Signs & Signposts in a Narcissistic Society

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 12, 2014

Foolish men mistake transitory semblances for eternal fact and go astray more and more.

                                                         

Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881), English essayist, historian and philosopher

When the millions applaud you, seriously ask what harm you have done; when they censure you, what good!

Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman

To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true of ourselves.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Meet Your New Best Friend (2014)

Normality Defied

What is the normal experience of a child of its time?  From the beginning that child is programmed to assume the collective biases, values, orientation, and history as interpreted by the times, which includes religious and intellectual orientation. 

From that basis, the child takes on the veneer of the pleaser, accommodating the world it enters.  It develops an obsession to belong with an edginess to be included.  The level of acceptance is the barometer of anxiety.  The motivation to please leaves little energy to discover the person’s own essence or to please self.  As covered earlier, an empty vessel craves attention and affection; a full vessel overflows with kindness and caring – just the reverse of the myth perpetuated. 

A content person can become an enabler helping others help themselves.  Conversely, a pleaser can misconstrue its role and attempt to carry other people’s burden.  It can’t be done.  The nature of life is that strength and resolve comes only from enabling others to find their own way, and carry their own baggage. 

Warrick Dunn was an African American football player in the National Football League.  Mr. Dunn created a program where he built houses for the needy, paid the construction and closing costs, and the house payment for one month.  At that point, he turned the house over to its new owners who assumed the mortgage and took responsibility for its care and upkeep. 

This is quintessential enabling.  This is not charity.  This is not flaunting one’s celebrity: See how generous I am?  This is enabling where the giver takes no responsibility for the burden of others.  Sadly, this is too often the exception rather than the rule. 

The fundamental requirement is first to meet our own needs before we can assist others to meet theirs.  The paradox is the generous appearing person often is needy, and therefore self-seeking approval and affirmation of others.  See me?  I’m a good person!   Neediness represents an elemental state of emptiness, whereas a person in the fullness of being has no need to own other people’s problems.  He is more likely of a mind to enable others to meet theirs. 

The whole problem of a narcissistic society is to look good doing good.  Narcissist believe everyone is like them in neediness, and therefore of the mind to desire what they have and are.  So, in a self-aggrandizing manner, they share their wealth unaware of the damage they do.  Many parents fall prey to narcissism and wonder why their children never catch hold in life. 

Packaging Damaged Goods

The other day a mother came to me about her ten-year-old son being taunted at school.  He is a big boy for his age, quite intelligent, but at the same time, not nearly as mature as his eight-year-old sister.  “Kids pick on him, girls tease him, and much smaller boys play pranks on him that get him in trouble with his teacher.  I don’t know how many times he has come home crying.  What should I do?  I’m at my wits end.”

Looking at the mother, obviously distraught and expecting me have a ready solution, I said, “Can I tell you a story?”  Her eyes glazed over.  It was clear that she was in a hurry and desired only McWisdom.  “If you think it will help,” she conceded. 

The story I told her was about my first week in a new school at the age of eight.  I, too, was a boy big for my age and immature.  I had come home crying to my mother about a boy in my class two years older than me who was the class bully.  “When it came my time to bat at recess, he took the bat out of my hands, and said ‘I’m batting now’.”  I started to cry again remembering my anger and humiliation. 

My mother wrapped her arms around me and told me she would talk to my nun at school.  My da hearing the conversation came over to me.  “Your mother is going to do no such thing.  It is not your teacher’s problem.  It’s your problem.  Now, what are you going to do about it?” 

I studied the distraught mother’s face to see the impact of my story.

The mother looked at me aghast, “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You expect me to go back to my son and tell him that?”

“I don’t expect you to do anything.  I expect you’ve done too much already.  Don’t you think it’s about time he start fighting his own battles?”

She weighed this for a time, and then in a whisper, said, “He’s my baby, my first born.”  Then thinking about my story, asked, “What happened when you went back to school?”

I laughed.  “My da had told me before that bullies are cowards and have a need to dominate even when it makes no sense.  He also said that when kids my age fight they always do the rub-a-dub, hitting each other in the stomach, leaving their face open for a fist.  ‘If you get in a fight with this dude,” he said, ‘hit him in the fricken face.  I guarantee you he won’t bother you anymore.’ 

And that’s what happened.  I wouldn’t give up my bat the next day, and he said we’d meet after school.  We did.  He did the rub-a-dub, as my da predicted, and I hit him in the nose, giving him a bloody nose.  He kept yelling, ‘You gave me a bloody nose!  See what you did?’  Then right in front of all the guys, he started crying.  I never had any trouble again.”  

Genesis of Narcissism

Since the child grows from the outside in, there is a chance that a point will be reached where he stops looking for signs and signposts to show him the way to his own personal growth and satisfaction.  He waits for a hand or a hand out, for someone else to fight his battles, or protect him from his folly. 

So often such a child finds himself bereft of courage, and in axiomatic reflects, thinks it is everyone else’s fault.  Whenever he encounters difficulty, embarrassment, or confusion, he looks to someone else to solve his problem, or blame someone else for his quandary.  Should this occur when the world is opening up to the child with all its possibilities, the adolescence self may become narcissistic at the expense of wonder and engagement.   

Wonder is introspection and the key to self-knowing.  The pain of confrontation with a hostile world, which is equally narcissistic, narcissistic triggers this projection.  Listen to a child and you hear this reflect action as if part of the child’s DNA.  What stalls nascent development is the well-meaning but ill-advised intercession of a parent to assume ownership of the child’s contretemps with another before the child can understand what is happening and why.  The parent intercedes because the parent has been there before and thinks the parent knows best.  No learning is allowed!  This may develop in the child a dependence on second-hand problem-solving, and lead to a second-hand life as spectator rather than as active participant in the process. 

This is not to suggest that introspection is an end itself, but rather a vehicle to self-knowing through action and reflection.  German philosopher Goethe (1749-1832) advises: Self-knowledge is best learned, not by contemplation, but action. 

Experience is the best teacher, and a child is aware of experience from its earliest moments of consciousness.  That said it never occurs to a complainer that it is his duty to change his situation, and no one else’s; that life is about problem solving and no one can solve another person’s problem, but that person. 

Where a person at an early age finds himself, despite all the woe is me, is where that person, for all intent and purposes, deserves to be.  Otherwise, that person would be somewhere else.  A child can be made aware of this at an early age, and once learned, it will serve that child through a lifetime.

There is a teacher I know in a private school.  No matter how many months pass between our visits the conversation is always the same.  She insists she could make far more money in the public school system than in the private academy in which she teaches.  Now why does she not teach in a public school?  Obviously, that never occurs to her, nor does it occur to her that her complaint is a broken record.  She wants more pay, better benefits, and has no interest in the fact that her little school has limited resources.  This does not interest her.  She doesn’t see the relevance.  She is a narcissistic child in an adult’s body and wants satisfaction, don’t tell her about limits!  She is where she is because a long time ago she quick growing emotionally, fueling her existence with the hot air of complaint.  

Introspection can be a lifelong self-awareness process governed by experience and learning, ultimately transforming into self-acceptance.  Without such a mindset, the person is likely to develop self-contempt expressed in constant complaining without any action or resolution of the complaint.  Life, in such cases, is reduced to a soap opera on television with the same episode repeated ad infinitum.

Advent of the Pretend World

Looking for others to solve our problems is a characteristic flaw of a society that has gone from inner-direction to narcissism, from self-discipline to permissiveness, from self-awareness to the over-domestication of instinct.  The result is that we have become spectators to our own lives, and have little sense that the motion picture in our heads is the same old film that we’ve been playing forever hoping desperately for a different ending. 

We have become a society with a mania for super stars and celebrities to live our lives vicariously through their achievements and scandals as compensation for our pervasive inner emptiness.  Scandal rags, as some newspapers and magazines were once called, were the only place such stories appeared, now they appear in The New York Times and Washington Post, on the Internet, while such stories have become the staple of 24/7 cable news.  There is no apparent embarrassment that society has become obsessively a bottom feeder.

We saturate our waking hours with other people’s experiences, people who are often living on the edge in the fiction of an increasingly pretend world.  Despite this, or perhaps because of this, we live a television fantasyland buying what we don’t need or cannot afford, dreaming that we are living in that beautiful house with that fabulous automobile in our driveway that appears in the commercial.  It is the sickness of our therapy as Christopher Lasch notes:

Although he may resort to therapies that promise to give meaning to life and to overcome his sense of emptiness, in his professional career the narcissist often enjoys considerable success.  The management of personal impressions comes naturally to him, and his mastery of its intricacies serve him well in political and business organizations where performance now counts for less than “visibility,” “momentum,” and a winning record.  As the “organization man” gives way to the bureaucratic “gamesman” – the “loyalty era” of American business to the age of the “executive success game” – the narcissist comes into his own. [1]

What counts today is style, panache, presence, and the ability to say and do almost anything without antagonizing anybody.  Personality has come to supersede performance, making and impression making a difference.   Pleasing others who have clout to be going somewhere has become a full-time job. 

The narcissist is a “winning-side-sadder” who cues on who occupies the power and then seeks the high ground to visibly bask in that power.  Lacking any notable curiosity or commitment, notwithstanding an inflated estimate of his ability, his ploy is misdirection.  This finds him depending on others for constant infusion of approval and support.  He attaches himself to someone going somewhere, living a parasitic symbiotic existence.  At the same time, his emotional dependence, together with his manipulative, exploitive approach, makes these relationships bland, superficial, and unreliable.  He covers his charade and dread with eye-catching scenarios that camouflage his intent so that the boss believes he is swimming in clover when he is actually walking through sludge.  What makes this amusing is that he is a pyramid climber when the pyramid has been reduced to a muddy playing field.

Persuaders as Puppeteers

Swimming with sharks is the same goal of persuaders otherwise known as advertisers.  Life has become an electronic billboard of desires with consumers the center of their synthetic universe.  With the constant psychedelic flashing of tantalizing imagery, the only experiences that have value, the only accomplishments esteemed, the only claims to distinction are those cultivated by these persuaders.  These dream merchants are the puppeteers of the narcissistic society. 

They have successfully created a superfluous, interchangeable, disposable, and inconsequential society, one that energizes the lower rather than the higher centers of being, one that mocks sincerity, spirituality, innocence, love and wonder; one that denies death and is therefore afraid of life; and one that subscribes to the formula: garbage in and garbage out. 

The dominant characteristic of personality is emotion.  When people go to great lengths to appear happy, healthy and wise, the words of Seneca, the first century Roman stoic philosopher come to mind: There are no greater wretches in the world than many of those whom people in general take to be happy. 

Somerset Maugham explores this folly in his novel The Razor’s Edge (1944), where the idle rich have little more to do than fuel hysteria with paralyzing anxiety on not being on the guest list of a high-status party.  To be included beatifies the narcissist with being accepted by “winners,” who have clout.  Clout consists not simply of money and influence but of power, and that power lies in legacy, which cannot be bought, and thus is a limited reference.  Indeed, it has no reference outside itself. 

The new ideal of success has no legacy.  Performance, as Maugham points out, means, “to arrive.”  Success equals success.  People with clout today in business, politics and the entertainment world have arrived and share “visibility” and “charisma,” which can only be defined as itself for it has no heritage. 

The most important attribute of a celebrity is that he is celebrated.  It elevated Ronald Reagan from a b-movie actor to governor of California, and then President of the United States.  Again, it has led to Austrian born Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California with aspirations to be president, but not being native born disqualified him.  It became a moot question after his scandal. [2] Schwarzenegger understood the pretend status of his adopted country and exploited its narcissism to advantage.      

Narcissism is apparent when your qualifications for a job are heavily weighted by what university you have attended, not on what you bring to the job.  Given this dubious indicator, it is not surprising that the quality of education is measured by the costs of that education.  Consequently, families are known to make huge sacrifices to send their children to the most status-conscious universities, expecting the investment worth the cost as brand is everything in a narcissistic society, and no one manages their brand better than universities that cost $60,000 or more a year to attend.

Give advertisers credit.  They have successfully created a collective mindset cost is equated with quality: the more expensive the better anything is.  And the better the university the better the chance of one’s child will make it to the promise land of success and the comfort zone of clout, privilege and accessibility to the people who count. 

 

These persuaders are puppeteers selling appearance, and would agree with the words of American clergyman E. R. Beadle (1812-1879): Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.  They choose our appetites, and then punish us with them to excess, while Swiss philosopher Rousseau ((1712-1778) cautions: Temperance and labor are the two best physicians of man; labor sharpens the appetite, and temperance prevents from indulging to excess. 

We beat the idea of excess to death, only to have it become more of a monster in our presence.  How else can the world know we are successful, happy and fulfilled, the unspoken consensus goes, lest we flaunt our stuff?

It never occurs to us that we would have less enemies, experience less hostilities if we kept our excesses to ourselves.  The paradox is the greater the flaunting the emptier we become; the higher we climb the more depressed we feel.  This prompted author David Ambrey to write, Finding Hope in the Age of Melancholy (1999).  Ambrey, who suffers from depression, failed to find relief through Prozac or psychiatry.  He decided to take control of his life by probing for answers on his own.  He concludes that human reason and scientific enquiry, which have become the primary standards of truth, are insufficient without spiritual nourishment.

Then there is real estate mogul Donald Trump who rides this spiritual wasteland to celebrity.  He now has his own television program – The Apprentice – having fun riding narcissism as television’s con king with a smile.  Trump evaluates fawning apprentices to applause as he declares with the catching cliché, “You’re fired!”  This declaration epitomizes the pathology of our times, that is, our self-estrangement marked by randomness, relativism, nihilism, marginality and cultural dislocation. 

Trump’s philosophy is that hard work is not enough for upward mobility.  You must be more than a performer; you must be a “winner.”  Winning is a selling job with you as the commodity.  So, what is a winner?  Trump is saying that objective references, credentials, pedigree, are not enough, that making an impression overshadows achievement, personality eclipses performance, creating a brand than selling it trumps making a difference.  Success is synonymous with publicity and the Donald is its entrepreneur.    

It is difficult to escape this cage, especially when the core value is success and not contribution and the great betrayal is to find wealth is not enough, that the Brahmins do not accept the nouveau rich.  Thus cultural dislocation leads to melancholy for climbers as well as foot draggers.  Betrayal is equally so for students who attend Camelot universities at great sacrifice certain of acceptance only to find that they, too, do not belong.  A cry of “foul” finds nobody is listening.

Yet betrayal is essentially self-betrayal for buying into a duplicitous system that has no room for trust.  Deceivers, writes American theologian George Crabbe, (1754-1832), trifle with the best affections of our nature, and violate the most sacred obligations.  American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1803-1860) echoes these sentiments: No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true. 

A narcissistic society suffers not only self-estrangement, but fails to recognize the chameleon that it has become.  The source of light is always outside and therefore it always must adjust to match the colors.

Apologists point out that the twenty-first century has accelerated, exaggerated, and hyped out of proportion what is significant.  As a consequence, nothing is in balance, perspective is lost, and “what could be” is treated as “what is.”  Apologists explain what is not understood.

The Great Transformation

To understand this cage is to realize it has no parents.  We see ourselves surrounding with everything and nothing at all.  The church was once our spiritual nourishing center, but is preoccupied with its own survival.  Life has become a homeless mind in search of itself and we are its reluctant orphans. 

Empty and lost, self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing, the advertising industry has come to the rescue with the narcotic to ease our pain, 24/7 television’s 24/7 news and weather innocuous dramas on hundreds of channels with moral updates. 

We have transitioned from neighborhoods to gated communities; from mom and pop stores to conglomerates; from unsupervised playgrounds to athletics mega-sports centers; from school houses to school emporiums; from churches of worship to citadels of political intrigue, from competitive capitalism to corpocracy. [3]

Old style feudalism has been transformed into Wal-Mart, which sets the table and manufacturing plays serf to its demands.  The world is upside down and bosses look up to professionals who are looking down at their iPhones, unconsciously texting.

Workers have been transformed from producers to consummate consumers, working night and day to pay for purchases they don’t need but feel compelled to buy.  It is the new refrain to the coal miners’ song, “I owe my soul to the company store.”  Now, everyone is in hock to a credit card company that collects $100 billion a year in processing fees for workers’ consumer purchases.

Mothers no longer canned goods and store them in their cellars.  They’ve been convinced by advertisers that store bought goods are healthier, cheaper and better.  They are not.

You can’t find work in most companies now without a college education.  The mania for formal education represents another control.  No one is asked first about their experience, but what education they have.

Society has been transformed into a managed society which asserts control when it has little control over itself.  Technocrats dictate what is good and bad for us, what we should and should not value, and what we can and cannot expect from life.  No one finds fault with them when they change their minds about such things.

These are aspects of a dying culture, which has turned narcissistic for “personal growth” and “professional development.”  We are in a survival mode and call it reinvention.  We have lost our way and misplaced our moral compass.  But that does not mean it cannot be found again.  The work ethic remains part of our genetic code, as discipline still lingers in our reptilian memory.  What has not changed is our nature:

We are all self-centered.  We are born egotists, in which we come into the world believing we are the center of existence, only to find that we are not.  Since our egos are fragile, we do anything to protect them.  This makes us difficult to deal with or influence.

We are all more interested in ourselves and what interests us than anyone else.  We are inclined to turn the conversation to what we think, feel, believe, and value away from what is being said.  Failing that, we become bored, stop listening and move on.

We all want to feel important.  This is the dignity of the self and nascent to us all.  Treat others with respect whatever their station, and respect will return to you tenfold.  Be condescending and you will have a rival if not an enemy.  Kindness restores balance is therefore the greatest virtue.

We each crave the approval of others to approve of ourselves.  We find it difficult to like much less approve of ourselves, giving others the benefit of the doubt.  Everyone suffers this sizable handicap despite the posturing or protest to the contrary.  That is why we are grateful for simple courtesy, or straightforward sincerity when complimenting or criticizing.

These aspects of our nature can go a long way to enable us to be authentic and take charge of our life in an otherwise inauthentic world.  Times may change, but people will remain essentially the same whatever the age, or whatever the peculiar predilections.  One day reading this some years hence, when narcissism has faded, you may wonder why people “back then,” who had so much and were so much enjoyed it so little, and why they were so uptight and self-concerned, preoccupied with what they didn’t have and weren’t.   I look forward to that age because that will mean this cage has lifted.

*     *     *

Notes

[1] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1970, p. 44.

[2] Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted in 2011 to having an affair with his housekeeper, Mildred Baena, which produced a son.  He claims he didn’t know he was the father until he notice when the boy was eight that he looked a lot like him.

[3} Corpocracy is a term I use in several of my books to indicate the nature of corporate enterprise in the complex organization, and how this approach is antithetical to personal trust and development.