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Narcissism Is Unpleasant. Guilt Destroys.
@doctorrobert linked to a brilliant essay by Kevin Williamson which compares the intolerance of today’s left to the intolerance of other religions and political movements over the years. That started my wheels turning and my brain excreted the following contribution to the debate. Williamson makes a series of characteristically brilliant points, but I wanted to look at the same phenomenon from a different angle. Please don’t read Williamson’s NRO article and then read mine – he’s a phenomenal writer and I’d prefer to avoid direct comparisons to his work if possible. But for what it’s worth, I submit the following:
I turn 50 today, although I don’t feel a day over 85. I work too much, don’t take care of myself very well, and I’m tired all the time. I’ve had both feet on the gas for so long that I can’t remember any other way to live. The immortal philosophers Def Leppard once observed, “It’s better to burn out than fade away.” I hope they’re right.
I’ve reached the age where people reflexively call me “sir,” and when I trip over a curb, people don’t laugh at me, they come running to help. I think, “Why is everyone acting so weird around me? What’s wrong with these people?” Then I look in the mirror. “Oh, right. I got old. Huh. I thought that would take longer.” Being on the other end of those sympathetic looks that I used to give old people has gotten me to thinking about our culture’s apparent infatuation with youth, and how it creates the seemingly incongruous but certainly destructive environment of narcissism and guilt. Allow Jim Beam and I to explain, hopefully using better sentence structure than that.
The hippie movement of the ’60s and ’70s had a famous mantra: “Never trust anyone over 30.” I suppose that makes sense if your goal is to do whatever you want, unconstrained by the cumulative wisdom of thousands of years of civilization. All those old customs and rules may have made some sense back in the ancient times of primitive civilizations, like, for example, the Eisenhower administration.
But the birth control pill changed everything. Are those bummer rules really relevant anymore? I mean, come on, dude. If the pill frees us from the biological consequences of our actions, then shouldn’t we be freed from the ethical consequences of our actions? And then, our actions could be, well, just anything we wanted them to be at any given time! What a wonderful world that would be, right? And if the old world can’t handle this new reality, then we obviously must move on to the new world, right?
If you want to live in a new world, first you must destroy, or at least delegitimize, the old one. Including the old people. Like, for example, me, I guess. What always struck me as odd, even when I was a young person, is that young people and old people are the same people. Just at different times in their lives. Just as Thomas Sowell pointed out that rich people and poor people are often the same people at different times in their lives. Leftists, and others with simplistic views of the world, often view young people or poor people as a sort of civil rights group, when in fact they’re just, well, people.
Man’s movement away from God over the past 50-70 years is due, in large part, in my view, from a lack of gratitude. Just like with spoiled kids. When spoiled kids get anything they want, they paradoxically lack gratitude. And that kid can never be happy. That kid is spoiled goods. Can’t be fixed. The spoiled kids of the ’60s and ’70s, likewise, are damaged goods.
Their parents, who were often born during WW1, survived the depression, and served during WW2; they just wanted their kids to have a better life. They were generous with their children – sometimes to a fault. Then the birth control pill came out. At exactly the wrong time. So these spoiled children, who thought they could have whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it – suddenly they really could have whatever they wanted. Whenever they wanted it.
Deep down inside, they knew that something was wrong. But they were enjoying what they were doing. So they could have changed their course and lived their lives according to the wisdom of the ancients. But they did not choose that path. Instead, they chose to continue to pursue immediate pleasures, with no apparent consequences. Who among us would not? Especially at the age of 16-24 or so?
And that left an enormous hole in their souls. It was hard to see at the time. It’s easy to see now. They became college professors and have nearly destroyed our university system. They became leaders in the Catholic church and their ingrained lack of respect for tradition or anything else greater than themselves has, at the very least, fundamentally changed the Catholic church. They have entered leadership positions in politics and our government has grown into an unpredictable monster acting with no apparent limitations.
The narcissism of the baby boomers, and their dream of a world with no constraints has led to power systems with no constraints.
Just for the record, after high school I was selected to play in an all-star football game. I couldn’t make it because I had moved to Sweden to live with my absolutely gorgeous Swedish exchange student girlfriend. My parents were less than thrilled, as you might imagine. But I knew what I was doing. Or, at least, I thought I did. So, I cast no stones. I’ve been there. And I understand.
But as destructive as narcissism is, I think guilt is worse. Guilt is a horribly destructive force. For a lot of reasons, many of which have been described by much (much, much, much) greater thinkers than me, like Thomas Sowell and many others. But the destructive aspect of guilt that I want to address here is its tendency to cause the bad behaviors of a few to rapidly metastasize to society as a whole.
Suppose a man decides that he is actually a woman and he wants to marry a man who for some reason thinks he is actually a man who wants to marry a woman who is actually a man. Ok. Ten years ago, that would not interest me, and the most response it would get would be a chuckle or a roll of the eyes. Whatever. Seems odd to me, but it’s really none of my business – go ahead. Whatever floats your boat.
This live-and-let-live attitude is, I would argue, an absolute requirement for a stable, peaceful society. At some point, one of my neighbors is going to do something I find odd. As long as I don’t stick my nose in his business and tell him how to live his life, then we can still be friends and love one another as neighbors and move on with our lives in peace.
But now, this attitude is viewed as homophobic and hateful, and the left seeks to criminalize my desire to leave other people alone. If the man/woman from the case I described asks me to bake a cake for his/her wedding, I cannot simply give him a list of other bakers who would be happy to help. According to the left, I must bake that cake. I can’t simply allow him to do things I don’t personally approve of – I am forced to participate.
Why would the man/woman, or the state, feel the need to force a stranger to participate in something they disapprove of? I think it’s to absolve their guilt. Just like the Democratic Party’s resistance to means testing for Social Security – we can’t criticize an activity if we’re all in on it. No one will call Social Security simple thievery if we’re all on the take. T.H. White’s description of totalitarianism — “anything that is not forbidden is now compulsory” – is a pretty good description of today’s intolerant left.
I would argue that narcissism leads to the abandonment of traditional ethics and mores. This leads to bad behavior, which leads to guilt, which leads to demand for others to assimilate and even participate in this new ethical system, which eventually leads to totalitarianism by outlawing independent thought. Whew.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe you just wasted five minutes of your life reading the drunken ramblings of someone who is substituting his longing for his youth with a longing for a beautiful society that never actually existed. If that’s the case, I apologize.
But I wonder if maybe all those old, dusty ethics, morals, and traditions – that, when I was young, seemed to limit my personal freedom – maybe those restrictive traditions actually protect our personal freedoms.
I’ll let you figure it out. I’m tired.
Man, I’m always tired. I’m getting old. I gotta slow down…
Published in General
Chewy.
Yeah. Overcooked.
I’m a boomer. I can say with absolute certainty that you are making a lot of suppositions about “boomers” that are inaccurate. Your first sentence is correct. People are people. Each person is unique.
I think the generations that preceded and followed the boomers resented a lot of the attention the boomers got for whatever they did. But the boomer generation didn’t ask for that. The attention this particular group got was the result of simply the size of the group. The press was fascinated by it. And the country was thrilled to watch the baby boom after the ravages of World War II. Seeing so many babies made Americans a little giddy after witnessing what must have felt like the true end of days.
As time went on, boomers got a lot of attention in the schools because there had to be so many schools built. After so much death, imagine cities and towns all over the country having to build schools. It was a joyful time. Every single school I attended as a kid was brand new.
As more time went on, the boomers became a marketing demographic. So it felt for people immersed in the media as if the world was centered on the boomers. But that was mostly because of Madison Avenue and hopeful businesses that saw growth potential.
In every generation, there are people who are rude, stupid, and self-absorbed. We can’t, as you said about the Left, descend into the madness of identity politics.
For one thing, life will be boring if we do that. We’ll think we know everything we need to know about a person just by knowing his age and skin color.
I think, in fact, that’s how identity politics has wreaked such havoc on American life. We’re not curious about each other anymore. We all have succumbed to the notion that we can know people just by looking at them.
And our boredom with each other may explain the loneliness problem. And that’s a tragedy.
Another branch of the ingratitude attribute of post-modern life is their unhappy nature. I believe gratitude is both necessary and sufficient for a happy life. Furthermore, a grateful life is not predicated on the quality of that life. It is independent of wealth, health or social standing. It is an attitude that is infectious. Where as an ingrate becomes focused on himself and leads to narcissistic behavior.
Because of human nature, we all need an outside agent ie tradition, custom or religious ethics/ mores to keep us focused outward as opposed to inward.
If they didn’t build forced actuarial stabilizers into it from the beginning, it is a political scam. It is theft.
People need to come up with new words for this stuff.
I love reading the Doctors on Ricochet!
Might I recommend a great book? “Guilt, Blame, and Politics” by Alan Levitte.
Free download here
Happy Birthday 🎂🎉 And Def Leppard was quoting Neil Young.
Afternoon Dr.,
When you look at the lives of your parents and their parents can you see how the boomers might have turned out so poorly? My mom’s first memory on a farm in Spencer Ind. was cleaning the chimneys for the kerosene lamps and when asked about the games she played as a child she doesn’t remember playing games even thought she was the middle of 11. She helped raise the last 5. Her brothers worked in the fields and cared for a butchered animals, three went in the army. Oran at 18 is with Patton’s Army and at 21 was at Buchenwald 4 days after it was liberated. I did not note great gratitude in her family, I did note great industry and ambition. That generation, my parents WWII generation achieved more than their parents had hoped, my generation did not build on our parents achievements but undercut them. We did not have the industry our parents had. Perhaps it is because as children we had a rather idyllic life, we were not in the fields, or at the store providing that essential bit of extra work or income which helped keep the family afloat. We had allowances for chores. Our parents had left the life of the farm, and with it the information one learns on a farm. One learns that all advances take work, life is unpredictable and hard. The boomer childhood also had a cohort unknown as a group, teenagers, we had our own way of walking, our own way of talking. We had music just for us, even tv American Bandstand, Father Knows Best. We were not a positive force, however our ignorance and self-centeredness was not just willful.
Here are three songs, none are big hits, which show aspects of the boomer world view. 1. “Outside of a small circle of friends”. Phil Ochs. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dMeG6dAFqXw 2. Talking World War III Blues”, Bob Dylan, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=947tGsiv4lQ 3, Eve of Destruction” Barry McGuire https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=947tGsiv4lQ
I like that.
Great article.
Personally, I think our whole system is set up to destroy capital as it’s described in this article. No one cares.
Yeah, I disagree. I think what characterizes our society is shamelessness — not guilt. This is because we don’t talk about the roots of sin (unless we’re religious) — addiction to wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. I would say people today suffer addictions to all those with no one to tell them it’s bad for them and for society. The Left’s enforcers of conformity are particularly fond of the honor they receive for virtue signalling. “Moral vanity” is what David Horowitz calls it.
I also disagree that people are the same people their whole lives. If we never acquire any wisdom (not just wealth) over the course of a lifetime, it a pretty sad state of affairs. We should be becoming who God made us to be. That involves change.
Also, you might be interested to know that many people (I’m one) believe in what Catholicism teaches because of the teaching on contraception — especially women (Dr. Scott Hahn’s wife, Kimberly, and Dr. Taylor Marshall’s wife…).
Afternoon Rufus,
To build on your comment, our/my parents gave me a world of material security. Although my mother did not have her own car until she was 31, my pop was a Dr., I never experienced rationing, of food, clothing. Economic security became our baseline and we did not learn the cost/value of the goods we had. We did not experience scarcity and so we took for granted the blessings of our lives, and complained about the remaining imperfections. Our parents gave us a childhood that they did not have, in this they were like all of us, who doesn’t want their children to have it better than they had. Maybe because they made our childhood so ideal we assumed that they could make the larger world in the same fashion and we were bitter that they couldn’t end war or racism. We saw the flaws in society and were sure that we could make a better world than our parents, imagine nothing to kill or die for , no religion too. Looking back it is shameful, our foolish arrogance, I was born in ’47.
Everything should be run so that some combination of human and financial capital grows for certain over say like a five-year period, on the micro and macro level. People, families, and in aggregate at the national level.
How’s that for a nice vague dictate? LOL
Think about what gets in the way of that or helps it.
I’d say the Fed and the education system alone make it go all backwards.
Jim:
I had plenty of material wealth, but I have personality disorders on both sides of my family tree. So I think because of the micro issues I tend to look at this in a pretty different way.
@drbastiat, I think your comment is much more cogently reasoned than Kevin’s. I admire his writing, but it seems he is often too focused upon “performing” that simply presenting his argument. I read all of your postings, and don’t find evidence of that. You seem genuinely interested in presenting your arguments, not in presenting yourself.
If that is the result of your fondness for Jim Beam, I may have to consider switching from Jameson Irish Whiskey. Incidentally, I have 30 years on you and can assure you it only gets better.
Yes.
That’s exactly what they did, exactly why they existed and exactly why they persisted.
Dr B writes of the challenges of turning 50. I turned 50 a little over a decade ago. It was one of the worst years of my life, coming just a year after being widowed, a time when I was isolated from God by my anger and grief, with the highlight being my first cancer diagnosis and the surgery and complications that accompanied this. But time passed, my health came back and eventually I regained my faith, remarried and achieved the happiest years of my life.
Dr B, from what you have written elsewhere I imagine you as a privately-practicing general surgeon on the east coast of a southern state. Perhaps this is wrong, perhaps this is right. Whatever is your professional situation, your admission of being tired all the time and not caring for yourself well trouble me. Take this momentous anniversary of the position the Earth was in relative to the Sun on the day that you were born and give yourself the gift of self-preservation. Take time out of every day for your health; as I am fond of saying to patients, 15 minutes a day spent on exercise is only 1/64 of your waking time. Stop driving with both feet on the accelerators, spend time with family and learn to live a little more slowly. You may not live longer as a result, but it will seem as if you do.
You will be the same person as you are now, but older and wiser.
Happy Birthday!
The work needed doing – still needs doing.
The problem, I think, is that your government contractors turned out to be corrupt union men.
Moses came down from the mountain with Ten Commandments, it seems to me the secular world, not to be outdone in their resentment that there was any other authority than their own has given us thousands upon thousands of rules. There is a paradox in their belief that it is forbidden to forbid.
I think it is nice of both of you guys to credit your co-authors.
It’s time again to play: Blame the Boomers!
Not entirely without reason, I suppose, after all, “they” (which is to say, not I) took the ball and ran with it. But I was there at the beginning, and I can tell you that the real privileged generation is those that were born just before and during WW2, not after. They were the ones preaching “Don’t trust anyone over 30” to the impressionable Boomers. They were the ones singing at the Hootenannies. Theirs was the birth-dearth generation. They were so few that they could get ahead (partly) because of lack of competition. The Boomer generation was not equivalent to the draft-dodgers and the flag-burners. Boomers were also the volunteers that went to Viet-Nam and were scorned when they returned home. These weren’t seen on TV, however. I personally knew more patriots among my contemporaries than flower-children or revolutionaries. Boomers became the cannon-fodder for the anti-war (anti-America) campaign of their elders.
By the mid ’70s, the stereotype seems to have taken hold among those I saw in college upon my release from active duty. The professors that were preaching to these kids were of a previous generation, of course.
ADDED: To return to the OP theme, one could wonder if Boomer guilt from avoiding/opposing the war has led to their endless defense of the politics of that era.
The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for them, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they ‘ this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that man might hope again in wretched darkness.
–Walter Miller, from his great novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.
I’m willing to concede all that. I think if we have to stick a label on the bad actors it should the Left. Danger on the Left. Always on the Left. It turns out godless communism starts with the godlessness.
Fine book. It’s been, perhaps, too long.
You really should. Actually I’ve moved into aging (at 69) relatively comfortably. I was shocked the first few times a young squirt picked up something I dropped, but then I thought how courteous and gracious they were! I love when young folks call me Mrs. Quinn; I love when they act friendly but respectful. I love to brag that I’ve been married 44 years. All of these are a result of being older. Baruch Hashem, I get regular exercise, meditate, and generally enjoy my life. I worked hard up until ten years ago. Now I can do other kinds of things that are productive and, I think, valuable. Because I choose to do them. Maybe it’s time, Doc.
Evening Richard,
What interests me is why did the WWII generation hold onto to the basic values of their parents and why did the children of these high achieving parents reject so many of the values of their parents. The WWII generation had many reasons to be cynical, FDR and the progressive failure of the 30’s, WWII, rebuilding the countries you just fought, but they did not fall into self pity or become full of themselves. The WWII generation did not coast along recounting their glory days, they mostly did not talk about the past but kept trying to improve themselves, joined a club, or Rotary, or the Great Books (my mom), or volunteered at the museum. If our parents were shocked when Ingrid Bergman ran off with Rossellini, their children weren’t shocked when abortion became legal. Remember we were the generation that closed down schools, from the 68 general strike in France, to the universities here, also the beginning of the “studies” courses which again were a rejection of standards. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go, and another classic, “kill the pigs”, and in our shy fashion, “Why don’t we do it in the road, no one will be watching us”. That is on us, those words either came out of our mouths or we passively did nothing to resist them. Our generation was and is a self-righteous generation, maybe when our generation breaks this pattern we can stop blaming them.
I think that’s why the left insists that all doctors participate in abortions and that we all be required to pay for them through our taxes.
There’s something more, though. It turns out that actions do have consequences after all. Sometimes the pill fails. And even though the pill usually prevents pregnancy, it does nothing to prevent venereal disease, which is coming back with a vengeance. But people don’t want consequences. Fortunately, government is there to lay those off on other people’s backs.
Like you, I’m happy to live and let live. But that’s not enough. The left wants to live the way they want to live and they want someone else to pay for it. I suspect that much of the motive behind identity politics is nothing more than a cheap money grab.
There’s the old model of guilt/individual responsibility vs honor/shame vs fear as the organizing principles of society; the latter two tend to emphasize group responsibility.
It’s oversimplified; shamelessness is also a problem today.
But what I also see is a mode of living, including educating our children, that promotes anxiety and reduces resilience. Anxiety can be very destructive. People will do terrible things to even temporarily reduce their internal distress.
I agree! We are supposed to be preparing our kids for living in the world and we cripple with all the evils they need to fear, instead of encouraging them to tackle whatever arises. I highlighted the one sentence because people have no tolerance for discomfort, for not knowing, for the unexpected.
Figures of speech can be very interesting. Some of our big health problems as a society stem from overconsumption of sweet things (including refined grains) and underconsumption of foods that among other properties are bitter.
“Eating bitter” is a Chinese figure of speech for enduring difficulty and even hardship; it has historically been seen as a virtue to be able to do this.
Interestingly, one of the desired end states for lifestyle modification is metabolic resilience and flexibility. Being able to fast for a day or two and function well; being able to go into metabolic ketosis and easily use fats for energy, as well as using complex carbohydrates.
This is generally associated with low baseline levels of insulin, which only rise short term to meet a carbohydrate load. This is simple in concept but can be a clinical challenge to apply.
Of course, if passively doing nothing is incriminating, then the WW2 and Korea generations are equally complicit.
My point is simpler than that. The majority of the Boomers were (are?) not equivalent to the highly publicized minority (Hey, hey, ho, ho etc) and in fact, the slogans were not spontaneously generated by the Boomers, but were seeded by organizers — initially, at least — from the previous generation or the politicized socialist remnant of it.
Why did the youth of the immediate postwar period reject the values of their parents? Perhaps they didn’t want to go through the same experiences, perhaps the Korean War made them ripe for socialist organizers. Perhaps they weren’t so unique, either. Previous generations may have tried to reject the values of their parents, but had trouble surviving that way. I suspect the rise of television may have had something to do with it, as well, since it provided a view of life that may have seemed more attractive than their home experience. What I do know is that the public image of the Boomers is not universally true. I am probably not the only exception to the stereotype.