Over the weekend, President Donald Trump railed against his Democratic opponents and former Senator John McCain on Twitter. Political observers were aghast that the President would take such an undignified act days after a gun man who claimed to be a white nationalist and cited Trump as an inspiration murdered more than 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand.
The President lashed out at the media for good measure, accusing news outlets of wrongly blaming him for the massacre.
"The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!" he wrote today.
Bill Eddy is a lawyer, therapist, mediator and the co-founder and Training Director of the High Conflict Institute. His most recent book "Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths―and How We Can Stop" looks at how changes in traditional and social media have created incentives for high-conflict people, like President Donald Trump, to enter politics.
We spoke with Eddy over the phone. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Tana Ganeva: Can you explain the concept of high-conflict people?
Bill Eddy: Yeah I've been studying and writing about high-conflict people in legal disputes over 20 years. High-conflict people have four main characteristics. First, they are preoccupied with blaming other people and don't take responsibility. Blaming others is number one. Then, there's all or nothing thinking. And their solutions are extreme. It's either, "always" or "never."
They might say something like "You always do this, or you never do that." Things like that.
The third quality is unmanaged emotions. Emotions often distract them, pull them off course. So that's when you see behavior like yelling, screaming and punching holes in walls. The fourth is extreme behavior. 90 percent of people would never do the things they do. Let's say, spreading vicious rumors on the internet or lying, stealing, hiding things, breaking things at work.
So the pattern is: blaming others, all or nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, extreme behaviors. We see these people at every level in society, but we've started seeing more of them enter politics much more over the last twenty years.
Tana Ganeva: Oh no, why the change?
Bill Eddy: I think a lot of it is emotional media. Things that can go viral, like Facebook, Twitter. It creates an emotional charge. They escalate it. Even visual media, screen media, with television being the biggest. Radio too, in terms of the emotions of a voice. But a lot of our new media is screened media and that registers for us as more emotional.
Plus, there's competition among media for attention, which means we're getting more and more extreme behavior by people. That's what grabs attention: media clicks. Step-by-step, every few years, you have to engage in more and more extreme behavior to get attention.
So that attracts high conflict personalities who thrive on conflict, crisis, chaos and fear.
Because that's what grabs our brain. We don't realize how today's high emotion media works for our brain and makes it hard for our brains to process. High conflict personalities are the best at this.
My analogy is, it's like basketball with tall players. They're the best at it because they're closet to the hoops, so they're more drawn to the sport!
Tana Ganeva: How is that linked to narcissism and sociopathy?
Bill Eddy: OK. Narcissism and sociopathy or anti-social behavior. So there seems to be five flavors of high conflict people. Narcissists and sociopaths are the two who are attracted to politics and leadership positions. Narcissism disorder is characterized by a drive to be superior. It's having a lack of empathy, grandiose ideas, fantasies of unlimited power.
That's what gets them into politics. Fantasies of unlimited power is one of the characteristics that SOME narcissists have, a lot don't, but some do.
Anti-social disorder is different. The key traits are a drive to dominate others. It's also marked by deceitfulness, lying and conning. They're highly aggressive, with boundless energy for dominating others and a lack of remorse. They don't care if they lie to you, steal from you - they don't care.
Not all of them are in politics of course! Some of them are petty criminals, some of them are on Wall Street. But they can often get into politics because of their ability to charm people and attract attention.
And you see this at all levels: running for school board, Mayors ... it's not just leaders of nations.
Tana Ganeva: Who are some recent public figures that come to mind?
Bill Eddy: I include 11 of them in the book. Including our current president.
Caveat: I don't diagnose personality disorders in people I haven't met. I'm merely observing that Trump has the characteristics of a high-conflict person. So this is not a diagnosis. But, he blames others. He's blamed over 500 people so far, according to the New York Times. He offers all or nothing solutions: No people from Muslim countries, for example. He wants to eliminate even a single person from slipping across the border when there's other problems that're much more significant.
He deems one group all good (his supporters), another all bad.
When you think about it, people who support him are all good -- until they don't support him and they're all bad. Jeff Sessions is one example. He had glowing things to say about Jeff Sessions until he didn't. Suddenly, Sessions is terrible, disloyal.
As for the unmanaged emotions ... it's classic and can be seen with his Twitter rants.
His emotions take him off track. You would expect someone in a position ... to just ignore stuff like criticism. But if someone criticizes him, he hits back ten times harder. He needs to fight off criticism.
And he exhibits extreme behavior and the threat of extreme behavior. For example with North Korea, threatening fire and fury unlike any in history.
His own past behavior like firing people, not even face to face, but on the TV news. Comey saw it on the TV screen that he'd gotten fired. It's all very extreme behavior.
There's his drive to be admired. There's his deceitfulness. A narcissist might exaggerate and inflate, but they don't necessarily lie. Actual deceit is anti-social.
And if he's anti-social, he's got a lot of secrets to cover up and he's engaged in a lot of bad behavior.
Tana Ganeva: What're are the dangers of high conflict people being in office?
Bill Eddy: The biggest danger is they can't stop themselves. They don't reflect and change. When something goes wrong, they charge forward. They can't learn. They just become more and more defensive. Then the more dangerous they become to their targets, to the people they blame.
Let's take a look throughout history and in other parts of world even today. Take a look at Duterte .... he's decided that drug dealers are his target of blame.
So he has the police going through neighborhoods killing people. Thousands of people have been killed because in his mind these are the people who are evil -- and his solution is all or nothing.
It's dangerous to be in a minority group with someone like Trump as President. Because that's going to set off other people with high conflict personalities and generate violence. Because, emotions are contagious. If you're giving an emotional speech and saying someone else is the enemy, somebody's emotions are gonna get hooked in with it.
Let's say, sociopaths are four percent of the population. They're going to get excited about him saying things like this. And only a handful of people can do a lot of damage, as we just saw.
Tana Ganeva. Well, that's terrifying. Especially since the killer in New Zealand streamed his killing. Clearly he exploited our current obsession with virality. What's the solution?
Bill Eddy: You have to educate everyone. People must learn how to discriminate between political differences and personality problems.
And it can be on the left or the right. We need to be more aware. They can sprout anywhere. We're seeing them sprout in many countries, especially in the current media environment. If there's new media, it goes viral so quickly. People don't digest it and can't tune it out.
But we have to get better about not electing people like that.
Tana Ganeva: Is there such a thing as a pro-social psychopath?
Bill Eddy: They could be successful for a while, like in business. Enron had at least one anti-social personality. There's some criminal behavior that people get away with. They can succeed in something for a while, but then it becomes dangerous and illegal. It's all about behavior and patterns of behavior.
They're really in it for themselves.
My belief is that these personalities may do some good but that we need to reign in their dangerous behavior.
And often it's a scam or illusion. Look at Theranos. That wasn't good, it just looked good. A lot of schemes look good. That's the nature of a scam.
Now, I'm not saying you need to lock up 4 percent of the population! But we need to keep our eyes open to scam artists.
No one falls for internet scams anymore, people just need to keep their eyes open.
It wouldn't hurt to educate people. My books can be read by high school and college students. Most of my other books are high conflict people in divorce, in the work place, the neighborhood. They seem to be increasing everywhere. Why we're writing about hip in politics.
It's not about politics, it's about personalities. What they believe and what they say ... its not just people on the right or people on the left.
My book ends on a blank line. Who will be next? In the US you've got McCarthy, Nixon, Trump ... and then a question mark. It could be on the left or right. But they tend to be on the extremes.
There's hope in education! The more people learn this, the easier their lives are. I'm not hopeless, I'm encouraged.
