Societal Narcissism

Jeremy Van der want

How did we get here? 

• How did we reach the state where powerful entities wreak havoc on our lives with apparently little concern for anything other than the profit margin? 
• Why are we fighting wars all over the planet? 
• Why are we depressed? 
• How can it be that we are selling off the natural habitats that sustain life on our planet? 
• Why are we buying the products that necessitate this? 
• How can it be that drone flights kill people without due legal process every year? 
• How is it happening that democracies are electing self-serving and grandiose leaders? 
• How did we arrive at the point where public health systems were overwhelmed by a change in the disease burden that was predicted years before it occurred? 
• Why are there wealthy men riding enormous phallic objects into the sky on the back of overworked and underpaid employees who have few options but to serve their masters?  

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a cognitive deficit theorist. I believe the trust gap in our society has arisen because of psychological issues suffered by both the powerful and the powerless. Narcissism and psychopathy both involve cognitive deficits and a lack of empathy. This has had the effect of causing a breakdown in the social contract. The top rungs don’t trust the bottom rungs and vice versa. 

Narcissism and psychopathy are partly trauma induced conditions. This means that while covert conspiracy to manipulate people may be rare…overt manipulation and unethical behaviour is rife and often unrecognised. We are being hoodwinked in plain sight. It’s not a secret. 

Climate change; pecuniary motivations for medicines we don’t need but all take anyway, like opioids which are a massive drug abuse issue worldwide but are sold over the counter in many countries; wars for outdated fuels we should have replaced with renewables decades ago; cigarettes and how long it took to definitively prove that setting fire to something and inhaling the result is bad for you; pick one… They’re not conspiracies, but they are happening. We can’t trust our leaders or ourselves; not because they or we are covert conspirators, but because many top tier individuals and their followers are overt narcissists and their trauma bonded codependents. 

Top level executives, presidents, prime ministers, your employers and your teachers may all be sharing a characteristic: They give you the sense that they are contributing, or indeed conspiring to, your detriment. Do you really want to devote your entire life to the pursuit of profit? What exactly is profit? What happened to fulfillment, satisfaction, adventure, and the love of a good life? For those of us who have managed to make a lot of money it may be less noticeable, but the social fabric is deteriorating. The overvalued feeling one gets upon being overpaid is perhaps a contributing factor to the narcissism and lack of empathy that seems so prevalent these days among top income earners like company directors, owners and chief executives. On the other hand, being underpaid and undervalued – or worse, unpaid, and literally suffering hunger and physical insecurity – is traumatic. This is similar to the psychological theories underpinning the modern understanding of narcissism and psychopathy. 

But what does this psychobabble mean? What exactly am I trying to say when I explain the abuse of the world with the phrase ‘cognitive deficit’?

What I intend to communicate is that there are some things missing from our lives. These include the peace of a satisfying life, the certainty that we are all in this together and we all care for one another. We’ve lost the humanity of being cooperatively human. 

Instead of the mutual care and concern our literature and our art would have us believe human beings prefer, we’re living in a predatory, unfair society. We’re living in a world in which failure to comply with the profit motive causes hunger and suffering, while compliance inevitably results in the destruction of the environment and the spiritual impoverishment of ourselves. 

Why? 

What type of creature destroys its own home and ruins the lives of its companions? A narcissist does that, and while he’s doing it he’s quite sure that he’s right and that his actions are godlike and grand. 

The question begs: Why are so many of us narcissists? Why is our society narcissistic? And how can we change it? 

The bad news is that many psychologists will tell us that narcissism or at least the full-blown narcissistic personality disorder is incurable or extremely difficult to eradicate. It’s caused by early childhood trauma and also by overvaluation and hot and cold parenting. It is a disease of the self in which the sufferer develops a false self to cover the pain of the emotionally abused and neglected true self. You may have been raised by adults who couldn’t see human values like empathy but pushed you to outperform others because they wanted to prove that as a product of themselves you were superior. In that case, superiority is the only truth;  entitlement a foregone conclusion. That is the emotional abuse that traumatises the narcissistic elements of our society.

The good news is that the codependent victims of people with this condition stand every chance of recovering. It begins with an exercise in self-knowledge and acknowledgement that we need help. During the codependence with our narcissists, we participate in their delusion and even learn to practise their abusive behaviours ourselves. However, at some point we suffer at their hands. We feel unheard. Unappreciated. Devalued. If we’re lucky, and we get help, we come to understand that there is something wrong with our master. He cannot see the truth. Blind to his own faults, exaggerating our faults, he’s headed for disaster. We remonstrate with the narcissist to no avail. He is oblivious. He suffers a cognitive deficit. 

So we leave the narcissist. We leave our job, divorce our spouse or reject our ‘friend’. We vote out our leader.

Even then it isn’t over. Beaten down, reduced, traumatised, we find ourselves filled with bitterness and still enacting the abusive behaviours we learned while in thrall to the narcissist. Only by seeking help, coming together in care of one another and relearning the human practise of empathy can we escape forever the clutches of the cognitive deficit that has ruled our lives. We can prevent ourselves from simply walking straight back into another narcissist’s clutches. We know we are getting well when we fully recognise that the person who ruled us was really just a child; a person who never grew to be fully human and simply couldn’t understand the ethical and compassionate actions that being a fully conscious human being entails.

So let’s do it. Let’s escape this abusive relationship with our masters. Let’s grow up and leave them behind. It will take some doing. We’ll have to rebuild ourselves and our society. We’ll have to stop handing our power over to immature, selfish leaders. We have the opportunity to become better by understanding this.