I think that Ross Pomeroy needs to collect his thoughts a bit more. While I agree with him that the trait of narcissism (as opposed to the personality disorder) has risen over the last half century, as he posts in his most recent offering at RealClearScience, I don’t think he establishes his thesis.
For example Gallup has found that engaging in charitable activities has declined over the last 20 years:
And for an example of self-obsession you need hardly look farther than this year’s Oscar ceremony.
But consider this observation from Mr. Pomeroy:
Psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell are most responsible for collecting data and creating a narrative to support this claim. According to the duo, the rise began with the Baby Boomers, who grew up in an era of relative ease and plenty after their grandparents endured a Great Depression and their parents soldiered and sacrificed through World War II. By the time they were college-aged, Boomers eschewed the collectivist mindset of their elders in favor of individualism.
The trend continued with Boomers’ kids. As Dennis Shen wrote for the London School of Economics’ Phelan United States Centre, “One study comparing teenagers found that while only 12% of those aged 14-16 in the early 1950s agreed with the statement “I am an important personâ€, 77% of boys and more than 80% of girls of the same cohort by 1989 agreed with it.”
14-18 year olds in the early 50s weren’t Baby Boomers. They were Silent Generation. Or this:
And, of course, the rise in narcissism has persisted since. In 2008, Twenge published a study comparing college students’ scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory scale to scores from students in 1979, finding that levels of narcissism had risen roughly 30 percent.
Those students in 1979 were Baby Boomers. Continuing:
Additional research has evinced this increase. “59% of American college freshmen rated themselves above average in intellectual self-confidence in 2014, compared with 39% in 1966,” Shen wrote.
Those college freshmen in 1966 were Baby Boomers, too. Quite to the contrary, what he’s establishing is that the trait of narcissism has risen in the generations that followed the Baby Boomers rather than Baby Boomers’ beginning the trend. Rather than looking at generational shifts to explain the rise of self-obsesssion, I think you need look no farther than the self-esteem movement in education. That was first promoted by psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden (lover of Ayn Rand) and achieved its epitome in education in the 1980s. Neither Dr. Branden nor his ardent followers who promoted self-esteem in education were Baby Boomers—they were Silent Generation.
That is not to absolve Baby Boomers from responsibility completely. It was among Baby Boomers that the average number of children per family declined from 2.44 to 1.85 (below the replacement level) and the notion of “quality time” as opposed to “quantity time”.
There are some points Mr. Pomeroy is making with which I agree:
There is also another way to look at the rise in narcissism – as a defense mechanism. Narcissism is often driven by low self-esteem and insecurity. Since the 1950s, wealth inequality has risen, cost of living has exploded, especially for housing, and puchasing power has stagnated. Combine these economic pressures with the competitive, pressure-filled media environment since the turn of the century and you have a recipe for a rise in narcissism. And sadly, narcissism is linked to elevated hostility and aggression towards others. One hopes that Americans can find a way to cool their collective narcissism before it boils over.
A few observations. We don’t need to teach people how to be self-absorbed. Human beings are self-absorbed by nature. We’re born that way. Lack of self-absorption is a virtue which, like all virtues, is cultivated with practice.
Healthy self-esteem is cultivated through real accomplishment not through unconditional praise. And the path to real accomplishments lies through effort and perseverance. Unconditional praise cultivates a sense of entitlement, something we can see in abundance nearly everywhere we look from the narcissism of Donald Trump (just to pick a public figure at random), to the richest men in the world cheating on their wives, to the idolization of people without talent, accomplishment, or virtue whose main activity seems to be taking care of themselves and their own needs, to complaints about micro-aggressions and demands or remediations from people who have done no harm by people who have experienced no injury.
