The Origins of our Narcissistic Age
Narcissism as an Organizing and Explanatory Principle
The genesis of our postmodern narcissistic age can be found in ideas that trace back to the pan-European Renaissance (14th-17th centuries), critically some 700 to 800 years ago.
While pathological narcissism has been around since time immemorial, it is the inflection point of the Renaissance, where narcissism takes root and informs our society today.
Lutheranism and Protestantism evolved out of the Renaissance and then clashed with the values of the Enlightenment.
We are living in a period that is reactionary and against the Enlightenment values, a period that resembles more the Renaissance in the early years of Protestantism and later perhaps Calvinism.
When did this Narcissism "Conspiracy" start and how did we get here?
A milestone in tracking the origins of narcissism includes Sigmund Freud’s seminal breakout essay On Narcissism (click here for my piece) in 1914. Twenge and Campbell cite the 1980s self-esteem movement as part of the origins of narcissism in their book The Narcissism Epidemic.
Narcissism shows up in present-day postmodern manifestations of woke ideology which I have documented here, here, and here.
Prior to the 20th and 21st centuries, narcissism emerged out of the Renaissance, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment, which pushed societies worldwide inexorably to postmodernism.
Postmodernity is characterized by three organizing and explanatory principles:
The individual is the source of all rights and these rights impose commensurate obligations on others. The individual is the basic organizational unit. Many individuals put together can structure and form any arrangement, any contract, social or otherwise amongst them because the individual is sovereign.
Perfection, progress towards perfection
The individual can better himself, perfect himself, and make himself superior by wishing hard, working hard, and studying hard. It is up to the individual to elevate himself stage by stage up the ladder of self-actualization and social supremacy. It is all in the hands of the individual. Individuals, if they are mentally healthy, should aspire to perfect themselves, to become more, never less, to grow, never regress, to always acquire new skills, and seek new opportunities, amass and accumulate wealth and accomplishments, in short, expand.
Suspicion of institutions
Institutions are penumbral. They're dark, they're tyrannical, they are averse to individualism. They are the enemies of the individuals, and they need to be resisted and subverted, undermined, modified, and ignored. At any rate, there's an enmity. There's a war between the individual and social or other structures and institutions and this war should be won by the individual. It's up to the individual to win it.
Narcissism as an Organizing and Explanatory Principle
Narcissism is an organizing principle. Narcissism is the way we organize our lives, the way we form and run institutions, the way we function in the larger society, among ourselves, in interpersonal relationships, and, even more importantly, within ourselves, our perception of the self and how we love or reject ourselves.
Narcissism is an explanatory, hermeneutic, exegetic principle that makes sense of our reality. Narcissism imbues our lives with meaning and renders the world an environment in which we can cope, function, and somehow survive. —Prof. Sam Vaknin
The Historical Landscape that gave rise to Pathological Narcissism
The following text is an edited for length and clarity transcript of Professor of Psychology, Dr. Sam Vaknin’s recent account of the origins of our narcissistic age.
Renaissance thinkers and scholars were concerned with the improvement of the individual; the emphasis was on the individual. They believed that if you were to somehow better the individual, transform the individual, and render the individual more functional, more clever, and more educated, these improvements would have an aggregate effect on human society. If you were to improve a sufficient number of individuals, there would be an emergent phenomenon; society at large would change and become also better.
Improving the individual by Renaissance standards involved reverting to classic Greek and Roman works and values. The Renaissance was a reactionary, retro movement, a movement that wanted to revive ancient Greek and Roman, especially Republican Roman values, works of art, literature, sculptures, paintings, you name it — anything Greek and Roman was in vogue.
The Renaissance man was a narcissistic, albeit gifted, multi-talented amateur in pursuit of worldly fame and rewards, a throwback to ancient Greece and Republican Rome when everyone was an amateur. The Renaissance man is a polyglot and polymath. He knows a little about many things rather than a lot about a single topic.
There were no professions to speak of during the Renaissance. Anyone could do anything. Philosophers became doctors, barbers became doctors and philosophers. There was high interprofessional fluidity and not much specification and expertise. The Renaissance wanted to revive Greek and Roman conduct or modes of being, which gave rise to the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who did a little of everything.
The Renaissance was both reactionary and modernist — looking forward by looking back — committed to a utopian new human type by regressing and by harking back to the ideal humanity of the past.
The Renaissance believed in a grassroots effect, crowdsourcing. In other words, the Renaissance, contrary to the Enlightenment thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau and others, emphasized the social contract.
The Renaissance comprised a series of grassroots modernism that, put together, constituted a reaction to elitist, hermetic, and scholastic medieval modernity with its modest technological advances. The Renaissance was evolutionary in character, but revolutionary in goals.
The idea was to displace erstwhile elites, especially the church, and endow the individual with agency, personal autonomy, and power to empower the individual at the expense of the church. The church, of course, was the predominant institution. The church did everything — the church had schools and universities.
The Renaissance was belligerent, combative, and warlike. Today they would have been called probably freedom fighters or terrorists by the church.
Prof. Sam Vaknin
The church catered to all the psychological and physical needs of the individual. Renaissance thinkers were courageous in attacking head-on this total institution, this multi-tentacled construct or structure, which had evolved over 1,500 years.
Consistent with how Western society in particular, if not worldwide, is regressing to the values of the Renaissance, there is a systemic modern cultural desire to displace elites, who may represent a threat to narcissistic individualism. -GC
The individualism of the Renaissance gave way to the Renaissance Man, which in turn gave way to Lutheranism and Protestantism.
Through the process of disintermediation whereby the individual was empowered to bypass the church to communicate directly with God vis-à-vis Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Protestantism, the Renaissance Man was emboldened to explore the world and gain knowledge by becoming a gifted amateur.
As the individual was empowered, the church was disempowered and weakened; one came at the expense of the other. It was a zero-sum game.
In the 20th century, Romanticism, a 19th-century malignant mutation of Renaissance Humanism and its emphasis on the individual provoked the counter-movements of Fascism, Communism, and Nazism.
It was the Renaissance that gave birth to the concept of totalitarianism, the personality cult, the obsession with men of action, the cultivation of verbal propaganda and indoctrination rhetoric as a means of influencing both the masses and decision-makers as well as the pernicious idea of human perfectibility.
Ironically, individualism and totalitarianism are both Renaissance ideas, but they're easy to reconcile because totalitarianism is founded on the concept of the individual, an individual at the center of a personality cult. The leader is a narcissistic/psychopathic individual who becomes the man of action. The Renaissance put together individualism and totalitarianism by emphasizing the prince in Machiavelli's terms, a strongman who is an unflinching leader in the face of adversity, a man who engages in Realpolitik and doesn't succumb to the feebleness and weakness of ideologies, philosophies, or theories, let alone the human heart or empathy. Many Renaissance thinkers considered the state, the structure of the state, to be similar to a constantly belabored massive work of art, whose affairs are best managed by a prince, not by God.
It is much safer to be feared than loved because love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
There was an authoritarian caste of mind, and this authoritarian caste of mind did not prevent the vast majority of Renaissance philosophers from vociferously and incongruously upholding the republican ideal and the individual's public duty to take part in the political life of the collective.
It was as if they thought that a narcissistic, psychopathic, strong man of action leader could somehow be juxtaposed or superimposed on a republican body politic, comprised of individuals, empowered individuals. Empowered individuals would resonate well with a man of action who is also an individual. However, the contradiction between authoritarianism and republicanism was only apparent. Renaissance tyrants relied on the support of the urban populace and an emerging civil service to counterbalance a fractious and perfidious aristocracy and the waning influence of the church.
It was a war between the emerging individual and previous institutions, whose aim was to create faceless anonymous masses; these two ideologies clashed here. The compromise was the idea of an individual who would create institutions that would convert groups of individuals. Masses later came to be known as ochlocracy.
Ochlocracy polities based on mob rule emerged in the 20th century, the rule of a crowd led by a bureaucracy with an anti-clerical, anti-elitist populist führer or duce or secretary general on top. The colonialist ideas of Lebensraum and white supremacy, forms of racist geopolitical narcissism — these ideas also have their roots in the Renaissance.
The Renaissance was a seriously bad period ideologically speaking. It gave rise to everything dark and bad in today's world and it is ironic that we consider the Renaissance to have been an improvement upon the Middle Ages because it was anything but.
Prof. Sam Vaknin
The Renaissance led inexorably to Protestantism, at least the primitive prototype of Protestantism, Lutheranism. Two pillars of Martin Luther's church were disintermediation, getting rid of the church as an intermediary between the individual and God, and the second pillar of Protestantism and Lutheranism was that you could be chosen or predestined by God. There's very little you could do to change your destiny, not only in Calvinism but also in the original writings and teachings of Luther, the father of Protestantism. You would know if you were chosen because you would be blessed with riches. The famous Protestant work ethic factors into modern-day capitalism.
Renaissance thinkers suggested the church was corrupt, the aristocracy was even more, and there was a need to elevate the individual, venerate the individual, empower the individual, and allow the individual to form new institutions, which would displace the church and the aristocracy. And at the head of these institutions would be an individual, a man of action. Today we would call him a dictator or tyrant, but at that time he was perceived as a prince, the remote descendant of Plato's philosopher kings. It was all around the individual, even mass movements, mobs, and even crowds were led by identifiable individuals. This was the Renaissance. Then came Protestantism and Protestantism through its various manifestations and transmutations also espoused that the individual is at the core of the religious experience as well. While the Renaissance emphasized earthly pursuits, governance, money-making commerce, and science — these were the emphasis and the activities of Renaissance thinkers and scholars — Protestantism suggested applying the same, the very same principle to religion.
The organizing unit in religion, the base unit, would be the individual, not the church. “We're getting rid of the church. The church does nothing but corrupt and steal and is utterly unnecessary,” says Protestantism. Individuals translated the Bible into the vernacular, a commonly spoken language, German, and later into English, so that people don't have to rely on priests to read the Word of God. Individuals constitute the church. There's a church of the individual, and individuals are in direct contact with God, and some individuals are blessed by God. They're chosen and we know that they're blessed and chosen by virtue of their standing in society and especially by virtue of their possessions — how much wealth they have, how much real estate, and how accomplished they are.
This was a revolution because whereas the Renaissance merged individualism with the institutions of the state, giving rise to totalitarianism and authoritarianism, Protestantism merged individualism with the institution of religion.
Prof. Sam Vaknin
Protestantism gave rise to individualized distributed religion. The Renaissance and Protestantism are precisely the two hallmarks, the two pivots of modern-day pathological narcissism. Pathological narcissism is a distributed private religion. The narcissist worships a divinity or a deity also known as the false self. It's a private religion that involves human sacrifice. The master sacrifices himself, his true self, and then he sacrifices his intimate partners, his friends, and so on.
There is a close affinity between this, the axioms and philosophical principles underlying Protestantism and the way pathological narcissism is structured as a private religion. Similarly, there's a close affinity between the principles of the Renaissance, the gifted amateur, the men of action, the Prince’s narcissism and grandiosity. If you put the Renaissance and Protestantism together, you get narcissism, pathological narcissism, period.
In the late 17th and early 18th century, there was a kind of counter-reaction known as the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment only made things worse and exacerbated the situation, though, in principle, the Enlightenment emphasized society, the greater good, and the public good over the individual.
The Enlightenment constituted an opposition to the principles of the Renaissance and Protestantism. As such, the Enlightenment divorced itself from religion and became anti-religious and anti-clerical. The Enlightenment distanced itself from Protestantism and the Renaissance because it began to consider the world in terms of much larger structures known as societies.
The Enlightenment thinkers and scholars committed a grave mistake that permitted and exacerbated the rise of narcissism. In the Enlightenment there was a counterfactual assumption, an ideal, that is not real, defied by the facts, and is not evidence-based — the ideal of the rational agent.
The Enlightenment introduced the rational agent into all kinds of disciplines, for example, economics, which stipulated that an individual makes rational decisions 100% of the time that are never biased or prejudiced, superstitious, or conspiracy-minded.
The Enlightenment presented an ideal, to use Freud's terms, an ego ideal, that set us up for failure. We constantly fail at being rational and we feel bad about it. We self-reject and we self-destruct because we keep failing.
The Enlightenment created a situation where none of us would measure up to its standards. We would all be defeated. Time and again, that's a bad feeling and ultimately we internalize these defeats and failures and begin to feel like losers, and as losers, we self-reject and sometimes self-destruct.
There was a first element that the Enlightenment introduced and coupled with the narcissism of the Renaissance and Protestantism, the Enlightenment transformed narcissism into a destructive force. In the Enlightenment, there is an external locus of control because the operating unit is society, the collective.
The individual is driven here and there, like flotsam and jetsam, like a cork on stormy water. The individual is moved along by the forces of history, culture, period, and society. To a large extent, he is a passive kind of vector. He is not an agent.
The Enlightenment denied the individual agency, personal autonomy, and independence that were afforded by Protestantism in the Renaissance because the Enlightenment embedded the individual in a much bigger picture, in much larger forces, for example, the force of history. And so there was this external locus of control, and of course, it gave rise to a sense of victimhood, an “I'm a victim,” mentality.
If my life is determined by economic forces, which are impersonal and huge and no one can control, then I'm a victim of these forces, and this led, of course, to what today we call victimhood movements. But victimhood movements are nothing new. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and most notably the American Revolution were victimhood movements.
If you read the founding documents of the American Republic, they are all lists of grievances. It was a victimhood movement par excellence. This sense of victimhood stayed with us and has come to define us, and it is a legacy of the Enlightenment. Scientism, consumerism, economic growth, and even atheism emerged as new religions that regulate human relationships in lieu of older religions and ideologies.
We are caught at the crossroads between the Renaissance, Protestantism, the Enlightenment, and liberal democracy. The Renaissance and Protestantism end up imposing on us totalitarian authoritarian structures and denying our freedom of action in the name of our individuality and the Enlightenment demands of us too much, expecting us to be inhuman. We keep failing. When there's a confluence of these forces, what emerges is a compensatory defense. We keep failing with the Enlightenment, so we claim to be infallible and that we never fail.
We find ourselves under the control of some personality cult or some totalitarian or authoritarian structures and we rebel and then we feel like victims and they're victimhood movements and then these victimhood movements become narcissistic and psychopathic and it all emanates from these three enormous forces, enormous historical movements.
The project of liberal democracy has failed and I think it should be somehow replaced. It's an ideology, exactly like communism and other ideologies that’s based on a counterfactual view of human psychology, a fallacious reframing of human history.
Ideologies are inflexible self-defeating straitjackets. Ideology is just another name for fantasy. When we adhere to such fantasies, it's a rejection of reality. It's an attempt to reshape reality in untenable ways. When we adhere to these fantasies, we ineluctably and inexorably end up in conflict and mayhem.
As the founding fathers of the United States knew well, universal franchise democracy, where everyone can vote, is a dangerously flawed idea. It empowers the nescient — the ignorant, the dumb. It gives rights to demagogues, elevates ruthless populist antisocial leaders, and so on. It's a bad idea, simply. Similarly, the human rights and civil rights agendas are totalitarian victimhood doctrines that abrogate the inalienable and primordial right for self-defense and the meritocratic allocation of resources, among many other distortions.
We need to get rid of all this delusional baggage of the Renaissance, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment, and we need to revert to reality, including Realpolitik, but not only. Reality and narcissism cannot go together; narcissism is a fantasy defense. If you are embedded in reality, if you are grounded, you will never be a narcissist.
If you are a narcissist, you are never in reality. We need to revert to reality. We have been brainwashed over the past 700-800 years by a succession of movements that emphasize the individual and then emphasize society and give rise to all kinds of mental health pathologies on a mass scale — mass psychogenic illnesses.
The only way to solve this problem is not by treating one individual at a time in psychotherapy. The only way to solve this is to substantially reform or even get rid completely of current social structures and institutions and replace them with others that do not reflect the values of the Renaissance, Protestantism, and the unrealistic expectations of the Enlightenment.
Such a manifesto could easily be composed. The question is the political will, because narcissism is enticing and addictive, and it caters to deep-set psychological needs. There's narcissism everywhere. There's narcissism in the Renaissance, and in Protestantism, and narcissism is a compensation for the accusatory finger of the Enlightenment.
It's not easy to ask people to get rid of their narcissism. Reality hurts and bruises and people might say, “I'm comfortable, cocooned, and ensconced in my fantasy. Why should I give it up?” You should give it up because otherwise, you will end up with another Hitler. Hitler was a direct spiritual descendant of the Renaissance and to some extent, Protestantism and the Enlightenment, believe it or not.
You will end up with these kinds of people. We have survived a generation of such leaders and it seems that we are facing a second wave of such men of action/ personality cult leaders. I don't know if we're going to survive the second wave. I have my grave doubts because social cohesion previously has been much higher than many institutions.
For example, the church was still respected. Today, we have no institutions. We have no social cohesion. We have nothing. We have no defenses against this second wave of insanity. Climate change may only be a symptom of this. We may be heading to an extinction event, a serious existential risk.
It's time to rethink where we stand and how we arrived here — the path, the road that led here, which is paved with the Renaissance’s, Protestantism’s, and Enlightenment’s stones.
Resources:
Released Jan 23, 2024
Narcissism “Conspiracy”: Historical Roots of Contemporary Narcissism Pandemic
Description:
In stark contrast to Medieval Man, the Renaissance Man was a narcissistic, albeit gifted and multi-talented amateur, in pursuit of worldly fame and rewards — a throwback to earlier times (Ancient Greece, Republican Rome). Thus, the Renaissance was both reactionary and modernist, looking forward by looking back, committed to a utopian “new human type” by regressing and harking back to the past's “ideal humanity”.
In the 20th century, Romanticism, a 19th-century malignant mutation of Renaissance humanism and its emphasis on the individual, provoked the counter-movements of Fascism, Communism, and Nazism.
Narcissistic Post-enlightenment World (with Ginger Coy) Narcissistic Post-enlightenment World...
Further reading: Authors Johan Huizinga, Charles Haskins, James Franklin, Machiavelli and his contemporaries Jean Bodin and Leonardo Bruni, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Jacob Burckhardt’s masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance.
Much improved expanding on the whole victimhood sovereignty rant. And explanation of anxiety by Freud. It is important to specify exactly what side you are on, it shows passion. Thank you. Leaders always do, not waffle around vaguely.