Thank you Trina. Totally agreed. This is a wildly complicated topic. I tried to respond to this a bit in the reply to Michael above. The point - which isn't so explicit in the essay - is that narcissism is an internal struggle separately from being a 'diagnosis.' And if the cultural inputs are all encouraging narcissistic behavior, then everybody has an incentive to give in to their own narcissistic tendencies. We had a vivid glimpse of that with Trump, but Trump illustrates a more pervasive problem in the culture.
Well said. I think this nails it: “It’s not really a surprise, given the manipulations of pop culture and then of digital technology, that we’re no good at any of these things - that we were basically sitting ducks for somebody like Trump.”
I would expand on this idea. Narcissism, let’s face it, has become normalized. I think our national wealth and privilege overall as Americans; the rise of helicopter-parenting; and social-media plus iPhones are the main culprits here. We’ve trained a whole generation to be obsessed with themselves. Along with this, civics are no longer taught; kids nowadays generally know very little about the history of America. We’re all incentivized to promote ourselves constantly. It’s a little funny to me how shocked people were about Trump’s rise to power. Love him or hate him (I’m on the Dem side) Trump does seem to me to be a perfect symbol of our contemporary American narcissism. His self-obsession and tweeting; alternative facts (which have mushroomed on both political sides now); the Reality TV-ification of the presidency. This is what America has become and what America wants. There’s serious science and literature and film etc...and then there’s Real Housewives. Which one gets the vast majority of eyeballs? Answer is beyond obvious.
Last thing: I no longer see narcissism as binary; just like autism, I think it’s a spectrum.
Michael, many thanks for the comment. Yes, I agree with you about the spectrum idea. I have this strong feeling that, very soon, we're going to drop the 'labels' and will be very embarrassed with ourselves that that was the latest-and-greatest approach to psychology for a long time. The movement - which is already happening - is more towards thinking along a 'spectrum' or 'continuum.' Vaknin's way of thinking about this is an interesting challenge, though, to that paradigm - and emphasizes childhood development more than any intrinsic neurology. Basically, most people learn to share, learn theory of mind, etc, but some people don't, and that creates a wild asymmetry in their interactions with everybody else. All that gets really complicated. The point for now is just this: that we've allowed our culture to drift in a direction where we lose some societal bulwarks against narcissism - against both 'malignant narcissist' individuals and, at an internal level, against our own narcissist tendencies - and it's important, in a sort of psycho-spiritual dimension, to hold the line, to recognize what's happening, and not perceive some narcissistic vortex as an underlying reality. Thank you again
Ah this topic. So many feels here. I do think there's more to say about it than just 'build a fence around the narcissist.'
Thank you Trina. Totally agreed. This is a wildly complicated topic. I tried to respond to this a bit in the reply to Michael above. The point - which isn't so explicit in the essay - is that narcissism is an internal struggle separately from being a 'diagnosis.' And if the cultural inputs are all encouraging narcissistic behavior, then everybody has an incentive to give in to their own narcissistic tendencies. We had a vivid glimpse of that with Trump, but Trump illustrates a more pervasive problem in the culture.
Well said. I think this nails it: “It’s not really a surprise, given the manipulations of pop culture and then of digital technology, that we’re no good at any of these things - that we were basically sitting ducks for somebody like Trump.”
I would expand on this idea. Narcissism, let’s face it, has become normalized. I think our national wealth and privilege overall as Americans; the rise of helicopter-parenting; and social-media plus iPhones are the main culprits here. We’ve trained a whole generation to be obsessed with themselves. Along with this, civics are no longer taught; kids nowadays generally know very little about the history of America. We’re all incentivized to promote ourselves constantly. It’s a little funny to me how shocked people were about Trump’s rise to power. Love him or hate him (I’m on the Dem side) Trump does seem to me to be a perfect symbol of our contemporary American narcissism. His self-obsession and tweeting; alternative facts (which have mushroomed on both political sides now); the Reality TV-ification of the presidency. This is what America has become and what America wants. There’s serious science and literature and film etc...and then there’s Real Housewives. Which one gets the vast majority of eyeballs? Answer is beyond obvious.
Last thing: I no longer see narcissism as binary; just like autism, I think it’s a spectrum.
Anyway--thanks for the piece!
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Michael, many thanks for the comment. Yes, I agree with you about the spectrum idea. I have this strong feeling that, very soon, we're going to drop the 'labels' and will be very embarrassed with ourselves that that was the latest-and-greatest approach to psychology for a long time. The movement - which is already happening - is more towards thinking along a 'spectrum' or 'continuum.' Vaknin's way of thinking about this is an interesting challenge, though, to that paradigm - and emphasizes childhood development more than any intrinsic neurology. Basically, most people learn to share, learn theory of mind, etc, but some people don't, and that creates a wild asymmetry in their interactions with everybody else. All that gets really complicated. The point for now is just this: that we've allowed our culture to drift in a direction where we lose some societal bulwarks against narcissism - against both 'malignant narcissist' individuals and, at an internal level, against our own narcissist tendencies - and it's important, in a sort of psycho-spiritual dimension, to hold the line, to recognize what's happening, and not perceive some narcissistic vortex as an underlying reality. Thank you again