Narcissism Run Amok

You will recall the following text from Scripture: 

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

It is quickly followed by the line that there is nothing new under the sun.

We keep these in mind as we review the current obsession with narcissism. You see, we are too sophisticated to quote the book of Ecclesiastes, so we pretend that our jejune opinions are science. 

In truth, narcissism derives from a character in Greek and Roman legend, one Narcissus. Saying that certain people are acting as though they are characters in pagan legend does not feel, to me at least, to be a great scientific leap forward.

For the record, a narcissus is also a flower. If your goal in life is to become a potted plant, narcissism will serve you well.

Surely, you know that our urge to pin psychiatric labels on culture problems is not new. Tom Wolfe wrote about “The Me Decade.” Christopher Lasch wrote a book entitled, “The Culture of Narcissism.” Psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Cambell declared narcissism to be an epidemic. Others rattle on about malignant and pathological narcissism.

However it started, narcissism is now a fully-fledged disease.

But perhaps the mystery of pervasive narcissism is not as mysterious as it seems. At the least, Jemima Kelly suggests in the Financial Times, it comforts us to imagine that we belong to the more sophisticated side of contemporary culture, the kind that sees character flaws as mental health issues. At the least, it drums up business for therapists. As long as there isn’t a pill for it. 

If it were not a mental defect, we would be reduced to tempering our narcissism by practicing humility. But, you may have noticed, therapy does not have anything to say about humility.  

So, the term is now ubiquitous, and this constitutes a cultural symptom in and of itself. Kelly makes the point::

The inter­net has given us all access to vast quant­it­ies of “men­tal health” resources that have turned us into ama­teur psy­cho­lo­gists who can dia­gnose ourselves and oth­ers with any num­ber of dis­orders.

Indeed, the overuse of the term narcissism counts as a recruiting drive, one that encouraged people to replace traditional Western religion with therapy culture. According to Kelly, when we buy into the therapy culture we believe that pinning a label on strange behaviors brings us something resembling understanding.

It turns out that such understanding is useless, but you cannot have everything:

This can be help­ful in mak­ing sense of cer­tain struggles we might be hav­ing, or show­ing us we are not neces­sar­ily the prob­lem. But some­times we end up patho­lo­gising per­fectly nor­mal issues, and some­times — dare I say it — we are the prob­lem. I never seem to get offered any pod­casts on how to be less nar­ciss­istic myself. Nor do I know any­one seek­ing pro­fes­sional help for their own nar­ciss­istic tend­en­cies.

It might be con­veni­ent to blame the break­down of a rela­tion­ship or a tricky work situ­ation on the fact that the other per­son is toxic and men­tally unsound. But put­ting every­one we have issues with in the “nar­ciss­ist” box just means we don’t have to take respons­ib­il­ity for the part we’ve played. There’s something dis­tinctly nar­ciss­istic about that.

As for the moral dimension of narcissism, when we brand behaviors as narcissistic we are refusing to take responsibility. And we are refusing to hold others to account.

And then, traditional religion distinguishes between pride and arrogance. Pride, we learn from the book of Proverbs, goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Of course, the cure for excessive pride is humility. But, the issue of how we develop the right kind of pride remains unclear.

Or, perhaps, not as unclear as all that. We feel pride in performing the most simple tasks well. Didn’t Admiral William McRaven, formerly the leader of the Navy Seals, tell the graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin, in 2014, that they should begin their day by making their beds. What did he mean, but to suggest that they begin with a consequential action, one that they can feel pride in performing correctly.

We feel pride in accomplishment, in our own and in the that of family members. And yet, if we are proud of our children’s good grades or excellent athletic performance we are saying that pride, like shame, is shared. It is not unique to self-contained individuals.

But then, a problem arises.  If we gain pride for performing well in competition, what happens to our pride quotient when universities, for example, stop admitting students on the basis of achievement, or even of test scores? What happens to your pride in gaining a job if you believe that you were hired to fill a diversity quota? What happens to your pride and your confidence when you learn that you were rejected because of your race, gender or ethnicity? And what happens to your pride when you learn that your parents, people who worked hard and succeeded in this life, were really part of an organized criminal conspiracy designed to oppress and exploit certain minority groups?

Gaining true pride depends on fair competition. When the culture as a whole decides that it does not like the results of competition and therefore bans it, the basis for your pride evaporates in the morning mist. You might be able to puff up your self-esteem by telling yourself how great you are, but nothing can replace the thrill of victory, when gained in a fair competition.

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