A Tale of Narcissism and Insecurity

A horrifying dichotomy and an Atlantic article

My thesis is as follows: Many people today live in the center of a horrifying dichotomy, subject to the dual demands of an intensely self-centered narcissism and a profound insecurity around one's choices and one's place in greater society.

I am no psychologist, and I am unable to make any serious conjecture as to how these two conditions relate. I simply do not know, so I will leave those discussions for more qualified individuals. Instead, what I am trying to do is identify the dual forces pushing and pulling on individuals (and ultimately tearing apart the social fabric).

The Push: Narcissism

There is a clinical definition of narcissism (in fact, I believe there are multiple different forms of it), but I find that an unlikely source provides quite the effective definition instead: the FX tv show, Legion.

In Season 2 of Legion, Jon Hamm was hired to do voiceovers for these mini videos that played either at the beginning, or in the middle, of each episode. One of them, titled Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, is far less about Platonic metaphysics, and far more about narcissism. Here it is:

While the definition of narcissism narrated by Hamm here likely wouldn’t be cited in the DSM-V, I think it gets to the core of what narcissism is and I think it applies strongly to the kinds of people who work at places like McKinsey. The Spreadsheet Sociopaths.

The most alarming delusion of all: that other people don’t matter

Hamm uses the idea of the shadows from Plato’ Cave and rather than tying it to a metaphysical system, he ties it to the psychology of narcissism in modern society and especially of confusing a world seen through a prism with the real world.

Unlike the allegory of the cave, where the people are real and the shadows are false, here, other people are the shadows. Their faces, their lives. This is the delusion of the narcissist. Who believes that they alone are real. Their feelings are the only feelings that matter, because other people are just shadows. And shadows don’t feel, because they’re not real.

But what if everyone lived in caves? Then no one would be real. Not even you.

This is, fundamentally, what narcissism is in my mind: the delusion that other people don't matter. That we cannot (or simply refuse to) appreciate and understand their inner depths. People cease being Persons and become Shadows instead.

We embark on a broad project of instrumentalizing and commodifying everything around us, including people, in pursuit of "autonomy" or "pleasure" or "self-actualization," and then wonder why we are so unhappy. Is it any surprise that a world of instruments is so cold? If the root of your relationships is not love and care, if it is instead driven by the value/utility others can provide you, your world will become colder and colder until a "death of despair" may begin to be considered a relief from the oppressive horror you have engineered.

Perhaps this is a cruel description. But I would venture to say that if you're reading this, you agree that what society has become is crueler than anything I could write. We are a society devoid of empathy, driven towards a north star that promises us empowerment and provides us emptiness.

The endpoint of our obsession with the Self, our focus on Autonomy, is ironically the abolition of the Self in a meaningful way. Our society becomes little more than a shallow sea of nodes: each one thinking the same thoughts, desiring the same things, and consuming the same products. Our inner depths are shaped, molded, and transformed by our relationships. Love, care, grief, sadness, loss, recovery: all of these and more drive our development as persons. And in what appears to be divine comedy, those who worship their own inner depths tend to destroy the very things that cultivate those depths. We became shallow caricatures of ourselves. And when you have a society that privileges the Self? Everyone becomes a shadow.

The Pull: Insecurity

Of course, we evolved as animals suited to physical contact and particularity. Universality can only ever be reached via particular relationships: we learn to love our neighbor only by learning to love our family first. Of course, in a world of parasocial relationships and declining numbers of friends, there is an "undercurrent" (for lack of a better term) of brutal insecurity. This comes from two places:

"Where am I going?"

I have spoken repeatedly of Maps and moral horizons in the past. Charles Taylor describes a significant difference in the existential dilemmas of the modern vs premodern human. In the premodern age, there was the terrible possibility of failing to live up to a defined, recognized moral framework. Of being an unrepentant sinner. Of lacking honor in battle, or being a coward. Of failing to live up to one's duties. In the modern age, the existential terror is that we don't even know what moral framework is correct. It isn't clear what is right. It is a terror of lacking grounding, of not even knowing if one is sailing in the correct direction.

To the extent that humanism collapses into subjectivism, our obsession with the Self only intensifies this terror. "I have no answers, so I will simply do what I want."

The Destruction of Community

Due to both technological and ideological factors, we are destroying the embeddedness that defines us in a meaningful way, leading to use being lost and distressed. The destruction of community ironically leads to a destruction of the self (the boundary between individual and community is far fuzzier than ideologues would like to claim).

People "become" an individual in the eyes of another when they meaningfully interact with them and care about them. But what happens when people are not able to meaningfully interact with one another regularly? What happens when you switch apartment buildings or neighborhoods every couple years, never becoming embedded in a community? What happens when you move cities for jobs, and can only see your friends every 6 months (if that)? What happens when public spaces continue to be gradually closed off and when the Virtual Public Square is exclusionary? Alienation is a constant in today's world. Is it any surprise that 27% of millennials and ~20% of all Americans reported having zero close friends in a YouGov poll in 2019?

The networks we operate in have simultaneously become broader and shallower, and I believe this is deeply detrimental to our lives (and I think the data on friendships, suicides, and mental health all support that claim).

Beyond the technological factors of the internet, we are faced with a society that demands shallow relationships due to its obsession with the Self:

We are all embedded within networks we had no choice in. We didn't choose where we were born or who our biological parents are, etc. We never consented to these characteristics that were thrust upon us. We didn't even consent to being thrown into the world in the first place!

And so, it is reasonable that when our society's core value runs up so strongly against the nature of our existence, our society rebels against "nature" itself.

This obsession with the Self promises fulfillment and offers only failure. Embeddedness limits potentiality, a horrifying state for those with no higher ideal to pursue. Those with no greater horizon or framework or Good to aspire towards must either judge everything by utility/value, instrumentalizing all those around them, or constantly attempt to affirm an ideology of the Self that is incompatible with reality:

Charles Taylor describes three axes of morality:

1. Our sense of respect for and obligations to others

2. Our understanding of what makes a full (rich, meaningful) life

3. Our range of notions concerned with dignity (aka "the characteristics by which we think of ourselves as commanding (or failing to command) the respect of those around us")

Most of modern ethics only concerns itself with the first question, questions of duty and obligation and what is right/wrong to do in any given situation. Little attention is paid to asking questions regarding the fullness of life or where dignity emerges from. In fact, I would argue that our notion of Autonomy leads to deep psychological distress because it attempts to answer those latter two questions with "living a full or dignified life occurs when one exercises their self-responsible reason and acts in an autonomous fashion." Of course, one is never actually autonomous. From the moment we are born to the time we die, we are embedded in a variety of networks and contexts, most of which we did not consent to. Our answer to "what it means to live a full/dignified life" is entirely incompatible with reality. Is it any surprise so many of us are depressed?

And then of course, our destruction of community leads to a sterilization of the Self:

If you only engage with people on a shallow level, what is the point of cultivating those inner depths that make life so rich and meaningful? There is nothing left but the surface: signaling and pleasure become the highest goods.

When every man becomes a shadow, the freest man in the world is the NPC.

Case Study: The latest notorious Atlantic article

The combination of narcissism and insecurity can lead to unbelievable levels of delusion, perhaps best exemplified with the latest Atlantic article about divorce. (This is not even close to their first foray into this area, and I am certainly not the first to criticize them for it).

The piece opens fairly normally, describing financial issues that cause tension. Finances can cause a lot of problems with couples, so this isn't unexpected.

But then...ho boy. The piece just drives straight off a cliff and somehow keeps accelerating.

Even that kitchen—which had the ambiance of an alley and filled with smoke every time I cooked—bothered me more in theory than in practice.

"Bothered me more in theory than in practice" - this theme keeps coming up. The woman has constructed an idea of what might be and then gotten upset her life doesn't live up to this. Imagine a man dumping his wife and kids for a younger woman. Pretty trashy and degenerate. Now imagine him dumping his wife and kids for the vague notion of a younger dream woman who will definitely love him better. Not only trashy and degenerate, but stupid.

I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself. Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them.

What is fascinating about this is that it isn't even like the woman got an offer for her dream job and the man said "no, your job is to stay at home with the kids"...while simultaneously making the family revolve around him and his work/desires/dreams/etc. The woman has no job offer or dream opportunity. She has the idea that something is out there for her better than what she has. Simply an idea that she will find herself, somewhere beyond who she is…good luck with that.

I wanted to be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy. How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind—had I built around my husband? Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women. Maybe I would write a book. Not a book about real estate!

Why can't you think about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy while married (obviously sex with women is out of the question)? There was nothing in this piece that suggested her husband was abusive or controlling, that he didn't want her thinking her own thoughts.

Being a spouse is about a project of building a life together, yes. Over time, being a wife or husband, a mother or father, will become part of your essence. But note that word: part. Ideally, a balanced life includes not only caring for the kids and family life, but also your own pursuits. Perhaps work, perhaps reading, perhaps you write movie reviews on a blog, etc.

Part of this reflects a collapse in the societal structures that supported parents in the past. We live far away from extended families who no longer appear to have been immersed in the societal norm of "help relatives who just had kids." Instead, we have people who go "F*** you, I'm done with that sh't!" Of course, this only perpetuates the cycle. Moms have organized help groups before, yes, but my experience from observing these is that they tend to be poor imitations of the societal support structures in healthy communities long gone. Not to say these groups don't help (they do!), but they aren't enough. As our partners are expected to shoulder more of the burden as the rest of our social fabric frays, it makes sense that the institution of marriage struggles under this weight.

There were days when the magnitude of what I’d done bore down on me. I kept wondering if I’d feel regret, or remorse. It is hard to admit this—it makes me cold, as cold a woman as my ex-husband sometimes suspects I am—but I didn’t. I felt raw, and I liked it. There was nothing between me and the world. It was as if I’d been wearing sunglasses and then taken them off, and suddenly everything looked different. Not better or worse, just clearer, harsher. Cold wind on my face.

I had caused so much upheaval, so much suffering, and for what? He asked me that, at first, again and again: For what? *So I could put my face in the wind. So I could see the sun’s glare.* I didn’t say that out loud.

"Liberating self-actualization" in our society IS narcissism. We have no higher virtues than the Self. And the fact that one of the premier media organizations in the US has a history of publishing these open celebrations of narcissism is a damning indictment of our society. Again, we are faced with the fact that this woman ironically named Honor has no concrete opportunity. She hasn't been given a position to do research or teach in some prestigious university, she hasn't been presented with an opportunity to do what she always wanted to do; no, she's just constructed a fantasy reinvention of herself, one with potentiality and authenticity. Of course, this fantasy is a delusion.

But houseless, husbandless, half the nights childless, I had never felt so exposed, out there on the cliff face of single life. I tried to pretend I wasn’t scared, but I was.

And the narcissistic delusions accompany insecurity in almost every case. Peel back the grandiose language and you have a person who has decided to throw everything away for the sake of something different, and necessarily finds oneself without the grounding of a community one is embedded in. It should come as no surprise that all of these people who claim to be authentically themselves seem to have the same interests, writing style, etc. Because without the communities we are embedded in, we become shallow creatures. Honor's ascension to NPC status is celebrated.

By breaking up our family, I’d taken something from my kids that they were never going to get back. Naturally, I thought about this a lot. There was nothing I could give them to make up for it, except, maybe, a way of being in the world: of being open to it, and open in it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call rationalization. When you know what you've done is wrong and you instead try to find some way to placate yourself. Honor and the rest of the Coastal Yoga and Whole Foods Enjoyer class will say this is "self-care" or some other such nonsense. This mindset is either evil or close enough to it to be almost indistinguishable.

The kids didn’t care about soapstone counters or what kinds of hinges were on their cabinets. More and more, I understood that what I wanted for them was public, not private, spaces.

What might have been a nice realization (kids do not care about luxury, so perhaps I should stop worrying about my idea of what a home “should” look) turns into rationalization. Rationalization leads to the delusion deepening. Rather bite the bullet and dig the hole deeper than accept one has done something wrong. The latter is far more painful (at least in the short term).

Maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe I’m not free of anything and I just want different objects, a different home, maybe someday—admit it—a different man. Maybe I’m starting the same story all over again. “For what?” you’d ask me, and you’d be right.

But I don’t think so. I think I’m making something new.

The tiniest flicker of self-awareness comes up at the end, but Honor mercilessly snuffs it out, lest it show her the horror of what she's done in a painful revelation. Narcissism and insecurity, bundled up together: what a terrifying fate that must be.

On the one hand, one is tempted to feel sympathy for someone as lost in life as Honor, but on the other hand, she brought this upon herself. If she asked her husband to take care of the kids on Tuesday nights so she could join a literary club in NYC to discuss the patriarchy and art and sex and politics, I doubt her husband would say no. Nothing in this piece suggests she was in an abusive or uncaring relationship. The only abusive, uncaring person in this story is Honor, who in her narcissistic delusions, destroyed her family and scarred her children (whatever her coping might claim).

If anything positive comes out of this, perhaps more Atlantic readers will cancel their subscription and hasten its decline.

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