Is Nassim Taleb a Narcissist?

In The Minimal Self, Lasch says, “The minimal or narcissistic self is, above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union.” The narcissist inhabits a world of struggling fantasy, discovering and fighting battles against the world in general. Illusion is the narcissist’s life-blood. He strives continually to “attempt to restore narcissistic illusions of omnipotence.”

The narcissist has no ideal as an end point of such striving, no vision, no strategy; merely the objective of being in control.Is Nassim Taleb, the trader/statistician narcissist? Well, let’s take a look.

Does he attempt to remake the world in his own image, when he determines to get rid of all the social scientists and journalists, basically, anyone who is not him or criticizes him? Check. Is he prone to merge into his environment in blissful union? Check.

Isn’t it funny how such an independent thinker has such strong opinions about following archaic religious traditions, thus completely dissolving into such a subculture? Wouldn’t an independent thinker be more interested in struggling with the truth of a given religion, and to engage in an investigation of the factual claims made rather than hand wave the things that most people take most seriously? Of course, an independent thinker would do just that.

But Taleb, when he takes a break from trying to fight his illusory war against civilization, decides to minimize himself into just another modest worshipper of religion – no critical thinking, no questions asked.Now for the final part. What is Taleb’s vision? Nothing on particular. But anything that threatens his control is automatically considered bad.

Hence his war on GMO’s (how dare other people control the food he eats?) or his war on employment and paychecks (which restrict freedom), he once wrote “never trust anyone who needs a salary, unless it’s minimum wage, thus condemning billions of people to the category of” untrustworthy” and then he praises those same people as doers and not charlatan thinkers. There is also his war against centralized government. Again, the simple formula is” anything that takes control away from me is evil.” Yet he does not seem to realize how little control he or anyone of us actually has.

A bona-fide narcissist, he constantly switches between the man who calls others phonies, frauds, charlatans, idiots, fools, imbeciles, intellectual-yet-idiots and so on, that is, the man who knows everything about human psychology, cognitive bias, finance, economics, politics, ancient languages, and history, and the man who is deeply submerged in tradition, is in awe of ancient texts that have survived the test of time, takes no credit for his ideas, pays tribute to the blue collar worker, has immense respect for intelligence that cannot be verbalized, and so on… The last formula is to discredit those he disagrees with, takes up any and all positions that are extreme, controversial, contrarian, self-serving, all to prove to anyone who listens, typically those who call him “maestro” – that his knowledge is greater than than the sum of human knowledge, but he knows the appropriate time to be humble, thus embodying the perfect image of the human being, which the sages and prophets have been preaching about for millenia. How lucky for us…

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Related posts:

1. Antifragile Summary (9/10)
2. Skin in the Game Summary (8/10)
3. Resolving a Talebian Paradox
4. How to Read Nassim Taleb?