What I'm feeling is that this narcissistic personality might actually be a signal that society rewards. I saw a news report recently saying that narcissistic traits are often found in successful CEOs.

In my view, maybe society is designed in a way that makes it hard for people without narcissism to succeed. It's like bad money driving out good.

Most successful VC leaders in the US are generally considered to have narcissistic traits. Why is that? VCs are inherently dealing with uncertainty in their investments. Grandiose delusions and absolute conviction get packaged as 'vision' and 'confidence.' Elon Musk's space data center project might look physically implausible, but some famous VCs see it as vision.

Narcissistic leadership is an extreme high-risk, high-return play. They ignore others' advice and bet on their own intuition. If they succeed, it's called innovation (Tesla, Apple). If they fail, it becomes WeWork. We only ever see the narcissists who won, but on the flip side, that's exactly what society rewards as a signal.

Society can't measure actual ability directly. So it looks for proxy signals. But vision, grandiosity, self-promotion, and actual performance are hard to distinguish. In a mass market, someone who speaks loudly gets famous before someone who quietly does good work.

Narcissism is advantageous in this selection stage. People say the preliminaries don't matter, only the finals do. But without the preliminaries, there's no finals, and in the preliminaries, narcissism is almost always advantageous.

Summarizing the papers I've read, narcissistic leaders tend to resist pushback because face-to-face environments where their power and status can be checked are reduced over time. And our society has built a system that rewards exactly that.

So rationally, we all know that this is wrong, that we should respect others, and that we should cut down our own egos. But the capitalist system seems to run in the exact opposite direction.

At scale, a clear identity is needed to get people to give you what it takes to pay the bills. An identity that is continuously refined becomes clearer. The act of refinement of the identity may then create an attachment to the identity, like an IKEA effect. Any protections of the identity also serve to make the identity clearer to others.