Part Two of three
Most of us, without knowing it, swim like tadpoles in a sea of narcissism. We grow up, absorbing the public school culture, the TV, the movies, the news, the street culture in modern Western life. We are formed, in large part, by the seemingly random and existential accidentals around us: and they form us more deeply the less we are aware of their presence.
We are the child who sits watching a Disney movie of a young woman who strives to break the bonds of natural authority in order to plant her image on the world around her; we are the middle school student who suddenly realizes that in order to matter to our peers, we must conform by asserting ourselves with the clothing we wear (which, by the way, ends up looking as a facsimile of the clothes that everyone else is wearing). We are the teenager who knows nothing of the word vocation and ‘lives for the weekend’- a weekend of trying, via some substance or another, to reach intimacy but never to build true friendship. We are the young adult on a gap year, feeling that the loss of identity in the midst of a European twilight is somehow our right; and we are the twenty and thirtysomethings, feeling the weight of new responsibility as if it were meant for someone else, and not really seeing the importance of it beyond what it means for us, as an ‘autonomous individual’. We are the middle-aged sixties washouts who cannot commit to anything, because it threatens our boundaries of surface happiness: and it directly threatens our false view of ourselves as loving individuals. We are the citizen who cannot see that our own secular government, founded on deep pluralism, can and does commit evil (although even a numbskull free of narcissism could put that together). We are the adults who cannot think for ourselves, or think abstractly, because the culture we live in does not produce freedom, but rather narcissists and their symbiotic Echoes.
In the fifties, a Muslim cleric named Kutu came to the United States to study our school system and lived in a small American town. He came to a devastating revelation: even in the American heyday of law and order, the philosophies of radical individualism would produce a people who could not see beyond themselves; they would become selfish, to the point of seeing reality in the image of themselves- and that this was the great danger of the future to his fellow Muslims.
In time, Kutu himself became unattached to reality, in that he was the founder of a radical group of Muslims who came to the (ironically) rather narcissistic conclusion that they were allowed to kill anyone who didn’t practice the faith the way they did. However, amongst the false religious views producing fanaticism were some valid observations. At the time of his American sojourn, Kutu was an educated, moderate Muslim: he was a religious man, who understood something correct and fundamental: that the truly religious person could not be selfish, and that selfishness (narcissism) can be cultural and not just an individual problem. He saw the devastating effects that narcissism, or radical individualism, would produce on a culture at large: it would destroy the ability for people to have faith.
The Latin root of religion is religare, which means “ to tie”. In religion, which is the way in which we practice our faith, we are tied to God: we are obedient to Him, we are the feminine soul in relation to the Creator, the I to the Thou, face to Face. A truly religious person is in the process of forgetting self, or "losing one's life to gain it (in Christ)". But a radical individual, one who “has the right to create the universe as he or she sees fit” (paraphrase from Planned Parenthood vs. Casey) becomes fundamentally a narcissist. And when our own Supreme Court makes statements anywhere close to the one paraphrased above, we have a narcissistic culture. We begin to lose the very ability to see beyond our own image to the other, most importantly to the most Other, God. We cannot think in terms of abstraction, or principles, or faith, because everything is immanentized, everything is reduced to Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”- or the modern version- “As I think, therefore everything is”.
M. Scott Peck wrote a great book titled The People of the Lie in the late seventies or early eighties. In it, he documents that people who are evil are essentially narcissists, those who cannot see beyond the image that they have of themselves. This way of life is not only diametrically opposed to a truly religious life; it is necessarily propped up by bundles of lies. Dr. Peck also describes how a group or nation can become narcissistic, and thus begin to see that making the rest of the world in their own image is somehow righteous and necessary. It makes a person, and a nation, unable to see beyond themselves to reality, and unable to see those whom they are remaking in their own image. Others simply become echoes outside the veil of self.
