Narcissists give new meaning to the term boldfaced liar. All who have seen the dark side of a narcissist will tell you that he or she is an outrageous liar. In fact, this is one of the top — if not the top — complaint about narcissists.

That should strike you as odd. Considering the seriousness of narcissistic abuse, one should think mere lying wouldn‘t compete with it for top billing. Also, the world is full of liars. So why is a narcissist‘s lying so offensive and appalling to people? Partly because it‘s vastly different than normal lying. It‘s egregious, audacious, inveterate, and mind-boggling. Narcissistic lying is something you must see to believe.

Narcissists will say ANYTHING. They tell the wildest lies conceivable. Unless you know a narcissist well, you will never be able to divine a conceivable motive for most of his lies. Narcissists lie gratuitously, about matters great and small. Their lies are an affront to your right to see what you see, hear what you hear, and know what you know. They won‘t hesitate to say that black is white or that square is round. In other words, their lies don‘t stop short of gaslighting.

They lie to you about facts they know you know. They lie to you about what you have said and done. Even if you said or did it only one second ago. They lie to you about what they have said and done in your presence. Even if they said or did it only one second ago. They lie about what you have done together. Even if it was only one second ago. In short, they lie like somebody out of his mind or hallucinating.

They resonate between alternate and contradictory versions of an event with blinding speed. They lie so fast and furiously that they metamorphose a lie five or six times in the space of a minute — like somebody on a psychedelic trip. They lie so fast and furiously that they lie absurdly and contradict themselves in the same breath. And if you ask them which of their contradictory statements is the true one, or if you contradict them, they project their craziness off onto you by saying that you need your head examined, that you are making stuff up, that you are crazy.

That‘s because, unlike normal people, a narcissist does not craft lies he thinks you will believe. His lies are willful delusions that he wants to impose on you (projective identification.) So, he will declare the sky purple, believe it, and expect you to believe it!

Well, not exactly. It only seems that he expects you to believe it. All he really wants is for you to NOT contradict his fantasy in any way. In other words, he wants you to let his lies pass.

Why?

When a normal person lies, he is trying to get you to believe his lie. He knows you are a person, like him, with an inner life, and a mind of your own. But a narcissist does not relate to others humanly. His disordered personality never developed properly. He relates to you as a newborn infant (at the Narcissistic Stage of child development) relates to its mother — as but an object in a world that revolves around him. He learns to operate Mother like we operate robots. We push buttons and levers to control robots. He bawls to push Mother‘s buttons, making her perform a series of services till she gets to the one he wants and he stops crying. Which is her "Off" button. In other words, Mother is just a tool for him to control. Whether by choice or disability, the narcissist‘s brain does not work right: it remains forever that infantile. You are not a person to him. He is unaware of your inner life. He doesn‘t think about what you might think.

In fact, you can crash his brain by asking him what he thinks you think. The question does not even compute, because he does not recognize your autonomy. So, you might as well ask him what a hammer or a robot of his thinks. He just wants the objects around him (which are here for his sake, not their own) to behave as though his fantasies are true. So, when he tells you the sky is purple, he doesn‘t want you to believe that the sky is purple, he just wants you to behave as though the sky is purple.

Why? To make it easy for his Magical Thinking Machine to believe that the sky is purple.

Narcissists carry their contempt for truth to bizarre extremes, but they are not alone in thinking that believing a thing makes it so. There are artists (pronounced ar-TEESTS) who argue that the moon is made of green cheese for you if you choose to believe it is and that you are just a simpleton if you disagree. Many people make-believe. And many think that believing their own lies makes them innocent of lying. But if we untangle that twisted logic, we see that believing a known lie is a form of lying. To oneself. So, if a person deludes himself by making up a lie and believing it, he‘s not innocent: he‘s just a double liar.

A narcissist lives in a world that is a work of art, a product of his own imagination, a mere apparition. So, appearances are all that count. He wants the objects in his world to NOT contradict the illusions he creates. Since he wants to control your behavior, not your thinking, he thinks nothing of telling you lies that you could not possibly believe. Then he just throws a fit if you contradict them.

How does he get people to let his boldfaced lies pass? That‘s easy. Child‘s play. In early childhood he learned how to control people with temper tantrums.

Let‘s say, for example, that he makes some ridiculously false assertion, such as, "The earth is flat." You have two options. You can contradict or ignore it. Let‘s say you refuse to accept this insult to your intelligence and reply, "No, it‘s round." You try to continue, citing your reasons for saying so, but he butts in and yells "No! it‘s flat!" as often as necessary to make you give up trying to talk into his fog horn‘s blast. Since you can‘t get a word in edgewise, before you know it, the argument has degraded to . . .

    "No, it‘s round." 
    "No, it‘s flat!" 
    "Round." 
    "Flat!" 
    "Round." 
    "Flat!" 
    "Round." 
    "Flat!" 
    "Round." 
    "Flat." 
    "Round." 
    "Flat." 
   

He will repeat "flat" one billion times if necessary to have the last word and thus make the earth be flat for him. In other words, he crams his lie down your throat.

Needless to say, you find this behavior so obnoxious that you soon learn to choose your other option — to just ignore his lies. But, in so doing, you let him have his way with you: you let him cram his lies down your throat, without even putting up a fight.

Being amoral, his behavior is chosen solely on the basis of whether it gets him what he wants. At an early age, he learned that behaving like a cantankerous, irrational three-year-old works. So, he never gives it up. To win an argument, you must get down to its level. So, he brings it down to a level lower than you care to stoop. He knows you feel it‘s beneath you to engage in such childishness. Since he has no self respect, he is shameless, and behaving this way is not beneath him. In fact, unless they‘re upset and regressing temporarily to such extreme childishness, this behavior is even beneath children beyond the Age of Reason. So, even a ten-year-old narcissist is already silencing his playmates this way, simply because they won‘t quarrel with somebody the mental age of a spoiled three-year-old.

This is how the narcissist trains you to let his lies pass. In other words, this is how he controls your speech.

How do narcissists rationalize this? By twisting the course of logic a full 180 degrees, of course. While she was throwing a fit over some unwanted fact I mentioned about a third party, I asked a narcissist why she had to control other people‘s speech to keep them from saying anything she didn‘t want them to say. She said others had no right to "control her ears."

Ah, T.S. Eliot was wrong: perversity is what‘s endless.

But, no matter how big a fit they throw if you don‘t, letting the narcissist‘s lies pass is a big mistake. It facilitates his delusions, and it gives him a power rush in thus cramming his insults to your intelligence down your throat. You are spoiling that brat and making a monster of him by doing this. Yet people make this mistake because of their GOOD qualities. They make it because they do not want to get down to his level and fight all the time.

So, it‘s a Catch-22. There is no such thing as peaceful co-existence at close quarters with a narcissist. It‘s either get abused or fight all the time. Those who live with narcissistic parents and siblings truly are trapped in a crucible. They would abandon ship in a New-York minute if they could. So they cannot understand why friends, lovers and spouses don‘t just leave narcissists.

There is, however, peaceful co-existence at a distance. You can win it by teaching a narcissist that you will get down to his level. Like any bully, he can‘t take what he dishes out. So he slinks off to look for easy prey.

I used to ponder whether the narcissists I knew believed their outrageous lies. But I eventually saw that it‘s a moot point. For one thing, people can willfully believe a known lie. For another thing, people can believe a thing one minute, believe it not the next, and believe it again the third. That‘s not true belief. That‘s a psychedelic trip. Or, if you prefer Thomas Aquinas‘ opinion, such lightly held ideas are superstitions, not true beliefs.