Narcissistic personalities usually do do better than you and me and the average person. We've always seen it in the office. The person who speaks up more in meetings, the person who's charismatic, who can sell an idea with more excitement and energy.
Narcissism, like the other personality disorders, is a condition that's known as ego-syntonic. In other words, the paranoid person really does believe that people are after him, and the narcissist really does believe that he or she is better than or more entitled than other people, and truly doesn't see why that's not the case.
If we were a culture of high-risk alcoholics, and suddenly we had Jack Daniels piped into our houses, we would be feeding that fire. Social networking, and the internet as a whole, seems to have simply landed in an extremely fertile place in an extremely fertile time in history, when we all have these narcissistic tendencies anyway - you can go further back into the self-esteem movement, and Dr. Spock, and the 'everybody gets a ribbon at the track meet' sort of thing, which preceded the internet - and then you drop the internet into the middle of this, and we've all gone haywire.
Narcissism is actually a clever guise adopted to mask its exact opposite, which is a deep well of self-loathing, a well of low self-esteem, rather than high self-esteem. This helps explain why narcissists are so sensitive to criticism, why narcissists tend to break into outrage if they're criticized, because their self-esteem is actually much more brittle than it seems, and once they're challenged, that mask falls apart.
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