The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement by Jean M. Twenge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Apocalypse Has Arrived

We’re already cooked. Really. Forget about the omicron virus, global warming, the big tech threat to freedom, AI inflexion points, Russians in the Ukraine, and Republican insanity. All these have a common core which so dominates our world that it is impossible to inhibit much less reverse its effects: pathological narcissism. Because “Narcissism is a psychocultural affliction,” it is really untreatable by any known therapy, remedy, or social campaign.

According to Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, we are now enthralled by a global culture of narcissism. As with any culture the culture of narcissism has an overdetermined history. It is the product of a vague coincidence of factors including war, economic fluctuations, influential sociological and psychological theories, technological advance, and… well plain serendipity.

The symptoms of this narcissistic culture are everywhere in plain sight. Near universal degeneration of national and local communities, the aspirations of youth and the disappointments of the elderly, the sexualisation of infancy and the disillusion of adolescents, disparaging attitudes towards racial difference, relative disadvantage, poverty, and disability, personal economic irresponsibility and institutional promotion of this irresponsibility.

Celebrity, ostentation, self-absorption and other manifestations of adolescence are now extended through whole populations. The authors conclude that “Narcissism has spread through the generations like a particularly pernicious virus—one with multiple means of entry and transmission.” Narcissism appears as if it’s a necessary condition to get on in the world: “Despite the iffy performance record of narcissists in leadership roles, narcissists are more likely than others to emerge as leaders in an organization.”

The analytic and anecdotal data supports these conclusions:

“Many cultural changes were eminently quantifiable: the fivefold increase in plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures in just ten years, the growth of celebrity gossip magazines, Americans spending more than they earn and racking up huge amounts of debt, the growing size of houses, the increasing popularity of giving children unique names, polling data on the importance of being rich and famous, and the growing number of people who cheat… the number of teens getting breast augmentations jumped 55% in just one year from 2006 to 2007, and some parents do indeed pay for them as graduation gifts”

So if you’ve felt like a frog in a slowly heating pan of water, you’re not hallucinating. Things are changing, and pretty quickly. But not just in the superficial ways revealed in the popular media (or for that matter in the fringe like QAnon who can’t see the implicit conspiracy of which they are a part). Narcissism is proliferating and evolving faster than the COVID virus: “Not only are there more narcissists than ever, but non-narcissistic people are seduced by the increasing emphasis on material wealth, physical appearance, celebrity worship, and attention seeking.”

According to fairly reliable surveys in the first decade of the 21st century (The Narcissism Epidemic was published in 2009), 1 in 4 college students showed markedly narcissistic traits; and almost half of those appeared to be suffering from clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). And this is the tip of a sociological iceberg because “lurking underneath is the narcissistic culture that has drawn in many more. The narcissism epidemic has spread to the culture as a whole, affecting both narcissistic and less self-centered people.”

The authors pinpoint the ‘patient zero’ of this now worldwide malaise in the United States as the clearly dominant cultural influencer of the late 20th century. Partly this is due to the subtle shift in values: “in America today there are few values more fiercely held than the importance of self-admiration.” Americans, they say, “love to love themselves.” But in a typically narcissistic manner, this national self-admiration seems to increase in direct proportion to the country’s obvious decline in its confidence in its own institutions of government, law, and religion. The authors quip that “Narcissism is the fast food of the soul.” It is easy to get and immediately enjoyable. But it is also destructive of health. Americans, it seems, have become obese in more than physical terms.

Of note in this regard is that, although five years before his political bid, Donald Trump is put forward as a sort of poster boy for the new American self image and aspirational ikon:

Donald Trump, who puts his name on everything he builds, has his own TV show, named a university after himself (yes, there is a Trump University), and picks fights with talk show hosts, is a great example of someone who is both successful and appears to be narcissistic. We know about Donald Trump’s success because he is relentlessly self-promoting. It is hard to miss The Donald in the media, and he is rich—but there are other real estate tycoons you’ve never heard of because they are not self-promoters and don’t want to be in the limelight.”

I think it is unlikely that even the authors would have predicted such a massive cultural shift that would permit the man to be nominated and elected to the presidency only five years later. It is difficult to imagine a better confirmation of their thesis than these events. They got it exactly right: “Americans are obsessed with people who are obsessed with themselves.” Trump is the perfect combination of vacuous celebrity, inflated ego, and ruthless determination to dominate that are the hallmarks of the pathological narcissist. He is indeed “the number one for thinking he is the number one,” and has brought a lot section of the population to the same conclusion.

It is clearly impossible to accurately predict the evolutionary path of a culture. We know more about black holes and the behaviour of quantum particles than we do about our effects on each other. But it is certain that the “quest for the self” which has characterised so much of recent cultural history cannot end well. Even the political, economic, and social crisis it is causing now simply provides more material, more ‘supply’ or ‘fuel’ for narcissism to feed off.

One way to encapsulate the effects of what is essentially a global revolution is to recognise the profound change in ethics this revolution has produced. Everyone of the world’s major religions and secular thinkers about morality agree on the supreme importance of the Golden Rule. Doing unto others at least to the degree you would have them do unto you is the root of civilisation. Narcissists dedicate themselves to breaking this rule, and do so by exploiting those who abide by it. So their attack on civilisation is profound and apparently successful.

This very well could be the way the world ends, not with a bomb but with a narcissistic whine.

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