Narcissism and Normies

Commonplace Newsletter #020

These newsletters, especially as of late, have been a series of hunches and intuitions laid out in long form. Scant supporting evidence or quotations or incontrovertible fact is offered. (Does incontrovertible fact even exist anymore? Is that phrase itself now an oxymoron?)

I make no apologies for this. Following the brush, as the Japanese call it, is, to my mind, a far more interesting method of discussing a given topic than preassembling a stack of (biased, cherrypicked, slanted) evidence and then laying it all out brick by brick.

Structure beyond bare bones becomes a cage for an improviser.

I’d rather just take an inkling, or even a simple word, and then write about it in a single free form and improvised session until I have exhausted my brain and my store of opinions and wit. 

You get the best writing- and the worst- when you let the unconscious take the wheel. There’s no reward in this life without risk.

This methodology will no doubt change over time (this is my newsletter and I can do what I want, I am large and contain multitudes) but for now I find this purely off-the-cuff method of weekly exploration and riffing fruitful. And hopefully you find it entertaining.

So given all of that, today’s hunch is that bashing so-called ‘Normies’ is misguided and unwise and that it probably says more about the accuser than the accused. That’s the thesis.

So let’s see where the brush takes us as I try and come up with some ideas as to why this is true...

A crowd of NPC’s. This is the first and last time I will commit the aesthetic crime of using a meme as the visual accompaniment

Unconscious Bias

Firstly, as with last weeks discussion of Minimalism, I feel compelled to justify why I am discussing something that is old hat. Sneering at NPC’s (I will get around to the tedious task of defining this in a minute, just bear with me) is an activity that is at least 4 years old and sneering at normies more generally is as old as the Post World War Two invention of the teenager as a distinct demographic and economic category. The Wild One starring Marlon Brando, for instance, is an hour and a half depiction of normie sneering that is older than my retired parents.

The sentiment has been with us for a good long while then. And though it bubbled up into the online zeitgeist during the dawn of the Trump era it has now not so much died down but become a perennial part of the divisive atmosphere.

It goes like this: you and your friends have agency and your hobbies and beliefs are interesting and worthwhile. The other side, on the other hand, are all lockstep unthinking automatons. This is the implicit dichotomy that is being sold. A case of the old divide and conquer maybe or just another manifestation of the human need to feel important and special and justified in your worldview. Either way this is a mentality that leads to an end point of deep unhappiness and rage.

But before we get into that, a quick word about the filtration of ideas. Normie hate, as I said above, has not so much faded in popularity as it has become embedded below the surface. It’s less visibly apparent because it is now something of a given, in the same way that short-term zero-commitment sexual relationships have filtered down from Edwardian aristocratic coterie to Swinging Sixties Free Love to now just being something that simply is, a largely unremarked upon facet of young adulthood. The phenomenon hasn’t disappeared so much as it has largely moved below the level of our noticing. Does that make sense?

NPC Equals NPD

But back to the matter at hand.

An NPC is pretty much synonymous with a Normie. A Normie is someone of boringly mainstream, conventional and ordinary tastes and beliefs. They are the conformists who the would-be non-conformists see themselves in opposition to. Similarly an NPC (from the video game term of Non Playable Character) is also a conformist figure, someone who does not make their own decisions and lacks the capacity to think and act for themselves. In a game an NPC is controlled by the computer and their function is to utter the same scripted sentences and to perform the same few simple and repetitive actions every time the player approaches.

Again bland conformity, lack of agency, lack of ability to think and act independently of the mainstream are the defining aspects here.

As satire this is great (memes- though they are in a matter of days now worn into the ground by the witless- are at their best the closest this unaesthetic age has come to producing Gilray-like cartoons) but as a worldview it is a problem.

And political memes, like the 20th Century propaganda which in some sense they are the heir to, have a way of formenting in-group=good, out-group=bad worldviews.

(There is a joke here who’s punchline has something to do with ‘the memes of production’. But I don’t have the patience to work out the set-up.)

This worldview- and though the NPC meme comes from the political Right, this is now beyond the narrow and increasingly outmoded and irrelevant dichotomy of Right wing versus Left wing- goes something like this:

I am great. I am right. I see through the nonsense and have formed my own beliefs based on actual evidence and fact. So have those that think like me. People who have different beliefs, though, are brainless, soulless robots.

Further: The witless normies around me are NPCs. They are instrumental. My life is a movie and I am the hero and everyone around me is a supporting character at best and an extra at worst in the ongoing Heroes Journey that is my personal and unique existence.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the textbook definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder there mate. And it’s gonna come back to bite you when you hit middle age.

Building up by Knocking Down

The Last Psychiatrist tried to warn us. Though it’s been some six years since he last wrote anything, his constant and consistent Laschian theme that the problem of the contemporary world is essentially one of rampant narcissism has not lost relevancy. If anything it has only increased in significance.

The young, educated, dissatisfied men who were The Last Psychiatrist’s core demographic (and who I suspect may well overlap with certain parts of my own audience) have since become the inventors and disseminators of scornful normie-bashing memes and NPC mockery. Narcissism has sadly but predictably accelerated as social media has gone from being prevalent to being absolutely ubiquitous (A late adopter like me wasn’t on Twitter in 2016. But I am on Twitter now).

The thing about Narcissism, whether we are talking colloquially or getting closer to actual clinical usage, is that it comes from a place of deep insecurity. If you had true and grounded confidence and self-worth earned via objective achievement you would not need to talk yourself up beyond reason or inflate your ego beyond measure. Power doesn’t need to project, it simply is.

And the other side of this coin is that if you have actual confidence you don’t need to build yourself up by knocking others down. You don’t need to warm yourself by setting fire to strawmen. And that’s what normie bashing essentially does.

Now, I know that these memes and this conversational shorthand is mainly meant as a joke and I know it is a cardinal sin against both humour and propriety to tediously dissect the meaning and implications of a joke, but there are many a true word said in jest. It bares considering.

And what’s more this building-up-by-knocking-down is a trope that I have seen growing more and more. It’s a weakness and when it becomes reflexive and pervasive it is a sickness.

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind and a strawman for a strawman makes the whole world kindling.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Narcissism?

Frankly, I don’t know what the solution is. I have to be honest. It seems to be deeply entrenched. Digital Natives have now come of age having spent their entire lives making performative and self-aggrandising gestures for the collective online gaze. Even young children are startlingly camera conscious and image savvy. I don’t think that particular genie can be returned to that particular bottle.

So all I can do, or at least feel capable of doing in this moment in time is to reaffirm some of the bulwarks against narcissism that TLP laid out all of those years ago. Namely, try to focus on what you actually do rather than what you claim you are. Action precedes identity. If you want to change the identity you need to first get the actions in line. A writer becomes a writer by writing, not by cultivating an image.

Second, spend some time alone with your thoughts for once. Being alone but online all day does not count. You have to learn to deal with boredom. We avoid boredom and find it terrifying because it reveals the truth. It chips away at grandiosity and ego-built edifices.

Third, realise that there is more to life than you alone. This is hardest truth of all in a world that is geared up in strict opposition to it. Infantilised, grasping narcissists are the best consumers no matter how much they may see themselves as being different to those other mouthbreathing normie consumers. All identities are off the peg amalgams. Fomenting narcissism and division is simply good business if you are in the business of selling people things they don’t truly need.

Letting go of us versus them, grandiose and narcissistic thinking is hard. It requires believing in something bigger than yourself and your own gratifications. And this is not fun. And it is often a thankless and unrewarding task. It gains you zero attention in this attention economy and so most be done for its own sake, the same as everything that is truly worthwhile.

It’s a difficult lifelong process, this task of growing up. And the first step towards change is accepting that.

Until next time,

Live Well,

Tom.

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