God Wants You Dead: Narcissistic Injury
Just as the identities we create for other people and things help us model their behavior, the identities we create for ourselves help us model our own behavior. We have a great deal of control over our own behavior, so our predictive models, in some respects, are also self-fulfilling prophecies.
If you think that you are the type of person who would rush into a burning building to save a child, then there is a good chance that you will. If you don’t live up to this self-image, you will either have to change it or continue pretending to be something you are not.
We constantly modify our self-images. How often have you done something and then said to yourself “That wasn’t like me at all!”? When that happens, you are faced with the choice of changing your identity model to fit the facts or deciding that you will not do such a thing again.
- God Wants You Dead
by Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg
An apt description of what drives people to do things even they don’t understand.
