The False Persona: Why Narcissists Care More About Appearances Than People

Yes. How fearful someone is related to their temperament. You can have a shy temperament and still be narcissistic. You can also be adventurous or fearless and be narcissistic.

What makes someone narcissistic is that they care more for how they appear to others than they do about people. In a sense, their facade, or persona as conceived in other people’s minds feels to them as if it is an extension of their actual self. And they feel entitled to protect that self and to be perceived according to their inflated sense of self. So they feel animosity towards and challenged by others' psychological freedom to perceive reality. In other words, they require others to acclimate to their narrative and often feel entitled to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Not perceiving a narcissist in alignment with their inflated sense of self feels like an assault to the narcissist’s actual person.

If they are less malignant, they will care a bit more about people vs. their inflated self-narrative. The more malignant they are, the more drastically they’ll care about the narrative vs. how they affect others, and as they become more malignant, the more pleasure they get from harming people and feeling exalted. They feel exalted by comparing themselves to the people they’ve harmed, and by controlling the perception of those they’ve harmed and the perception of anyone in the vicinity.

You can have a shy narcissist, who doesn’t like being the obvious center of attention. (They will still need to be indirectly exalted or treasured as according to their personal narrative) They can be extremely psychopathic in the sense that they can kill their entire family in cold blood with the expectation that they can have validated a “poor dear widower who lost his treasured family” as opposed to a “bad sort of fella that leaves a pregnant wife and two kids” persona. This person may not be a risk-taker usually, but they are narcissistic because they care more about their persona than they do other people. They feel an inflated sense of power and control over the perception of other people. So despite having a more reticent shy or fearful personality, they may not fear being discovered, as they’ve had their false persona validated successfully for their entire life. They feel entitled to act in opposition to their persona and feel they still have a right to have that persona validated by other people. Simply put, a narcissist’s false persona being validated matters more than the lives of others if they are sufficiently malignant. In this case, the person who killed their family was caught and went to prison, and now has adopted the persona of a person who has found God and has the right to preach to other people. Their inflated sense gives them the right to never be responsible, and to be exalted as a victim/over-comer. Narcissists are always some form of both victim and hero. Evil forces made him do it. (Chris Watts) Victim-hood relieves the narcissist of responsibility, while heroism, or overcoming earns them praise. Narcissists relieve themselves of responsibility and exalt themselves and if others do not validate this distortion, narcissists feel entitled to overwrite their will.

You can also have a person with a loud brazen personality, seemingly fearless, or having less fear. They may act out and demand to be the center of attention, or they may simply fearlessly bully people. But as they grow older, they see the results of their behavior. They may have children, and this might cause them to feel a sense of responsibility. So this person may feel initially entitled to be exalted, they may be initially callous towards others, but as they grow older they are bothered by the harm done to others. This person may be fearless, but they are less narcissistic because they recognize that others matter and they are willing to change their behavior so that it’s less harmful. This person can be said to have traits of narcissism. A person like this will seek to improve themselves, which is something that cannot be forced from the outside.

We can’t force narcissistic folk to improve, they have to actually care about the impact they have on others. And that desire comes from within them. Or it doesn’t happen at all.

Fear only relates to narcissism in that a narcissist will worry more about how they are seen than about the well being of others. If they are able to care more about others than they do about how they are perceived by others, then they may simply have traits of narcissism rather than full-blown narcissism.

A psychopathic, fearless person, with comorbid narcissism may not feel fear at all, but they may delight in being perceived a certain way. And they may rage if not perceived that way. Narcissists take ownership of how they are perceived and feel animosity or threatened by other people able to perceive freely. They feel they have the right to dictate others’ perceptions. They don’t feel responsible for the effect they have on others. They don’t submit to a shared reality. They dictate reality and will violate people who do not submit to their sense of reality. The more malignant a narcissist is, the more they care about controlling others’ perception and increasingly malignant ones will use any means necessary. The pleasure at harm done increases with malignancy.

Fear/anxiety or an extreme lack of it is more related to temperament and any co-morbid conditions. Narcissists have an entitled inflated sense of self that encroaches on people’s freedom of perception. They feel entitled to promote and protect that sense of self to the detriment of other people. They don’t submit to a shared reality and instead dictate reality. In the place of responsibility, they feel victimized, and in all things, they are the deserving/hero/overcomer/best/most.

So yes, one can be a fearless narcissist.