The type of villian I'm thinking of is the kind that builds a following and then commits atrocities. Or maybe the kind that commits small-time, senseless atrocities. Or the kind that would collect a massive following and commit atrocities if he could. Every criminal has a good chunk of it. I'm talking about narcissism.

I'll start by explaining what narcissism is. I'll confine it to intellectual narcissism (though somatic narcissism is fascinating as well). For further reading, consult this page:

http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/dsm-iv.html

It has an excellent colloquial interpretation of the DSM-IV definition of narcissism and its symptoms.

A narcissist lives in a small universe in which he is the very center. Children are narcissistic by nature (especially babies), and most grow out of it just by gaining experience. The narcissist never seems to. His life is built upon two main premises:

1) I am the best at everything that matters.

2) The only things that matter are the things I'm best at.

(It's circular, I know. That's the best kind of logic, right?)

Obviously, this is bad. First, the narcissist, being the best, can do no wrong. He is right, end of story. The narcissist will never learn from his mistakes, unless he prides himself in doing so. In drawing up plans, he will never plan for contingencies, unless he prides himself in doing so.

As confident as he seems, he actually has very little self-worth. (It's believed that many times, this is the source of the narcissism.) He constantly needs people to tell him how wonderful he is. He needs affirmation and validation. He surrounds himself with yes-men, his "narcissistic supply." To him, they're the people who "get it." Everyone else is worthless. At best, he annoys the "worthless" people. At worst, he polarizes people into two groups: those who love him, and those who hate him.

Of course, he has to deal with people who hate him or are annoyed with him. Since there obviously can be no rational reason for people to do so, there must be an irrational reason. Paranoia sets in. (Though, unlike classical paranoia, people may actually be out to get him.) He often develops a "me vs. the world" mentality.

His moral judgment consists solely of deciding whether something fits into his universe. If it does, it's good. If it doesn't, it's bad. He will never admit to having that morality, but will invent reasons after the fact for having judged something in a certain way.

When confronted with the idea that he may actually be wrong - especially when he can't reason his way out - he may become violent and abusive.

He is usually at odds with actual authority. He can't stand the idea that someone else, who is not as perfect as he is, has some bit of control over his life.

He is not capable of empathy. Since his moral universe consists only of him, there isn't room for anyone else.

He is likely to have another personality disorder, such as bipolar disorder, autism, or ADHD.

He has frequent grandiose fantasies, most of which are ridiculous. Many of them involve everyone finally realizing the truth: some grand thing happens, or he fulfills his great destiny, to finally convince them.

He believes he is entitled to special favors, to authority, to recognition (with or without achievement), and to respect. He is special, after all.

He lies about his past achievements in order to convince you of how wonderful he is, and how he deserves your respect and admiration.

Now, it's rare to find all of these traits in a single narcissist, but it happens. Which show up generally depend on what the narcissist considers important. For example, the narcissist may decide that the actions of "worthless" people don't matter to him. That makes him relatively harmless. On the opposite side, he may decide that he deserves their obedience. That makes him dangerous.

With this knowledge, it shouldn't be hard to extrapolate a villian. All you have to do is decide what matters to him, and you can extrapolate his thoughts and actions, and probably communicate them in a believable way.

For further study, you might consider reading up on some Internet narcissists. One of the most entertaining is Derek Smart, the creator of the venerable video game Battlecruiser 3000 AD. Just to give you a small taste of him: he still maintains that he has a PhD from a prestigious, unnamed university, even though it's been proven that he can't have one.

Derek Smart:

http://www.werewolves.org/~follies/

One I've had the good pleasure of running into called himself "Twisted" in the Quake 3 World mapping forum. (It's a place where Quake 3 level designers hang out.) His first post there announced ten (count them! Ten!) new excellent Quake 3 maps. (He was obviously fishing for admiration.) When the Q3W regulars pointed out flaws, he had a fit. In the end, reluctantly, he fixed some of them. (All the flaws were inevitably the fault of the tools he was using.) He hung around for a while, annoying everyone to no end (because he was incapable of being wrong about anything), including some of the people who wrote the mapping tools he used. (They had made mistakes, not him.) Well, someone did some digging using his personal information - which he was vain enough to include much of in his profile - and found some interesting background:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4vop05%24ru8%40bertrand.ccs.carleton.ca

In the end, he was evicted from the forum like he was evicted from the chemistry lab.

Now, these guys aren't villians, but that's only because they don't think that controlling everyone else is important. They just want everyone to acknowledge their greatness.

What I find especially interesting is that your old-school, stereotypical villian exhibits many of these traits, though exaggerated. Could those guys actually be closer to the truth than we give them credit for?

Anyway, I'm about done typing. This was way longer than I intended.

The other thing is, what makes you think a villian has to have some kind of mental disorder? OK, I can't see a serial killer being particularly normal, but the jealous rage that brings a man to shoot his cheating wife doesn't necessarily come with a disorder (and certainly not a prepackaged one).

What about a terrorist? Well, it depends upon what kind. A more rational motivation for their behavior may simply fall in the realm of religious fervor and oppression, whether real or iamgined. Let's say someone felt the US was evil...but how do you go against a giant like the US? The military is awfully well equipped for a head on confrontation. Perhaps a seemingly underhanded plan to evoke teror is the only way. [note: I am only attempting to create a rationalization for a villianous psyche...I am not suggesting that anyone should actually try terrorist tactics.]

The trouble with the DSM-IV is that by its very nature it creates guidelines that amount to steretypes. If you notice when reading it, the guidelines almost always state something like "4 of the following 7" factors. This creates room for a wide variety of people to fall under any given category and almost no two are really alike. The danger is in creating a cookie cutter character who follows the characteristics to the letter.

From inside, everyone is the star of their own story. As they see it, they're often just reacting to their situation. Do we honestly believe in villains who say "Hmm. Girl tied to a log in a sawmill. What to do... What kind of person am I? Oh, right. Eeeevile. I know what an evil person would do here, so I'll do that!"? I don't. Some of the more compelling "villains" I've read are those who are perfectly average, normal people who honestly believe that what they're doing is for the good of mankind. (Reminds me of the _No Exit_ breakdowns: evil ignoring itself, evil justifying itself, and evil fully aware of its own horrors.)

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"Hmm. Girl tied to a log in a sawmill. What to do... What kind of person am I? Oh, right. Eeeevile. I know what an evil person would do here, so I'll do that!"?

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Have you ever read "The Last HEro" by Terry Pratchett? It stars a band of old fashioned heroes who know that you should always leave a back way out for the villian so that they can return. It also features a villian who knows to always hire really stupid guards who will be easily fooled by awful disguises. They know the rules of being good and bein eeeeeeville.

My point isn't that the old-school villians are more believable or that you should model your villians after them or anything.

My point - which I didn't make very well, because I wrote that late at night - is that it takes a certain kind of extreme selfishness to actually commit evil. I know it's romantic and all that - and it makes a good story - to assume that any normal person could be driven to commit horrific crimes while remaining fully rational (in the absence of a commanding authority figure, etc.), but it just doesn't happen. Horrific crimes, in general, are committed by people who are in some way mentally ill.

(Aside: Actually, it's still up in the air whether narcissism is a mental illness. There is mentally nothing wrong - that we can tell, no chemical imbalance, etc. - with a narcissist. Many psychiatrists think it's a character flaw.)

I'm not talking about people driven by jealous rage, or any other tragic villian. I'm talking about your Hitlers and Stalins and Voldemorts. If your villian isn't one of these types, you can skip this discussion entirely.

Christine:

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A more rational motivation for their behavior may simply fall in the realm of religious fervor and oppression, whether real or iamgined. Let's say someone felt the US was evil...but how do you go against a giant like the US?

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Are you going to assign rational motives to Osama bin Laden? Really?

To him, not only is the US evil, but so is every person in it. His golden standard for fitness is your following of his interpretation of Islamic law. If you don't, you're worthless, and can be expended to make a point. Sounds like narcissism to me.

Religious fervor and oppression are definitely involved, but it takes narcissism's unique characteristics to push someone over the edge.

Gen:

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Narcissism as a phenomenon is interesting, but I'm not sure that in fiction it would always make for a compelling or interesting or realistic villain.
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Not that incomprehensible narcisism and malevolence don't have their role in the world of villainy. It just seems a bit more complexity can also be interesting.

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Two things:

1) I wasn't advocating that narcissism be the only basis of the character. I probably wasn't clear on that, writing it so late at night.

2) Narcissism is more complex than you give it credit for, especially since it's usually coupled with other problems.

It's very interesting to note the tone of the responses to my post. Even though narcissism plays such a large part in the evil acts people have perpetrated through history, it's still very misunderstood. Perhaps it's because the traits we associate with it are so repugnant - I don't know. But it's clear that the responders don't actually understand what it is.

You're probably thinking of some pompous, arrogant individual that preens himself incessantly, tries to capture the protagonist's girlfriend, and straps the hero to a conveyor belt headed for a giant saw, giving him only just enough time to escape. Reality is much different.

In reality, about 1% of the population has some form of NPD. You'd never know it, until you do something that potentially invalidates their little universe. Then the fireworks happen.

The Hitlers, Stalins, and Voldemorts of the world are perfectly genial people in private. You'd never know they were mass murderers just from talking to them. Their public manners, though, are defined by the fact that they believe they are entitled, by virtue of their greatness, to greatness. The rest of us exist for them.

I think we, as writers, when writing villians, spend too much time trying to figure out how we might be compelled to act how we want our villians to act, and ascribe their motivations accordingly. Maybe because they're easier to write? We don't know better? What I'd like to do is step into an alien mind, figure out how it works, and then find a way of communicating that to the reader in a believable way.

It looks like I'm failing so far.

This may be unrelated, (as I feel many things here are a bit over my head... ) but this talk about bad-guys has reminded me of an acting class in college where we discussed playing the part of a villian, and how to tell a good performance from a bad one. (No puns intended! )

In order to make a villian believable, he has to be likable in some way. The technique in acting is called "playing opposites." A good example of this is Alan Rickman's brilliant performance in the hideous "Robin Hood: King of Thieves." As the Sheriff of Nottingham, he is just so cruel, and yet all the audience is almost rooting for him! (And it's got more to do with his character choices, than with Kevin Costner's bad accent-- I promise! ) Why? Because he makes himself absoluting charming, even though his actions are revolting and evil. If you've been to a stage production of "Les Miserables," you'll know what I mean when I say that the bad guys in this show (the Thenardiers) garner the most applause. We, the audience, know they're not the heroes; we know that they are vile human beings. I guess audiences just love to hate them!

What I'm saying (though maybe not very well...) is that whether the villian's inner reasons are justifiable or not, the audience/reader should know those reasons behind it. (i.e.-- Voldemort was a poor little orphan, nobody loved him, etc.) Rationalization can be taken to the pinnacle of evil, and is usually the vehicle for arriving there. In my mind, making an evil character "believable," includes seeing my weaknesses and maybe my own tendencies to make bad choices. And seeing characters make poor-- even repulsive-- choices, makes me take a second look at *my* life and *my* choices. (I hope this isn't clear as mud... )

Shutting up,

I'm not sure that definition of evil captures everything a villian would do, however. I suspect there's a number of other cases where people, say, commit an evil act because they think it's going to help the greater good. To them it's self or-group-defense, and how you're defining it is going to make a difference. If they didn't have the information we do, can we judge them on their actions based on what we--with superior knowledge--would have done?

>Are you going to assign rational motives to [terrorist]? Really?
You don't have to assign motives to someone to recognize that they have them, and that to them, they probably seem rational. (And like Christine, I AM NOT saying terror makes sense; by its very nature it is a senseless act. But for the purposes of debate...) There's a difference between saying they *have* rational motives and saying they *think they have* rational motives. I think some of the confusion here may be the difference between being someone and seeing someone. Even when we imagine ourselves in their head, we still bring our own baggage along.

Actually, there are many more terrorists in the world than Bin Laden...though he was one that clearly came to mind. And as a matter of fact, I have tried to assign a rational motivation to his behavior because rather than just being a part of the mob mentality, I am a curious student of human behavior. As a writer it is my JOB to assign rational motivatins to monsters even as bad as that. It is not my job to like them or their motivations, but it is my job to give the reader something deep in his psyche. I believe he thinks he is doing the right hing.

Now does this constitute a personality disorder? We are inequipped to disagnose him. Maybe. But more important, who cares? What does a label do for our villians? How does a label help us understand their motivations? Personality disorders are overdiagnosed and very shallowly understood even by experts. In my opinion, they do not even constitute the best starting point in characterization.

So back to my original point. Who cares if someone is narcisistic or not? What does that do for us? The question of how they got to be the way they are is of quite a bit more importance in predicting future behavior and establishing realistic crimes for a villian to perform.

[This message has been edited by Christine (edited March 16, 2004).]

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How are we defining evil? Because if we're saying terrible acts _for selfish purposes_, then yes, only narcissists will be able to commit evil under that definition.

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Yes, but don't forget that there is a distinction between NPD and narcissism. Everyone is narcissistic to a certain extent, but very few people have a personliaty disorder. A man who kills his wife for the insurance money is selfish, but I wouldn not automatical assume he had a NPD.

And yes, thanks for clarifying the difference between me thinking that a villian has rational motivations and him thinking so. We are trying to assign rational motivations from the POV of the villian, not from our own.

Gen: Alrighty, I'm going to have to get myself a copy of The Last Hero and read it in a single night. (That's how I always read Pratchett books. I just can't put the darn things down.)

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There's a difference between saying they *have* rational motives and saying they *think they have* rational motives.

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This is in part why I brought up narcissism. So many people do things for what appears to be irrational reasons, but to them, what they did makes perfect sense. What I want to get at is why ordering the execution of 10,000 makes perfect sense. I'm not aware of anybody that does things for reasons they assume are irrational in the first place.

NPD? Like "borderline personality disorder," "social phobia," and "Asperger's Syndrome," it's a bunch of symptoms with questionable cohesion, and not everyone with the symptoms has the disorder, and we're not even sure where the disorder falls or why... which is why I have problems writing from lists of "Eight Heroines Beyond Cinderella:" it's a list of symptoms/characteristics, and they never seem to create a realistic person I can see.

I don't believe the real crux of the argument is that villains should be modeled around narcissism. Rather, the point as I perceive it is simply that any villain in a story is likely to exhibit somne of those characteristics.

Achilles in the "Shadow" books by OSC definitley portrayed a mindset that placed him at the center of the universe. Sauron...the buggers (as a whole in Ender's Game)...Elemak...and so many others all display signs of (in the very least) great selfishness.

Yes, we're all selfish to a degree. And being overly selfish does not a villian make. However, a person capable of committing atrocities is either imabalanced initially, or becomes as such later.

Bob kills two men because they are known terrorists and if the government won't eliminate the threat, he will--somebody has to! This is still murder. Bob's assumption that he is above the law or is justified because his opinion on the situation is simply the only viable option makes him a villian. Not because of how he justified the events, be because he acted upon his impulse.

However...let's say Bob didn't mean to kill the terrorists. He only wanted to threaten them, keep them under guard until the authorities showed up. But they wouldn't listen, they wouln't sit still like he commanded them too. The first one came at him and he fired his gun. Now there's one dead. The other would be a witness. Bob panicks. He isn't a muderer! He didn't pull the triger on purpose! He cannot be known as a killer, but that other terrorist will speak. No, he cannot tell people what happened. That other terrorist has to die, too. It's okay, because he would probably be executed anyway. Bob's not just protecting himself, he's protecting innocent civilians from a terrorist. So he pulls the other trigger and kills the second man.

Two people dead. But Bob had to do it. There was really no other choice. It was self-defense. The other...well...that was too. Bob was better than they. He was not an evil person. They had to die.

Both of them? Yes, both of them. THe other would have Bob imprisoned. That cannot happen...Bob had to protect himself. He didn't ask to find those two plotting a bombing...he just did. Lucky for him he had a gun. He did what he had to do, what any man would do.

And it spirals downward for bob. I know that's a poor example...but the point is some people simply are 'bad'...and other's evolve that way. But for many villians, they will ultimately show some degree of pride and selfishness, and an unwillingness to admit fault.

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Everyone is narcissistic to a certain extent, but very few people have a personliaty disorder. A man who kills his wife for the insurance money is selfish, but I wouldn not automatical assume he had a NPD

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I've got to go with Christine on this one. Sure, villians are narcissistic...but not so much more than an ordinary person (remember the origin of the word 'villain').

A really effective villain won't have NPD per se.

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I think you read the first half of my post and failed to continue to the end. I'm still not sure what your point was, but my point was that motivations for villians need to be better than a label.

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Sorry, I did do that. The terrorist example totally threw me, because it seemed to me you were ascribing rational intent as we would reason it.

I agree, using the DSM as a template for a character is an awful method. Since it seems I'm unable to express myself clearly on this subject (or just today, I don't know), I'll defer to rjzeller:

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I don't believe the real crux of the argument is that villains should be modeled around narcissism. Rather, the point as I perceive it is simply that any villain in a story is likely to exhibit some of those characteristics.

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What I think the DSM is good for is to help a writer understand exactly how it is that people can think and reason in a radically different way. The NPD, for example, really does exist in a universe in which he is the very center. This drives his reason, and makes all of his irrational behavior actually rational.

By the way, just like with DID, there is a strong correlation between NPD and childhood abuse. (It's not so strong, but it's there.) One of the current theories floating around is that it's primarily a defense mechanism.

The DSM describes pathological behavior...behavior that is a form of illness. The best example is pathological liars, people that lie even when they know they will not be believed. Kleptomaniacs are another good example, they steal even when they know they will be caught. The difference between a clinically narcissistic person and anyone else is that the clinically ill person can't maintain the hypocrisy demanded by social mores.

Just as a really good liar has to tell the truth often enough to be believed, and a really good thief has to refrain from stealing until no one is looking, so too a really monstrous super villian must be able to pretend not to be a complete narcissist so as to win influence.

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Two people dead. But Bob had to do it. There was really no other choice. It was self-defense. The other...well...that was too. Bob was better than they. He was not an evil person. They had to die.

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Essentially the point is this: a villain will look at things from his own moral standard, and see his actions as perfectly correct.

That moral standard may be different to ours, but does that mean he is wrong and we are right? How do we know?

This is an interesting question, and there is no good answer to it that I know of. But the important thing for us is to remember that the villain _can_ have different morals to our own, because people all over the world do have widely divergent morals.

For instance, I have come across people who hold the moral viewpoint that any action is acceptable as long as it causes no noticeable harm to any one individual (or even is unlikely to cause such harm).

So in the mind of the villain, he is justified and right to do as he wishes. Sure there are many 'bad' people who know they're bad and really don't care (or worse, embrace it), but I would think a large number of criminals/villains/bad folk are the way they are because in their own mind, they are justified in behaving the way they do.

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Bob kills two men because they are known terrorists and if the government won't eliminate the threat, he will--somebody has to! This is still murder. Bob's assumption that he is above the law or is justified because his opinion on the situation is simply the only viable option makes him a villian. Not because of how he justified the events, be because he acted upon his impulse.

However...let's say Bob didn't mean to kill the terrorists. He only wanted to threaten them....So he pulls the other trigger and kills the second man.

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I think that the point was that you would consider the first Bob to be a villain and the second Bob to be an ordinary person caught up in a bad situation. We are talking about two different Bobs, the one killed them both for reasons that I would find sensible and just, the second killed them both for reasons that I find merely amusing in the abstract and tragic in the concrete. But your opinion seems to be that the actions of the first would be reprehensible because of his reasons and the actions of the second would be understandable though still wrong.

Which is one major problem with the DSMV of personality disorders generally...

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An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectation of the individual's culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment.

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The only criterion that I would think essential, which the DSMV has the misfortune of not addressing, is that people with real disorders are liars...they say things that aren't true. The lying doesn't have to be pathological in the sense that it is compulsive, but it is pathological in that only a person more interested in labeling all dissent as the product of diseased minds than with mental health per se would characterize people that can support their dissent with facts rather than fictions as having a disorder.

The preceeding sentence having been rendered unreadable by dint of hard work on my part, I will rephrase it more simply.

A true personality disorder (or any true disorder of mental health) has to involve some kind of delusion. If a person accurately and reliably percieves and reports the objective facts...then that person is not irrational, hence not mentally ill.

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A true personality disorder (or any true disorder of mental health) has to involve some kind of delusion. If a person accurately and reliably percieves and reports the objective facts...then that person is not irrational, hence not mentally ill.

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I'm not sure I agree with this. There are actually some valid arguments that depressants may actually be seeing the world a little too realistically for their own mental health. That those with good self-esteem, a good lease on life may be inflating their own egos just a little bit, but all in the name of feeling good about themselves. I tend to agree with this, to a certain extent.

Actually, what separates a true mental disorder from random symptoms is the ability to function in the real world. Unfortunately, like most of my books, my DSM-IV is packed. (Everyone should have one for coffee table discussions, IMO.) But there is a chart toward the beginning that gives you a 0 to 10 scale for rating how dysfunctional a person is. At one extreme you've got so healthy that everyone hates you because you don't exist and on the other you have comatose.

What, pray tell, is the real world, and what is defined as function?

Were the Israelites mentally ill for rejecting a "functional" role in the "real world" of Egypt? Were the early Christians mentally ill for rejecting a "functional" role in the "real world of Judaism? Were the later Jews mentally ill for rejecting a "functional" role in the "real world" of Christianity? Were the abolitionists mentally ill for rejecting a "functional" role in the "real world" of the antebellum South? Were the suffragettes mentally ill for rejecting a "functional" role in the "real world" of male only democracy? Were the partisan's mentally ill for rejecting a "functional" role in the "real world" of Nazi Germany?

Sure, these people all helped to change the worlds in which they lived...but so does everyone. Most of the changes depended on other forces. And most of the changes were unforseen by those agitating for change.

In some cultures, it is accepted that a person's life may reach a point where suicide is the only "honorable" option...you just have to face facts and die with dignity. I'm not talking about Imperial Japan here either (or not just about Imperial Japan). Are all members of those cultures mentally ill? Or is it dissenters from that culture that are mentally ill? If accurate assessment of your life leads to to contemplate suicide as a good thing...and you belong to a culture that accepts this idea, then how can we call your "depression" a mental illness?

What about cultures where it is acceptable to lie to yourself and others about your accomplishments in order to feel good? Is that really healthy? Can it lead to behavior which, while functional and normal in the context of that society, appears senseless and self-defeating in any other cultural context? Isn't this just how NPD tends to express itself, in an unrealistically high self valuation?

But of course this also perfectly describes most principled objectors to the prevailing culture. In fact, it often describes principled objectors better than people that have real personality problems, depending on how you define 'impairment' and 'distress'. If you limit the definition to impairment and distress caused to the individual diagnosed rather than to others, then a lot of things that are pretty serious personality problems can't be regarded as disorders, because no matter how destructive the problem is to everyone else, the individual is still managing to look out for number one. If you include impairment and distress caused to others, then being smarter, nicer, stronger, or more attractive than average is also a personality disorder because others will feel envious. A lot of times they'll actually lose out in competitive situations because there was this smarter/nicer/etc. person running around scooping up top place.

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If you limit the definition to impairment and distress caused to the individual diagnosed rather than to others, then a lot of things that are pretty serious personality problems can't be regarded as disorders, because no matter how destructive the problem is to everyone else, the individual is still managing to look out for number one.

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Very true and very scary. For instance, the DSM doesn't consider pedophilia a disorder unless the pedophile experiences "clinically significant distress or impairment" about it. Clinically significant. Which means even if he feels some distress or impairment in his daily life about the child sexual abuse he commits, if that distress or impairment is not clinically significant he's still considered as normal as the average person -- with no concern for the child(ren). I suppose for the psychological profession, that's considered job security.

My point was that the DSM fails to discern whether the disorder is in the individual examined or the surrounding culture.

Imagine a girl raised in a culture where children have their eyes and ears put out at or soon after birth (I actually read a story that went along these lines once, though the people had been bred to be congenitally blind and deaf). By a mistake, her eyes and ears are left intact...so she has extrasensory perception of a sort, she can see and hear while nobody around her can.

Because this causes her to behave differently from everyone else, the powers that be realize that she must still have sight and hearing. But they, being blind and deaf since birth themselves, don't know that these are actual senses, they consider both sight and hearing to be theoretically impossible and therefore know that anyone that claims to have such senses is delusional. Fortunately, they know that this "delusion" is commonly caused by failed removal of the eyes and destruction of the ears. So they set out to "treat" this girl by putting out her eyes and destroying her ears.

Now by the sort of criteria found in the DSM-IV, the powers that be are correct, and the unremoved sensory organs are simply a cause of delusion. True, those organs are natural and the removal of them unnatural (but not abnormal in the context of that culture), but that doesn't affect the question of whether there is a disorder.

We, with common agreement that sight and hearing are not simply delusion, can look at that culture and clearly see that the society itself is the source of "disorder", impairment and distress. The rational response would be to test the girl, and see if she could accurately determine things using her sight and hearing. If she can, then those senses aren't delusions, they represent something real.

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You are confusing a mental disorder with not being normal. Because the word "normal" does not enter into the equation. A pedaphile is not normal by any definition. However, he might not have a mental disorder. The DSM does not attempt to classify an individual as normal or not.

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