The Selfishness of Self-Love

Exploring the new school of narcissism

Psychosis is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture.
- Jules Henry

At a resort in Palm Springs, I was looking for sunglasses at the poolside shop and saw a sixty-dollar tote bag. “Self-Love is Radical,” the tote bag said. I pictured carrying it back to the folding chair by the pool and lying down with the message displayed at my feet as I drank hard ciders and fell asleep in the sun. I pictured taking the subway with “Self-Love is Radical” hanging from my shoulder as I pretended not to have money when asked, not even in the “Self-Love is Radical” bag.

The idea of “self-love” seems perversely silly as a slogan on a tote bag, but it has become the recommended foundation for psychological well-being. Love yourself first and the rest will follow. As Psych Central explains:

Self-love is not the same as being narcissistic or selfish. Rather, self-love means having a positive regard for our own wellbeing and happiness. When we adopt an attitude of self-love, we have higher levels of self-esteem, we’re less critical and harsh with ourselves when we make mistakes, and we’re able to celebrate our positive qualities and accept our negative ones.

Having fallen in love with yourself, you’ll find it easier to love others. Self-love will act as a mirror in which you reflect into the outside what you feel from the inside, therefore manifesting love from your self-love in everything, everywhere, and everyone.

But what if this school of thinking is not just optimistic, but outright wrong?

This is the theory of history professor Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979).

When it was published in 1979, The Culture of Narcissism became a surprise bestseller and won the National Book Award. The book entered a post-Freud, post-Vietnam culture where sociology, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy wetly bred and occasionally howled Christian truism, a decade where the country’s old dreams went to die under a disco ball. The mythology of national invincibility ended in the seventies with not a bang, but helicopter rides for both the president and a proxy government. Hippies became homeowners and landowners. Lyndon Johnson’s six-foot four frame no longer justified mass murder or toilet-side interviews. A disillusioned Christian nation looked for a reason to feel proud again - especially if hippies could be blamed in the process.

The Culture of Narcissism washed ashore in this low tide of culture, hitting shelves two years before the country elected Ronald Reagan. With a heroic fortitude, Lasch attempts to prove that liberal society is founded on narcissism - from education and psychology to sex and sports - without necessarily examining the reasons for the nation’s spiritual shift from the exterior to the interior.

In charming yet relentlessly grumpy prose, The Culture of Narcissism explores the commodification of Flower Power and the white-hot shame of a post-Vietnam America. Siding with the hard hats, not the hippies, Lasch argues that self-love and self-expression are not a supreme good but supremely selfish.

The book is divided into ten sections with equally dire titles:

1. The Awareness Movement and the Social Invasion of the Self

2. The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time

3. Changing Modes of Making It: From Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker

4. The Banality of Pseudo-Self-Awareness: Theatrics of Politics and Everyday Existence

5. The Degradation of Sport

6. Schooling and the New Illiteracy

7. The Socialization of Reproduction and the Collapse of Authority

8. The Flight from Feeling: Sociopsychology of the Sex War

9. The Shattered Faith in the Regeneration of Life

10. Paternalism Without Father

A contention emerges early: if we are to scorn spiritual fulfillment, where should we find meaning? Lasch keeps us guessing and grumpy through the end.

As in literature, as in life: in 1993, Lasch, who had undergone surgery for cancer a year earlier, was told that the cancer was back.

He refused chemotherapy and rebuked the pleas of specialists, explaining:

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.

He died at home in 1994 at age 61.

The Culture of Narcissism is a step-by-step plea for practicality in an era of emerging secular spirituality that Lasch saw as alienating apathy, not triumph over the self. He believed transcendence is another word for escapism: By assuring yourself that it’s what’s on the inside counts and what’s on the outside in the “material world” is an inconvenient illusion, self-love devalues your connection to a greater whole and that self-love necessarily becomes selfishness.

There is a more functional outcome to be learned from Lasch’s analysis of this new narcissism - which is still relevant today - but engaging with the material is a rewarding exercise in seeing the seams of a national culture fraying in a post-propaganda age.

Narcissus Unbound

Narcissists are self-centered and crave endless attention and admiration. They think everything they do is grand on a cosmic scale, but can’t imagine the worlds of other people.

Secondary symptoms of narcissism cataloged in The Culture of Narcissism include:

1. Pseudo self-insight

2. Calculating seductiveness

3. Nervousness

4. Self-deprecatory humor.

5. Intense fear of old age

6. Decline of the play spirit

7. Deteriorating relations with the opposite gender

In Lasch’s interpretation, self-consciousness and self-awareness is a mask for self-centeredness.

The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety. He seeks not to inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life.

It’s important to reread the passage above: Lasch is arguing that inflicting certainties on others is a good thing, compared to trying to find your own meaning in life. He’s basically worried that the new narcissist is retreating into the self at the cost of the world. This narcissism is a “state of mind in which the world appears as mirror of the self.”

If you’re determined to improve yourself and find self-love, all you care about is how you see yourself in the mirror you call the world. In modern terms, we might call this “manifestation.” Modern culture doesn’t see this as a bad thing. Lasch does:

The ideology of personal growth, superficially optimistic, radiates a profound despair and resignation. It is the faith of those without faith.

The self-love narcissists focus on “personal growth” because they are weak-willed and worried about how to stop or how to soothe uncomfortable urges, instead of finding productive channels for them. Lasch explains:

Narcissism in this sense is the longing to be free from longing… The narcissist feels consumed by his own appetites… he longs to free himself from his own hunger and rage, to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion, and to outgrow his dependence on others.

In his definition of new narcissism, Lasch is saying that, by dedicating all of our feelings and thoughts and actions into polishing the mirror of the self, even with the best of intentions, we are still only left with a world made in our own image.

If you have strong feelings about the world, Lasch may recommend, it’s better to throw it all out there than throw them against the mirror. He is advocating for expression as construction, not deconstruction.

In other words, inflict your opinion on others?

Divine Defeatism

Going for a jog each morning?

Think again. This kind of thing isn’t just some harmless hobby. Lasch believes it’s participation in a “culture of competitive individualism” in which an unseen “war of all against all” is fought with “a narcissistic preoccupation with the self” that a culture of narcissism sees as the pursuit of happiness.

The new narcissists retreat from the world out of the fear that they can’t control anything beyond the self.

Lasch paints the picture with one of his funniest grumpisms:

After the political turmoil of the sixties, Americans have retreated to purely personal preoccupations. Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East. jogging, learning how to ‘relate,’ overcoming ‘the fear of pleasure.’

Want to feel more connected to the world by meditating about your role in the universe? Don’t fall for it. As Lasch warns, learning to live, laugh, and love is just an excuse for self-indulgent drama encouraged by hippie losers:

Radicals had so few practical results to show for their sacrifices that we are driven to conclude that they embraced radical politics in the first place not because it promised practical results but because it served as the new mode of self-dramatization.

Every form of self-expression - from fitness to art, spirit to habit, ideology to identity - is a strategy of “narcissistic survival.”

In a tangent predicting the nineties era of slackers and a misshapen movement against selling out, Lasch sees a growing number of narcissistic Americans joining “the cult of authenticity” at the cost of everything else.

Materials of Meaning

Despite the Fox News-friendly cheap shots at Flower Power, The Culture of Narcissism has a lot in common with the philosophical and psychological studies of power structures and industrialized spirituality that C. Wright Mills (1916 - 1962) illuminated in 1951’s White Collar: The American Middle Classes and 1952’s The Power Elite and a philosophy Ernest Becker perfected in his Nobel Prize winner, The Denial of Death (1972).

The Culture of Narcissism should not be taken as a 10-item list of complaints about self-love or self-expression, but a prophecy of a new alienation. Lasch’s conclusion is that by confusing our inner world for the real world in our pursuit of self-love as a virtue, we inevitably decide that what makes us feel good is the meaning of life and we think fulfillment should come from within the self instead of from the outside world. In selfish self-expression, we inhabit a fantasy world where the guest list is exclusive and the beliefs bespoke and decide we’ve transcended, but we are never happier:

Acting out fantasies does not end repressions… it merely dramatizes the permissible limits of antisocial behavior.

The math of this claim is as follows:

1. Transcendence is isolation.

2. Isolation is selfish, because you focus on the self.

3. The focus on the self leads to grandiose ideas of the self.

4. Grandiose ideas of the self lead to selfish patterns.

5. Selfish patterns produce narcissistic ways of thinking.

The Culture of Narcissism is an investigation of a society’s spirit as capitalism and nationalism become interchangeable. Lasch doesn’t think that the determination to save your own soul is bad - he just thinks the soul is corrupt by the practices we think preserve it. Yet, as a man so disillusioned by self-discovery, he is predictably bad at making his actual point in the end.

Here’s what he is trying to say: if self-love is really the secret to being happy, there’s no data to support it. In every survey, the causes of happiness will almost always be centered on relationships with others, not the self.

Does that mean all the time and the pain we take to healing wounds from the inside is wasted effort? Will self-love only separate us from the outer world where we could find happiness from loving and helping others and belonging instead?

Maybe it depends on whether you see the soul as a light or a mirror but, if we’re to believe in The Culture of Narcissism, the only true thing is that it can’t be both.

Interested in more alt-culture hot takes from the chunky post-war years?

• Read the righteousness of repression in “The Defense of Repression”

• Read about the theory of the personality market in “Are Vacations Evil?”

And subscribe for Litverse’s next investigation into the Economics of the Personality Market, “Sins of the Selfie.”