Simon Rogoff On Narcissism And Power

He details the psychological condition via Churchill, Trump, Diddy, Lennon, and Chaplin.

Simon is a clinical psychologist who writes about the connections between “Narcissism, Trauma, Fame, and Power” — the name of his substack. He has over 20 years experience in the field of treatment of personality disorders and complex PTSD — the field of psychology in which narcissism is most invoked. We talked about what narcissism is, healthy and unhealthy; and we discuss some famous narcissists — Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon, Hitler, Churchill — and the childhood patterns they have in common. Then of course you-know-who, our Malignant Narcissist-In-Chief.

An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For three clips of our convo — how narcissism is formed in childhood, my own struggles with it, and when narcissism turns malignant — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in Birmingham; his mom a social worker and his dad a probation officer; Simon working in prison psych units; personality disorders vs mental illness; the Big Five traits; bipolarism; Freud and trauma; cold parenting; the Best Little Boy in the World syndrome; the coping strategies of narcissists; Sly Stallone; Norma Desmond; the benefits of narcissism for society; John Lennon’s violent bullying of others; Churchill’s childhood wounds; his psychic similarities with Hitler; Charlie Chaplin and sex trafficking; Trump’s sadism from a very young age; his nonstop superlatives; his 2020 denialism; his retribution crusade; how Obama’s narcissism is different than Trump’s; the new interview with Susie Wiles; the new Diddy documentary; Nietzsche’s Übermensch; social media as a playground for narcissism; the love-bombing of Trump’s 2016 rallies; his empty marriage to Melania; Epstein; and the danger of Trump’s psyche when allies like MTG turn on him.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness, Laura Field on the intellectuals of Trumpism, Vivek Ramaswamy on the right’s future, Jason Willick on trade and conservatism, and Claire Berlinksi on America’s retreat from global hegemony. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s episode with Shadi Hamid:

I greatly enjoyed the discussion — two things in particular. First, I’m on record as being a big fan of your religiously oriented episodes, and while it wasn’t the primary topic this week, Shadi’s discussion of his Islamic faith and the relationship between Islam, liberalism, and democracy was fascinating. I would totally welcome more dialogues between you and practitioners of different faiths going forward.

Second, stylistically, I found this to be one of the more successful Dishcasts yet, in which you and your interlocutor sharply disagreed on the main point. While you didn’t hold back in challenging Shadi’s viewpoint on US global leadership and the benefits of intervention, you generally did a much better job than you sometimes have in allowing him to fully develop his thoughts and arguments without interrupting too much. I can tell you’ve taken listeners’ feedback to heart on this part, so well done.

In terms of substance, I think it’s possible to bridge some of the gap between your position and Shadi’s by distinguishing between the American exercise of hard power and soft power. I suspect most listeners will be sympathetic to your view that the 21st century has called into question the wisdom of direct US military intervention in foreign conflicts — or at least a much higher bar for intervention.

At the same time, the US absolutely can deploy lots of resources to shape global outcomes in a positive way. These can include a robust deployment of economic, cultural, and diplomatic resources, ranging from USAID, PEPFAR, the Peace Corps, Radio Free Asia and Europe — which are now under assault by the Trump administration — to American support for the kinds of global institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO.

It’s also helpful to distinguish between granting military aid and actually deploying US forces. It seems probable that without US (and European) military aid and intel, Ukraine would have suffered a rapid defeat and been reduced to a Russian puppet state. Setting aside the knotty question of how to end the conflict, the fact that US support has allowed Ukraine to fight Russia to a stalemate after nearly four years is not only a remarkable achievement, but a pretty serious blow to Russia’s global prestige and strategic positioning. It also may have helped reduce the likelihood of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which would be a much more difficult operation than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

All this to say: it doesn’t have to be a choice between Cold War-style interventionism and a retreat into isolationism.

No it doesn’t. Which is why, nonetheless, we need to air radical critiques of our recent past to find a saner, smarter middle path of responsible retrenchment. Here’s another listener in favor of that middle:

I was shocked that someone as smart as you, and arguing in good faith (I think, I hope), would smear together under the rubric of “interventionism”: the 2003 Iraq invasion, US military and financial support for Israel, a commitment to the defense of Taiwan, a commitment to the defense of Ukraine, an interest in defending Rwanda’s Tutsis from marauding mass murderers, and … drum roll … acceptance of China into the WTO.

Each of these cases needs to be evaluated on its own merits. Mr. Hamid’s position is far more defensible, which is that America should steer away from extreme policies, avoiding the follies of the neocons and the isolationists.

Your concern for the American voter doesn’t sound right. I agree with Mr. Hamid that American voters don’t seem to know much about foreign affairs, or remember for long what happened. I am not convinced there is any new robust isolationist consensus.

You made an interesting historical swing in the conversation, saying that before 1941, America had been isolationist; that the period from then to the end of the Cold War was a justifiable deviation; and now we need to get back to reality and realize we are safe in our continental redoubt. I’m a little surprised he didn’t push back and ask, “Well, ahem, do you recall that all through the 1930s, until 1941, Republican leaders in the US Senate were saying the very same thing? They were myopic then, and, given how MUCH more interconnected the world is now, you are being that much more myopic now.”

I feel as though you are over-compensating, having committed a colossal error in judgement in 2002 and 2003 by cheering on interventionism in Iraq. I wish that instead of switching to the opposite extreme, the lesson you took from that fiasco was to be more humble in your views. Sadly, you haven’t done so.

I’m not against all intervention. I favor NATO and our alliances; I support more military aid to Ukraine to get a better settlement. I just don’t believe in going to war for Taiwan, or using the military to “stop” something like the genocide in Rwanda or the civil war in Syria.

Another reader dissents against both me and Shadi:

I’m not sure if you were serious or simply playing Devil’s advocate when you seemed to question why we should support Ukraine (and Mr. Hamid’s response was wholly inadequate). We should support Ukraine because it’s in the long-term interest of the United States. Russia is one of the junior partners in a coalition of nations that means to do us harm and alter the geopolitical order that has served us well since WWII. To the extent that Putin is thwarted, that the Western alliance is strengthened, and that Ukraine is integrated into the EU, we and our allies will be stronger.

If, however, Putin ultimately absorbs Ukraine, Russia and its coalition will be an even greater threat. And if he does win, he will test the alliance again, possibly in the Baltics.

Do we need to recognize that it’s 2025 and not 1945, or even 1995, and accept that reality? Of course things have changed, and we’re not in the same position we once were. Do the nations of Western Europe need to do most of the heavy lifting in their own defense? Yes, absolutely, and they are beginning to, but it will take time to restore their atrophied militaries.

Putin will never agree to a peace that leaves Ukraine as an independent nation as long as he thinks he can win. Resolve on the part of the United States now, standing shoulder to shoulder against an aggressor and providing unambiguous military support at a relatively small cost, can make the difference.

China under the Communist Party will be a dangerous adversary for the rest of your life and mine. Their aim is the same as Reagan’s a generation ago: we win, you lose. Taiwan is already as good as lost, but things won’t end there. We will need all the allies we can get.

And your notion that we have deep resources and two big oceans to protect us is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Chinese hypersonic missiles can sink our fleet when it’s tied up to the pier in San Diego; cyberattacks can destroy critical infrastructure nationwide; and our bombers in the heartland can be destroyed by drones in the same way Ukraine destroyed many of Russia’s.

Neo-isolationism might give us peace in our time for a while, but I don’t think we’ll like living in that world.

Another writes, “US citizens won’t care about Taiwan because of some affinity for Taiwanese self-determination, but they will care about their pocketbooks when computer chips, which are in almost everything now — from airplanes to cars to children’s toys — are scarce or expensive.” Yes. Which is why it’s such a damning verdict on foreign policy elites that we ended up in that situation. Same with rare earths. But we’re working to alleviate that problem.

Another points to polling:

You are greatly exaggerating Americans’ turn towards isolationism. If you look at the Pew report that came out last month, only 28% of Americans believe the US should not provide military assistance to Ukraine, which is the same percentage of Americans who say the US should not provide military assistance to Taiwan.

Also, your idea that pre-1941 America was a bastion of isolationism is also overstated. Besides entry into WWI (which I don’t think you can wave off as the exception that proves the rule), think of William Howard Taft’s famous quote about the Philippines in 1907: “Our whole job in the Philippines is to make them good democrats.” Or think of the support of American humanitarians and missionaries for Greek independence in the 1820s, or their support for Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese Revolution almost a century later. From early in our history, there was always an important current of support for America’s “civilizing” role in the world, linked to Protestant evangelism.

Yes, and it violated the Founders’ vision, in my view. More history comes from this listener:

You keep saying that Taiwan has been part of China “since forever.” You need to do some homework, because that’s not even close to true.

Starting around the 12th century, Taiwan had scattered settlements of Chinese, but these were small and independent, not state-sponsored. Around the late 1500s, the Chinese state started taking a military/colonial interest in the island — at about the same time as the Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese did as well. China ultimately came to dominate, and it officially annexed the territory in 1684. But even then, they didn’t control it, as they continued to deal with suppressing the indigenous people for about another century. In 1895, Japan took Taiwan and held it, and then after 1945, there was the whole KMT vs PRC drama you know about.

The point is, prior to the 20th century, China only claimed Taiwan for a little over two centuries, and only securely held it for less than one century. Saying that Taiwan has been part of China forever makes as much sense as saying India has been part of England since forever.

More like saying that about Ireland. And the UK still has a part of it. Yet another dissent:

A couple of times in your interview, the claim is made that Europe’s GDP is larger than Russia’s. That’s true, but you should not look at GDP based on exchange rates, but rather GDP based on purchasing power parity — a better measure of military potential. Using that metric, Russia comes in as the fourth biggest economy in the world, appreciably ahead of Germany and Japan.

When it turned out that Russia was producing more artillery shells than the whole of NATO, people ought to have started wondering if there was something wrong with the GDP figures. I don’t mean to criticize Mr. Hamid in particular. Lots and lots of people who should know better are seriously underestimating the size of Russia’s economy — and their underestimation means their strategic calculations are faulty.

Using purchasing power parity, my reader is right that Russia is the fourth biggest economy at around $7 trillion. But that compares with the EU with $29 trillion and the UK at $4 trillion — for a total of $33 trillion for the European powers with a stake in security, more than four times’ Russia, and roughly the same as the US. They can afford to pay more.

One more listener provides “a German perspective”:

I really enjoyed your talk with Shadi Hamid, whose views and arguments make a lot of sense to me. Born in 1969, I am one of many Germans who are well aware and still grateful for America’s intervention in WWII, and the bold (and smart) decision to support Germany after the war ended. The world is a better place for all of this, and the order that the US established after 1945 has led to great prosperity for itself and its allies. It’s the reason why we are living in the best of times now — although it looks like the world is about to take a big step backwards.

There is one crucial point that did not get mentioned in your conversation: if Russia prevails in Ukraine, this may well lead to many countries seeking their own nuclear weapons — before starting their own wars against their neighbours. That is clearly not in anyone’s interest and may well lead to a spiral that could cost so much more than the support of Ukraine. So I think it’s in the interest of the US to ensure that Russia does not win this war.

Europe clearly needs to step up, and this seems to be starting — especially since the US cannot be trusted as an ally anymore. Of course at least in Germany, there were good reasons for keeping a low military profile. The re-establishment of the German army was opposed by many both inside and outside of Germany. There are still many Germans who are very sceptical of the Bundeswehr, however shortsighted that may seem to the rest of the world. The trauma of the war still has an effect even on those of us who did not experience it — which unfortunately is also making many Germans fall for Russian propaganda.

I have often wondered what it was like a hundred years ago in Germany, and if I would have had the courage to speak up against the Nazis. It would never have occurred to me that this could happen again, least of all in the US — or that a Nazi party would get a quarter of the vote in Germany.

I have been thinking a lot about your episode on Eisenhower. It answered some of your questions about why the US should take an interest in the world! Eisenhower really represented the spirit that made America the nation that set the standards for everyone else.

Perhaps another interesting topic for your podcast might be the German Jews who looked after captured German officers in the US during the war. In those days the US army knew that they would not have gotten any useful information out of them by torture. Instead, those Jews befriended the people who killed their families, and learned everything they wanted to know. It’s another example of something that made America great and appears to have been lost.

Apologies for the rant! I guess I’ve been carrying some of it around for a while. Love your pod episodes; they are always great food for thought. Keep them coming!

On my latest column, “Ten Years of Marriage Equality,” a reader writes:

Great piece. My husband and I just returned from your native country where we went to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. (We celebrate the date of the actual wedding we snuck off to Canada to have in 2005, even though it was legally meaningless here at home for another 10 years.) I just wanted to say thank you. I don’t always agree with you, but have been reading since the New Republic days, and I know history will remember the role you played in making life better for all us normie gays.

Another reader also gets personal:

My mother is a lesbian, and her forced public “coming out” occurred in a custody trial with the result being me separated from her when I was just a year old.

That should not have happened. It cost me. It cost her. So gay rights have been close to my heart my whole life, and I was overjoyed when marriage equality became the law of the land.

I recall one of my mother’s friends speaking about the proliferation of trans women entering the lesbian dance scene in Seattle back in the ‘90s. It raised hackles. She also worried about the death of butch women who are transitioning to male. That has come to dominate the movement, it seems. My mother has had normie, straight parents ask her about trans issues and she really doesn’t know what to say. She’s gay, but never questioned her gender.

I’m writing to say I appreciate your thoughtfulness, glad to hear you are in good health, and thank you for advocating for yourself and many others who wanted to establish equality, who demanded equal rights and privileges for same-sex partners. It is an important victory that endures.

One more on the column:

We have gotten to the point in America where being a black NFL coach doesn’t mean anything special. Then today I read on the Dish that the treasury secretary is gay; I had no idea. Sounds more like MLK’s “content of character” every day.

It’s amazing how many people don’t know that. It’s partly because the queer movement wants nothing to do with him or anyone like him, and partly the usual media bias. Imagine if a gay Democrat ever became that powerful! There would be no end of profiles and awards and hype. Instead: near total silence. I bet you a majority of gays don’t know that either and what passes for gay media won’t tell them.

Another reader has a “small correction” for my latest Spectator piece, “Trump has made D.C. safe again”:

I don’t think it’s correct that Frederick Law Olmsted designed Meridian Hill Park. He died in 1903, before the park was built. I noticed this because I live across from Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, which Olmsted helped design, and that prompted me to learn more about him.

I’m sorry. That must have lodged itself in my brain at some point and I should have double checked. On my column “The Question of Decency,” a dissent:

I intellectually grew up on you (among others, such as Hitch and Harris) and I’ve aped many of your essays in polite company. I understand this note is longer than you’d typically entertain, but I’ve met and chatted with you for 45 minutes in person in DC and would be grateful for your understanding. (It’s downhill from here.)

Like what I assume to be a non-trivial share of your audience, I could never apprehend how someone with such a brilliant talent for conjuring the reasonable could not transcend the blissful experiences you had as a child in Catholic settings and come to rational terms with religiosity as an adult. I have generally turned a blind eye to this because of your abundant talent and persuasiveness where it counts, but I can no longer ignore the fact that you routinely chalk up humanity’s goodness to Christianity. For example:

There remains a common aversion to cruelty, unfairness, extremism, and lies in our everyday lives. It has its roots in Christianity — as liberalism does, as we are beginning to understand better.

I find this statement to be ludicrous (which I can deal with) and seriously chauvinistic (which I cannot; please see below). Briefly on the general matter of religion, here’s an example from your October 17 episode with Charles Murray:

CM: “And what is not disputed by the physicists is that our universe is a one in a trillion chance. And that sort of pushes you into a corner, you know?”

AS: “mmm hmmm”

C’mon, man. You’re so much better than this. No, Charles, it does not push anyone into a corner. 10^24 snowflakes (a trillion trillion) fall on Earth each year. As we all know, each is unique. Furthermore, there is no known theoretical limit to the number of molecular snowflake configurations. This does not imply any special status or divine intent to any particular snowflake. Nature deals in incomprehensibly large numbers and probabilities … sorry!

I think you might raise an objection if he said something like: “There’s a one in a trillion chance she wins the lottery. She won the lottery. That pushes people who said she’s not special into a corner.” But using this logic to rationalize religion somehow earns your assent. I was taken aback to hear Charles speak in such anti-intellectual terms and had to end the pod right there, out of sadness. (I would guess, as no expert, that the size of the god-shaped hole is inversely correlated with our remaining life if we’re not careful.)

Falling back on divinity or a creator (whatever) because the next Newton, Planck, or Einstein hasn’t emerged yet to fill incremental gaps in our existential knowledge is basic bad intellectual etiquette. And who knows: maybe Homo Sapiens are too limited intellectually, or in our ability to summon physical resources, to measure at the necessary scales to ever prove how it “all” works. If so, too bad — that doesn’t allow adults to take fantastical explanations of phenomena seriously.

Regarding the more important point of equating human decency to Christianity …

To get a superficial and obvious point out of the way, Christian institutions and consensus have almost without exception been an impediment to the good values you attribute to Christianity. This is obvious and superficial, and I’m sure you are well-prepared to account for it, so will leave it there.

If you absolutely must attribute “good values” to a particular human organization (rather than their emergence from evolutionary usefulness), you’ve got a much more compelling case with Ancient Rome, at least in Western Civ. Before Jesus, Rome had the Twelve Tables (rule of law), Cicero’s natural law, universal citizenship, and so on. Cicero and Aurelius (among others) espoused Clementia, Humanatias, Temperantia, and Aequitas — again, long before Jesus.

Numerous pre-Christian Roman emperors justified their rule with themes of mercy and clemency. Look up Clementia in Augustus’ Res Gestae, for example; he pardons citizens who seek mercy, refuses absolute power, weaves a narrative of peace and forgiveness, etc. The New Testament’s human authors were very talented at the “who are we?” cult-classic screenplay and included some really clever devices to get people hooked, like (1) original sin — an easy way to spot a racket is when you need its pusher no matter what; (2) forbidding sacrifices — nobody likes pouring wine down the drain; and (3) the promise eternal life — lovely!

These were popular trade-offs versus what the Roman deities offered at the time. However, general themes of Christianity were easy to swallow in a Roman culture that already possessed them.

A much more compelling and sane explanation is that Rome, Christianity, and everything else fundamentally human was created by humans to serve or seize upon a biological impulse. In your pod with Charles, you seem to concede that religion has evolutionary usefulness, but for some reason you don’t take the obvious step of identifying that religion — like a fear of sudden loud noises — is then almost certainly an emergent quality of evolutionary biology.

Humans are a physically weak species whose security, safety, and procreation strategy are all heavily reliant on social cooperation, alliance-making, and knowledge accrual. This will have a different look and feel from society to society, but attributing pro-social values that emerge from our evolutionary strategy to Christianity specifically is preposterous, self-serving, and chauvinistic.

Yes, chauvinistic: pro-social values emerged independently in numerous non-Judeo-Christian cultures. If you’ve traveled around China, Japan and Korea — societies that basically emerged from Chinese antiquity, not Judeo-Christian or Roman tradition — it’s obvious that they exhibit greater “Christian values” than almost any place in the West. If you want to make the argument, for example, that Chinese society — the oldest continuous language and civilization on Earth — is somehow unwittingly Judeo-Christian, well I don’t know what to tell you. Read some Taoism, Confucianism, and Chinese folk traditions (e.g., Menshen). They have a lot of harmony, humanity, justice, warding off evil, etc. — stuff that rhymes with what you attribute to Christianity.

On a personal note, my wonderful wife is Chinese. Her family, who lives in hinterland China and does not speak English, has exhibited nothing but kindness, love, and generosity toward me (despite a language and culture barrier) and anyone else I’ve seen them interact with. I’d love for you to come over for a feast at her family’s place in Hunan province, and as they open a bottle of baijiu that runs them a week’s pay, you can explain what terrific Christian values they are exhibiting. They might have a general sense of who Jesus was, but not sure they’d agree with your appraisal regarding the origins of their social traditions.

Bottom line: I guess you were charmed by some pretty light that trickled through a stained glass window as a kid or whatever, but I’m unsubscribing for good if I hear any more “we are decent people because of Christianity” chauvinism.

I can’t respond to all that and won’t. Except to say I did not say and would never “chalk up humanity’s goodness to Christianity.” The sentence you cite is culturally specific to Europe and the West Europe created. And the radical nature of caritas was not the same as what came before.

Another reader on another column:

I’m just getting caught up on your October 31 column, “‘Read a Book’”, in which you wrote: “I remember vividly giving a talk at the time when my assertion that school segregation had ended in the 1950s was greeted with guffaws.” As a foreign-born American, you provide an important, impartial opinion, and it helps that you were not reared in a Republican family or Democrat family, because you aren’t saddled with that subconscious partisan baggage. But there is also something you lack, based on your background, about which I think you often don’t tread lightly enough on: race issues.

These issues cut very deep in this country. It is perceived (often correctly) that minimizing past racial wrongs is itself racist, even if inadvertent. So it really reiterated to me that there is a lot you don’t know about the issue, but which you apply a simple lens to. So you really screwed up with your school segregation comment. It did NOT end in the 1950s. It has rather famously evolved in character, but still exists in meaningful amounts. That is why the phrase “all deliberate speed” in Brown v. Board of Education is so ridiculed.

Here in the South, after that Supreme Court ruling, there suddenly sprouted up an entire industry of private religious schools that were de facto segregated. White students moved en masse to these religious bastions of segregation. And by white-student attrition, public schools became black. That still largely exists today. It may not be as segregated as before, but it is still very embarrassingly segregated.

Your statement also ignores the Boston busing controversy of the 1970s, which played out nationally. Here in Louisiana, just last year we had a white community (St. George) within a black city (Baton Rouge) form a new local government in order to create a new essentially white school district.

The difference between chosen segregation and unchosen is profound. By segregation, I obviously meant legally enforced bans on racially mixed public schooling. In a free country, I see no reasons why private schools cannot pioneer same-sex or same-race students. Personally I benefited from same-sex education. Your argument also comes perilously close to critical race theory, which denies any diminution of racial oppression in America is even possible — just a new, more concealed version of it. I disagree. As for the notion that because I didn’t grow up here, I will never appreciate the power of “white supremacy,” I can’t dispute it, because it is unfalsifiable.

But by the same token, it may also be true that having been brought up here actually blinds you to the progress made, and prevents you from grappling with how much less racist America often is compared with any other multiracial society in human history, and less racist than anywhere in Western Europe. The guilt so many white Americans feel for the past — and have no reason to feel at all — may prevent them from seeing reality clearly today.

One more reader for the week:

I agree with this reader’s critique:

I’ll offer one thought that occurred to me: a number of these older folks, especially the left-leaning ones, probably imbibed the belief that ‘the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.’ The famous quote implies that the world is getting better: each generation is more just than the last. If that’s a core premise, than naturally the young are the ones further along that arc of justice … As a conservative, I’ve never liked that quote.

But even worse, in my opinion, is the related belief that the arc in question is bending towards a “right side of history.” That’s a reductive framework. There is, certainly, a better side of history in the commonly accepted sense of broader equality and acceptance for all people. But even then, there is ongoing debate about what type of society best promotes those goals. There are rarely, if ever, any simple answers or risk-free policies — so therefore we need to accustom ourselves to compromise, humility, and nuance.

If there’s a “right” side of history, compromise is inherently problematic, humility is a weakness, and nuance is for those foolish enough to flirt with the possibility of winding up on the dreaded “wrong” side. Once a clear binary is established between those “right” and “wrong” sides, the issue is no longer one of pursuing the best possible option in a given time and place, but instead, the situation becomes an existential struggle between good and evil.

And woe be upon those deemed “evil”. I believe this sort of simplistic worldview contributes to the cancellations, the groupthink, and the cowardice we’ve seen so much of during the past ten years. And it may also help explain the otherwise inexplicable success of the transqueer revolution. Somehow or other, they branded themselves in liberal circles as being on that “right” side, and any and all criticism — no matter how constructive it may have been — was on part of the untenable “wrong” side and therefore no longer even worthy of consideration.

So yes, by all means, the “arc of history” worldview can be dangerously misleading. But even worse are the “right” and “wrong” sides of history that presume to dictate the nature of justice.

Amen.

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