In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, conservatives are angry. We don’t want violence, but we do want justice. We want Kirk’s killer brought to justice and the left crushed.
Finding Kirk’s assassin might prove easier than defeating the left. It’s difficult to rout an enemy who is suffering from a psychological problem.
That problem is narcissism. Narcissism is not self-love, but the opposite. The narcissist is not full of ego. He has no sense of self. Lacking a stable sense of identity, the narcissist hunts for meaning in therapy, self-help, sex, or radical politics. This is the mental illness and the driving politics of the left.
In his incredible 1979 work The Culture of Narcissism, the historian Christopher Lasch argued that the human personality and psychology have changed over the course of the last century. Americans have transformed from strong and well-adjusted people to those evincing a “minimal” self — a personality that is weak and dependent on government, corporations, radical politics and bureaucracies for a sense of meaning. A central idea in Lasch’s analysis is how infants develop. Citing Freud, Lasch argued that to an infant, interactions with the world result in feelings of either omnipotence or helplessness. In their fantasy world a baby is either the king of the world, demanding their needs get met right now, or is totally helpless and dependent on parents for survival. It represents two extremes that need to be evened out. To do so, it is vital that parents, community, and what Lasch called “transitional objects.” Toys, games, siblings, and pets, introduce limits to the world of the child. These objects shrink the scale of fantasies, introduce reality, and allow a healthy transition into adulthood. In the later 20th century, the raising of the child went to television, the helping professions, schools, and bureaucracies.
Lasch expert George Scialabba once summarized the process this way:
Formerly, the presence of potent but fallible individuals, economically self-sufficient, with final legal and moral authority over their children’s upbringing, provided one kind of template for the growing child’s psychic development. As fathers (and increasingly mothers) become employees, with the family’s economic survival dependent on remote, abstract corporate authorities, and as care-taking parents were increasingly supervised or replaced by educational, medical, and social-welfare bureaucracies, the template changed. The child now has no human-size authority figures in the immediate environment against which to measure itself and so reduce its fantasies to human scale. As a result, it continues to alternate between fantasies of omnipotence and helplessness. This makes acceptance of limits, finitude, and death more difficult, which in turn makes commitment and perseverance of any kind — civic, artistic, sexual, parental — more difficult. The result is narcissism.
In short, the left are babies with mental problems and violent fantasies. Lasch lamented this psychosis and how “men and women no longer manage even to raise their children without the help of certified experts. The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence, in one area after another, and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies.”
When the narcissistic personality met with the radical politics of the 1960s, it was a disaster. Politics became about “filling empty lives” and therapy rather than concrete solutions and rational debate. Narcissism met Marx. Lasch:
On the fringes of the radical movement, many tortured spirits actively sought a martyrdom made doubly attractive by the glamour of modern publicity. The left, with its vision of social upheaval, has always attracted more than its share of lunatics, but the media have conferred a curious sort of legitimacy on antisocial acts merely by reporting them. The streaker at a football game becomes for a moment the center of all eyes. The criminal who murders or kidnaps a celebrity takes on the glamour of his victim. The Manson gang with their murder of Sharon Tate and her friends, the Symbionese Liberation Army with its abduction of Patty Hearst, share with the presidential assassins and would-be assassins of recent years a similar psychology. Such people display, in exaggerated form, the prevailing obsession with celebrity and a determination to achieve it even at the cost of rational self-interest and personal safety. The narcissist divides society into two groups: the rich, great, and famous on the one hand and the common herd on the other. Narcissistic patients, according to Kernberg, “are afraid of not belonging to the company of the great, rich, and powerful, and of belonging instead to the ‘mediocre,’ by which they mean worthless and despicable rather than ‘average’ in the ordinary sense of the term.” They worship heroes only to turn against them when their heroes disappoint them.
This is what we’re up against. The college kids screaming like toddlers when faced with a speaker they don’t like, the transgender people asserting that their truth is all that matters, the psychologists helping mentally wobbly people demand respect even if they haven’t earned it, the killing of Charlie Kirk — this is the world The Culture of Narcissism predicted. These aren’t the old communists with their “dialectical materialism” and their views on evolutionary social change. These are grown babies throwing tantrums. These are mentally ill people. It will be difficult to cure.
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