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Narcissistic and authoritarian personality structures share a root: a fragile ego that resists challenge.

Research shows narcissistic individuals are disproportionately likely to emerge as leaders in groups.

When a narcissistic leader controls a military, it becomes an extension of their distorted internal world.

I want to talk about sanity. Not sanity in the clinical sense, though that will become relevant shortly. I mean the broader kind: whether a person in power can see past the boundaries of their own defended self clearly enough to make decisions that serve people other than the self doing the deciding.

Because here is what the research consistently suggests, and what I keep returning to as the world arranges itself into fresh configurations of violence: War, in a great many cases, is a failure of this kind of sanity first. The missiles come second.

The Ego Under Pressure

The ego is not inherently a problem. It is the self's organizing principle, the structure through which we navigate a world that would otherwise be overwhelming. But the ego, in its compulsively defended state, the ego that has calcified around a wound and decided its survival depends on the subjugation of some perceived other, functions as a kind of ordinary madness. Not psychosis, and not necessarily a diagnosable personality disorder, but the particular breakdown that occurs when a self becomes so defended it can no longer perceive clearly, regulate proportionately, or act from anything other than the imperative of self-preservation.

Psychologist Bob Altemeyer's decades of empirical research on authoritarian personality structures identified a consistent cluster: rigid intolerance of ambiguity, hostility toward out-groups, and a need for dominance that resists........

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