Leaker Is a Narcissist
Foreign Policy magazine weighs in on leaked evidence US government is secretly trying to start a war for no reason
It seems like there are narcissists everywhere these days. Somehow, apparently, somewhere along the way, we were suddenly overrun with the clinically selfish. So, I wasn't surprised by the headline to an article in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine about Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman arrested last week in Massachusetts for posting classified documents online. In the article, "The Discord Leaker Was a Narcissist, Not an Ideologue," the authors, David V. Gioe and Joseph M. Hatfield, assessing the impact from the foreign policy perspective of the insanely criminal conduct the leaks exposed, explained that Teixeira’s "narcissism, bad judgment, and arrogance got the best of him."
I’ve been curious about this growing narcissistic menace, so I read the whole thing. Unfortunately, despite the promise of the article's headline, the authors’ investigation into the leak, which detailed the illegal and reckless activity driving the world towards a nuclear holocaust, found no actual evidence of Teixeira's actual narcissism. In fact, the authors didn’t provide much information about Teixeira at all, as the article was mostly focused what steps the government needs to take to keep their outrageous and treasonous activities better hidden from us. About all we learn from the article about Teixeira is that he had "some rather radical and distasteful views." The authors don’t tell us what those views were, however, so readers are left to assume Teixeira’s views are probably the kind of views with which large segments of the population agree. If his views were truly radical and distasteful, the authors would have included them.
We also learn that Teixeira’s intent in publishing the documents was a desire to “discuss geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars” and that his case is marked by "social adherence to a gaming community more than a cause."
None of this seemed particularly narcissistic to me, so I checked with the experts to see whether I was missing something. Narcissistic personality disorder, according to the Mayo Clinic, "is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance." Grandiosity, in other words, and Gioe and Hatfield do note that Teixeira was "grandiose enough to think that [he] wouldn’t get caught." But that may be the weakest stab at conjuring a mental illness diagnosis since the first psychotherapist discovered people would pay you to listen to them. Is thinking you aren’t going to get caught when you do something wrong (something, I'll hazard, we can all relate to) really grandiosity? Or is it just miscalculation? Or giving in to temptation? Or the thrill of risk-taking? Or youthful recklessness and inexperience?
The only grandiosity that stood out to me in the article was found in the authors' bios, where the general rule proved true that there is an inverse relationship between the length of one's title and the weight of one's contribution.
According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissists also believe they deserve special exemptions from the rules others must follow. If that's true, then there was an example of full-blown narcissism in the title of another piece carried in the same issue of Foreign Policy, "Congress Calls on Georgia to Release Political Prisoners." Just a few blocks east from where Congress was pointing its finger at the little country of Georgia, hundreds of Americans are sitting in prison for their political activism. Talk about exempting itself from the rules it expects others to follow! No one at Foreign Policy ever calls Congress a narcissist, but how is Congress not a narcissist? I mean, it even has its own reflecting pool.
Foreign Policy shows no interest in holding the powerful accountable for the crimes Jack Teixeira exposed. Instead, the magazine attacks the kid, pulling “narcissist” out of thin air to smear him as mentally ill. The authors of this piece need to remind themselves that the two most murderous regimes of the 20th Century, the communist regimes in China and Russia, both made widespread use of weaponized psychiatry as a political tool to suppress dissent. Don’t go there, Foreign Policy.