I have recently begun reading about Narcisstic Personality Disorder, and am finding that this particular prism–Tubaform, I have called this sort of thing–can be used to create order in many places.
Consider that a primary trait of narcissists is the need for attention and power. Logically, these traits–the need for these outcomes–will lead to greater efforts at attaining professional recognition and political power than would be the case for people without the disorder.
Logically, in a free society, this will lead over time to narcissists occupying much of the top strata of society.
Consider further that most historical democracies only last perhaps 200 years. This was the case, roughly, with the Athenian democracy, and roughly the case with the Roman Republic.
What one would expect to see, and what one does see particularly in true democracies like that of Athens, is the rise of the demagogue. Who is the demogogue? That person who says WHATEVER he needs to say to keep the people behind him. His motto is “the voice of the people is the voice of ME” (vox populi, vox ecco? I am no Latin scholar), where he silently substitutes God for “me”. He is not thinking long term. He does not care where the antics forced on him by the need to stay in front of a mutable mass of ridiculous human beings leads him. He is led, but he is for his purposes the leader, which is to say the object of attention.
Look at our current political scene. We have hordes of people either crying out to be the ones to “save America” by pursuing short-sighted, failure-certain policies, and it is difficult not to believe that on some level they KNOW IT.
This is the core reason why there are so few principled politicians: principled people do not survive, and in most cases lack the drive of the narcissists to be in power.
When we look at most Republicans, what we mostly need to see are intelligent narcissists who crave power for its own sake, who like being in the limelight, and who may believe somewhat the bullshit they peddle about caring about the national debt, and blah, blah, blah, but who are quite willing to forget what they “believe” if it means risking losing out on continuing to walk in the halls of power.
On the Left, there is a double layer of narcissism. They have the same desire as Republicans to stay in power, but they also believe, truly believe, the counterfactual claim that socialism improves human lives. They can’t explain the failure of Detroit and other cities, who were targeted with their supposedly “best” policies, to thrive, but they don’t care. They inhabit a magical world–one of the traits of narcissists–in which failures need not be explained, and if they are, all one needs do is blame someone else. Narcissists never take responsibility for anything.
I truly believe that BOTH Obamas are clinical narcissists. So is Nancy Pelosi. So is Harry Reid. But so too, in all likelihood, is much of the Republican leadership.
Look at our cultural heroes: movie stars and rock stars. It is considered a great compliment to say someone is a “rock star”. What does this mean? He is universally loved. We are deifying on some level the people who are emotionally the most shallow, least principled, and least able to offer us positive examples of how to live our lives with internalized senses of meaning.
Reality TV panders to this dynamic. I have not watched the show, but it seems obvious to me that every major person on Jersey Shore is likely a clinical narcissist.
More generally, the phenomenon of reality TV has long seemed to me to be symptomatic of a generalized cultural failure. Standards of conduct are no longer self evident. Children in many cases acculturate themselves through osmosis, which include mimetic repetition of what they see on TV. Lacking an internalized inner direction and sense of self, they try to find their way by watching other people. This is what narcissists do: lacking empathy and a sense of self, they must depend on environmental cues to pretend to be incorporated into the social space, which in fact they are not and can never be.
When one considers that we are now two generations down the road from the “Me Generation”, it also becomes attractive to speculate that no previous generations of Americans has ever been exposed to such pervasive parental and social selfishness and self preoccupation, and that what one expects in particular from the children of narcissists has become generalized.
What one expects to see are latent and apparently inexplicable rage. This is quite obviously present in our culture.
One expects to see inexplicable but recurrent bouts of depression. Check.
One expects to see feelings of rootlessness, shallowness, and unreality, caused by lacking a core sense of self. This is much harder to measure, but I think one could reasonably look at our pop culture and infer the presence of these traits as well. For those who have traveled, it is hard not to feel on some level a greater sense of the gravity of life in other countries. That has been my own experience, at any rate.
We have not always been like this. We were serious, sober, generous and idealistic in a good way 50 years ago.
Solutions: as I see it, the only block to this dynamic is the firewalls intended by our Founders, which is to say constant and structural obstacles to the consolidation of power either locally or nationally. States had the right to make moral decisions, but within the limits set by the Bill of Rights. As Madison argued, correctly I believe, the only realistic block to what I would term the rise of the narcissist is to put the narcissists in competition with one another, and prevent any of them from ever winning finally.
Our Supreme Court has failed us badly. This much is clear. Having arrogated to themselves the right of judicial review–not granted in the Constitution–they finally used it to enact law, and thereby began what is to my mind what may in the end be the decisive wound to the walls intended to protect us.
Of course there are ways to rectify this. I have been arguing for years that we need a Constitutional Amendment granting either the Senate or Congress as a whole the right to overturn Supreme Court decisions by a two thirds majority.
We of course further need to return to the era before the New Deal, when States could and often did provide safety nets for their citizens, but without Federal Government support.
Of this I am certain: given the capacity for collecting power, the narcissists who seek and win power will continue to aggregate it until they have it all. Every step in that direction is bad for psychologically normal people who just want to live and let live. Narcissists cannot do that. They do not live, and therefore need victims, or what is termed “narcissistic supply”.
Actually, one last note: one can see in vampires, werewolves, and zombies another expression of this dynamic. Vampires are not alive, but they need the blood–here, the attention–of others.
Werewolves are the concrete expression of rage which appears without warning, and in otherwise normal people.
Zombies are people who have lost a sense of self, of self direction, of purpose. They are the result of being exposed to narcissism as children. They have not stopped moving, but they lack a sense of unity as in-dividuals.
All thoughts worth pondering, in my view.