[Paracelsus]

(11-15-2018 06:42 PM)Johnnyvee Wrote:  

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.

Describing your offspring as an extension of yourself is exactly the problem. It reveals how you see the world: yourself as main character, everyone else as background or just an extension of you. Which is fine if all you care about is you. After all, why worry about the supporting cast? They're not the protagonists. They don't have lives as real and authentic and feeling as yours.

When everyone in your society thinks that way, though, you have a serious problem. Also see: why libertarianism as practiced today is no more authentic to early-American settlerism than communists today are ever going to be able to replicate good old functional Marxism or even Stalinism.

Let's be clear about something: you do not survive and thrive when your children live on. You are not your children. At best you're 50% of them, and then it's at a DNA level, which is not determinative. You don't survive death, at best you go on to something else. Someone who believes they're going to "live on through their children" has something wrong with them: it's only children who say their parents live on in them after they're dead.