As Kristin Dombek notes in her book-length essay, The Selfishness of Others, every articulate generation believes that it is living through an epidemic of selfishness. Never the selfishness of themselves, of course—not of the writers and presumptive readers of thought pieces denouncing the new selfishness—but of others. Particularly those who are not present in the conversation to defend themselves, and who therefore can be treated as polemical fair game: children, the very young, members of various nonconforming social groups who lack spokespeople in the immediate vicinity.
Dombek was critiquing this myth of selfishness and the new narcissism—which we all believed in, by the way, in the years before her book was published; myself included. Despite being a Millennial, I would quote uncritically statistics from major news articles deploring the "declining empathy scores" reportedly found among the college-bound young, without inquiring much into the origin of such figures. (As Dombek shows, many of the core empirical claims of the then-trending belief in a crisis of "narcissism" fell apart under scrutiny—or at least became much harder to substantiate.)
Before she ultimately dismantles the myth, however, Dombek cites some of the more potent examples that people used to justify it, in order to make sense of the myth's staying power. Some of these now seem dated. The book was published in 2016: only six years ago, but aeons past in cultural time. Thus, reading it at times becomes an exercise in nostalgia. In a book on the topic of narcissism, for instance, it was then possible to make only a single and very fleeting reference to Donald Trump. The young were "Millennials," rather than Gen Z. Tucker Max was a name people still remembered.
The most terrifying exemplar of narcissism that Dombek cites, however, is also the one that still feels the most contemporary. He is the mass murderer who stalked and shot to death more than 70 children on the island of Utøya in Norway. He did it when he was not so many years older than his victims himself. And, when caught, he displayed not the frothing rage of our mental image of the unhinged killer, but the cold apathy of the semi-legendary Millennial Narcissist. He smirked. He played X-Box in prison. He complained about the minor discomforts of his incarceration.
He who had shown no mercy to more than 70 teenagers whose lives he stole demanded the world care about the fact that the prison authorities had given him a pen that was hard to write with.
The writing utensil comes up because this mass murderer was also a promulgator of manifestos. This is another sense in which he feels painfully contemporary. Many of the overhyped fears of 2016 didn't stay with us: they were replaced by new terrors, new apocalypses, real or imagined. But the figure of the far-right mass shooter who churns out hundreds of pages of plagiarized conspiracy theories about women, Muslims, immigrants, Jews, replacement, and then goes out, buys weapons of war, and tries to put these genocidal thoughts into practice, still looms large among us.
And that person is still very young. The person who murdered ten people in Buffalo, New York in May 2022 was only 18 years old. So was the shooter who killed nineteen children just ten days later in Uvalde, Texas (a massacre that, unlike the mass killings in Norway, Christchurch, Pittsburgh and Buffalo, has not been linked to any specific far-right ideology). And since, as we said above, every generation reinvents the myth of the new selfishness, with only the names of the culprits changed—for Millennial, swap Gen Z—we can be sure that these recent mass murders have prompted more big thoughts about what has gone wrong with the rising generation.
On the New York Magazine podcast Pivot, co-host Scott Galloway makes sure to acknowledge up front that the primary social problem needing to be addressed here is the easy access to guns in our society; but he then immediately shifts to denounce what he describes as a crisis of "attachment" among the young—specifically young men. "I'm not denigrating single mothers," he caveats, before attributing recent mass murders to a lack of "male role models" in the family. Co-host Kara Swisher intervenes at this point, to add that studies on this do not support the inference. Fatherlessness does not in fact correlate with mass murder or violent crime. Scott therefore broadens his claim: maybe not "fatherlessness," per se, but a lack of "attachment" in general is to blame.
(This quick redefinition of terms reminds one of the kind of legerdemain that narcissism researchers would pull—in Dombek's telling—in the face of conflicting evidence. Maybe they couldn't prove that scores on any measure of pathological levels of narcissism were increasing over time, but they could chart the growth of the use of the term "I," the first-person narrative voice, in fiction over the same period, and that was suddenly presented as a truer index of the phenomenon.)
This is not the only place in the episode, however, where Scott has something to say about young people these days and their lack of character. A discussion about the (apparently) growing trend of Gen Z youths buying expensive merchandise and paying for it on the installment plan launches him on an extended rant about what he calls "the porn-ification of everything." Young people these days don't want to have to save and wait and work. They want their gratification now. And this distinctive pathology on their part manifests in their consumption of online pornography ("instead of putting the effort in to go out and have real sex"), their purchasing of expensive goods on credit, and their use of day trading apps like Robin Hood.
Of course, taking on debt can be a risky decision for anyone, young or old. People's willingness to do so is fueled either by a rational belief that the risk might pay off in the long run, or by an understandable if unfortunate human bias toward present gain, and the discounting of future losses. In either case, though, it is not new (payments on the installment plan powered the consumer revolution and much of U.S. growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Robert Gordon has shown); it is also not unique to young people or Gen Z. All of finance, throughout all of history, runs on the same idea: people will pay more over the long term for capital if they can enjoy the use of it more cheaply now. This is why interest payments exist, and why the entire edifice of capitalism functions at all. If the system is bad, Gen Z are at any rate not the ones who invented it, nor the only ones participating.
The same could be said for day trading. What exactly is the objection: that such activities are self-interested? That they encourage a casino-like addiction to the rises and crashes of stock prices? That they constitute schemes for getting rich quick? Yes, they are all of those things. Which participant in the stock market, though, is not trying to get as rich as they can as quickly as they can? If there are financial products that are holding out false hope and defrauding people (such as the crypto industry), the solution is to regulate them, not to impugn the motives or character of the people who fall victim to these tricks.
It's Scott's plaint about the sexual habits of Gen Z, though, that most gives the Catch-22 away: young people just can't win. After centuries of being accused of being selfish for having too much sex, they are now to be denounced as selfish for not having sex enough. Never mind the many highly-questionable assumptions behind his rant: does porn consumption actually correlate with having less sex? Is the human libido really some sort of fixed quantity that can either be expended in one outlet or the other, but not both, or neither? Ignore that, I say, and suppose Scott is right: are forms of sexuality that carry no risk of unwanted pregnancy or STIs really the ones that most need to be avoided among the young?
Scott in his rant never—so far as I can recall—explicitly uses the word "selfish," though it is implied in his denunciations of the purported cult of immediate gratification, the lack of attachment, and the solitary sexual habits of the young. Someone who was more explicit in his use of the s-word, though, was Pope Francis. In remarks that made headlines earlier this year, the pontiff lamented declining birthrates in the developed countries, and attributed them to self-centered people who have replaced children with pets. "Today [...] we see a form of selfishness," he declared. "We see that some people do not want to have a child. Sometimes they have one, and that's it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of children."
One's first reaction may be that this is all rather rich coming from someone who belongs to an explicitly all-male, all-celibate, all-childless religious hierarchy. There seems to be a double standard at play: my decision not to have children was right for me and for God; yours is selfish and sinful. That rejoinder, though, is just a tu quoque. And like all such ad hominem arguments, it may be good for scoring points, but it does not address the meat of the issue. Suppose someone other than a member of the Catholic clergy had said the same thing. Would they be right?
I could be said to have a dog in this fight. Not literally, since I'm not even a pet owner—perhaps rendering me even more selfish than the people il Papa had in mind. But figuratively, in the sense that I am childless and live alone. Is my decision to do so selfish? It was certainly made with self-interested motives in mind: that is, it was rooted in my sense of what I value, what things make me happy, how I want to live my life. And I tell myself that by living in a way that I feel meets my needs, I have a better foundation from which to be of use to others: whether at work or in my personal life. But that could just be a happy narrative I spin for myself: a dodge; just as my perception of my own desires could be an illusion.
I can't claim to know whether these latter possibilities are true or not. By definition, I would be incapable of determining the matter from within my own perspective.
But I think the part I would question is whether anyone else is making decisions about such matters on substantially different bases. Are the married people with large families acting out of motives that don't have reference to their own interests, values, preferred modes of living? I think of the poem by Philip Larkin, in which he ponders a married friend. After concluding at first that the friend must be "less selfish than I," he reconsiders in the final stanzas: But wait, not so fast:/ Is there such a contrast?/ He was out for his own ends/ Not just pleasing his friends[.]"
The same goes for the rants about Gen Z-ers day trading and racking up personal debt. Are they doing so because they want gratification now, rather than later, even if they ultimately have to pay more for it in the long term? Yes. Are they doing it because they want to make money on the stock market? Yes. In both regards, are they acting out of self interest? Yes. But what aspect of the financial system is not driven by selfishness? Who is on Wall Street just because they are set on "pleasing their friends"? If the market allows for ways of pursuing self interest that are particularly destructive, ruinous, exploitative—the solution is to regulate them, not to blame the young, who are after all playing within the rules of the game that was handed to them.
"They," that is to say, are not the only ones taking on unsustainable debt, planning their lives around their own needs and interests, looking for ways to relieve the financial pressures and stresses of their world—"we," the older, are doing it too. Except on a much, much larger scale.
This, at last, is Dombek's point as well: when we fret over the image of the Narcissist, what really panics us is the way in which the mythic image of that person resembles ourselves. They are self-centered; they crave praise and admiration; they have unrealistic goals and ambitions. Are we not a little bit like that too? And at the same time as we fear them, we also envy them: they are remorseless, they are free of guilt and shame and self-consciousness, they can shed people who encumber them without pity because they are fully complete and sufficient unto themselves. Do we not wish we were a little more like that?
And so too, when we lash out at the idea of the narcissistic, selfish young person, we are doing two no less contradictory things: first, we are trying to reassert distance between ourselves and "them." Having been surprised by the resemblance, we seek to obscure it again. By condemning the "selfishness of others," we thereby re-assert the selflessness and purity of us. And secondly, we are registering a protest against the myth that let us down. We wanted to sin vicariously through them, and find we can't. The Narcissist turns out not to be as fully autonomous as we thought. We projected this myth onto them, out of our own wishes and desires, and then we are disappointed when they end up being human, all too human.
I was reading recently about the life and death of Adrián Lamo—a person who, prior to his death at age 37 in 2018—embodied a certain mythic image of the wholly self-sufficient young person that we so admire and dread in our culture—at least in the way he presented himself to the media. Dubbed the "homeless hacker," Lamo spent much of his time wandering the country with no fixed address, doing freelance "grey hat" hacker work for no pay. He would find security gaps in the back end of major institutions' websites, then alert them and the media, all without asking for a cent.
The 21st century's ideal of perfect freedom: someone with total command over the powers of the new technology, but who disdained to monetize it, preferring instead to live without the encumbrances of private property: couch surfing, camping out in abandoned buildings.
How did he have the courage to do it? one thinks. How can someone attain such perfect lack of fear, indifference to social pressures, as to roam the country at will in perfect solitude? —to attain what Thomas Wolfe calls, in a stray phrase from his Look Homeward, Angel, a "Utopia of loneliness"—plainly a desire, a fantasy deep-wired in the American psyche; an image that conjures all that we long for (total self-possession, total autonomy, total independence and individualism) but that we fear as well (selfish! narcissistic!) in exactly the dialectical way Dombek describes. Lamo seemed to have found it.
Unsurprisingly, though, as one reads and hears more about his life, the mythic image breaks down. His hacks were not actually as morally pure as he made them sound; some of the companies subjected to them resented rather than welcomed his unsolicited vigilantism; his decision to reveal the identity of Chelsea Manning to federal authorities cost him many friends and admirers in hacking circles; he could be creepy and controlling in relationships; he was motivated in part by vanity; he wasn't always so indifferent to money but actually did try to monetize his work, without success; he did not in fact enjoy being homeless and isolated, but rather suffered from devastating social anxiety and numbed himself to it with a massive supply of various psychotropic drugs and supplements, an overdose of which ultimately killed him.
So, discovering this, do we then condemn him? Do we say: he was selfish after all! He was a narcissist! He, like us, it turns out, was after all "out for his own ends/not just pleasing his friends"—how loathsome! Or do we say that we are the ones who projected the myth of the autonomous individual onto him in the first place? We are the ones who wanted to believe that there was someone out there who didn't seem to need any of the things that we need—a stable home, a social network, steady work, a financial safety net—and who are disappointed when we discover that he was not in fact that person; and that indeed, such a person probably does not exist.
In the end, it is American culture that keeps idealizing and handing to us the myth of the fully-autonomous individual who has no need for social ties and has achieved total indifference to the needs of others or the consequences of their actions. When we find people who seem to embody that archetype, we elevate them to great and dangerous levels of wealth and power: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, and so on. We worship and detest this type of person; we project its image onto whoever is not in the room to protest: the young, the disfavored; and we can't figure out which we hate and fear more: when one of them does something that seems to embody the archetype—or when they disappoint us by failing to live up to it.
Breaking this cycle by accepting that the narcissist is us —our own desires and projections, our own fear and subconscious recognition and rejection of our own capacity for selfishness—means parting with two of our most cherished myths: both that we are pure, unlike them, and that someone else out there, through whom we can sin vicariously, is living the fantasy. We are not the first, and the second does not exist. And while parting with these illusions will de difficult, perhaps with them too will vanish our desire and habit of installing dangerously self-centered people in positions of authority from which they can hurt others.
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