The ego epidemic

In the conclusion to my previous post (“Regression trumps Progress”), I referred to the epidemic of hubris that is currently dominating human behavior. Although hubris, the kind of overweening pride denounced by the ancient Greek philosophers, has been around for as long as human beings have existed, it certainly seems to have reached the status of a true epidemic nowadays. Following the collapse of the collectivist ideologies that were popular during the “thirty glorious years” of human development (1945-1975), the neoliberal counter-revolution has installed libertarianism as the governing ideology of our era. Unfortunately, the victory of ultra-individualism could not have happened at a worse time, with today’s enormous population of over seven billion people straining to find the resources necessary to deal with all the social, economic, geopolitical and environmental crises that are currently combining together to threaten our collective existence.

Humanity’s main problem in solving previous crises of this magnitude, such as the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War, from the 1914-1945 period, has always been the huge gap between reality and perception that prevents most people from realizing what is really happening to them. In today’s world, millions of ordinary people have been brainwashed by the egotistical maniacs of vulture capitalism into believing that it is organized society, cooperation and solidarity that are threatening our survival and not the toxic personalities who are constantly promoting unbridled individualism.

Unfortunately for everyone, a large minority of the world’s population is made up of individuals infected by several different kinds of personality disorders, whose toxic behavior poisons the lives of all those around them. These disgusting people tend to concentrate in larger institutions like private corporations or governments, but they also thrive in smaller social institutions like the neighborhood or the family. As a result, millions of people who now fall prey to libertarian ideologies are doing so because they have themselves encountered increasing numbers of such egotistical maniacs in their own lives, and mistakenly conclude that total submission to such domineering individuals cannot be avoided.

Several years ago, I was so fascinated by the negative impact of the world’s leading bullies on their numerous victims that I decided to read a couple of dozen books specifically related to this social disease. The one that impressed me the most was a work published in 2000 by Marie-France Hirigoyen called Stalking the Soul: Emotional Abuse and the Erosion of Identity. The author pointed out that even though she was particularly concerned about abuse in the workplace, bullies are to be found everywhere. Wherever they congregate, however, even though some of them became aggressive monsters because they were themselves bullied at one point in their own lives, this does not at all justify their attempts to destroy those around them. Many other people who have been bullied just as much refused to become bullies themselves later on.

Hirigoyen is also impressive when attacking the myth according to which the victims are considered to be masochists, or accident prone people, who merely bring out the aggressive side that is supposed to exist in just about everyone. In fact, this is nothing but pro-bully propaganda, invented by toxic personalities and their sycophant courtesans in an attempt to let them get away with bullying their victims to their heart’s content. But the victims do not at all enjoy being victimized and are in fact immensely relieved whenever they succeed, after a tremendous amount of effort, in escaping from the clutches of their gleeful tormentors.

Unfortunately, toxic personalities seem to thoroughly enjoy causing as much harm to others as they possibly can. Some people try to soften the blow by claiming that bullies only act in this way to escape from a lack of success in their own social relations. In reality, however, bullies, who often have more money and more power than most other people, keep on torturing as many innocent victims as they capable of reaching because they can never get too much pleasure out of choosing to mistreat their designated victims.

This kind of antisocial behavior is behind practically all the problems that I have been identifying on my blog, as well as in my published writings since 2001. The long-term existence of this anti-socialism, and its recent acceleration in the neoliberal counter-revolution, is a sort of “answer to everything” as to why so many different aspects of human life have become even more negative than they were before. It is something like a “unified field theory” of recent social activity, outlining how aggression, both active and passive, has overcome cooperation as the current standard of human behavior.

This is the same ultra-individualist trend that was identified as long ago as 1979 by Christopher Lasch in his book (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations), published in the same year that neoliberalism’s Margaret Thatcher first came to power in the United Kingdom. Many more aspects of the same trend were also identified in Tom Wolfe’s well-researched novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Wolfe’s description of “the masters of the universe” (the bankers and the traders) who deliberately set out to ruin the world economy to prove their own superiority over others, turned out to be quite prescient, since he seems to have predicted the 2008 world financial crisis, whose effects are still very much present nowadays.

But it is not just the world’s most important bullies who belong to this current trend in human behavior. The same general approach to life also characterizes the activities of millions of quite ordinary individuals, whose massive egos also prevent them from identifying with any of their unfortunate victims. Today’s overwhelming rejection of civility, or any kind of public spiritedness, also stems from the same root of deliberate irresponsibility. All of today’s egotistical maniacs are governed by similar kinds of cognitive distortion, variations on the theme that although they used to be “mister nice guys” in the past (usually untrue), now it’s “pay-back time” and everyone one around them is just going to have to do what they say or else.

Unfortunately, we are now living in an age of total self-indulgence, in which liberation from the stifling social constraints of the 1950s (“father knows best”) gradually morphed into total dependence on subconscious spontaneity. In other words, a complete rejection of society altogether, in which each individual concentrates all his, or her, attention on immediate gratification of every possible inner desire. Publicist Timothy Leary’s admonition that everyone simultaneously “turn on, tune in and drop out” soon became abject consumerism, driven by the uncontrollable need of investors to convince every single individual in the world to mindlessly purchase “sex, drugs, rock and roll” and every other item that they could possibly cram into a deregulated and often illegal market economy.

As a result, people’s walls were constantly defaced by graffiti, autographs were replaced with selfies, face to face conversations were replaced with cellphone messages, bridges were loaded down with love lockets, and illegal drugs starting being decriminalized, along with many forms of prostitution, artificial insemination, womb renting, vote buying and so on. Even religion was individualized, with each believer choosing among a million different denominations and ceremonies the ones that were most suited to satisfying every particular need for spiritual stimulation.

Deadbeat dads also became part and parcel of the same individualist trend. Although this category of human behavior has always existed, the number of people afflicted with this particular antisocial disease also seems to have significantly increased recently. All over the world, more and more deadbeat dads simply run away from home at the birth of their first child, while the others satisfy their domineering desires by always letting the women in their lives do all the work that has anything to do with the home or the children.

Even in relatively advanced societies, that allow women to have decent jobs, it is still the missis who has to do all the housework, make the children’s lunches, take them to school and bring them home again, go to all the doctor’s and the dentist’s appointments, meet with their teachers in the evening, and so on and so forth. Even when madame makes more money than monsieur, even when monsieur is officially a house husband, the woman still has to do everything domestic, so as not to disturb her man-child’s oddly fragile identity.

A similar category of burgeoning antisocial behavior is the spoiled brat. Again, this juvenile version of social irresponsibility has also existed since the beginning of time, but until recently it was largely confined to children from rich or powerful families of aristocratic or upper bourgeois origin. Nowadays, however, the spoiled brat syndrome has also gone from several thousand cases per country to millions of examples everywhere. The spoiled brat is no longer just the screaming five-year old in the daycare center, nor just the teenage monster refusing to do any household chores, no matter how trivial.

This social type has now morphed into twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, living with their parents forever, flunking out of course after course, and refusing to do any paid work whatsoever. Some of them go so far as to blame their ignorant behavior on the post-recession economy, or even (in some countries) the capitalist system, conveniently forgetting that many of their peers manage to behave normally in spite of living under exactly the same conditions. The spoiled brats irresponsible behavior is really pro-capitalist, however, since it is the unearned income of the speculative investor that has always been recognized as the very essence of vulture capitalism.

In today’s world, those odd individuals who are still antediluvian enough to remain socially responsible can only survive if they try to avoid such egotistical monsters whenever possible. People with normal egos should do whatever they can to keep their different social groups (families, unions, associations, administrative boards, academic departments, and so on) from falling under the control of toxic personalities, as they so often do. Normal egos should also try very hard to avoid sharing property with ultra-egos, such as in condos, inheritances, or joint investments, because the toxic ones will always do their damnedest to ensure that nobody except them gets to enjoy any of the benefits of the theoretically shared enterprise.

Normal people should also avoid also getting into any arguments with excessive egos about any subject whatsoever, because such bullies always claim to know absolutely everything about anything, in every field of endeavor, no matter how distant it is from their own area of expertise. Like the eighteenth century composer Johann Schobert, every last one of these dominant bullies is quite capable of wiping himself out, along with his entire family, whenever he (or sometimes she) pretends to know as much about wild mushrooms as he does about music.

Avoiding toxic personalities on the personal level is definitely difficult, but not impossible. Avoiding their noxious influence on society as a whole, however, is another thing altogether. With every passing day, our world is becoming increasingly ungovernable, as the ego epidemic undermines our collective capacity to resist its evil onslaught. No one knows what the future holds, whether or not human society will succeed in escaping from the totalitarian control of conspicuous consumption. All we can do, as the saying goes, is to hope for the best while preparing for the worst.