Are you who you say you are?

Roger L. Simon writes about growing up as a member of the "me generation."

The election of Barack Obama was the apotheosis of this melding of lifestyle with political worldview. That he celebrated his victory in front of Grecian columns was symbolic in more ways than one. Narcissus was in the house—both on stage and in the audience. The “me” generation had found its perfect leader. Hope and change were never specified, because we all knew what he meant. How could it be otherwise? He was speaking, as was said in an earlier era, to “our crowd.” But our crowd had become everyone who saw himself as politically correct, even if we weren’t sure what that meant or implied. It sounded good. Whatever it was had to be true. Obama was cool and his adversaries were not. He was our image in the reflecting pool, preening in front of those Greek columns, nose slightly elevated.

...Narcissism has taken over our society to such an extent that we cannot see straight. It has disconnected us, or a great many of us, from reality, and is in the process of undermining what tiny bit of democracy we have left. Every even mildly unconventional thought has a “trigger warning” lest someone be offended. Narcissism is making us blind. It is the secret sauce destroying America from within. It is also the handmaiden of perpetual distraction, the misdirection that prevents us ever from solving anything.

...Another far more lethal form of narcissism dominates and leads the parade of self-regard that is destroying our culture, even gnawing away at the fabric of Western Civilization itself, which is on the verge of disintegration, excessive as that may sound.

That form is moral narcissism—a pathology that underlies the whole liberal left ethic today and some of the right as well. What exactly is this form of narcissism that is destroying—if it hasn’t already destroyed—our families, friendships, workplace atmosphere, and democratic republic?

The short form is this: What you believe, or claim to believe or say you believe—not what you do or how you act or what the results of your actions may be—defines you as a person and makes you “good.” It is how your life will be judged by others and by yourself. In 19th-century France, the gastronome Jean Brillat-Savarin told us that “you are what you eat.” In 21st-century America, almost all of us seem to have concluded that “you are what you say you are. You are what you proclaim your values to be, irrespective of their consequences.” That is moral narcissism.

It is a narcissism that emanates from a supposed personal virtue augmented by a supposed intellectual clarity. It is what allows Hillary Clinton to go from undergraduate scold to Chappaqua plutocrat with a net worth in the tens of millions without missing a beat, or John Kerry to go from Vietnam War protester likening his fellow soldiers to Genghis Khan to a billionaire with a yacht constructed in New Zealand that he houses in Rhode Island to avoid the taxes of his native Massachusetts.

This is a narcissism of political and social thought, a narcissism that evolved as religion declined, a narcissism of ideas and attitudes, a narcissism of “I know best,” of “I believe therefore I am.” It is our identity tied up inextricably to our belief system in a way that brooks no examination. It is a narcissism of groupthink that makes you assume you are better than you are because you have the same received and conventional ideas as your peers, a mutual reward system not unlike the French concept of BTBG—bon type, bon genre—but taken to a national extreme. There is only one way to be, one kind of idea and attitude to have. There are no others. Why even bother to look, consider, or try to understand them?

And those ideas and attitudes are “reflected” in the following narcissistic manner: If your intentions are good, if they conform to the general received values of your friends, family, and co-workers, what a person of your class and social milieu is supposed to think, everything is fine. You are that “good” person. You are ratified. You can do anything you wish. It doesn’t matter in the slightest what the results of those ideas and beliefs are, or how society, the country, and in some cases, the world suffers from them. It doesn’t matter that they misfire completely, cause terror attacks, illness, death, riots in the inner city, or national bankruptcy. You will be applauded and approved of. Like the 1960s song by The Animals, it’s all okay “if your intentions are good.” No one will even notice what happened. You’ll be fine. In fact, better than that, your status will continue to rise as you continue to parrot the received wisdom.

Deeper down, beneath this conformity, it’s all about how you feel about yourself. Self-regard is all. In the world of moral narcissism, we are all the ladies of Code Pink, craving attention, fairly yearning to be dragged out of a congressional hearing, preening for television cameras, as we mouth the most clichéd of progressive slogans, oblivious to their impact in the real world or even, remotely, to their veracity.

Not only are we good. We are the best, and therefore we can do anything we wish. We have permission. Moral narcissism is the ultimate “Get out of jail free” card in a real-life Monopoly game. No matter what you do, if you have the right opinions, if you say the right things to the right people, you’re exempt from punishment. People will remember your pronouncements, not your actions.

Hollywood stars, media personalities, and many politicians are prototypes of this behavior, but we are all prey to it. Look behind almost every issue of our day—climate, environment, energy, gun control, defense, foreign affairs, terrorism, education, income inequality, immigration, race (especially), women’s rights, gay rights, political correctness (the mother lode of moral narcissism), microaggressions and trigger warnings (moral narcissism as modern-day opera bouffe), media bias, cultural and entertainment bias, not to mention the very size and scope of government itself—and you will find the profound influence of moral narcissism, almost always for the worse. It is the prime hidden motor for our society, pointing to our republic’s demise because it makes people blind to reality and democracy moot.

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