[Main Blog Post] Narcissism and Me

[jprussell]

(The title's a joke, btw).

Check out the new post, and feel free to comment here on Dreamwidth.

Comments

[jprussell]

One other important thing I left out above, that might help cast some further light: that self-identifying label of "nice person" (or however else the person wants to be seen: special, badass, smart, lovable, important, whatever) is almost always a defense against deeply felt insecurity. So, Alice, Bob, and Charlie all have deep-down worries that they may or may not be wholly aware of that there is something wrong with them/they're not likable/admirable/something, and the way each of them copes with this is by telling him/herself "but I'm a nice person!" and then seeking out other folks to validate that judgment. The trouble is, as long as there's a mismatch of this deeply-felt unworthiness and the label that other folks are validating, the person seeking the reassurance won't really buy it in the long run, it'll be a temporary fix ("wow, Alice, you're so nice!" "Gosh, thanks" [temporary feeling of security, then, to herself:] "wow, that guy thought I was nice just for that? He was just being polite, he didn't really mean it.")

[sdi]

Oh, so it's like how people talk about their jobs? They want to convince themselves and others that they're busy and important even (and especially) if they don't like their work or feel like it's pointless? If so, is this another manifestation of the commoditization-of-everything?

[jprussell]

Exactly! Rather than confronting the yawning existential horror that they are wasting their lives on stupid shit and the hard and scary work it would take to make that not true, they settle for trying to convince themselves that activity=value and that title/postition=real importance. Never mind that it's self-defeating, because the only reason they're working so hard to convince themselves is because they really don't buy it.

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.

[sdi]

I believe you're focusing on dead authors presently, right? If you have room for an author who is aged-but-alive, I might suggest "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott. His premise is that when a government (or anyone, really, but Scott's an anarchist and so he's talking about governments :) ) measures something, it optimizes for that measure at the expense of all else (including it's long-term sustainability).

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?

[jprussell]

Oh man, Seeing Like a State has been on my list for years. I think I first heard of it either through Eric S. Raymond or Scott Alexander, but it was the Uruk Series by Lou Keep of sam[]zdat. He slightly tweaks Scott's concept of "legibility" in the series, but I have found it tremendously useful for understanding what goes wrong with well-meaning interventions (and makes less well-intentioned ones even worse).

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!