A malignant narcissist

Bookworm watched the entire ESPN series on O.J. Simpson. Some of her thoughts:

watching the trajectory of OJ’s career, I went from admiration to disgust. This was separate from my certainty that he slaughtered two people. Instead, I was following the life story starting in high school, when he was a talented guy who always let his friends take the rap — yet his friends remained devoted to him. In the beginning of his career, when OJ refused to be defined by his race, I thought that was admirable. After all, I do take seriously Martin Luther King’s admonition that America will have achieved racial redemption when we start judging people, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That’s what OJ seemed to want.

However, as his career progressed, it became clear that OJ was not making a civil rights statement. Instead, he actually thought he was a special being. He was the ultimate malignant narcissist who believed himself to be somewhat divorced from and better than the rest of the human race. A malignant narcissist has a host of problems and is not the type of person anyone should ever want to marry. The narcissist is brutal in a marriage. Some are just mentally abusive; others, like OJ, are physically abusive. And narcissists are the type of people who, when their ego suffers a severe wound (such as seeing an ex-wife start dating a younger, more successful protegé), will kill.

In his relationship with Nicole, OJ did what all malignant narcissists do: Because they are utterly devoid of insight, everything wrong in their life is always everyone else’s fault. They cannot change, they cannot grow and, when things go bad, they cannot recover. Like the rats they are, when trapped, they are utterly vicious, all the while being pathetically whiny.

...even though I accept as true that blacks have been on the receiving end of appalling racism in America for centuries, especially police racism, I do think that the victim message obscures another message that the black community needs to hear: Lift yourself up. Police yourself. Improve yourself. Don’t let racists define you as lackluster, criminal, do-nothings. When you hear the activists speak (and they spoke a lot in this show), they are as narcissistic as OJ — there is no self-reflection, no change, no growth. It’s a dead-end devoid of individual responsibility. The activists stoke the rage but refuse to acknowledge that, racism notwithstanding, the black community needs to improve itself too.

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