Faust or Narcissus
Anyone familiar with The Last Psychiatrist will know he sees a lot of narcissism in the world. He’s not alone — the received wisdom is that man today is atomized, individualistic, and selfish. Modern man has made a faustian bargain in which he’s traded community and duty for ambition and the satisfaction of his unique desire, or so the refrain goes. He’s destined to be punished, so many harbingers of the apocalypse surmise; but this moralism reeks of resentment and not pity or contempt. For our moralistic individual, the sin of narcissism is the sin of overweening independence and strength, strength that surely will not go unpunished by God or Gaia. Eventually, those who chose weakness, dependence, surrender of agency and assimilation into the collective will be vindicated. Or so we’re told.
Needless to say, I am no fan of the resentful impulse, however it manifests. This popular critique of narcissism is curious, though, as in any case the sufferer has nothing of which to be envious. The narcissist is not drunk on overweening strength, but is rather crippled by weakness. He is not flying high with Mephistopheles at risk of having his soul snatched up at some point in the future, his soul is already been swallowed up by the reflection in the pool which transfixes him.
It is true that those with direction, agency, and strength sometimes succumb to narcissism. But narcissism is not smoke for the fire of ambition — rather, most sufferers never achieved anything like greatness, fame, or success. Narcissism does not strike the strong, but instead the weak, those with a fragile sense of self. Indeed, it strikes those for whom ‘sense of self’ is salient, for whom the image in the pool is anything interesting at all in the first place.
Narcissism as over investment in behavioral legibility
What is the self? It’s a social technology.
Stable social relationships depend on predictability. The extent to which I can predict your behavior depends on two things; the amount of information about you that I have and the complexity of your behavior. These two things trade off; if I only am willing to interact with people whose behavior I can predict with some above-threshold accuracy, I’m going to limit my interactions to people I know very well and to people whose behavior is low in complexity.
A “self” is a low-complexity behavioral algorithm. Simply put, it is a list of propositions which serve to describe our behavior. “I’m creative.” “I’m a hard worker.” “I care about XYZ.” Notice that each of these, if taken at face value, provide a massive amount of prediction power. This prediction power means that many more strangers will be willing to work with us; accordingly, we conform our behavior to legibly adhere to this algorithm in order so that these descriptors can be taken at face value.
So, the self is a social technology which combines a low-dimensional representation of our behavior with credible signals of its reliability.
Generally speaking, this “self” is aspirational; that is, it’s a lie. We’re rarely as hard a worker as our self-conception would have us believe, and for very good reason. That’s just how the game theory of self-deception works.
That’s usually ok, because we typically only need the “self” to sell ourselves to people who have little information about us. First dates, hiring managers, and new friends. If we have a partner, job, and lot’s a friends, none of those situations are worth over-optimizing over.
So, tell me about yourself. If you have to pause upon hearing that question to collect your thoughts, your brain is not optimizing for self-sale to strangers. Lucky you.
But what if a lot depends on your ability to sell yourself to strangers? What if you are dating and desperate to stop dating, have big interviews coming up that you can’t get wrong, and are trying to make high-status friends but don’t have so many yet? You not only have a lot to win from investing in your self — self improvement — but are made desperate by your circumstances. You need your self. It’s your ticket to heaven. But really, it’s your ticket to hell.
Narcissism as Delusion
If you struggle to get a girlfriend, job, or friends, our model makes a simple prediction: either you’re not predictable enough, or you are predictable, you just suck. A safe bet, then, is to construct a self that’s more desirable — “I’m not just a hard worker, I work from dawn to dusk” — and to adhere to it more credibly, that is, legibly.
Sometimes this is actually an entirely reasonable response. Indeed, often people do suck, and adhering to an ambitious programme of action can help people convert time and energy into habits which improve their life.
The algorithm goes: suck => construct non-sucky self => conform behavior to non-sucky self => stop sucking. It’s a story as old as man.
The only hitch is self-deception. We strategically delude ourselves about the extent to which we bear out our self-conception, both to fool our future self into assigning more divergence to conception-violating actions, and to help ourselves convincingly lie about ourselves to others. One can’t lie oneself into a completely different persona, but most people can convincingly shade up a bit — and so we do in equilibrium. This sort of moderate self-delusion is usually harmless if not effective.
When adherence to self-conception is important, your brain will distort your perception of reality to make it easier to believe that you’re adhering. This is not a here-and-there tendency, it is an iron law on the neuronal level. When you combine distortion with salience with general desperation, you have a recipe for disaster.
If you just had salience and desperation, you’d get Rocky, and that’s fine. When you throw in distortion, your brain starts wire-heading, maximizing perceived adherence to an attractive sense of self instead of the real thing. All counter-evidence goes out the window, and you invest your time and energy into those actions which most efficiently make you feel like your self. This delusion and poor resource allocation makes you suck more faster than your desperate adherence can make you suck less, causing you to do worse on the “friends, girlfriend, job” front, which makes your brain assign more distortion, salience and desperation to the self. Pretty soon, all you can think about is your self, and perversely your actions do become very predictable, only not in the way you’d like.
You’re staring in the pool. Look away? The story suggests narcissus could, at any moment. In reality, once you’re narcissistic, the whole world is the pool — there’s nothing to turn to. The positive feedback loop is everything you know now. Welcome to hell.
Anti-Narcissism
If this characterization is correct, then narcissists are slaves to delusion and trapped by a pervasive sense of suckiness which inexorably seeps in through the walls of their grandiose self-conception. They are not strong, and their condition did not arise from strength, but rather from desperation and weakness. To the extent that the ambitious suffer from narcissism, it is because their grasping invited a bit too much urgency. Their narcissism does not invite divine punishment, it is divine punishment.
So, narcissism is something to be avoided. How? Ultimately, the best answer is strength.
If you have a good job, good friends, good girlfriend, and the only thing riding on your self-conception is a marginal improvement on those things, your brain is not going to generate desperation pathologies. However, this is protective, not ameliorating. If you don’t have those things and are narcissistic, trying harder to secure those things is the worst thing you could possibly do.
Instead, you need some external source of strength, meaning, stability. Your brain needs to assign less importance on outcomes downstream of your persona.
The most popular such source is religion; narcissists nonetheless can find a way to mess this up, by creating a false religious “identity” that they conform to, but for most people it will do more good than harm. Believing that God loves you no matter what, believing that you’re a sinner and that your misdeeds have cosmic importance no matter whether you have a personal excuse for why you were not yourself when you committed them, believing that pride is the chief sin — this truly is an escape from Hell, in this world if not the next. The main problem with religion is that for many today, Nietzsche is decisive. They simply cannot believe in God.
Another path is settling, at least in the short term. Find a girlfriend that you think is beneath you, find friends that are lame, find a job that’s just ok. This isn’t a permanent solution, and serves only to take the bite out of your desperation. Once your brain is no longer in panic mode, you become soberly ambitious once more, and trade in your temporaries for upgrades. The danger here is that you become complacent.
A third path is emotional manipulation. Maybe you meditate — or you take psychoactive drugs — so that you brain stops caring. Once you stop caring, the delusion fades with time and you naturally converge to non-suckiness. It may cure your narcissism, but there are downsides to “cheating” like this.
A fourth path is treating the symptoms. You find a way to overcome your delusion — sometimes you do this by listening to claims contradictory to your delusions for long enough that they eventually mutually self-annihilate, sometimes you do this by speaking them aloud to a stranger, whereupon the embarrassment module in your brain realizes how obviously ridiculous they are. When this works it works, but sadly there are just as many gurus and therapists who will help you deepen your narcissistic delusion as there those who will free you from them. The former often pays better.
Another path is assimilation into the collective. When done right — think of a monastery, or nunnery — but this too is a fraught path. Most of the fashionable collectives extant today cultivate and vampirically off of the narcissism in their members; think of political groups and various cause movements. Whether it cures or deepens one’s narcissism, though, assimilation to the collective always comes with grave costs.
A final path is a bit more abstract. I believe it’s the only real alternative to religion, and perhaps not coincidentally is widespread in societies which do not have strong organized belief systems. It simultaneously encourages great action while eliminating the desperation — I’ll elaborate on it in Part Two.