With all the promos for Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything, which chronicles the lead-up to Elizabeth Holmes’s being remanded to prison, many have asked if she is a master manipulator, autistic, or some combination of both. And yet, we also have to ask ourselves what is our obsession with trying to label someone? I guess it’s human nature and I am no different. When we understand why someone does the things they do, we feel more in control of a situation. There are a subset of autistic people who exhibit narcissistic traits and I believe she is one of them. I have encountered people like her before and it is truly frightening to experience someone so cold-blooded and calculating, but also bewildering as it is someone who shares the same autism as I do.
What sets a narcissistic person apart from someone who is autistic? There are few people who truly have Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), which research estimates to be about .5% to 6.2% of the general population, while looking beyond a clinical diagnosis, to include people with those traits or behavior, it rises to 15% to 30% of the population. Some of the same traits translate for both, including a need for admiration, lack of empathy, low self-esteem, self-centered, and a tendency to exploit and manipulate others. As such, it can be hard to distinguish who actually is truly a narcissist or just someone who exhibits those tendencies. What I believe is happening is that there is a subset of autistic individuals who are more prone to narcissistic tendencies because they lack social awareness, an understanding of societal norms, and an ability to relate to those that are different.
The prevailing attitude about autistic people is that the majority of them are truthful to a fault, so many feel they are incapable of lying. Some autistic people also have a strong sense of justice and are very loyal to those they are close to. While some autistic people hold these traits, not all of them do and the spectrum can run the gamut from those who are savants to those who are intellectually disabled, so it is not fair to group all who are autistic together. I myself identify as autistic and do have a strong sense of justice and it boggles my mind that some of us can exhibit extreme narcissistic traits; and I believe many do lack cognitive and emotional processing, and as such, it can lead some down this path if they have low self-esteem and are very self-centered. Without the cognitive and emotional processing, they can lack empathy for others and hyper fixate on their delusions of grandeur because they have low self-esteem. This then leads to constant lying and manipulating of others for their gain.
I have encountered these very people in my life and have been fooled by them because you never think someone is trying to manipulate you at every single level. It is devastating to know someone can do this to you and it’s hard to explain it to someone else. Still, I can sympathize with who they are because I understand they are not a true narcissist, but have been lead down this path because of autism. I have to wonder what the correlation is between those who are diagnosed as NPD and autism. For many who are autistic, we engage in masking to help navigate social situations and that is the armor we wear to protect ourselves, but if someone has narcissistic tendencies, masking only seeks to amplify how they disengage with others and hide their true emotions in order to make themselves look better.
Does Elizabeth Holmes have autism? I don’t know, but if she did, I would wager that she has extremely low self-esteem and seeks out men with power to flank her so she may be brought to their level. Because of this low self-esteem and being self-centered, it would be easy to fake a multi-million dollar business in order to inflate her own ego and make herself look more powerful than she really is. Because she lacks empathy, she will feel little to no remorse and will never take responsibility for what she did because she does not think about the people she has harmed. At her core, she is a scared and small child who doesn’t truly understand this world but disperately wants its approval and this is how she truly sees herself. This does not excuse what she has done, but it explains how she explains what has happened around her and not what she has actually done.
