Book Review: Five Stars
Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People by Joe Navarro
This book gives insight into the personality disorders that put us all at risk.
My father actually married a psychopath, and my younger brother inherited my mother’s mental attributes.
Growing up as I did made me think, in hindsight, that I wished that I could have read and understood this book when I was five years old.
(I first read and reviewed this book nine years ago and by oversight it didn't get posted.)
EXCERPTS;
Narcissistic personality: someone who overvalues himself or herself and devalues others with reptilian indifference. That reptilian indifference is what we see in major cities and elsewhere in the phenomenon known as knockout assaults, in which the unsuspecting (including elderly women) are targeted for a blindingly fast punch without provocation, just to see if the person can be knocked out (usually causing a concussion) with a single hit. To behave with such callousness, one has to be able to devalue others—a trait the narcissistic personality has in abundance. In November 1998, 1 year after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in California and on the 20th anniversary of the Jones town massacre in Guyana, a small group of FBI profiteers gathered at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to look at the events surrounding Jim Jones and his cult, the Peoples Temple. It was a sobering day for me because even though I had read about the event over the years, seeing the actual crime scene photographs of the bloated bodies of children and babies gave me a new perspective on the massacre, the Reverend Jim Jones, and his narcissistic personality. For those who are interested, you can go online to the FBI’s virtual vault and retrieve the actual investigation of the massacre, which is code-named RYMUR (Murder of Congressman Leo Ryan) FBIHQ file number 89-4286, and examine some of the same documents that I viewed (http://vault.fbi.gov/jonestown/jonestown/). If you read the thousands of pages from this online FBI report or from one of the many books written about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, some lessons prominently stand out: A striking number of people can be made to unconditionally put their lives in the hands of one individual. Under the cloak of religion, a dangerous personality can get away with a great deal for a long time with no outside scrutiny. Sect leaders can exert total control over the lives of their followers, ruling as if in a totalitarian regime. Repeated psychological and physical abuse may be used to hamper the efforts of those who want to leave the sect. Family and friends who fear for sect members will be persistently thwarted or frustrated in their efforts to help or rescue them. The narcissistic personality of a cult leader is palpable—as was evident in Jones’s words and writings, which should have been warnings to prospective members. Only a handful of sect members may see the sect leader for what he is. Only a few saw Jim Jones as a toxic and dangerous narcissistic personality. Once vested and committed to the cult leader, followers are reluctant or unwilling to see the looming peril or to resist the urgings of the narcissistic personality, even when the lives of their children are also in peril. For the profilers looking at the Jonestown massacre, our findings were sobering particularly because we had seen ample evidence of what we can expect from the narcissistic personality in past cult leaders (e.g., Charles Manson, David Koresh, Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr.) and the danger they present to the nonskeptical believer. Our limited analysis revealed the following: Cult leaders will continue to attract people who are unwilling or unable to discern when they are being manipulated or exploited. Cults that make leaving difficult (via psychological, social, or physical pressure) achieve compliance at a great psychological cost—even years later. Isolation of the sect is key to the narcissistic personality to avoid criticism, ridicule, or scrutiny and to control the sect. The narcissistic personality thrives in a leadership position within a cult and will do almost anything to remain the leader, including marginalizing or destroying those who oppose them. The narcissistic personality as leader of a sect acts with impunity in almost all cases, allowing the leader greater privileges (e.g., travel, clothes, luxury items, sex) than sect members. The narcissistic personality as sect leader purports to have all the answers and secrets to a better life and makes all the decisions. Because of constitutional protections around religion and voluntary associations, there is little that law enforcement can do to intervene in sects unless there is a clear violation of state or federal law. In most cases, because of secrecy, it is difficult to intervene, as we saw with the case of Warren Jeffs of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints in southern Utah in 2006 (sex with underage girls). Or, tragically, police come on the scene too late, as happened in Jonestown.
If you think about it, many of these same characteristics (secrecy and isolation, psychological and/or physical abuse to weaken free will, absolute power concentrated in one person’s hands) can be found in toxic work environments or organizations, in homes ruled by tyrants, or even in nation-states.
Pathological narcissism is at the root of terrible suffering. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot stand out as examples of leaders with narcissistic personalities who exterminated millions, all because of their extreme grandiosity—they believed that only they had the answers.
