Pretense of Knowledge - Dan Cassenti, Novelist

Concept: Narcissists have a predisposition to try and appear wise to others. When gatherings turn into discussions, expect a grandiose narcissist to assert domination over the conversation or a covert narcissist to speak up and disagree with others at times and show their contempt for various points through non-verbal signs. In both cases, the narcissist inserts an aura of knowing better than others. Sometimes this is the case, but typically narcissists are not as knowledgeable as they pretend to be. A life of feeling that they compete with others makes them less likely to acknowledge experts’ superior knowledge. This does not mean that narcissists are averse to gaining knowledge. After all, they can often weaponize their knowledge to get the better of someone else, but they tend to fill in the gaps in their knowledge with distortions that serve their narratives. Even when they had the education to know better, narcissists often replace knowledge with distortions to serve their narratives.

Testing someone who you suspect of narcissism: Research the suspected narcissist’s claims. You’ll find that many of the narcissist’s claims do not hold up under scrutiny.

Examples:

A trained therapist diagnosing a non-client.
A businessman claims that given someone in the family knew a field, he knows it too.
When a lawyer contradicted Willard’s claims on a legal matter, he started ranting about how they’ll give a law degree to any idiot these days.

Advice: Narcissists often push the idea that they are knowledgeable but fail to produce evidence or logical reasoning. Giving a narcissist the benefit of the doubt is never a good idea.

Narcissism Encyclopedia

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