Narcissism and Its Effect on Politicial Behaviour

Recently, I saw a couple of articles in the Globe and Mail that made a lot of sense to me. More importantly, they explained the manifestly bizarre political behaviour of my generation.

In the first article, someone had studied the demographics of dating websites, from the supposedly pure e-harmony to the more tawdry AdultFriendFinder. My own experience, with e-harmony and as a social experiment on myself, had been infuriating and traumatic. Naturally, I wanted to know why. In effect, the article explained that the majority of dating site users are women. The majority of these women also have no intention of ever actually meeting any of their admirers. While this certainly reduces the chances of said women becoming the next centrepiece on a hysterical 48 Hours special, it really raises a lot of questions. Apparently, most of these women also already have boyfriends; these women are doing it because they have a need for someone to tell them they are pretty. Their boyfriends don't do it because North American society mandates that for Attractive Male X to seduce Attractive Female Y, he must be discourteous and neglectful to demonstrate his masculinity.

Bear with me, this really is going somewhere.

The second article was describing the deleterious effects of hyper-parenting on youth entering the work force. People of my generation are spending more time in school, and relying on their parents far more than in the past. The article described a few extreme cases where parents actually conducted the pay negotiations for their children.

Fair disclosure- My father helps me quite a bit with things that are financial, and things that involve tools. I can do home repair, he's just so much better at it that I still like to have his help. Not to mention the fact that my father and I both lead busy lives, so fixing the floor that I damaged by improperly installing a washing machine can be some good father/son time. As to the finances, essentially the help I get from my father falls into the "making life better for the next generation" category. Should my father immediately stop assisting or guiding me financially, I would not be cast into ruin. I would be renting a home rather than owning one, and I would be driving a used vehicle instead of a new one. My financial health would be significantly reduced, but I would by no means be destitute.

What the article in the Globe was describing, however, was a significant sector of society with exaggerated senses of entitlement and worth, and completely atrophied senses of obligation and responsibility. The culture of hyper-parenting had led to a group that had been praised as genius for accomplishing merely what is expected of any functional human. I know of many people my age who had their entire lives scheduled into oblivion so that their parents could keep up with the Joneses in terms of maintaining the illusion that their child was a multifunctional prodigy. It isn't that my parents deprived me of social activities, it's that my schedule made sense. I had one weeknight activity (usually sport-related), one weekend activity (at first religious, but as I got better at my sport it became tournaments), and every now and then I would pick up a third activity that would last a few weeks, like a school play. Managing my time was my own responsibility: while my parents certainly encouraged me to study or do my assignments, there was little or no coercion. As my report cards can show, I frequently learned painful lessons on scheduling and prioritizing my work.

So where do the two articles overlap? Well, we have a generation that in significant numbers is not capable of functioning independently, nor does it desire to. From day one, my peers have been told that they are unique and precious snowflakes, deserving of high praise and special treatment, and most importantly superior to all other snowflakes. Take a look again at the dating sites, and insert the bizarre tendency youth now has of sending nude photos across unsecure means. These are women, and men, who will literally do anything to maintain the status quo of having someone tell them they are special. Is it any wonder that my generation buys in so easily to cheap rhetoric peddling nebulous concepts of social justice? I get blank looks when I tell people that Canada's healthcare system is, in my opinion, unjust. I explain that I consider it to be fundamentally unjust for the government to force me to pay for services rendered to someone else. Should I feel obligated by my conscience to help the poor, I can do so on my own, more effectively because I don't have to create a Department of Distributing Largesse to the Unproductive. I point out that it is unjust to inflict an inefficient and ineffective system on 320 million Americans who have good healthcare and are happy with it for the sake of the 30 million who do not. I point out that the core ideas that permeate the Progressive Left are in effect Communist, and that the Soviet Union proved irrefutably that debasing the majority to ensure there is no underprivileged majority is in fact heinous and merely produces an underprivileged whole. Capitalism, the favourite punching bag of modern intelligentsia, has produced the only societies in history where the general populace has a standard of living and disposable income so high that they can literally pay to rebuild another country devastated by disaster once every five years. (Ethiopian famine, tsunami victims, Haiti fifteen years ago and today, etc.). If capitalism is so evil, then why is it that the medical problems in capitalist countries are related to an excess of necessary items, rather than the standard deficiencies? My father likes to say that unfettered capitalism is truly a great evil, and I do not disagree. I do disagree on who should make the fetters; he approaches it with a classical liberal (as in small, responsible government) bent, and I maintain a philosophically Libertarian position. Deck chairs on the Titanic, as far as the average liberal is concerned.

The point though, is that my father and I could argue for hours with my peers and accomplish nothing, quite simply because failure and direct challenges are totally foreign concepts. I should agree with them, because as everyone has always said, they are brilliant. In effect, their whole lives have become one giant intellectual echo chamber. I get scorn because I read the National Post, and Mark Steyn. But how am I the closed-minded one when I also read the Globe and Mail, and read Rick Salutin (even though he drives me crazy)? The same people who despise people for watching Fox News are those who take the CBC as gospel. Something about pots and kettles comes to mind (and arguing about degree of bias really is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship).

My general point is that the political behaviour of my generation is totally explicable, and depressingly predictable. The average Ontario university graduate can be counted on to be a collectivist, if not outright statist, who feels every identity group (except white males) should get a piece of the pie but has no idea how to bake one. They want to change the world, but can't change a tire. You see where I'm going with this. The infantilization of the Citizen by an overreaching state is merely the nationalized expression of the infantilization of the individual by a culture of hyper-parenting.

Not every twenty-something is a spoiled peacock; just the majority of the ones who are political.