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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 22, 2002
Pathological narcissism
I was writing last week about "infantile narcissism" - perhaps the largest single social problem in Canada today and elsewhere in the Western world. By now quite possibly the majority of adults suffer from this debilitating ailment having failed to pass through the normal childhood stages of emotional development. For them no question in private or public life can be reasoned in facts and arguments or tested against principles of right and wrong. Instead everything reduces to: "How do I feel?" This arrested emotional development necessarily entails an arrested intellectual and spiritual development since the victims are trapped in an infantile circularity. It is a condition easy to diagnose but which I suspect can only be treated through "acts of God". (For some 9/11 served as a kind of shock therapy.) A general regression into narcissism may be the inevitable fate of any "mass" society and I am not saying anything new. Jacob Burckhardt wrote presciently about this in the 19th century predicting the triumphs of totalitarianism in the 20th with great precision. Ortega y Gasset used different terminology to describe the same phenomenon in The Revolt of the Masses. The condition is progressive however and more recently Francis Fukuyama wrote a fairly apt description of a universal relapse into infantile narcissism calling it "the end of history". The odd thing is that he looked upon it with overall approval. By now our narcissism is reinforced by almost everything in the public sphere -- from the soft porn of mass commercial advertising and popular entertainment to the soft sociology that has sapped the humanities departments of our universities. In my own field I come up constantly against the soft squishy tabloid mentality that pervades current media and news reporting the demand to "package" almost everything as comfort food. The phenomenon is slightly more advanced in Canada and Europe than in the United States -- I suspect for the simple reason that Christianity continues to have its hold on so many Americans; a hold which it has lost elsewhere in the West. For no matter how crudely presented the Christian teaching enjoins one to "be a man" in the old and fullest sense -- to live and love in a relationship with a Creator God freed from thrall to childish things; to acknowledge something vastly larger than one's own petty ego. For here is an important thing to know about our narcissism. It is the triumph of our inbuilt self-love or more precisely self-regard over all other possible loves: over affection friendship eros charity. To the narcissist love is a teddy bear an inanimate extension of self whereas the real world beyond that self is finally cold friendless loveless lonely -- populated is it must appear to the narcissist only by other narcissists. In public life narcissism is verily "the politics at God's funeral". As I say the condition is progressive in its social ramifications and we are reaching the point of catastrophe. It is no longer something that can be politely accommodated or avoided. We were already suffering from the collapse of universal civilized values into that relativist moral void that is called "multiculturalism". Suddenly we are also under external attack; plausibly threatened by terror regimes and networks with weapons of mass destruction. We can no longer afford to humour or placate the teddy bears or their owners. Or as President Bush has expressed it in purely practical terms we must act with or without the support of the United Nations . We must overcome our own infantile narcissism to confront something that is uglier and worse: a lethal enemy in the grip of an aggressive and malignant pathological narcissism. To get some idea of it one may look at the monuments to himself that Saddam has erected over every part of Iraq that he controls; at the murderously obsessive utterances of Iran's ayatollahs; at the mythic posturing of Osama bin Laden. Infantile narcissism is the condition of living in a private fantasy world of the ego; it is the childlike pursuit of instant gratification plus the wailing and sulking when one's desires are not supplied. Pathological narcissism is the condition in which the person attempts to impose this private fantasy upon the external world not by wailing and sulking but by main force. For while the infantile narcissist is a mere crybaby hoping to be indulged the pathological narcissist has found a way to impose his demands. He is the vicious rapist or serial murderer. He treats real people as his teddy bears to do with them as he wants making them the playthings of his fantasies. The pathological narcissist who gets himself into a position of great power has correspondingly great opportunities. Yet what he seeks is still the fulfilment of some private fantasy. Mussolini annexed helpless Abyssinia to his imaginary Roman Empire; Hitler was building a Germanic pagan Thousand Year Reich in a world miraculously cleared of Jews. Osama has his teddies fly airliners into office towers on his way to restoring Andalusia to Islamic rule. Saddam in his own dreamwalk corners the world supply of oil to build a new caliphate from his seat in Baghdad. It is all a matter of private taste or appetite a strange and twisted outgrowth of the culture and mythic universe from which the tyrant sprang. And here we come to one of the mysteries of human psychology: the way in which the dominant fantasy of the pathological narcissist resonates within the minds of all the infantile narcissists within his culture. Hitler found no shortage of Germans Mussolini no shortage of Italians Osama has found no shortage of Arabs to hear the siren call. Fortunately nature itself limits the appeal the resonance mostly stops at the outer fire-ditch of the culture. Beyond that mark the only people who can feel it are those attuned to its basso profondo -- the psychopath 's fellow psychopaths across the cultural divide. (Hence the enemy's success in recruiting Islamist fanatics among non-Muslim criminals in Western prisons.) The rest of us are insensitive to it; the fantasy seems foreign ludicrous; we laugh at it or at least scratch our heads. To our infantile narcissists the threat of such foreign pathological narcissists cannot be taken seriously. But Hitler and Mussolini were serious; and so alas are Osama and Saddam. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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