CosmosStag ·
I now ask, whence comes the modern personality? If narcissism is a early suppression of the personality caused by an environment in childhood that is not conducive to self-reflection, then we would have to say that narcissism must become more and more common the farther back we go in time because good environments which are free of what we would now call "child abuse" are more and more rare as we go back in time, and, indeed, so does war and brutality become more and more common. Though humans invest in their children much more than a typical animal, or even a typical mammal, much more than a typical ape, the degree of investment in children by tribal societies would be considered highly neglectful by the standards of our modern society, which is of course perfectly in line with what we would expect of a very high time preference. These "totalitarian democracies" produced people with very poor boundaries between the individual and the collective, and when they tried to integrate into civilization, tended to become addicts and criminals. Early civilizations practiced child sacrifice, and parents and schools educated children with constant beatings. The modern west is the only civilization to have come out against corporal punishment as a whole society. It seems, then, that our modern society has a historically strange attitude toward mental health, and that our modern mental health is an extreme luxury that people of the quite recent past could have barely imagined. Our modern personality, with all its empathy and authenticity, is associated with an absence rather than a presence--an absence of abuse. It is as if we believe that it develops naturally as long as parents step back and let it happen. However, it is better to think of narcissism and abuse as the natural state of man and of the modern personality as the result of an extremely refined method of education that has no parallel in earlier societies--a method of and by empathy, which is a highly advanced cognitive function. You cannot define good parenting as an absence of abuse--logically, you would need to define empathy first and define abuse in terms of its absence. Thus, the development of the modern personality is a kind of nomos--it is a convention that we all know how to do, more or less, but it arose somewhat on its own, refined over the centuries. It is something very valuable but also fragile, as it is not truly natural, in fact quite different from the true state of natural man. And it is fragile too, in how easily philosophers can interfere with it when few know how to defend it.