The Wound and the Crown
This is part three of a four-part series about narcissism in a variety of its permutations. It describes a problem, almost as ancient as Judaism, and still important today. Part Three examines how groups disguise privileges as moral licenses.
Everyone recognizes the classic narcissist: charismatic, beautiful or powerful, the type for whom everyone else exists as a supporting character. That narcissist is easy to spot, and some of us have family or friends like this.
There’s another kind, though, one that’s tougher to see, because it doesn’t look like vanity. It looks like virtue.
Picture someone whose sense of being special has nothing to do with looks or money or charm. It rests instead on something we’re taught to admire: lineage, learning, piety, zeal for a great cause, often religious, but also secular.
Genuinely good things, all of them. Which is exactly what makes this version of our ancient malady so hard to catch.
Consider this, take something good, like ancestry, wisdom, mitzvot, courage, even the memory of suffering, and work it until it becomes “I am therefore better than you.” If special entitlements and a poor sense of empathy follow, you know you have a problem.
If contempt and superiority follow, you’ve got a real problem.
At that point the good thing is not only something you serve, it becomes proof that you’re more special. Only the self-important currency has changed. Not prettier or richer this time, but more learned, more elite, more chosen. Different values, but an identical outcome. Entitlement and superiority reduce the other person to an object.
Another form of Narcissus and Echo.
It shows up in two registers, each with a set of special qualities and entitlements.
There’s the grandiose key: “we’re so exalted, so uniquely blessed, so plainly in possession of the truth, that we’re entitled, and the rules binding lesser people don’t apply.”
And there’s the victim key, the more dangerous of the two, precisely because it wears humility as a mask: “we’ve been so wronged, so uniquely persecuted, that the wound itself entitles us. Because of what was done to us, anything we do is justified.”
Crown and wound look like opposites, but they are actually quite connected. Two doors into the identical psychology. Both are binary by dividing the world into the truly special and those who are not. Both are asymmetric, making our own needs urgent.
Beneath both lies a brittle certainty that cannot bear to be questioned.
Grandiose or wounded, the reflex is the same, usually growing from something real. A genuinely positive quality or a real deprivation, turned over time into a license.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling special. A tradition ought to feel precious to the person carrying it. But when “we are special” turns into “we are more special than you, and therefore owed,” and when the people standing outside the circle stop truly counting and become objects, sometimes even contemptible objects, we are in trouble.
This process occurs in so many settings.
A cult is just group narcissism sent into hyperdrive by binary thinking. We alone have the truth. We alone have been persecuted by a hateful or privileged world. Our leader, our doctrine, sits beyond question. Whatever we do is permitted, because God, or history, or the cause, is on our side.
A cult can sacrifice its own members without flinching, because once people become objects, even your own are expendable. Tragically, some of Israel’s enemies well understand these ideas.
Structurally, it’s identical to the controlling husband who isolates his family from everyone else in the name of his own superior judgment. Only we understand. Everyone else is beneath us, or against us.
At the murderous end of this spectrum, group narcissism becomes an engine of atrocity. The worldview driving groups like Hamas, it appears, operates in the victim register: a wound raised to the level of sacred injury, felt so deeply that slaughtering innocents is a moral good. October 7th was that logic made real.
Whether the ideology of the Iranian regime operates on wound or crown, the entitlement to subjugate is unmistakable. That special entitlement to exploit or murder sounds awfully familiar to anyone who’s sat where I’ve sat for forty years, listening to a murder-suicide, or a divorce gone so bitter a parent will wound their own child just to settle a score.
Scale it up from a kitchen table to a nation, and the structure doesn’t change one bit. Only the body count does.
Here’s the part of this conversation that usually gets left out, though.
Group narcissism doesn’t only grow from the inside. Sometimes it’s handed to people, deliberately, by leaders who know precisely what they’re doing.
Eric Hoffer gave this its clearest name. A longshoreman who wrote philosophy between shifts on the San Francisco docks, he published The True Believer in 1951, out of the wreckage of the movements that had just finished tearing the world apart. His subject was the person who surrenders a brittle, unhappy self into a movement.
What he found is the uncomfortable heart of this whole series. The true believer does not need the movement to be true. He needs it to be certain, and he needs an enemy.
When people are in real pain, and without a doubt, we are, they become available to a certain kind of leader. The one who says “You’re not confused, it’s all clear.” “You’re struggling, but it will be made OK.” I understand history, or God, just follow me. Sounds like insight, but you may be on the other end of a sales pitch; and a dangerous one. And it sounds so real, because the person delivering the pitch may believe it too.
The tragedy is that it feels like the knowing protection of a capable parent. It shows up in a moment of real fear and grief and says, I see you. I know who the enemy is. I know exactly how to protect you. And, as the register goes up, we are special — wounded, chosen, often both — and they deserve nothing but our contempt.
Just be careful when you hear these words.
People take what’s offered to them in moments of pain. It’s a human response. But it’s also how a wound turns into a political program, how a crown or wound turns into a license. The leader hands you the story, you are the true people, the eternal victims, and you take it, because it arrives exactly when you need to believe it. Once you’ve taken it, it’s brutally hard to let it go, or admit that you had been wrong.
We’re watching this happen in Israel right now. There’s no need to point fingers. There are elements of it all over the political map. But the specific offer on the table, over and over, is this: follow me, they’re the enemy, and you don’t have to examine anything. You only have to remember what was done to you. And that you’re entitled. That memory is enough. That memory is everything. That memory exempts you.
It doesn’t.
The memory of suffering is sacred. Using it to wave off healthy moral self-scrutiny is something else entirely. That’s the wound, worn as a crown.
Yes, we can see the wound and the crown in our adversaries. But the harder question was never whether our enemies do this.
When we take our suffering, and use it to excuse ourselves and our actions, without looking more deeply, we don’t honor our wounds, or our people, or our Torah. We weaponize them. We step onto the very path we find abhorrent. Group narcissism in its victim form begins by defending something sacred, and ends by denying the preciousness of everyone outside the circle.
That’s true as we respond to October 7th. It’s true for Israel dealing with the Diaspora. It’s true for the Diaspora dealing with Israel. And it’s true across our political and religious divides, wherever we struggle to keep our way of life.
The Torah suggests that Joseph and his brothers never truly healed. Beyond our enemies. Beyond the conflict with America. Beyond the huge tectonic shifts that are occurring politically around the world, we’re still a family. And we have work to do together. Wound or crown, group narcissism within our own family will not serve.
We must recognize this dynamic. Because the moment some of us decide we’re the only ones who matter, we’ve lost our way. That, and an answer from a healing place, is the subject for the final piece of this series.
