Power as Compensation: Frustration, Narcissism, and the Emergence of Contemporary Political Leadership

This paper proposes a formal, non-clinical framework for understanding contemporary political power as an emergent effect of accumulated frustration and narcissistic compensation within coupled social systems. Instead of treating political leadership as an ideological or moral phenomenon, the model describes how low agency, repeated frustration, and external validation loops generate conditions in which aggressive, polarizing, and conflict-oriented figures gain and stabilize power. The work frames mass alignment and authoritarian drift as phase transitions in collective identity dynamics, offering a structural, measurable explanation for current global political trends without relying on cultural, partisan, or psychological profiling assumptions.