Colonialism and Narcissism
I recently recorded a podcast on mental health discourse and neoliberalism. My thesis was that the use of mental health discourse in politics can be harmful when it creates a blanket diagnosis around political actors. The limiting of speech to avoid a trauma response only creates limitations about what we can talk about, rather than tackling the debate at hand.
I want to make a distinction between diagnosis-via-Twitter and the analysis I am attempting in this essay. I cite Christoper Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism in another recent podcast, where I make the point that our current society, including culture, politics, economics and everything that falls into these categories (work, media, relationships) are structured in a way that promotes antisocial, narcissistic behaviors over cooperative, empathic behaviors.
We can peek at the “moral good” of accumulating excess wealth. Take our corporate system, particularly the superficial “democracy” of publicly-traded corporations. The CEO, an-all powerful entity makes decisions on behalf of voting shareholders, whose only goal is to make as much money as possible and expand the company as far and wide as possible. They do not face workers or customers. They are considered the voices of the customers, by proxy, but product quality and safety are not their main criteria for decision making. For example, if I buy a crib for a baby, I don’t want that crib collapsing in the middle of the night. For the Boardroom, they want to know exactly how many cribs may collapse in the middle of the night and whether or not the lawsuits would warrant their changing the structure for the crib, or continue making that crib and eat the expense of a few dead baby lawsuits. If you think this is hyperbole, I suggest you go to some swanky after-hours drink spot in Chicago’s Gold Coast (AKA the "Viagra Triangle”) and eavesdrop on the conversations being made over $30 martinis.
Now, if you are a CEO, there is little incentive to bring your empathy to the forefront when the Board is talking about making cuts. You have to make the “difficult” decision to lay off some people. Maybe the people you’re taking a paycheck and healthcare from worked for a firm that your company purchased merely to get rid of the competition. In our culture these are “tough, shrewd decisions,” not “heartless, violent” decisions. Because we live in a culture that lionizes selfish behavior. How can we have progress without competing self-interests? This where we see how neoliberalism is the political expression of narcissism.
Before there was neoliberalism, there was colonialism, which is the “domination of a people or area by a foreign state or nation : the practice of extending and maintaining a nation's political and economic control over another people or area. This is where we see how colonialism is the geopolitical expression of narcissism.
Let’s take a look at how narcissism is defined via the 9 criteria of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition text revision. Now, I know the DSM-5 is highly problematic, and is worthy of its own analysis, which I cannot fit into this piece.
1. Grandiose sense of self-importance.
2. Frequent fantasies about having or deserving
3. Belief in superiority.
4. Need for admiration.
5. Entitlement.
6. Willingness to exploit others.
7. Lack of empathy.
8. Frequent envy.
9. Arrogance.
We could use this as a checklist. #1 “Grandiose sense of self-importance” harkens back to the All-American (but certainly not solely American) concept of Manifest Destiny, which is the philosophy that it is God’s will for the European settlers living in the North American continent to expand their territories to the Pacific Ocean and beyond. This expansion was viewed as a moral obligation of the supposedly superior white people to expand their culture through the uncivilized parts unknown.
Of course, there was no material basis for this belief. Outside of cult leaders like Brigham Young, no one had documentation of God verifying the superiority of white people and their obligation to conquer indigenous lands.
Manifest Destiny also endorses #2 “frequent fantasies about having or deserving.” The settlers, much like Boardroom CEOs today, could not be satisfied with enough. Stagnation was an affront to the moral obligation. Settlers needed to make names for themselves by “discovering” and/or conquering new lands and resources for the cause. The settlers “deserved” the land because of their innate superiority over indigenous people, which satisfies criteria #3, #4, #8, #9, and #5.
#6 very clearly applies when looking at both the genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans, which dovetails into #7.
Settlers use concepts like Manifest Destiny, or Pan-Asianism, or Zionism to bolster #7. Socially-constructed divisions between people allow for the people with more power to commit horrific acts against other humans they deem as being fundamentally different from them.
The idea here was not to pathologize a very serious sickness in our world, but to show another example of how our culture historically enables a self-centered, unempathic way of being for institutions, which filters down to our individual behaviors. We live in a society that rewards narcissism and punishes the empathetic. It’s incredibly difficult for one to heal in a truly sick society as ours, and even more difficult to repair our institutions that run on “human capital” rather than being run by fully-developed human beings with wants and needs.