Escaping the dead end of narcissism
We need something bigger than ourselves to rescue us from our self-obsession
One of Donald Trump’s many gifts to the Anglosphere was a surge of interest in narcissism. A quick Google will turn up a plethora of articles on the former President’s self-referential and grandiose tendencies and, while I’m no expert, the diagnosis seems reasonable. But it also seems hypocritical. Trump may be an extreme example, but many of us manifest the same tendencies, carried along by social and technological currents that are reshaping our relationship to each other and to ourselves. Just as you can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, we’ll need something bigger than us to rescue us from our self-obsession.
Narcissism is named for the Greek myth of Narcissus, a young man apparently so beautiful that he became entranced by his own reflection in a pool and fell in love with himself. A clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder is characterised by “a grandiose sense of self-importance,” “fantasies of unlimited success … [or] beauty,” a need for “excessive admiration,” a lack of empathy, and so on. While relatively few people are pathological narcissists, a quick look around the cultural landscape shows how common narcissistic behaviour has become.
Take the advent of Facetune. The app allows users to manipulate photos so they appear more idealistic and less realistic, ready to upload to social media. A Huffington Post story reports that the people shown in the images:
would be anatomically impossible to replicate: … facial structures so warped eyeballs would need to be repositioned, legs so long femurs would need to be stretched, heads so narrow skulls would need to be reshaped, waists so cinched ribs and internal organs would need to be removed.
Despite this, plastic surgeons say young patients increasingly come equipped with Facetuned selfies and a request to “edit [their] face and body in real life” so it matches. It’s not hard to work out where this ends: “a body dysmorphia epidemic.” It’s a perfect confection of narcissism—a fantasy of beauty, a desperate hunger for admiration, envy and comparison, and self-absorption, all fuelled by and fuelling an aching insecurity.
It’s not just a social media issue. Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, has spent years documenting the effect of computers and digital technology on us and our relationships. In her books Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, she describes how “social robots” and smart phones “are both part of a current assault on empathy.” By drawing our attention away from other human beings, our phones and other technologies undermine our ability to understand the world from someone else’s perspective. Indeed, she worries that these trends will lead to a rise in narcissism, as others are increasingly “experienced as part of one’s self, thus in perfect tune with a fragile inner state.”
But while social media and digital technology should bear their share of the blame, they’re just an expression of deeper cultural trends. In The Road to Character, journalist David Brooks traces the historical evolution of what he calls the culture of “the Big Me,” in which “each of us has a Golden Figure at the core of our self.” Life, for the Big Me, is self-referential. It involves looking inside ourselves for meaning, purpose, and truth. Its highest value is authenticity, meaning the outward manifestation of our inner selves. It’s a natural outgrowth of a kind of individualism that dominates modern thought, one that elevates autonomy and treats meaning and truth as something to be manufactured rather than discovered.
This individualistic mindset is reinforced by the relative anaemia of civil society, and the modern tendency to view society in terms of the individual and the state with not much in-between. Never particularly strong in New Zealand, the connective tissue of civil society has largely been an afterthought since the market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and the upsurge of social democracy in the early 2000s, apart from a fleeting spark of interest when America’s “compassionate conservatism” movement spilled over here, before that movement was submerged beneath a welter of American wars. As disconnected individuals, we have fewer external reference points to help us make sense of ourselves and to see the world through others’ eyes.
An isolated individualism is also reinforced by what Boris Johnson recently described as “deracination,” the alienation or removal of a people from their roots wrought by globalisation. These days, our ordinary cultural experiences are increasingly homogenised so that you might hear phrases on the streets of Auckland that would be equally at home on the streets of Los Angeles—more at home, in fact, as that’s where they’re likely to have originated. In a Starbucks-and-Netflix world, it’s harder to feel attached to somewhere particular when everywhere seems more or less the same, leaving the individual with little to fall back on but themselves.
So far, so bleak. But there are nonetheless grounds for hope, reasons to think that Narcissus might be able to break away from the pool, and Singer Park is a good place to start exploring them. This small and unlikely football ground lies down the road and round the corner from where I live, wedged into the side of a hill between a busy arterial road and a railway line. It’s the home of Glen Eden United, where the club president will tell you the club’s origin story with pride—of how Charlie Singer’s daughter wanted to play football and so Charlie, a council groundsman, marked out a rough piece of “unused bushland and invited passing truck drivers to drop their earth, from the central Auckland rebuilds, onto the land.” He rolled and mowed the earth into a field, and in 1974 the club was born. Nearly 50 years later, it’s still going strong, a multi-generational success story.
The lesson is that stories and traditions that are bigger than the individual can help us to see that we are part of a larger whole and draw us out of ourselves. In Singer Park’s case, it’s a story of devotion to family, service to community, and attachment to place. That sense of being rooted in a particular place is also expressed by Māori as tūrangawaewae, meaning “our place in the world, our home.” That relationship to place isn’t just an address, it’s an identity. So, too, are other cultural features like language, custom, and whakapapa. Tā (Sir) Pita Sharples spoke movingly of his own whakapapa in a 2015 lecture, describing it in these terms: “You become part of a continuum and you accept that you are a part of that continuum. You are an integral part of now and the past, but you are also part of the future through your children, your grandchildren, and those still to come.”
Tā Pita’s description also points to the importance of history to help us see ourselves rightly. When we begin to grasp the grand sweep of events, the incredible diversity of the numberless and forgotten billions who have inhabited this globe before us, we begin to realise that the world may not revolve around us. When we see the way in which cultures of the past were shaped by the cultures that preceded them, we begin to realise that we too have been shaped by what has gone before, that we may not be the self-actualising and autonomous authors of our own destiny that we believe ourselves to be. Of course, this requires history to be taught the right way—not solely as a parade of great men and women, with the implication that we could all be Kate Sheppard or Martin Luther King, but as a record of the rise and fall of ideas and cultures, of great events as well as people, and of the everyday lives that made them up. With this view of history, we can see ourselves humbly and more accurately, as ordinary as well as unique, with much to learn and less to tell.
Institutions can also help to weave us in to the larger social fabric, because they make us part of an enduring web of relationships and meaning. Take marriage as an example. Although marriages are fewer and divorces are more frequent than in the past, it’s a social institution that still exerts a strong pull. Marital infidelity is one of our society’s few remaining taboos and, because of marriage’s relationship to children, there are significant norms towards keeping marriages intact. Or consider the institution of the church. Although it’s a rather threadbare part of the social fabric these days—only around a third of New Zealanders profess any Christian affiliation and only about 20 percent of us actively practise that faith—it’s still a source of meaning and belonging and a catalyst for positive social action, just as it has been for centuries.
We should, as the saying goes, find ourselves, but we may have to look in different places. Narcissus died by his pool, held in place by his enchantment with his own image. There are many technologies and trends that would have us share a similar fate, metaphorically at least, binding us to stunted and unfulfilling versions of the lives we could be living. Culture, place, service, history, tradition and institutions—all can help us avoid the self-defeating consequences of our self-referential culture. We just have to lift our gaze.