BREAKING: Hostage Situation Ends, 5-year-old Child is Safe, Kidnapper Dead, U.S. Official Says

[JDPriestly]

48. You mean, there is a difference?

Any one of us can be narcissistic to some extent, but almost by definition, very right-wing people who do not believe in helping others, who want their guns and have a self-centered definition of freedom are mentally ill. Those are the traits of narcissism as well as some other mental illnesses.

Campbell and Foster (2007)[15] review the literature on narcissism. They argue that narcissists possess the following "basic ingredients":

Positive: Narcissists think they are better than others.[16]
Inflated: Narcissists' views tend to be contrary to reality. In measures that compare self-report to objective measures, narcissists' self-views tend to be greatly exaggerated.[17]
Agentic: Narcissists’ views tend to be most exaggerated in the agentic domain, relative to the communion domain.[clarification needed][16][17]
Special: Narcissists perceive themselves to be unique and special people.[18]
Selfish: Research upon narcissists’ behaviour in resource dilemmas supports the case for narcissists as being selfish.[19]
Oriented toward success: Narcissists are oriented towards success by being, for example, approach oriented.[clarification needed][20]
. . .

Malignant narcissism

Malignant narcissism, a term first coined in a book by Erich Fromm in 1964,[38] is a syndrome consisting of a cross breed of the narcissistic personality disorder, the antisocial personality disorder, as well as paranoid traits. The malignant narcissist differs from narcissistic personality disorder in that the malignant narcissist derives higher levels of psychological gratification from accomplishments over time (thus worsening the disorder). Because the malignant narcissist becomes more involved in this psychological gratification, in the context of the right conditions, they are apt to develop the antisocial, the paranoid, and the schizoid personality disorders. The term malignant is added to the term narcissist to indicate that individuals with this disorder have a powerful form of narcissism that has made them ill in the forms of paranoid and anti-social traits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism#Collective_or_group_narcissism

Narcissism leads to paranoia and then to big problems. No one of us is the center of the world. When we think that we are, we are in trouble. It's a tough balance. What we today call the "conservative philosophy" is virtually the textbook description of narcissism.

In my opinion, the characters that Ayn Rand described as her "heroes" were narcissists. Quite possibly verging on or actually paranoid.