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Narcissism
1 min read · 327 words
Narcissism is the system running the self-model at such inflated resolution that other operators’ data barely registers.
Every system runs a self-model. The ego inflates it slightly by default — this is standard equipment. Narcissism is the extreme version: the self-model has expanded to fill nearly all available processing bandwidth. The operator’s needs, perceptions, and self-image occupy the foreground so completely that other operators’ needs, perceptions, and experiences are processed only as they relate to the central model.
The mechanism produces a specific distortion: other operators exist, in the narcissistic system’s model, as extensions of the self-model rather than as independent control rooms with their own operations. The other operator’s admiration is fuel. Their criticism is threat. Their independent existence — the part that doesn’t revolve around the narcissistic system — is functionally invisible.
The hardware produces narcissistic features in all organisms to varying degrees. The version that warrants the label is the version where the self-model’s inflation is so severe and so rigid that it cannot accommodate the reality of other operators as equals — systems with their own valid data, their own needs, and their own authority over their own operations.
From the chair — for the operator assessing another system: the diagnostic is how the other system handles data that doesn’t confirm the inflated model. Moderate self-focus adjusts when confronted with disconfirming data. Narcissistic self-focus attacks the data, discredits the source, or rewrites the narrative to preserve the model intact. The model cannot be wrong. Everything else must accommodate it.
For the operator assessing their own system: the honest question is how much bandwidth is allocated to the self-model relative to the processing of others’ actual data. The answer requires the kind of honest self-observation that narcissistic processing specifically prevents — which is why external feedback, honestly received, is the primary diagnostic tool.