style="font-size:15px;"> But ignore for the moment Narcissus admiring his visage in the pool, or even endless Kardashians parading across television screens as “real” housewives metastasizing from city to city. That is not the form of narcissism that need concern us unduly. Whatever we think of the aesthetics, it is at best a minor contributing factor and essentially trivial. Another far more lethal form of narcissism dominates and leads the parade of self-regard that is destroying our culture, even gnawing away at the fabric of Western Civilization itself, which is on the verge of disintegration, excessive as that may sound.
That form is moral narcissism—a pathology that underlies the whole liberal Left ethic today and some of the Right as well.
Qu’est-Ce Que C’est “Moral Narcissism”?
What exactly is this form of narcissism that is destroying—if it hasn’t already destroyed—our families, friendships, workplace atmosphere, and democratic republic?
What is moral narcissism anyway? The short form is this: What you believe, or claim to believe or say you believe—not what you do or how you act or what the results of your actions may be—defines you as a person and makes you “good.” It is how your life will be judged by others and by yourself. In nineteenth-century France, Brillat-Savarin told us that “You are what you eat.” In twenty-first-century America, almost all of us seem to have concluded that “You are what you say you are. You are what you proclaim your values to be, irrespective of their consequences.” That is moral narcissism.
It is a narcissism that emanates from a supposed personal virtue augmented by a supposed intellectual clarity. It is what allows Hillary Clinton to go from undergraduate Alinskyite to Chappaqua plutocrat with a net worth in the tens of millions without missing a beat, or John Kerry to go from Vietnam War protestor likening his fellow soldiers to Genghis (pronounced Jenn-jiss) Khan to a billionaire with a yacht constructed in New Zealand that he houses in Rhode Island to avoid the taxes of his native Massachusetts.
This is not exactly the aforementioned narcissism we remember from school, with Narcissus staring endlessly at the reflection in that pool, although it is related. It is more a narcissism of political and social thought, a narcissism that evolved as religion declined, a narcissism of ideas and attitudes, a narcissism of “I know best,” of “I believe therefore I am.” It is our identity tied up inextricably to our belief system in a way that brooks no examination. It is a narcissism of groupthink that makes you assume you are better than you are because you have the same received and conventional ideas as your peers, a mutual reward system not unlike the French concept of BTBG—bon type, bon genre—but taken to a national extreme. There is only one way to be, one kind of idea and attitude to have. There are no others. Why even bother to look, consider, or try to understand them?
And those ideas and attitudes are “reflected” in the following narcissistic manner—if your intentions are good, if they conform to the general received values of your friends, family, and co-workers, what a person of your class and social milieu is supposed to think, everything is fine. You are that “good” person. You are ratified. You can do anything you wish. It doesn’t matter in the slightest what the results of those ideas and beliefs are, or how society, the country, and in some cases, the world suffers from them. It doesn’t matter that they misfire completely, cause terror attacks, illness, death, riots in the inner city, or national bankruptcy. You will be applauded and approved of. Like the 1960s song by the Animals, it’s all okay “if your intentions are good.” No one will even notice what happened. You’ll be fine. In fact, better than that, your status will continue to rise as you continue to parrot the received wisdom. It’s the Peter Principle gone ideational.
Moral narcissism is the reason so few people change their views about anything and need something as cataclysmic as Nazi Germany to do so. And even then many change tentatively, reluctantly, ready to revert to type at any time.
But deeper down, beneath this conformity, it’s all about how you feel about yourself. Self-regard is all. In the world of moral narcissism, we are all the ladies of Code Pink, craving attention, fairly yearning to be dragged out of a congressional hearing, preening for television cameras, as we mouth the most clichéd of progressive slogans, oblivious to their impact in the real world or even, remotely, to their veracity.
Not only are we good. We are the best and therefore we can do anything we wish. We have permission. Moral narcissism is the ultimate “Get out of jail free” card in a real-life Monopoly game. No matter what you do, if you have the right opinions, if you say the right things to the right people, you’re exempt from punishment. People will remember your pronouncements, not your actions.
Hollywood stars, media personalities, and many politicians are prototypes of this behavior, but we are all prey to it. Look behind almost every issue of our day—climate, environment, energy, gun control, defense, foreign affairs, terrorism, education, income inequality, immigration, race (especially), women’s rights, gay rights, political correctness (the mother lode of moral narcissism), microaggressions and trigger warnings (moral narcissism as modern day opera bouffe), media bias, cultural and entertainment bias, not to mention the very size and scope of government itself—and you will find the profound influence of moral narcissism, almost always for the worse. It is the prime hidden motor for our society, pointing to our republic’s demise because it makes people blind to reality and democracy moot.
Even so, it could be argued that in a free country it should be your privilege to follow your narcissism, to support any foolish, unexamined, self-aggrandizing belief you want, if that is your wish, at the ballot box and elsewhere. In many instances, it will coincide with your self-interest, at least in the short run. But within that narcissism is the root of the destruction of that very society that is giving you that freedom, because the narcissistic allure is not far from the allure of fascism—a refracted hero worship. If our politics is dictated by what makes us feel good about ourselves, our mirror will soon, perhaps inevitably, morph into mass movements in which mock gestapo salutes or pseudo-anarchist Guy Fawkes face masks, not to mention faded T-shirts emblazoned with mass murderers like Che and Mao, become the real thing and not just symbols of adolescent rebellion.
Many of the abovementioned issues are tilted to the left by moral narcissism, but several push right as well. As much of a pose as progressivism may be, conservatives and libertarians are not excused. They too are part of this inescapable zeitgeist. How could they not be? In recent years, moral narcissism weighed heavily in the neoconservative belief that America could nation build in the Middle East, transforming tribal cultures like Iraq and Afghanistan into democracies like Denmark. Remember the slogan “Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!” that dominated the Right side of the Internet at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in a grand display of self-congratulatory triumphalism and misplaced hipness? Even the New York Times was quoting it.1 Everyone would be like us—living freedom, jazz, and kicks. In a world where only the “whisky” part of the triumvirate survives—and that more than likely on private Saudi jets headed from Riyadh to Paris—and the Islamic State runs rampant over the very territory we thought we democratized, how antique that slogan seems now. How sadly misguided.
Other examples of right-wing moral narcissism exist, particularly in areas where social conservatism bleeds over into a holier-than-thou attitude toward one’s fellow citizens, telling them how to live even when they are, in many instances, already quietly and privately living that way. Here certain beliefs work at cross-purposes, as in the opposition to gay marriage when the impulse that gays have to formalize their union is often highly bourgeois and essentially conservative. Similarly, social conservatives, putatively strong adherents of small government, veer equally strongly
