[Johnnyvee]

(11-15-2018 05:53 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

(11-15-2018 11:50 AM)Shemp Wrote:  

@Parascelus: The argument against blaming narcissism for everything is the same as your argument against inhibition: "If this last assertion were anything near remotely true the human race would have died out thousands of years ago." That is, humans have always been subject to narcissism, so if narcissism can really take over and shut down sex so easily, it would have done so long ago and our ancestors world have been replaced by humans not subject to narcissism.

Narcissism itself is not new. Welfare state, feminism and smartphones are new. Nothing like them before in human history. Perhaps these other new phenomena allow narcissism to flourish like never before, in which case narcissism is merely a symptom rather than the underlying problem.

Welfare states and feminism are not new. We had the equivalent of them around the end of the Western Roman Empire. These, too, are symptoms, not causes. Smartphones represent technology, and technology is never more than an amplifier for the species' tendencies: it only allows us to do things faster or louder.

Narcissism is not new, but only since roughly the Baby Boomers has it become a generational pathology, something that afflicts entire wide swathes of people. And that only happened because the generations since roughly the Silent Generation have been raised by parents who
(1) shielded their children from any sense of knowing their own limits and
(2) took a relentless focus on themselves as individuals.

The "Me" generation was something unprecedented in human history: for the first time, humans actually took seriously and centrally the idea that they were individuals, that they weren't part of and therefore didn't ever have to think about the fact they were part of things larger than themselves. This is why I'm not really worried about an outbreak of full-blown communism in the West: that requires a subordination of the Self to the State, and there is no way anyone in the past three generations or so is even capable of doing something like that. Nietzsche says we killed God, but in his place we raised up the Self.

I think Narcissism is a bad term to be honest. Your offspring are after all the the extension off yourself. So if you see yourself in your children, and you do everything you can to insure they are successful, (same with grandchildren) you can in fact be described as a narcissist! Since you are making sure the only part of you that can survive and thrive, does just that.

My point is that this term, and other terms like manipulation, empathy etc. are all value neutral terms, unless you inject some ad-hoc objective morals. This tends to boil down to either religious or ideologically derived narratives.

I reality, not investing all in your offspring, unless you have a plan to maintain the soma (biological immortality) is self destructive. You are eradicating your primordial germ line, which is really what matters. The soma is after all just a shell to protect what is really alive, which is the sperm and egg cells. (Unless you can find a way extend the soma indefinitely as I mentioned.)