E Michael Jones on the Culture of Narcissism

Once sports became professional they created a huge pool of spectators that increased exponentially with the rise of television, which in turn infused more money into the game, and, therefore, more corruption. The corruption of the professional athlete is the most obvious evil which followed. Less obvious was the corruption of the spectator, especially the TV spectator, who turned all professional sports into Quidditch, namely an essentially narcissistic fantasy that was observed rather than performed. Spectators of professional sports are a prime example of “the empty self” which was promoted by the culture of narcissism during the years following World War II.

The “empty” spectator has no natural moral resources in terms of character and skill of the sort that sports in the classical understanding of the term are supposed to supply. As a result, the spectator is fixated on winning. Because he uses the sports figure as a fantasy reservoir to supply what he lacks in terms of his own inner resources, he is threatened with non-existence if his team loses. He becomes, in other words, “a loser” and that threat of loss of being is so threatening to his fragile “empty” self and the delusions of omnipotence the culture of narcissism creates in him that he flies into a rage and seeks to find an object for the rage which flows from the assault on his grandiose and unrealistic sense of self that a losing record creates in him. The usual scapegoat instances like this is the coach, particularly the college coach, who regularly gets fired when he fails to “deliver the goods,” as Endicott Peabody once predicted.

The emphasis on winning at any cost is not only based in narcissist fantasy, it creates a completely irrational state of affairs, according to which each coach must have a winning record. This corresponds to the principles of narcissistic education, according to which each student must be above average. Professional spectator sports turned sports into the opposite of what it was supposed to be. Instead of producing moral character through physical effort among the people who play the sport, sports now produces spiritual bondage by promoting narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence among a nation of spectators.

The culture of narcissism promotes certain forms of behavior. Both Connors and McEnroe could have been kicked out of the matches they disrupted long before they ruined the game, but the people who decided to change tennis into a narcissistic spectator sport as opposed to a gentleman’s participatory sport, decided to coddle both of them because they admired their plucky, i.e., narcissistic behavior. Sports, in other words, could help the culture implement its values by providing a means of conveying those values in a concrete way to each new generation of young people, but sports could not prevent the degeneration of those values. Something else had to do that. The same could be said for education. Education followed the culture; the culture did not follow education. Education had to get direction from something higher than itself, every bit as much as sports did, and that’s where the problems began.

Did the American system of ordered liberty based on moral constraint fail? It’s like asking if sports failed, or if education failed, or if the culture which was supposed to support those institutions failed because the people who were the cultural leaders failed to implement their own principles. The question is analogous to what Chesterton used to say about the alleged “failure” of Christianity. Was the American system of ordered liberty tried and found wanting? Or was it found difficult and not tried?

Theodore Roosevelt, who stood astride the cultural crossroads when America’s fate hung in the balance, had a different explanation. He felt that Americans were committing what he called “race suicide.” Race, in this instance, does not refer to skin color. In the common parlance of the times, race meant ethnos, which is to say, as Allan Carlson has pointed out, “the sense of a group with a common history, a common culture, and a yearning for a common destiny.” Race suicide in this regard meant, in Roosevelt’s terms, “the gradual extinction of a people through a tendency to restrict voluntarily the rate of population growth.”

When Roosevelt talked about “race suicide” what he really was talking about was “the demographic consequences of birth control.” In his 1917 book, The Foes of Our Own Household, Roosevelt wrote that when a people voluntarily failed to reproduce, “The New England of the future will belong , and ought to belong to the descendants of the immigrants of . . . today because the descendants of the Puritans have lacked the courage to live.” Roosevelt was reacting to the rising tide of propaganda in favor of birth control that reached a crescendo in the years around World War I, when Margaret Sanger was agitating for the repeal of the Comstock laws.

Roosevelt looked on procreation as a duty, and a specifically American duty. It was the highest form of patriotism. It was un-American, from Roosevelt’s point of view to have a small family, something he expressed in no uncertain terms to a group of liberal Protestant theologians in 1911: “If you do not believe in your own stock enough to wish to see the stock kept up, then you are not good Americans, you are not patriots, and... I for one shall not mourn your extinction; and in such event I shall welcome the advent of a new race that will take your place because you will have shown that you are not fit to cumber the ground.”

“Narcissism,” according to Lasch, “emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future.”

The WASP ruling class in America lost interest in the future the moment they became interested in birth control, as Roosevelt perceptively pointed out. Once they made that decision, the decline of every institution from sports to education into what would ultimately become and entire culture of narcissism, as epitomized by the Harry Potter books, was only a matter of time.

The consequences of this attitude toward procreation are clear for Roosevelt. Since “no race can hold a territory save on condition of developing and populating it,” immigrants and not native stock would determine the future of the country, a fate which Roosevelt may not have liked but one which he embraced with manly frankness anyway. “I, for one,” Roosevelt wrote in his review of the book Racial Decay, “would heartily throw in my fate with the men of alien stock who were true to the old American principles rather than with the men of the old American stock who were traitors to the old American principles.”

The culture of narcissism promotes idea that all desires can be filled. When desires are not fulfilled, first anger, then rage, is the result.

William E. Wycislo shows convincingly the natural affinity between narcissism and tyranny: "the nature of tyrannies, whether of the first or the twentieth century, is such that it necessarily established a political milieu in which the narcissist can assume a respected public role, enforce public policy, and receive reinforcement for the very traits Freud and his disciples would consider symptoms of pathology. In Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany or Neronian Rome, narcissism escapes detection because it is an essential component of a political order that requires an allegiance as identical as an image in an undistorted mirror... Just as the totalitarian government of the twentieth century rewards the outward manifestations of pathology as unmistakable signs of political virtue, the autocratic imperial order of the first century displays a public atmosphere in which the narcissist with his peculiar behavior can achieve political prominence."

Americans have a limited number of options when it comes to cultural restoration. They do not have a shared ethnic identity; they do not have a state religion; they do not have a culture as deep or a history as long as the European ethnic cultures have, nor do they have the state religions that nurtured those cultures. What they have is what John Adams said they had: a constitution that can only function when the people who live under that system conform their lives to the moral order.

John Adams: “We have no constitution that can function in the absence of a moral people.”