so-called climate deniers with no reference whatsoever to actual science of any sort, only to what in his morally narcissistic view a citizen is supposed to believe. The coming climate catastrophe was a given, a premise on which all educated and reasonable people must perforce agree. Otherwise, they were barbarians, yahoos out of a Sinclair Lewis novel like Babbit or Dodsworth. The contradictory details of climate research were beneath mention by Obama, even irrelevant. A “good” person wants to save the earth and is willing to spend billions to do so, even if that means impoverishing the lower classes further, with no discernible evidence that there would be an improvement of any sort to the environment or a true determination as to whether warming is a positive or a negative. The audience, equally infused with moral narcissism and feeling especially good about themselves, gave the president a standing ovation for his pronouncements. As we used to say in the sixties, the personal had become political—or was it vice versa?
That sixties slogan is worth rethinking. More accurate might be that the personal yields the political or, in other cases, that the personal hides us from the political. In the end, for all of us as human beings, the personal is ultimately just that, the personal. We live in our own skins with our own feelings, our joys and pains, reacting to our own friends, family, and coworkers. For most of us, that is our world, at least the most important part of it. The ability to exist comfortably within a social sphere is a significant measure of our sanity. If that ruptures, our peace of mind and that social sphere begin to disintegrate.
That has been the outgrowth of moral narcissism in our culture. It has divided us almost as no other phenomenon. America is a nation emotionally divided because it is ideologically divided and quite rigidly so. Our families are split, many of our lifelong friendships damaged or destroyed. This is particularly true since the events of September 11, 2001, when, for a few months, our country drew together before it inexorably drifted apart to an extent it had not for decades, perhaps since the Civil War itself. Terrified to think anew, people retreated to the traditional views they had had for decades, in many cases since childhood. Now we often live in silence with each other, unable to speak about the most significant things for fear they will cause the situation to get worse, that we will alienate each other further and cause the social fabric to explode.
Almost all of this is because moral narcissism has made us adhere so closely to our ideas, even to identify our entire personalities with them in the most precise manner, when that would not be necessary at all. Bret Stephens, in his America in Retreat, speaks of an “overdose of ideals.” Perhaps that is what we suffer from. Of course, those ideals come from somewhere. At some point we attached ourselves to them, as I did as a high school student, paging through The Communist Manifesto. The question is how to detach our minds from this narcissistic identification to see the world with clarity.
Good versus Bad Narcissism: Henrik Ibsen versus Jonathan Gruber
Which works better and will last longer—A Doll’s House or Obamacare?
I have painted us all as narcissists, but narcissistic identification is not entirely bad. There’s narcissim and narcissism. Some narcissists are indeed better than others. “Healthy” or good narcissism exists, as Freud, among many others, has told us. A rational amount of self-love makes a necessary contribution to our lives. It motivates us, sometimes even makes us happy. I wouldn’t be writing this book without it—or have done much of anything with my life. Most wouldn’t have. More significantly, many of the advances in our science and culture wouldn’t exist without a dab of narcissism, often more than a dab. The history of extraordinary achievements in the sciences and the arts can be viewed from one angle as the history of a kind of narcissistic megalomania. Henrik Ibsen is said to have kept a mirror at the end of a stovepipe hat that he would stare down at for hours, admiring himself and his genius while sitting at a cafe table. He wasn’t the only one. Well, he may have been the only one with a mirror at the bottom of his hat, but metaphorically he certainly wasn’t alone. Tooting your own horn, at least to yourself, may be a prerequisite for success.
An operative difference exists, however, between this healthy, or normally neurotic, narcissism and the moral narcissism under analysis here. One way to look at it is the difference between Henrik Ibsen and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who putatively was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s healthcare reform that has been so heavily criticized. It is perhaps unfair, even absurd, to compare Gruber—a seemingly intelligent though essentially routine academic—with a genius of world literature who helped revolutionize playwriting and the theatre, but it does highlight the difference between healthy, albeit extreme, narcissism and the moral kind—“I am best” (Ibsen) versus “I know best” (Gruber).
It is this latter type of narcissism (“I know best”) that is the more dangerous for the citizenry at large and the culture. The MIT economist is one of the prime public exemplars of moral narcissism in recent times, a paradigm figure much in the way global warming is a paradigm theory or movement. Caught repeatedly on video asserting the American public was too ignorant to know what was for their own good, Gruber became a poster boy for elites manipulating the electorate for their own ends. These ends are at once antidemocratic and self-congratulatory and geared, again consciously or unconsciously, toward power, control and, quite often, economic gain.
It’s no accident that few, including then majority leader Nancy Pelosi, knew what was in the Affordable Care Act. It didn’t matter. They weren’t supposed to. The bill itself was written by a small group of unelected and largely unvetted elites like Gruber and Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Barack Obama’s former adviser Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. All the elected leadership had to do was cooperate with these elites, receive their wisdom, and profit from the appearance of doing something. What the elites wrote had to be good because the elites said it was good and because elites felt good designing it and the leaders felt good enacting it. It’s no more than a high-toned shell game—moral narcissism as legislation. And the more byzantine the bill the better because there was no intention that it be understood and debated. As Nancy Pelosi made clear, “You have to pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it.” The process is more emotional than intellectual or analytical and, while pretending to the practical, is the antithesis of it. Results are immaterial and may never be known. In fact, it’s better if they’re not.
Inherent in this too, and not so far below the surface, is a buried insecurity. You pretend to know best, because deep down you fear you do not. You also may fear you are unqualified to make the decision or write the bill in the first place, because what really constitutes a qualification? A PhD? (The famous quote from William F. Buckley applies here: “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”) All of the usual qualifications that define elites may indeed be merely pretensions, something to be mocked like the pompous Il Dottore (the Doctor) stock character in the Commedia dell’Arte. Your ideas may be defective and you will be unmasked as a fraud. Nevertheless, you have become so thoroughly identified with these ideas that you cling to them more strongly, while making them as complicated as possible, thus wrapping them in a cloak of invisibility. The preservation of power is all.
This process or pattern—famously dramatized by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s It Is So If You Think So or Right You Are (If You Think You Are)—repeats itself over and over in many aspects of our political and social life. I could be polite and say to our detriment. Or I could be honest and say, particularly now, to our destruction. We are living in a time, it has been pointed out by commentators, of increasing global threat to our civilization, not unlike the 1930s. One of the enduring mysteries of that era is how so many allowed Hitler to carry out his dreadful work without forceful opposition until it was too late. There are many answers to that mystery, but moral narcissism is one of the keys to unlocking all of them, possibly the key. I will deal with that later, but first . . .