Posts Tagged ‘culture of narcissism’
Connect the dots: Narcissism in America
Due to various interruptions from the strange land of real life, mostly midterms and the transformation of my sleep schedule into something not even remotely worthy of the term ‘schedule’, I have not been able to write a full post recently. Instead, take these quotes and connect the dots. There’s not much I could add here anyway; the point should be clear enough.
If I were to speechify to a conclave of Tea Partyers, “America is the free-est…the most democratic…the best educated and most dynamic country the world has ever known, an example to all mankind,” the assembled would hoot and hooroar and applaud in dizzy exaltation. Here is the soul of the American approach to existence, bottomless self-admiration devoid of knowledge or curiosity, wrapped like a psychic burrito in the patriotism of overwrought middle-schoolers. And there are many, many of them.
…
Americans believe this stuff. There is probably no one in France, and here I include asylums, drains, and morgues, who could be so narcissistically stupid.
Christopher Lasch: (quoting from the Wikipedia summary because I don’t have my copy of the book at hand)
The book proposes that post-war, late-capitalist America, through the effects of “organized kindness” on the traditional family structure, has produced a personality-type consistent with clinical definitions of “pathological narcissism”. This pathology is not akin to everyday narcissism — a hedonistic egoism — but rather a very weak sense of self requiring constant external validation.
The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.
The friend of popular Governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice [faction]. … The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular Governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.
Technosociology
Technological developments are going to end up having sociopolitical ramifications of some sort, but nobody’s talking about them seriously.
Everyone has heard by now the media narrative of how Facebook and Twitter somehow caused the revolutions in the Middle East, as if people had any trouble organizing revolutions before. (One would expect Americans not to be so vulnerable to that way of thinking, but given the dismal state of American history education, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.) And most people have heard some variation of the theme that some new piece of technology is horribly mutilating the fabric of our society, but, with good reason, this sort of alarmism is almost never taken seriously.
But even though it is clear that the aforementioned ramifications exist and are most likely very large, academia refuses to seriously study them; it has instead confined itself mostly to studying small minority populations and repeating irrelevant, decades-old generalities, spewing absurd, crypto-Marxist excuses about the academic’s supposed duty to further social justice when they are questioned on their tunnel vision. As if justice were better served by ignoring large-scale changes that will surely affect everyone and instead focusing on the concerns of the small percentages of the population that are favored by the establishment.
One of my professors, an ex-mainframe programmer, told me a few months ago that studying Lasch was pointless, because he didn’t raise any new questions. I didn’t get what he meant then, but now I think I do. (Though I still think Lasch can be made relevant; social networking and the concomitant “personal brand” absurdity are surely feeding the culture of narcissism somehow.)
