Like many, I have been fascinated by Steve Jobs. The former Apple CEO was a businessman of extraordinary charisma who paired a dramatic, theatrical presence with an unyielding drive. While not a particularly talented engineer, he pioneered the home computer revolution and earned over 450 patents for inventions ranging from speakers to user interfaces, to even staircases and lanyards. One of the very first biographies that I read as a kid was his, written by Walter Isaacson. It tells the tale of a misfit whose famous sprezzatura towards rules has become the smokescreen of choice for all tech poseurs and wantrepreneurs. The book is a deeply captivating read, and one that goes into the mind of a very polarising personality who was called a narcissist by many and whose reality-distortion field famously warped people’s sense of time and difficulty, coaxing, coercing and cajoling them to get the work done.
The best-seller is a compulsory read for aspiring entrepreneurs. And Jobs’ example—along with those who sought to emulate him—has spawned a generation of young men and women who embrace work as an obsession and has shaped the tech economy in ways that, in hindsight, are quite surprising. However, as history has taught us, for every Jobs, we get ten Elizabeth Holmes. Which leads us to the question: do narcissists make good leaders? And more importantly, are they good for us? These questions are endlessly asked of presidents and chief executives. It is rarely asked of judges.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the famous tale of Narcissus, who wastes away gazing at his own reflection. Narcissus does not know the face is his own and mistakes himself for the world. Sigmund Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism and his 1931 paper Libidinal Types introduced the narcissistic personality type and gave the term its current popular currency. Heinz Kohut’s The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (1971) recast narcissism as a healthy developmental need, and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979) diagnosed a whole society.
Lasch’s work is particularly interesting as it argues that the late 20th-century capitalism transformed individual psychology into a defensive and self-absorbed response—a survivalist focus on self that shifts the traditional Victorian neuroses such as phobias towards “disorders of the self”, marked by emptiness and compulsive self-surveillance. When people lose faith in societal structures, they start to retreat into hyper-focusing on their personal universe, and a narcissistic culture replaces genuine achievements with performance, vanity and visibility. Some escape into a grandiose self-conception of reality centred around themselves, viewing others merely as instruments for utility.
Almost all leadership research measures narcissism as a continuous trait in normal populations. In a widely cited 2007 study of chief executives in the American computer industries, Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick found that narcissists did not make their firms better or worse on average, only more volatile. In other words, they do not increase outputs on average but widen the spread—they either go big or go home.
The case for narcissistic leadership comes mainly from Michael Maccoby’s Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons. He argues that narcissists are good for companies in extraordinary times—when firms need passion and daring to move in new directions—, but can lead them into disaster by refusing to hear warnings. His practical remedy is to place a trusted sidekick who keeps the visionary grounded in operational reality.
Narcissism in politicians is a pure psychological spectacle. In a cultural landscape filled with macho men and self-possessed, image- obsessed mass-media, a politician’s primary goal is not governing well but managing impressions. Because modern life makes individual citizens feel small and powerless, voters look to politicians not for civic representation, but for psychological compensation. In this climate, for a narcissistic politician, the institution is identical to the self. If a court rules against them, the court is corrupt. If the press criticises them, the press is evil. What contains hubris is fear of losing an election, fixed term limits, a sceptical and powerful colleague, and the ability to be laughed at and to listen. In sum, narcissists can make good leaders, but only when their appetite for the grandiose is checked by people and institutions they cannot bend to their will.
However, almost every one of the constraints mentioned above is weaker or non-existent for judges of constitutional courts. In many ways, judging is the work narcissism does worst. The checks that contain hubris in public life, the next election, the fixed term, the board that can dismiss, are deliberately absent from constitutional courts, and for very good reason—a judge must be free to displease the powerful.
Judges themselves have been the most candid about the risk. In Aravali Golf Club vs Chander Hass (2007), the Supreme Court observed that judges “must have modesty and humility, and not behave like emperors”. In Mohammad Naim (1963), the court had cautioned that judicial pronouncements “should not normally depart from sobriety, moderation and reserve”. Justice Robert Jackson of the US Supreme Court in Brown vs Allen (1953) offered a disarming confession: “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final”. What these voices share is not suspicion of judges but an understanding that an office insulated from external checks must carry its checks within it. But when the checks fail, hubris may set in. The US even has a folk name for it: Black Robe Fever, which a retired judge, Steven Platt, described as the syndrome where donning the robe brings out every latent character defect.
India has tried to write those internal checks down. In 1997 a full-strength Supreme Court adopted the Restatement of Values of Judicial Life, which asks a judge to “practise a degree of aloofness consistent with the dignity of his office” and to remember that he is “under the public gaze”. However, it names no enforcer and no sanction, and the in-house procedure the judiciary adopted in 1999 to examine complaints against judges works in confidence, so its outcomes guide no one.
Ronald Dworkin’s ideal Hercules has superhuman skill and patience. Hercules is a regulative ideal to strive towards and not a likeness to be recognised in the mirror. The danger is not the person who aspires to be Hercules but the one who believes he already is. Ironically, the more a person sees Hercules in the mirror, the less he does what Hercules does.
Saai Sudharsan Sathiyamoorthy | Advocate, Madras High Court
(Views are personal)
