Jeff Russell
[Main Blog Post] Narcissism and Me
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Date: 2023-04-11 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-11 02:26 pm (UTC)Possibly I'm just overtired and need to come back to all this a different day.
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Date: 2023-04-11 04:13 pm (UTC)What you wrote above in your comment triggered a series of brain farts on how different people deal with existential angst and uncertainty.
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Date: 2023-04-11 04:25 pm (UTC)But let me back up. What
So why is the author saying that? Presumably to justify his own selfishness, or at least justify his struggle with it, right? But, IMHO, this is just the Christian myth repurposed: that you are an irredeemably awful monster and here's what you should do about it. But I guess I fundamentally find that myth silly: it's not hard for some people to be a good neighbor, and saying no really it is doesn't change that. I can absolutely see how such a myth is valuable to people like Saint Paul or Augustine of Hippo or Bill Wilson who really did struggle with their problems and needed such a myth to help them overcome them, but not everybody has the same hangup. I think it was Raymond Smullyan who said something to the effect of, "there's a wide variety of religious beliefs because there's a wide variety of people in the world." So while I think the author's model of human behavior may make sense in some situations, I can't imagine that it's broadly useful.
So to bring this back around, the author that
And so I think my confusion is that you're making the assumption that the author's point is fundamentally sound and correct, hence self-reflection and self-examination is fundamentally crucial to make sure you're balancing your own (selfish) desires against others' (selfish) desires, and since occultists spend more time on self-refection than others, then occultists are presumably better-than-average at being selfless. You're also, I think, making the point that since America is hyper-individualistic, and since individuals must be fundamentally selfish, then America is hyper-selfish, exacerbating the problem.
But since I reject the author's point from the get-go, neither of those further elaborations followed and I was confused why they might.
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Date: 2023-04-11 06:02 pm (UTC)TLP's definition of "narcissism" is not being "selfish", "egotistical", or "grandiose", though those commonly come along with it, and most of my examples reinforced that. Instead, TLP's definition is that narcissism is having a felt sense of "identity" that is some "thing" that you are or have, rather than the emergent outcome of the actions you do. Sometimes (often?), these things line up, and you might say that one way of measuring how pathological things have gotten is by the disconnect between these two things.
Let's go a little more concrete: Alice thinks of herself/sees herself as a "nice person". It's important to her sense of identity, "who she is", that she can apply that label to herself. To whatever degree Alice thinks she has some quality, some essence of "nice personness" that is insulated from rather than determined by her actions, that's narcissism. Happily, Alice actually does things she thinks other people will like, takes care of the worse off, gives people compliments, and so forth - in other words, she actually does nice things. So, she likely has a very small amount of narcissism that is pretty healthy.
Next, let's take a look at Bob. Bob also thinks of himself/sees himself as a "nice person," and it is likewise important to his sense of identity that that is what he is. Bob also is pretty good about helping other folks, saying kind things, and so forth, but every once in a while, something gets under his skin and he explodes in a tirade about how ungrateful and awful the person who set him off is, and as often as not, he makes the target of this outburst cry. Bob always feels bad about this and apologizes, does what he can to make it up, and tells himself "that's not really who I am, I'm really a nice person." That last part - protecting the identity of being "a nice person", without actually doing the work to stop the behaviors inconsistent with that identity, that's the narcissism talking, and it's started to get less healthy.
Lastly, we come to Charlie, who, like Alice and Bob, sees himself as "a nice person" and finds it important to define himself that way. Charlie, though, only sometimes helps people out, rarely says anything kind, and often makes jokes about things other folks are sensitie about. When someone confronts him about it, he says "okay, well, yeah, I don't help out that much, I say mean things more often than kind things, but I'm really a nice person deep down." That's getting to a much unhealthier level of narcissism, because the identity is now almost entirely divorced from the deeds.
The crucial point I wanted to highlight here is that narcissism does not obviously equate with selfishness as it's usually understood, but rather with a desire to protect one or more parts of the self's identity in the face of contradictory evidence. It is just at its ugliest and most likely to hurt other folks when that protected identity is either a) something harmful, like thinking you're better than other people, or b) the gap between identity label and actions is huge.
All that being said, it is quite possible that the author's (and my own!) experience and inner state are, in fact, rather different from yours - I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page about definitions before discussing further.
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Date: 2023-04-11 06:54 pm (UTC)It could be that I'm running into the conflict of two useful rules of thumb:
I'll have to spend some time pondering it, I think.
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Date: 2023-04-11 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-11 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-11 08:45 pm (UTC)And huh, thank you, I had not explicitly linked this to JMG's "Reign of Quantity" and the commoditization-of-everything, but that's absolutely right. TLP talks about the "pornographization" of things, where a single piece of a complex whole is picked as a symbol/fetish and then elevated to the only thing that matters (easy example: measuring your worth as a productive human being by the size of your paycheck). That's his preferred way of looking at it, as he is more interested in how the piece can come to unhealthily stand for the whole. With commoditization, on the other hand, the emphasis is on the exchangeability or ability to make money, but I think both takes are getting at the idea of a simplification/reduction of something complex into something that's easier to deal with in the short run, but in the long run erases much of what is true and important about the more complex phenomena so reduced.
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Date: 2023-04-11 09:11 pm (UTC)A simple example from the first chapter is how a government (I believe one of the various German governments of the 1800s) wanted to optimize timber production on a piece of land, so they chopped down all the trees (getting timber), planted a monocrop of the best-producing species, in 30 years chopped down all the trees (getting lots of timber, hooray), replanted the monocrop, and then found to their dismay that the land was barren and none of the trees they planted grew. Turns out a forest isn't just a collection of trees, who knew?
The book is largely a series of case studies along these lines about various other measures (land use, weights and measures, etc.).
I suppose we're seeing now what happens when one applies such a methodology to the value of a human life?
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Date: 2023-04-12 12:18 am (UTC)I'm actually not holding myself to only dead authors now that 2022 is up, so maybe this is a sign to bump Scott back up the list (Against the Grain is also on my list). Thanks!