The attacker on the French train demanded he be given his gun back.
“He didn’t say anything. He was just telling us to give back his gun. ‘Give me back my gun! Give me back my gun!’ But we just carried on beating him up and immobilised him and that was it.”
If you haven’t dealt with a narcissist, this might seem nonsensical. As if the men who stopped him would say, “Oh, so sorry, kind sir. Please accept our apologies. Here is your gun back, now please go on shooting us.”
But that is how they think. When they encounter adversity, especially adversity they cannot overcome, they will believe anything to relieve the angst. In this killer’s head, his defeat was so traumatic, that the only way his brain could cope was to demand his gun back – with an expectation it would work.
This is probably why we keep encountering Muslim terrorists who think Allah is on their side – that idea of a deity who will hand them victory shields them from having to honestly assess the reality.
I remember my narcissist once telling me something like that – that he would just demand something from some people, and the people he was demanding it of, would have to give it to him. I first thought he was putting me on, but when I realized he was serious, I tried to gently explain that was probably not how it was going to work. He didn’t want to hear it. I tried to explain how they would have no incentive to do it. He said he didn’t care. I tried to explain how much it would cost his opposition to just give him what he wanted, and how they would not want to do it, and how they would not do it. He was adamant – he would demand it, and they would give it to him, or he wasn’t going away. It worked about as well as you’d think, and when he failed, he simply replaced his certainty of his success with a focus on how evil the people he expected free stuff were, for not giving it to him.
It is amazing how amygdala damage can so warp one’s view of reality. However once you understand it, you can see how the idiots it afflicts end up so detached from reality.
Apocalypse cometh™ with even more idiots.
