According to new research from Queen’s University Belfast, narcissists are some of the most successful people in the world. If you spend your life marauding around with a bellyful of unearned self-worth, it’s claimed, you’ll soon develop a mental toughness that will drive you to beat your more humble peers in education, work and romance.

This is depressing news, but not entirely surprising. Everywhere you look, it’s perfectly clear that the narcissists won long ago. Social media drips with wrongheaded opinion masquerading as violent certainty. The buzziest television programme of the day, Love Island, is essentially just a petri dish of obnoxious self-adoration. Untalented colleagues get promoted above you because they are unafraid to gelatinously network. The world’s sole remaining superpower, for crying out loud, is run by a man who looks like the cartoon you’d draw for a monkey to make it understand the basic concept of narcissism. It’s everywhere. We’re drowning in it.

And it’s exhausting. For all the claims that narcissists enjoy a better quality of life than everyone else – they do better at school, they get better-paid jobs, they have more sex with more people – I’m still not convinced. In fact, it makes me feel like I should timidly poke a little flag in the ground for the meek. You know, if nobody minds.

I shall do this by discussing a television programme I like. My favourite moment from Lost comes near the end. While most of the characters are fighting tooth and nail to secure a victory that they know in their hearts belongs to them – a victory that represents their ultimate destiny, no less – we bump into Rose and Bernard, a couple who we haven’t met for a while. As everyone else shoved and fought and clawed for a greater purpose, Rose and Bernard simply sloped off into the background to create a quiet little life for themselves. They didn’t have a lot, but they didn’t want anything more. And they were the happiest characters in the entire series.

This is how I feel about narcissists. They’re charging around, their lives a binary tickbox of things to conquer, and for what? It’s telling that Dr Kostas Papageorgiou, whose brainchild this new research was, had to pretzel himself into all sorts of contortions just to make narcissists seem even remotely decent people. “Narcissism is considered as a socially malevolent trait,” he said. However, he added that things would be so much different if only “we could abandon conventional social morality, and just focus on what is successful”.

Oh stupid conventional social morality, why are you always getting in the way of success? Can’t you see all these subclinical narcissists desperate to gobble up the world and fart it out for their own stupid means? Look into their eyes, and see what your basic expectation for them to be even superficially pleasant people is doing to them. You’re draining them of their life force.

Can’t you let them off the hook for one day? Just one day to let them be their true selves. Yes, admittedly by the time that day ends the financial industry will be in ruins and we’ll all be dead from a nuclear firestorm. Yes, the only survivor would be Pants Man from The Apprentice and, yes, he’d quickly die from trying to have sex with a shattered mirror. But that wouldn’t matter, because we would have finally allowed these people to be their true selves just for a moment. Who are we to deny them that?

If this research has taught me anything, it’s that I’m even more in love with the idea of conventional social morality than I thought. Before, it was just a loose collection of rules that kept everything together. Now, though, I can see it’s nothing less than a firewall for arseholes. If we drop it for even a second, the narcissists will barge through and eat happy self-doubters like us alive. Social morality is all we’ve got. We should protect it with everything we have.

And here ends the lecture on narcissism by a man who gets paid to shout opinions to hundreds of thousands of people next to a giant picture of his own face. The lecture on self-awareness comes next week.

• Stuart Heritage writes about film, TV and music for the Guardian