As babies, we all start life as profound narcissists: other people — particularly Mom & Dad — exist only for our benefits. As we mature, however, we slowly learn that the world is not about us. Our siblings, we realize, are just as much entitled to our parents’ love; our parents, in turn, have their own lives, which began before ours; our friends have families as central to their existence as ours are; as we reach adulthood, we realize that billions upon billions of people live long, meaningful, lives without ever having ever given us a second’s thought.

Unfortunately, such thinking is not inevitable and, in certain professions, gets in the way of things. As Dan Drezner points out in his Washington Post column today on the controversy over when (or if) the US Senate should release its report on CIA torture and rendition during the Bush Administration, the delusion that the world turns on your word is easy to find among the members (current and former) of the upper chamber:

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if Dianne Feinstein, Lindsey Graham, and the director of Human Rights Watch all think the report is necessary to prevent the United States from committing the same egregious mistakes in the future, then that countermands the magical thinking needed to accept the worst-case scenarios regarding its publication.

That “magical thinking” Drezner is referring to? The idea that releasing the report will lead to more violence from terrorists. As the good professor rather hilariously points out, the idea that a Senate report will meaningfully impact anyone’s behavior on the matter in insane; not a prosecution or even a hearing, just a report.

It’s one thing to encounter this level of narcissism among the denizens of our celebrity culture, but when the Senate takes itself almost as seriously as Kardashian/West household, we have a problem.