In Love With Ourselves

By Silja J.A. Talvi, In These Times. Posted August 15, 2006.

"It seems like just yesterday I was at the White House staying in the Lincoln bedroom, and everything was wonderful."

These were the words of former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland to a group of teenagers in early July. Rowland was trying to explain his downward trajectory from one of the Republican Party's favored political "stars" to standing in line for toilet paper in a federal prison.

He described his "sense of entitlement" as a political persona. "Before you know it, you're doing things you never thought you'd do in the past. ... Then you send that message to others."

The former governor no doubt got the message from those who influenced him in his rise to power, including the president himself. "I can't tell you how important it is to have people who hold office who deliver," President Bush glowed about Rowland during the Connecticut Republican Committee Lunch in April 2002. "[O]ne of the jobs of a governor is to help restore faith in the political process of a particular state. And the best way to defeat cynicism is to accomplish things on behalf of everybody ... to rise above the traditional noise that tends to dominate the political scene and perform."

"Performing" indeed. The governor put on a great act as a public servant -- that is, until he had to resign from office in 2004 amid an embarrassing investigation into rampant corruption and influence peddling.

Rowland's myopic perception of endless omnipotence could be described as wholly narcissistic. But he is not alone. Building a public persona in America often amounts to a narcissistic exercise on the grandest of scales.

Narcissism is clinically defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) as a "pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy." Although just about any person can possess certain narcissistic tendencies, the disorder can't technically be diagnosed until five out of nine criteria are met:

• A grandiose sense of self-importance unsupported by reality;
• A belief that s/he is special and unique and can only be understood by other 'special' people;
• A preoccupation with fantasies of extraordinary success, wealth, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love;
• An intense, excessive need for admiration;
• A sense of entitlement;
• A frequent tendency to exploit interpersonal relationships without guilt or remorse, including advantageous behavior to satisfy his/her own end goals;
• A lack of empathy;
• An envy of others, or the perception that s/he is the object of others' envy;
• Regular displays of arrogant behavior or attitude.

The likes of Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Rumsfeld, Rush Limbaugh, Paris Hilton and any number of other public figures leap to mind. But narcissists come in all shapes and stripes -- you may even be living or working with a few or have one as a parent.

Addressing an audience of people desperate to understand the narcissists in their midst, a subgenre of self-help books have been written to help non-narcissists identify and extricate themselves from this kind of interpersonal "toxicity."

Some of these authors are beginning to insist that the preponderance of narcissists in our society did not develop in a vacuum. In an April 2005 interview in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Julia Sokol (co-author of Help! I'm in Love With a Narcissist) observed: "I think society places a value on narcissism and narcissistic values. We put an emphasis on the superficial. We put an emphasis on the people who sound as though they know what they're talking about, even when they don't. ... Narcissism forgives an awful lot that in an earlier time would have been considered obnoxious."

Sociologist Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, first published in 1979, was the furthest thing from a self-help book. Written in a dense, unemotional style more suited to the classroom than to armchair psychology, the work was nonetheless groundbreaking. Lasch grasped an emergent sociopolitical trend: a societal push toward self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement, to the near exclusion of a sense of collective responsibility and accountability. One of Lasch's greatest feats was to pinpoint the narcissistic by-products of our American culture of "competitive individualism." Our society, he argued, had carried the "logic of individualism to the extreme of war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of narcissistic preoccupation with the self."

Lasch's book is both illuminating and prescient, particularly as the author predicted what we would later come to know as the "cult of celebrity." In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch alternated between clinical and casual observations of people who wanted not to be esteemed for their real accomplishments so much as they wanted to be admired and adored for their fortune, beauty, or social standing -- and politicians were not exempt from his scathing analysis. "Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity," Lasch writes. "[A]ll politics becomes a form of spectacle."

Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times.

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