SATURDAY: What the Sam Hill is megalomania?

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2024

We decided to give it a look: Yesterday, we heard a throwaway comment about "megalomania"—a comment directed at Elon Musk.

That said, what the heck is megalomania? For example, is it an actual clinical term? We decided to give it a look.

Below, we'll start you on your search. First, though, some recent findings by the New York Times' Linda Qiu.

Qiu decided to fact-check Musk's claims about this past week's original budget bill—the bill which was voted down after Citizen Musk, and then Citizen Trump, complained about its contents. 

She decided to fact-check Citizen Musk! Regarding this intervention, an earlier report in the New York Times had asked us to believe such improbable claims as these: 

Elon Musk Flexes His Political Strength as Government Shutdown Looms

[...]

In more than 150 separate posts on X, starting before dawn on Wednesday, Mr. Musk demanded that Republicans back away from a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. He vowed political retribution against anyone voting for the sprawling bill backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called Mr. Musk on Wednesday to ask that he stop posting about the bill.

Mr. Musk also shared misinformation about the bill, including false claims that it contained new aid for Ukraine or $3 billion in funds for a new stadium in Washington. By the end of Wednesday, Mr. Trump issued a statement of his own, calling the bill “a betrayal of our country.”

It was a remarkable moment for Mr. Musk, who has never been elected to public office but now appears to be the largest megaphone for the man about to retake the Oval Office. Larger, in fact, than Mr. Trump himself, whose own vaunted social media presence is dwarfed by that of Mr. Musk. The president-elect has 96.2 million followers on X, while Mr. Musk has 207.9 million...

This week also marked the first time Mr. Musk has been able to use his website as a digital whip, driving lawmakers to support his desired outcome. 

[...]

One of Mr. Musk’s first posts about the spending bill came at 4:15 Wednesday morning in Washington.

“This bill should not pass,” the billionaire wrote on his social platform.

Between posts about his own video game antics and SpaceX’s satellite internet service, he used his X account to call the bill “criminal,” spread misinformation about its contents and issue a rallying cry to “stop the steal of your tax dollars!”

His posts followed a similar pattern of past activity on X, where he can become hyper-fixated on a single issue that bothers him.

[...]

On Wednesday, narrative eclipsed truth. “The terrible bill is dead,” Mr. Musk posted just before 4 p.m. in Washington, closing his post with the Latin phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which translates to “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”

"More than 150 posts?" Does anyone believe such claims about this clear-headed industrial giant? 

Does anyone really believe the claims according to which Musk "can become hyper-fixated on a single issue" as he allegedly "posts about his own video game antics" while reporting the voice of God?

Also, does anyone really believe that the man who knows the voice of God could or would traffic in misinformation? These claims seemed bogus on their face—until we perused Qiu's report.

Qiu's report took the form of a journalistic "fact check." Online, her report appears beneath this triple heading:

FACT CHECK
Assessing Elon Musk’s Criticisms of the Government Spending Deal
The world’s richest man posted or amplified inaccurate claims about the bill’s provisions for congressional salaries, a football stadium and biological research.

We'll simplify it for you. According to Qiu's report, Musk tweeted that the original bill contained a 40 percent pay increase for members of Congress.

According to Qiu, his claim was remarkably close to correct. The actual number was 3.8 percent. 

(With this devotion to technical accuracy, it's no wonder his space flights work!)

Also according to Qiu's report, Musk had tweeted the claim that the original bill included a “$3 billion NFL stadium in Washington, D.C.” According to Qiu (and everyone else), that claim was just plain false.

According to Qiu, the industrial giant had also shared an earlier post which claimed that the bill contained "$60B to Ukraine" and "Mask/vaccine mandates." Those claims were also bogus, Qiu said, before moving on to Musk's inevitable but bogus claims about "bioweapons labs."

This, of course, is the Christmas season. It's a season of nutballs and fruitcakes, but also of broken toys. 

That said, on what meat doth this particular nutball feed—this extremely high-end toy? With those questions dancing like sugarplums, we return to the terms of our search:

Is "megalomania" a clinical term? Or is it simply a colloquial term of derision? 

These were the fruits of our search:

The leading authority on the term instantly clicked us ahead to its report on "narcissistic personality disorder." At its companion site, Simple English Wikipedia was willing to tell us this:

Megalomania

Megalomania is a mental illness. People with megalomania have delusional fantasies that they are more relevant (important) or powerful than they truly are. They have inflated self esteem and overestimate their powers and beliefs. People with megalomania tend to exhibit a disposition that is less inclined towards humbleness.

The word "megalomania" is no longer used in the mental health field, and is not mentioned in either the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or the International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD). Instead, this condition is now called narcissistic personality disorder.

We take that to mean that "megalomania" is no longer regarded as a diagnostic clinical term. Regarding the apparent substitute diagnosis, the leading authority on the matter starts by telling us this:

Narcissistic personality disorder 

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a diminished ability to empathize with other people's feelings. Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the sub-types of the broader category known as personality disorders. It is often comorbid with other mental disorders and associated with significant functional impairment and psychosocial disability.

Personality disorders are a class of mental disorders characterized by enduring and inflexible maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner experience, exhibited across many contexts and deviating from those accepted by any culture...Criteria for diagnosing personality disorders are listed in the sixth chapter of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

There is no standard treatment for NPD. Its high comorbidity with other mental disorders influences treatment choice and outcomes.

And so on, at length, from there. For the record, it isn't clear that Blue America's contemporary elites actually believe in this branch of modern medical science.

It's awkward to read about this particular clinical disorder. That's especially true for people who remember what the niece of the incoming president wrote about her uncle in a best-selling book whose specific assessments were almost wholly disappeared:

MARY TRUMP (pages 12-13): None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather's sociopathy and my grandmother's illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as "malignant narcissism" and "narcissistic personality disorder" in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label only gets us so far.

Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist. That doesn't mean that her assessments are necessarily correct.

Her assessments could always be bogus! That's even true when she goes on to offer this:

...A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe forms is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for. 

So the observer alleged. Full disclosure:

According to current rules of the game, you can't be exposed to such ruminations within the mainstream press corps. Within their pixels or pages or endless broadcast hours, issues of mental health and mental illness can and will be applied in a wide array of contexts, but not in a context like this.

Again, this is the season of discarded fruitcakes, but also of broken toys. At present, a large assortment of such toys can be found beneath one public figure's tree.

As happenstance has it, these broken toys emerged from a remarkable array of early childhood experiences. This seems to include membership in a father's apparent cult; abandonment at an early age by a mother who was never seen by the broken toy again; and lifelong devotion to a grandmother who (literally) set a drunken grandfather on fire one night while he slept. 

For the record, the collection of highly unusual stories doesn't end there. According to prevailing rules of the game, you aren't allowed to contemplate these matters under prevailing arrangements.

Under prevailing arrangements, Citizen Musk can be derided for his megalomania, but only in passing, colloquially. He sits beneath the other citizen's tree in what may be a broken state.

The anthropologist Cummings once wrote of these seasonal trees, inhabiting a child's perspective as he did. He penned his account in the form of a poem—a poem which starts like this:

little tree

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see          i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraid...

And so on from there. There are many different ways to describe the array of human experience.

With respect to Cummings' account, there seem to have been no broken toys beneath that particular tree. Within our plainly failing society, we've come a long way from there.

What the heck is "megalomania?" Breaking every rule in the book, we decided to conduct a search. We decided to take a quick look!