Self-importance & self-awareness are inversely proportional
Or, how I exposed your weaponization of the label "narcissism" and made fun of your circular idiocy
Self-awareness, in the sense of accurate self-perception, naturally deflates self-importance. You see your own cognitive biases and limitations, recognize the contingency of your beliefs and preferences, and notice when you’re rationalizing. You see yourself in proportion to the larger context.
Conversely, self-importance actively interferes with self-awareness because accurate self-perception threatens the inflated self-image, so defense mechanisms kick in to protect the constructed (fictional) identity.
You are motivated not to see clearly by default.
The very structure of self-importance involves a kind of myopia, a metabolically protective inability to see oneself from outside. Self-importance places you at the center in a way that precludes the perspectival flexibility that accurate self-awareness requires. Self-importance necessitates a kind of offensive inflation that can only be sustained through selective perception.
The defense mechanisms that protect self-importance are the same ones that prevent self-knowledge: rationalization, selective attention, motivated reasoning. The more clearly you see yourself, the less you can maintain the illusion that you’re special in the way self-importance requires. Accurate perception of yourself and nature would force the mental model align to the thermodynamic reality.
Self-importance and self-awareness really are inversely proportional.
The prefix “self-” already encodes the distortion—importance that originates from the self rather than from your actual standing. If the importance stems from observable reality and not merely internal self-image, it’s just plain “importance,” and recognizing it is itself an act of self-awareness, not a contradiction.
On the weaponization of the label “Narcissism” by petty narcissists.
The narcissism discourse in pop culture is a case study in how self-importance defends itself against self-awareness—and specifically how it can co-opt the appearance of self-awareness as camouflage.
The person weaponizing the label “narcissist” exhibits exactly the inverse proportionality I describe above: high self-importance (my account is valid, I’m the wronged party, I see clearly) combined with low self-awareness (unable to perceive their own motivated reasoning, their own selective attention, their own role in the dynamic). The clinical vocabulary provides them with performative intellectualism that simulates insight. They get to posture as someone who has done the difficult work of seeing clearly, while deploying clinical language to avoid precisely that work.
It’s not simply that self-importance degrades self-awareness through the usual defense mechanisms. The narcissism discourse shows how self-importance can actively parasitize self-awareness discourse, hollowing out the language of insight and wearing it as a skin. The accuser comes away feeling more self-aware than ever—they’ve learned about projection, gaslighting, and “supply”—while their actual self-perception has degraded further towards low energy investment in metabolically predictable ways. They now have sophisticated tools for deflection.
Let’s make fun of some “experts” on narcissism
I found an random article titled “15 Signs You’re Dealing With A Narcissist, From A Therapist” written by people signaling their status with PhDs in soft sciences. Wow. The title itself gives it away. Note how it’s “15 Signs You’re Dealing With A Narcissist” and not “15 SignsYou Might Be a Narcissist” or “Understanding Narcissism in Relationships, Including Your Own Role.” The reader (accuser-in-training) is positioned as the one dealing with the problem, never as the potential source. And never encouraged towards self-examination. The metabolic priority for the authors is pleasing the reader, not accuracy.
And each of “the signs!” How magnificently ambiguous!
“Attention seeking” = “following you around the house, asking you to find things.” This describes... a spouse? A child? Someone craving interaction?
“Anxiety” is listed as a narcissist trait. Anxiety.
“Trust issues” and “Insecurity”—also pathologized as narcissism rather than, say, the universal human condition.
“Perfectionism”—wanting things to go well and having standards now diagnostic. Perfect. For someone who thrives on mediocrity and plausible deniability.
Ah! The exquisite irony of specific items:
Sign #5, “Lack of accountability,” describes placing blame on others. As the reader is doing exactly this… by reading the article.
Sign #10, “Blaming,” says narcissists blame others for negative outcomes. While the entire proposed psychological framework IS ITSELF a technology for placing blame.
Sign #9, “Deflection,” says narcissists “look to something or someone outside themselves to solve their feelings.”
I need to linger on this point because the way “deflection” is framed pathologizes looking outside yourself for information. So if you try to check your interpretation against external reality—ask friends, look for corroborating evidence, consider alternative explanations—that becomes a symptom rather than a reasonable epistemic practice to ground your observations in reality. The article closes off both directions:
Looking inward to see if you’re contributing? No! That’s what the narcissist has trained you to do! (gaslighting aftermath)
Looking outward to verify your interpretation? No! That’s deflection!
The only sanctioned move is to trust your own immediate emotional read of the situation, which is positioned as reliable a priori precisely because the other person is pathological. Your perception becomes self-validating.
Which is almost comically ironic: the diagnostic criterion describes solving problems by looking outside yourself, but the entire article is an external solution to an internal problem. The reader is deflecting their relational difficulties onto a clinical category they found in a pop culture listicle that pathologizes the very thing it’s providing. Reality-testing is the enemy of the prosecutorial frame. If you actually checked whether your partner’s behavior fits the pattern, consulted people without an ax to grind who know both of you, or examined your own contribution, the clean victim/narcissist narrative might dissolve. The framework has to neutralize that possibility, so it labels verification-seeking as a symptom.
This creates a completely unfalsifiable interpretive structure.
“Narcissists perceive everything as a threat. They frequently misread subtle facial expressions.” How would you know someone misread your expression? You’d have to assume your interpretation of the situation is correct—which is exactly the lack of perspectival flexibility that actual narcissism involves.The reflexive question is structurally absent: Nowhere does it ask “could these signs apply to me?”
We are left to conclude the people who wrote this article ARE NARCISSISTS by their own definition.
By their own criteria:
Deflection: They’re providing an external solution to readers’ relational problems rather than directing them inward.
Blaming: The entire structure places responsibility on the other party.
Lack of accountability: No acknowledgment that this framework could be weaponized, misapplied, or that the reader might be the problem.
Lack of empathy: Zero consideration for the person being labeled, who may be falsely accused, or whose own wounds and limitations are being pathologized rather than understood.
Grandiosity: The confidence with which ambiguous behavioral signs are presented as diagnostic certainty.
Not a team player: Framing relationships as adversarial diagnosis scenarios rather than collaborative systems where both parties contribute.
And the metabolic signature: this content feels good to produce. It gets clicks, engagement, shares. It provides narcissistic supply to narcissistic readers (validation, righteousness, protagonist status) in exchange for attention and ad revenue. The authors are doing precisely what they describe: maintaining a façade of expertise while deflecting responsibility, blaming others (the diagnosed), and getting their needs met through others without reciprocity or empathy. The discourse doesn’t just enable narcissistic capture—it’s produced by the same dynamics it describes, which may be why it’s so perfectly structured to serve weaponized use. It was built by and for the orientation it claims to diagnose.
Oh, where art thou, self-awareness?
The loop closes perfectly. The inverse proportionality we started with: high self-importance, zero self-awareness. They cannot see themselves in the mirror they’re holding up. The framework they’ve constructed to diagnose others is a perfect projection of their own cognitive structure, and they have absolutely no access to that fact.
Which validates my original thesis at a meta level. If self-importance and self-awareness really are inversely proportional, then the people most motivated to produce “how to spot a narcissist” content—content that provides supply, positions the author as expert, and serves the reader’s prosecutorial needs—would be precisely the people least capable of recognizing what they’re doing. The content selects for its own blindness. High self-awareness would produce hesitation, caveats, reflexive questions, acknowledgment of how the work is observably misused. That version of the article doesn’t get written, or doesn’t get clicks, or doesn’t feel satisfying to produce. What survives the selection pressure is the version that maximally serves the narcissistic function while appearing clinical and helpful.
Credit where credit is due—ha ha—you can thank Margalis Fjelstad, Ph.D., LMFT and Darja Djordjevic, M.D., Ph.D. for this un-self-aware diversion. (But I won’t dignify the article with a link.)
Your Takeaway
The discourse isn’t accidentally capturable—it is produced by captured cognition. The snake eats its tail. The very confidence and clarity that makes the content feel authoritative is the signature of the blindness it purports to illuminate. The credentials point to no measurable competence.
This is why psychologically literate and technically accurate vocabulary provides such effective camouflage.
Any assertion that cannot be definitively measured in objective reality cannot help but be captured by parasites.
Note: The predictable response will be to label this critique DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender)—which is itself DARVO, and which proves the point about unfalsifiability. There is no way out of the trap of self-deluded mediocrity. Capture is complete. Enjoy the enshittification.