On narcissism as the paradigmatic malady of our time (which explains everything)

Every epoch needs its figures of evil. Ours is still Christian, because it figures evil as selfishness and desire. Narcissus is Oedipus and Adam. He is Prometheus proud, not cowed. Figures of psychical malaise or malfunction are always social figures. They figure what a society largely wants and fears. The European bourgeoisie of the 19th century could discover neurosis because its discordant experiences of family and society (or state), individual and market, were neurotic. Today, the people who participate in the endless parade exposing and condemning narcissists are usually narcissistic themselves. But social change does not happen through criticizing as sick or bad the individuals who most intensely express the society's characteristic malaises. They have to be criticized from the standpoint not of someone else who in some sense of spatiality is somewhere else, but from the standpoint of time: what the present looks like from a standpoint within it that is envisioned as different from and beyond it. If the society can be described in medical metaphors, or the theatrical ones of sacrifice and law courts, then it needs scapegoats, exemplary figures who embody its worst traits and whose exclusion will theatrically figure its own cure.

What is lost from the Hellenic-Christian view of hubris or pride as sin is the idea that a moral badness is the consequence of a psychical abnormality. But there are normal and abnormal narcissists. The narcissist does not love anyone, and needs others to love him, while sensing this is impossible. But not loving others was, classically, a vice and sin. Now people mostly feel other anxieties: the more self-centered ones of failure, unhappiness, loneliness, or being wronged by others. (The Biblical Ishmael as a Narcissus, and as the dominant figure of subjectivity, quarrelsome, unruly, quick to anger and accusation and rarely appeased, for our time?) If as Heidegger said, guilt is wanting to have a conscience, the narcissist's innocence is wanting to not have one. And of course, what a person can be most guilty of is not realizing the meaning of his guilt. So Professor Borg's dream in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries is precise: He is "guilty of guilt." The narcissist will hear others echo his faults and demands, but won't easily learn by observing them. That's the idea, anyway.