Is There Someone Else, Narcissus? Self-Love

“In our own celebrity-obsessed culture, where people such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are ‘famous for being famous,’ one can hardly blame the young who grow up with such role models as Zsa Zsa Gabor, who once had 15 portraits of herself hanging in her home, Donald Trump, who has the territorial habit of ‘peeing’ on everything he owns, and Madonna, who once said, ‘Everyone is entitled to my opinion.’” Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.”—Walt Whitman

“Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.”—Karen Anderson

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—9/3/2012—One post-modern archetype of low self-esteem is short, bald Ziggy, who inhabits Tom Wilson’s single-panel strip on the comic pages.

On one visit, the nurse at the “Self-Esteem Clinic” asks Ziggy, “What can we do for you, Shorty?” When he returns another day, she says, “Not you again.” On his third call, he is met by a sign reading, “Please use back door.” When he finally gets past the nurse, the doctor tells him what he already knows: “You need to boost your self-esteem. For the next few weeks, stay away from mirrors.”

When Ziggy applies for a seat in a self-esteem workshop, the instructor asks, “Not so fast—what makes you think you’re good enough to take this class?” And when our anti-hero applies for a personalized license plate, the DMV clerk says, “You want vanity plates? C’mon, get serious.” Desperate for validation, Ziggy deposits 50 cents in a “Self-Esteem” vending machine which extends a mechanical hand to bless his shiny pate.

To consider the other end of the self-esteem spectrum, one might dig into back issues of The New Yorker where narcissism has been under attack for over 50 years.

At a cocktail party, one absorbed fellow drawn by Peter Steiner tells a woman, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said. I was listening to my body.” Victoria Roberts imagines the same fellow telling his date after a Yoga class, “I’ve tried a lot of life strategies, and being completely self-serving works best for me.” Leo Cullum reminds us that television’s only competitor is the mirror. He has a talking head saying, “On a personal note, my wife and I have agreed to separate, as I’ve fallen in love with my own voice.” Finally, Lee Lorenz draws a body builder of gargantuan proportions shaking hands with a minister following church saying, “Nice job, Reverend, but I think I’ll stick to worshipping my body.”

Actually, I’ve seen this fellow at the gym wearing out the mirrors.

But my favorite local narcissist is a 30-something woman on a stationary bike who, without slowing her cadence or removing her ear pods, reached down recently, grabbed her purse, and rummaged about until she’d found her floss dispenser. Oblivious to the ten or so people watching, she sat flicking the detritus of lunch from her bleached teeth onto the floor. When she was done, she draped her limp twine across the handlebars for the next rider.

One expects children of a certain age to be full of themselves as when one complains to a carpool driver, “Mom, Tommy is looking out of my window!” Self-interest is a survival strategy that nature has implanted in the young to protect the neglected. One does not, however, expect an adult to be jealous of “my window.”

A few years ago, a student told me that her sixth-grade home-room teacher had used the period as her personal window of opportunity. As the principal was reading the announcements over the PA system, the teacher quietly put on her eye liner and lipstick, oblivious to the giggles of the class.

In the 15th century, Baldesar Castiglione chided a peace-time courtier who was “married to his armor.” The Italian writer called such behavior a product of “impudent self-praise” and warned that it arouses “hatred and disgust” in all who observe it.

In our own celebrity-obsessed culture, where people such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are “famous for being famous,” one can hardly blame the young who grow up with such role models as Zsa Zsa Gabor, who once had 15 portraits of herself hanging in her home, Donald Trump, who has the territorial habit of “peeing” on everything he owns, and Madonna, who once said, “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.”

In a discussion of such ingrown suckers, my father once likened the ego to a pneumatic tire: “Overfill it,” he said, “and the blowout will likely occur near the tread. Under-inflate it, and the walls of the tire become vulnerable. Either way, there’s trouble on the road ahead.”

Those who believe that “I” is the only vowel think their intellect or their physique is unparalleled, but it’s seldom both. Few cerebral narcissists spend any time in the gym, and body builders rarely show up in the library, so confrontations are rare.

Occasionally, one type changes into another. My mentor, James Dickey, graduated from high school and entered Clemson by most accounts as a somatic egotist, but years later he had morphed into the cerebral sort who enjoyed showing up Harvard grads when the writers he’d “developed” took their oral examinations. For all his blather about being a weight lifter, canoeist, and archer, he was really a very bookish man who on occasion thought his literary efforts exceeded Yeats’s.

Evelyn Waugh observed, “Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist,” and Dickey was never threatened by modesty or the truth. Waugh adds that the artist “enriches the world more than the generous and good . . . .” Really? Is Bill Gates’s work in eradicating malaria not more important than Puella? I know, apples and oranges, but still . . . .

Whether it’s won by conscientious physical or mental work, self-regard is a result of achievement, not the cause. Nature’s genetic programming dictates that humans will learn to sit before they stand, but she bestows no laurels at any milestone.

In the last 40 years, however, many educators have argued that laurels should be distributed prior to or despite the achievement in order to promote self-esteem. The effect, however, is to destroy the nominal virtue when children finally realize they’ve accomplished nothing. If the realization is slow in coming, society is saddled with a population that feels entitled despite an empty résumé. These shallow folk are epitomized by the short-sighted, orgasmic fellow who wore his silvered shades outside in and his ribbed condoms inside out.

One thin gold thread in the history of humanity is the attempt by enlightened souls to broaden the definition of “neighbor” from family to tribe to city state to nation to the world.

The Talmud says that to save one life is to save the world. Nowhere has this been more dramatically demonstrated than in Leningrad in the winter of 1941-42. At the time, the Russian city was besieged by the German military, but deep in the Vavilov Institute, a seed bank for rare plants the world over, men and women dedicated to their mission stood guard. Two of them starved to death beside hundreds of pounds of edible seeds rather than admit any who might destroy the future of humankind.