Taylor Swift Isn't a Narcissist, But Roaring Kitty Might Be, For Now

Pardon my intrusion. I know, I know, this is a quant blog. But I had some thoughts to share about the Roaring Kitty phenomenon then I’ll recede to my cave and continue my research. Look, don’t subscribe to a blog if you don’t expect to occasionally hear the author’s musings.

I bring up Taylor Swift because I have been to deep recesses of the internet where it has been argued that she is quite possibly a narcissist, if not a sociopath. I am aware that it’s quite stupid to try to diagnose anyone with a personality disorder from the snippets of their life you see online. For that you need prolonged contact and a psychology degree. But the armchair psychologist in me couldn’t resist the temptation. I think it makes for interesting conversation and could give a useful lens to interpret the Roaring Kitty phenom.

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It is difficult to talk about narcissism with people who don’t truly understand it, so let me start off with an ELI5 of its nuances.

Imagine a child that has grown to the ripe old age of 2 years. Until then, when they were hungry, they cried, and they were fed. Thirsty? Cried Pooped their pants? Cried And so on and so forth. At that age, children don’t cry strategically to elicit some kind of reaction from their caregivers. They cry simply because they feel bad.  And as far as feelings go, they are always either feeling good or bad. Their understanding of life is that if they are feeling bad for some reason, they simply need to cry, and stuff will happen so that whatever was upsetting them is sorted out. They do not know that actually other people have to figure out why they are crying and what to do about it.

To understand narcissism, you have to first understand how absolutely crazy this kind of relationship to reality is. Think about it. Imagine, for instance, if almost every time you were upset that it was raining, it suddenly stopped. What would you think? That God pays special attention to your feelings, or that you have godlike abilities? You would feel very, very special. It would be like magic, and it is the default experience of a healthy child up to around 2 years. You can already see some elements of religion here, and narcissism is very much like religion. It involves a lot of believing, for better or worse, and the narcissist is at the same time the god and the most devout worshipper.

Around the age of 2 and up to 6 years, reality starts to impose itself on the child’s life. Maybe they cry about something, but Mother decides that whatever it is isn’t a big deal, and so ignores them. Maybe they do something, like try to walk, and they fall, which in this case teaches them that mobility takes more effort than just saying ‘Up’ to an adult. These seemingly insignificant events play a crucial role in a child’s development because they start to make the child doubt their hitherto flawed concept of reality. As reality continues imposing itself, the child is forced to develop ways of coping, which promotes grow and maturity. They therefore learn, for example, that it is much easier to say ‘Mummy I’m hungry’ than to cry. A simple thing on the surface level, surely enough, but the thought involves two separate people and a feeling, which requires self-concept and introspection abilities. The child must form a concept of who this I is, and they start with a naïve one: “Well, I must be whoever Mother (or any other caregiver) refers to when they interact with me.”  They stop to see Mother and them as one and start to see their reflection in their Mother’s interactions with them. Enter self-concept, and the roots of an identity begin to form.1

Until this point, the child made no distinction between themselves and other people. It seemed to them that only they existed and everyone else was an extension of themselves. As they develop a concept of self, they at the same time intuit that if they are a self, then other people must be separate individuals too. By gaining a sense of self, they confer it to others as well. Psychology books call this process separation and individuation, and it is the exact process that separates children who grow up to be narcissists and those who don’t.

To make a true narcissist, all that needs to happen is preventing a child from interacting with reality repeatedly and for very long. There are two main ways that this occurs. One: the caregivers pamper and spoil them, cater to their every whim, and when reality rears its ugly head, interpret if for the child in a way that upholds the idea that they are special. “The mean kids are just jealous of how amazing you are”. A good example is how Alexander the Great’s mom convinced him that he was the child of a god, and not just any god but Zeus. What you get in this case is a classic narcissist. A classic narcissist is like a mangled human being. They are still quite normal, but there are parts of their psyche that are ‘deformed’. They are more stable than other types of narcissists which means they can interact with reality longer and more elaborately, which helps them uphold their BS for much longer, even though they eventually fall. So Taylor Swift cannot be a classic narcissist- she has been doing her thing for quite a while and we would have noticed if she was.

The other way a child can end up as a narcissist is by being forced to constantly reject reality, which they do when they cannot form an attachment with the primary caregiver, usually the Mother.

Winnicott, the guy who ‘discovered’ narcissism, argued that if a child doesn’t feel consistently cared for, they manufacture the feeling inside. How do they do this? This is where things get bat-shit crazy. Imagine that you take a sock from your drawer and put your hand in it to make a puppet, then you give it a name, say Mr. Socky. You then decide that henceforth, you will only talk through Mr. Socky which becomes you, and you, on the other hand, become a third party. You tell your wife or husband, as the case may be, your friends, and all your colleagues to address you through Mr. Socky. If your wife is mad at you, for example, she can’t just take it up with you directly. She has to talk to Mr. Socky, who will absorb the impact and neutralize the emotional effects of the conflict. While he is doing that, he can also cater to your emotional needs by reframing things to enhance your ego i.e., saying things like “Men, you have to deal with this all the time, your wife is crazy!”  

This part is very confusing so let me recap: (1) You made a puppet who you pretend is someone else, but whom you control and actually say and do what you want it to. (2) You told everyone to talk to the puppet, Mr. Socky, instead of directly to you, so they have to act as if Mr. Socky is really a person. (3) You also talk to yourself through Mr. Socky by attributing to him things you want to say to yourself, making it feel like an external party is giving you emotional support.

So, life is great, and you can hide away from harsh realities with Mr. Socky by your side. He is your best friend and the best friend anyone could ever ask for. Then one day, Mr Socky says something off-script, as if he had a life of his own! You can no longer will him to say or do something because at some point in this whole dynamic, you confused who was who and yielded to him your self-agency. He is the captain now. That’s how the false self of a narcissist is formed, and this whole explanation I’ve used is the plot of Mel Gibson’s 2011 movie The Beaver. The movie captures a lot about the dynamics between the false and real self, but it shows the real self as being functional. In a narcissist, the true self is for all intents and purposes dead. Only Mr. Socky is left.

Now, however much you believe Mr Socky is real entity(because he talks to you and basically commands you to do everything) in the eyes of the world, he is not a real person, and he knows that. You understand this fact, which is the only thing keeping you from being admitted to an asylum. So now you are desperate to make everyone believe he is real just as much as you do. People underestimate just how much of a role faith plays in narcissism. The whole thing is about believing. Narcissists either have the most loyal followers or the most virulent haters. Both serve the same purpose: they validate the false self by giving it attention. Anyway, you and Mr. Socky conspire to make the world believe in him. He comes up with the ideas, and you do the leg work. But Mr. Socky is really just a sock—for people to believe he is real, he must do things real people do. It doesn’t matter what, all that matters is that it gets people to believe he is real. He chooses something, say to be a surgeon. It doesn’t matter if he can do surgery, as long as he can get people to believe that he is a real surgeon. Unless what Mr. Socky decides to be is something you have some innate talent for, it is likely the case that you, and therefore he, will be suck at it. Over time though, he discovers where your talents lie and aligns his ambitions with them. This is now your life: Your whole existence is to convince people that Mr Socky is real and that he is whatever he claims to be at the time. Part of why you put up with it is to stay sane because if you were to stop believing Mr. Socky is real, he would ‘disappear’ and you would have no connection to yourself anymore.

This is what happens to a child who rejects reality. They first create a ‘friend’ in their mind, who intercedes for them, and then, slowly the ‘friend’ takes over and holds them hostage, leveraging anything the child had to convince the world that they are real. Somewhere deep in the psyche of the narcissist remains the two-year-old. Anything that the narcissist is comes from to the two-year-old in them, which is why narcissists are very childish and never grow up.

The problem for narcissists is that this dynamic happens to them when they are defenseless against it. After the age of six, a child cannot believe Mr. Socky is real. Neither can an adult. The whole thing needs to happen when a child can’t know any better for it to result in a permanent lack of self. The process does actually happen to people of all ages for one reason or another and when it does, they become a fully-fledged narcissist for a short time. This is called transient or temporary narcissism.

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One of the things that can make you become a temporary narcissist is becoming a celebrity. It is often said of celebrities that they remain at the age they were when they became famous, and now you know why. We all have an inner identity and an outward persona. When you become a celebrity, your outward persona is so much larger than life and better than you in every way, that it is too tempting to let go of your true self and become this larger-than-life persona. You can be sad old you, or you can live up to your new fname. The famous persona becomes Mr. Socky, and you believe in its myth and greatness. You become at the same time the god and the worshipper, and have a burning need to make everyone believe in it, you, too. This is why some people become famous for being famous: the dynamics of their narcissism are the same as if they had become famous for something else. Since you are not a child and cannot believe that Mr. Socky, your external persona that you adopted as a false self, is real, you get to keep your real identity and your self-agency, except you keep it in a drawer somewhere far away in your mind as you assume the role that society gives you. This is what I think is happening to Keith Gill aka Roaring Kitty.

Let’s take it for granted that this is the case. It would mean that another explanation for how he came across on his stream, other than being drunk or high, is that he is experiencing transient narcissism. He is high from being Roaring Kitty and streaming is giving him narcissistic supply which is the feeling of reassurance that Mr. Socky feels when he thinks you believe he is indeed real. That’s why he is doing the memes and streams, not to pump up the stock. What I can’t say for sure, is why on earth he is up to his eyeballs in long GME exposure. Remember that Mr. Socky tries to leverage your talents to convince people to believe he is real. Roaring Kitty could simply be using Keith Gill’s stock picking talent to convince people he is really good at it. Or maybe Roaring Kitty simply ran out of narcissistic supply and pulled a harebrained idea to gain infamy. 

I am much more inclined to believe the latter because if Keith Gill was especially talented at picking stocks, it would have shown in various other investments over the years. Trading for any other reason other than to make money introduces bias and tends to be unprofitable, so if Roaring Kitty is really just after narcissistic supply, then his GME trades might not be coming from a rational place like the first time, making them more or less a gamble. The size of the trade makes for an interesting interpretation. If Mr. Socky convinced you he is a great stock picker and commanded you to put your whole net worth in a stock, which you then did because you believe in him and anyway he has your self-agency now, then the size of it is not really meant to maximize profit but to make him look like a genius if things go well. It is a dramatic device. A real-world prop. Keith Gill won’t feel anything if he loses the money because his false self, in the form of this Roaring Kitty persona, will shield him from that reality.

Transient narcissism subsides and you return to normal as you get used to fame. It takes a lot more fame to produce the effect again which you might want to do if you are depressed and sad. The godlike feelings that narcissism produces are very intoxicating, and I’m quite sure if a cure for narcissism was found few of them would take it. So, some celebrities go through these cycles of transient narcissism as they gain more and more fame over time, but in between, there are periods where they are just regular sad old people. That’s what I think happens to celebrities like Taylor Swift and is the main reason I don’t think she is a narcissist of any kind.

If Keith is experiencing transient narcissism, the whole GME thing will end in tears for him and his followers. I don’t want you to think that’s what I wish for him and the GME apes. I want to see him become a billionaire because I like to root for the underdog. But narcissism is like gravity; it brings down anything in its sphere of influence.