Narcissism

A meditation on our epistemic culture.

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

Maybe I am crashing out. Let me take the observation seriously, and play with it a little. It has been suggested by a chorus of interlocutors—most of them very anonymous—that what has happened here at Notes From The Circus over the past week has been the display of a man coming apart at the seams. And I’ve been sitting with this. Asking myself: is that what people really see?

After some consideration and thought, I’ve convinced myself that people really do see it that way. From my vantage point, I find this strange and disorienting. Because honestly, I feel perhaps the most at peace with myself that I have been in my entire life. I have managed to move past the internal obstacle of reasoning behind other people’s imagined judgment. And so I pushed through and simply wrote about my thoughts. Naked. On display for the world to see.

What will people think of that?

Egotistical.

Self-absorbed.

Narcissist.

I anticipated this reaction, of course. And yet, I wrote anyway—pushing into a frame of introspection and sharing with the world my thoughts, unvarnished. The moral philosopher inside my conscience observing, asking the question: “what is the disapprobation that some of your friends and audience are expressing here?”

At least two people have now suggested to me that this is the least interesting and most off-putting of all the registers of writing. People are pushing back. Suggesting I stop writing in this way.

The philosopher in me asks… why?

You don’t have to be reading this, you know.

I do not own your attention.

I never claimed to.

So if you think I’m wasting your time right now, you are more than welcome to get off the bus.

I’m serious. If that seems rude to you—that I am confronting the critic reading this in real time, the one who would have the thought “Jeez, when will this guy stop talking about himself?”—then perhaps you’re missing what I’m actually doing here.

Because I’m not talking about myself at all.

I’m reflecting on our cultural condition, and using my personal experience as a case study, shared with you—you don’t have to keep reading—to illuminate a particular corruption in our culture.

If you are a paid subscriber, and you feel like I am now wasting your time, I invite you to the unsubscribe button. Seriously. Do it. Hit unsubscribe. Cancel your subscription. Because I am doing something here that, for whatever reason, has become quite radical in our contemporary cultural condition: simply saying what I think without pretense.

Or maybe you’re still here, and want to hear what I say next…

What I’m going to say next is that I think we have become a culture corrupted by imposture. I think this is what influencer culture is. Pretense-for-hire, I call it.

What am I doing here? I’m not trying to be an influencer. I’m trying to be me. I have a world of thoughts, a cosmology of being, and I choose to share that here with you. You can take it or leave it. You can say to yourself, “I’m going to stop reading, because this guy seems to only care about himself”—and if that’s your impression, I don’t care. Goodbye.

The truth is, I don’t only care about myself.

I care about the world, deeply.

It’s why I study it so relentlessly.

It’s why I have undertaken such personal sacrifice as to risk writing pieces like this—pieces that evoke the predictable reaction that I am, in fact, making the object of interrogation in this essay.

Narcissist.

That word.

It has been deployed at me so much throughout my life.

And I won’t lie: I bristle at it. Because I feel like my life story—as people who know me can attest—has been filled with self-sacrifice, commitment to higher principles beyond my own personal comfort, a love for argument, and a refusal to mistake ideas for the person sharing them. I have approached the world in that way.

“But you are being a narcissist right now, Mike. You’re writing another essay talking about yourself.”

Okay, now you are tiring me out—oh imagined interlocutor—because I must now tell you that what you observe is not narcissistic at all. It’s merely my thoughts drained of pretense. Formed outside the domain of your imagined judgment. A concession of social power to you that is unearned and undeserved.

As I said, this is not about me.

This is about our culture.

A culture that has atomized.

A culture that smothers individual expression.

A culture that punishes taking expressive risk—risk like I’m taking right now.

And I grow wary of this malaise that has descended upon our disenchanted world.

“Mike, the way you are talking sounds so condescending and pretentious.”

I hear you. And on the first count, guilty as charged.

I am condescending—toward a culture that has chosen to value posturing above truth.

I look down on it with some degree of pathos.

Tell me why I shouldn’t.

I’ll watch the comment section carefully.

But pretentious? Here, I push back. Here, I flip the tables. Here, I suggest that you make a dangerous mistake. To confuse unvarnished honesty—personal monologue stripped of hedging and deference—with pretension is to mistake the absence of pretense for its presence. It commits even more mortal intellectual sins without mentioning them: self-deception. The act of lying to oneself by saying something different to others than one thinks internally.

Why do we do this?

To provide space for other people’s feelings, of course.

Noble, I suppose.

Nobody should seek to hurt other people’s feelings on purpose. What a cruel thing to do.

But surely we can agree that lying about what one believes to spare someone the discomfort of cognitive dissonance—to protect them from the psychic pain of encountering the possibility they might be wrong about something important—is to collude with a dark force at the bottom of our sick culture.

A culture where rhetorical skill and performance has replaced honesty and authenticity.

Maybe not surprising, then, that some among us can’t detect real narcissism when they see it: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and many others.

“Mike, we just want you to talk about politics and philosophy.”

Oh, but I am, dear reader.

I am.

That’s what I am doing in this very moment.

But I’m doing it in a way that forces you to question your assumptions—about me, about each other, about yourself. Some of you really don’t like it. It almost seems to carry a menacing quality: that I persist in this way.

Yet I’m going to keep coming at you.

Not to scold you.

Not to make you feel lesser.

I am inviting you.

Inviting you to consider all the times you gave an opinion, declined to give one, or took some action to shield the world from knowing what you really think.

Why do you do this?

And why does our culture expect such guardedness of ourselves?

Still now, some among you are wondering when this display of self-exhibitionism will stop. And yet I persist. I keep writing these words, wondering why you are so disappointed in me talking this way.

I do not claim ownership of your attention.

Nor do I want to.

I wouldn’t take title deed if it were offered.

Because I am not trying to lead you in thought.

I’m trying to have a conversation.

An honest one.

And if this turn of prose has disquieted the confidence that propelled you to join my subscriber list, then I might suggest—and I demonstrate this commitment to you now—that I was never going to submit to audience capture. Because I was never going to lie to myself, and by extension, to you.

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