.

In such bad faith, it’s everyone else’s fault. Most of the time.

Eventually, they’ll look to themselves and then to their few remaining friends and with a maudlin whine and a child-like stream of tears in their eyes, ask “is it me?” Paradoxically, such maudlin prose being almost entirely their only genuine expression. As if they couldn’t tell that Dr Zachary Smith’s “the pain!” was put on for show, they’ve learned ham theatrics as their most honed social skill.

If you tell them the truth, that it’s mostly their fault, they’ll break down and really start to sponge off you for emotional support – in a crisis mostly of their own creation. If you tell them it isn’t, it’ll give them some relief. Whatever you tell them, it won’t be long before they’re back set to blame everyone and everything else again. They can’t be at fault. It doesn’t matter what you tell them.

Eventually this projection ratchets itself up into misanthropic delusions. They may pride themselves on their moral character not shared by most other people. They can pride themselves on their anti-racism, while making complete generalisations about Asian work ethic. Pride themselves on picking up on everyone else’s “isms” and bigotry, in the same conversation as writing off a generation in broad strokes. Sexism can be denounced while talking misogynistically about the “vadge hunt” only a little while later.

They’ll talk about how everyone else is so stupid and how the world is limited for not being like them. Even though they aren’t that good themselves.

They may think they’re a scientist and a skeptic, and express interest in the biggest acts of scientific fraud, not knowing they are fraud. They may be great (but naturally under-appreciated) artists, who produce excruciating and banal rubbish. They may be mathematicians, and not know what an irrational number is, or even that Pi is one.

They may be computer professionals, yet have only written spaghetti code and never been professionally affiliated. They may be wise child psychologists, yet fail with children in exactly the sad and predictable ways that someone with a bit of child psychology warns them in advance. They may be pop-culture gurus, yet be entirely kitsch in their attempts at gurudom. They can be a morally superior thinker, while in the room with those who have studied ethics, which naturally they haven’t and don’t care to – because they’ve already re-invented that wheel. Why re-create it yet again!

And they’ll assume these flattering assumptions when talking to talented scientists, skeptics, artists, mathematicians, computer professionals, child psychologists, pop-culture gurus and moral thinkers. Talking down to them at least.

They’re capable of looking down on nearly anyone and everyone, even when, and maybe especially when, nobody around them is less skilled than they are. Because no matter how innately talented they are, they haven’t taken the opportunities to cultivate their talent, even when the opportunities have been explicit and numerous. They are profoundly lazy.

In a way that the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn’t quite seem to explain this – they aren’t entirely unaware of it, they just won’t admit it!

And eventually, when people again avoid them, or set them straight, or tell them to back the hell off and treat people with the proper respect, it’s either moral indignation or more maudlin whining about how their lives are so sad, with all the accompanying attention seeking and externalising of the locus of control. Those that don’t evade them entirely, either withdraw at least a little, while the rest tell them what they want to hear and the whole process repeats itself.

“Why do people exploit me? Have I done something wrong? People are just stupid and selfish! I need to go easier on myself! I am better than them after all!”

Have you ever known someone like this?

Someone so sad and pathetic, so utterly culpable in their own plight and unwilling to take a slice of the blame they dole out to everyone and everything else? Have you taken pity on them?

How long have you been able to withstand it if you have?

I know I’ve burnt a few bridges behind me after things got progressively worse, as associations with these types of people tend to. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried. Maybe I should have burnt the bridge the first moment I cottoned on to the kind of emotional vampirism and low-functioning grandiose these sad people trade in.

Maybe their loneliness is deserved. I know I’m getting sick of putting up with this crap.

If they don’t show the good faith in wanting to improve their lot and their conduct towards others, should I be giving them the time of day?

~ Bruce

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