Living in a reality of his own making, a narcissist is unconcerned with truth or objectivity. Honesty & consistency are for mere mortals or losers; he is not bound by them in any way. https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-a-narcissist-251ec901dae7

Even if a narcissist has a high IQ, he sounds--and is-- unintelligent because his emotional stuntedness makes him incapable of grasping essential facts of human life, particularly higher level feelings and values, as well as different perspectives on life’s issues.

While narcissists will actively espouse on many occasions how smart they are, they totally lack the capacity to be bright, the elements of which include the capacity for intellectual and emotional reasoning and debate necessary for forming rational ideas and predicting outcomes.

A narcissist’s cognitive style as well as his behavior can be best described as impulsive. He is averse to sustained effort and this makes him a lousy worker; but then he is not cut out for something as boring and unglamorous as work — his destiny is far grander than that.

A narcissist’s speech is vague, impressionistic, light on facts, and often contradictory. No matter the subject, however, his words are almost always seasoned with grandiosity, resentment, and sometimes sadism.

He makes up his arguments, such as they are, as he goes, without any regard for truth or consistency, but it is not really that he lies. Just as he is not constrained by values, he is not hampered by facts and figures, so he creates his own to suit his needs at the moment.

As a narcissist does not understand what other people feel and experience, he must rely on projection (a self-defense mechanism where he denies the existence of his faults while attributing them to others) during those rare occasions when he may try to grasp what others feel...

and think (of him and his winning schemes, of course — the most fascinating and the only, really, subject that interests him). And what he projects onto others is fairly consistent: fear, jealousy, contempt, rage, hatred, and a desire for revenge.

This inability to understand the inner worlds of other people, and his reliance on projection, is one of the reasons why a narcissist usually ends up plagued by paranoia.

While a narcissist can mimic empathy and some semblance of concern over human ideals, he cannot mimic guilt, an emotion that is completely beyond his ability, even if only intellectual, to comprehend.

His compulsion to dazzle and to erect ever greater monuments to his own glory, whether in the form of bombastic poetry or shiny palaces, satisfies his grandiosity; but it is also a way to divert attention, his own and others, from the destruction he sows around him.

A narcissist creates discord wherever he goes by inflaming the worst impulses in others and watching the results of such manipulation, while he gloats and revels in his power evidenced in having others do his bidding. He cannot help being destructive, as there are no brakes...

...imposed by conscience, on his rapacious primitive drives.

This lack of brakes endows him with a kind of perverse Midas touch: he destroys everything he comes in contact with — relationships, projects, organizations, countries.

He does not create anything of value; he is either indifferent or hostile to expressions of values in the material world. He may annihilate such expressions — books, works of art, or cherished public spaces — out of spite.

Like the Wilde’s cynic, he knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing — and he is proud of it.