A narcissist is someone who is consumed by the superiority of themselves over others.  Those who consider all others around them as idiots.  They look at others with contempt.  This person culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and knowledgeable peers.

This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The narcissist himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact;

and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. In fact it is a type of moral ignorance.

The opposite of the narcissist is the altruist. The altruist sees others around him, even strangers, as individually distinctive people with valuable perspectives, whose desires and opinions, interests and goals are worthy of attention and respect. The altruist yields his place in line to the hurried shopper, stops to help the person who dropped her papers, calls an acquaintance with an embarrassed apology after having been unintentionally rude. In a debate, the altruist sees how he might be wrong and the other person right.

A narcissist almost always kisses up and kicks down. He is obsessed with hierarchy and disregards others who are at a low pecking order.

He often has little idea how he appears to them. This leads to hypocrisies. He might rage against the smallest typo in a juniors document, while producing a torrent of errors himself; it just wouldn’t occur to him to apply the same standards to himself. He might insist on promptness, while always running late. He might freely reprimand other people, expecting them to take it with good grace, while any complaints directed against him earn his eternal enmity. Such failures of parity typify the narcissist’s moral short-sightedness, flowing naturally from his disregard of others’ perspectives. These hypocrisies are immediately obvious if one genuinely imagines oneself in a subordinate’s shoes for anything other than selfish and self-rationalising ends, but this is exactly what the narcissist habitually fails to do.

If you catch yourself constantly complaining about others, their inability, stupidity, and inability to rise upto your levels; Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks? Are you the only competent, reasonable person to be found?

It’s time to get some help…….