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Interesting! One often wonders how much misery the world would have been spared if certain other people with what was clearly NPD had either snapped first and done something that resulted in their removal from society or been diagnosed and put away before they could do any harm: people ranging from Mohammed to Napoleon to Hitler and beyond.

All of them thought they were special people and specially annointed by Fate and thus were beyond the strictures that applied to normal human beings. They appear to have been sane enough to capitalize on these things politically, or perhaps they just happened to come along at the right time, when the societies around them were so chaotic or weak that they were able to gather followers.

I think the thing that confuses some people is that there are things they believe Breivik was correct in saying. But aside from the fact that virtually anything that sounds sane in “his” manifesto was literally taken from the writings of other people (IIRC, about 2/3 of its 1500 pages are quotes from other people’s work), that particular type of insanity does seem to be very much prone to attach itself to a cause.

Paranoid schizophrenics are in their own world of fear and anger and are genuinely reacting to something they think is a threat to them, even though it is literally a hallucination; but people with NPD need a stage and an entire drama to highlight them.

Eric Becker, in one of his excellent books, commented that during the French Revolution (during the Terror, particularly), the mental asylums were emptied out and nobody noticed the difference, because suddenly all the lunatics had attached themselves to a violent cause where their insane behavior then appeared perfectly normal.