Trump, a malignant narcissist, auditioned for the Presidency his whole life, relying on charisma and snake oil. And Americans, who were sadly regressing in the same direction, swooned for him.
With great foresight back in 1953, the psychologist Alexander Lowen argued that narcissism was becoming more than an individual problem: it was a disorder of society.
“On the cultural level, narcissism can be seen in a loss of human values — in a lack of concern for the environment, for the quality of life, for one’s fellow human beings. A society that sacrifices the natural environment for profit and power betrays its insensitivity to human needs. The proliferation of material things becomes the measure of progress in living, and man is pitted against woman, worker against employer, individual against community.”
He then nails it: “When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture itself overvalues ‘image’ and must be regarded as narcissistic.”
Today many experts agree that in numerous ways, the U.S. has become narcissistic: social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok encourage self-promotion and validation through likes; culturally there has been a growing emphasis on individualism, which has shifted societal norms to reward self-centered traits; and changes in parenting styles, such as over-praising children, appear to have led to inflated self-esteem and narcissistic tendencies.
For 14 seasons, Trump played the role of a preening, arrogant know-it-all, becoming the face of our already-blossoming narcissism. That’s how he paved his way to the Oval Office.
Perhaps the overwhelming midterm rejection of Trump will wake us up: a bucket of cold water thrown on the face of our lazyboy, slumbering, social media-addicted denial of reality.
In the words of Erik Rittenberry, the “Poetic Outlaw,” we’ve become addicts of the artificial, completely sucked into a disenchanted world. Existence has been reduced to itself in a flat, two-dimensional phenomenon that induces a limited view of the whole. And we’ve grown used to it, comfortably numb in our little culture of convenience, blind to the higher realms of reality.
I’ve written before about how the myth that we are like machines has whittled away what makes us human, and now, in its latest AI iteration, it is poised to finish us off. Thankfully, there is a better, tried-and-true way that, until recently, empowered us to flourish.
Before the 17th century, society took for granted that nature was a living, breathing organism. In the words of Leonardo da Vinci: “We can say that the earth has a vegetative soul, and that its flesh is the land, its bones are the structure of the rocks … its breathing and its pulse are the ebb and the flow of the sea.”
Almost everyone believed that the universe was like an organism, and so was the Earth. Luckily for us, that myth is being revived by the nurturing myth of Gaia, aligning us with the human needs of our body and soul rather than pretending we are merely metallic cogs in a machine universe.
The idea of Gaia originates from ancient Greek mythology, where she is depicted as the primordial goddess of the Earth. Gaia was considered the mother of all life and the personification of the Earth itself, symbolizing fertility and nature’s nurturing aspects.
This ultimately nourishing metaphor is now being breathed back to life by the Modern Gaia Project, a community of individuals and organizations focused on the environment and sustainability.
Adopting Gaia is our lifeline to the future: we are not complex machines destined to be controlled by AI, but living tissue, part of an animate Mother Earth.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.