Group Narcissism

And how it explains today's conflicts

Housekeeping: We just launched our most ambitious podcast yet, a narrative podcast about nuclear energy co-hosted by Packy McCormick of Not Boring fame and Julia DeWahl, a leading thinker and builder in the nuclear space.

Turpentine also announced that we’re now doing 350K downloads a month across our network and growing fast. We’re looking to expand shows into different verticals and then expand formats to become a more full fledged tech media company (also looking to grow our team across the board).

OK, onto the piece of the week….

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John Cuddihy was a sociologist who tried to make sense of how America was unique in its ability to assimilate so many groups so successfully, when so many other regions of the world were caught up in endless ethnic conflict.

Cuddihy’s model is that the United States' “civil religion”, by which he also means “religion of civility” has always had high WASPs values and virtues — impeccable manners, premium on education, work ethic, etc.

And each new generation of immigrants for generations understood that if they wanted to rise to the top of the American social hierarchy, they needed to adopt that civil religion, which is to say those WASP values. And this is how the American elite assimilation engine rolled more or less happily on for 200 years.

But then, sometime between the 1950's and 1970's, the high WASPs collectively decided to abandon the old rightist aristocratic model and turn into a more progressive model. They kept doing all the same things — sending their kids to Harvard, passing along multi-generational wealth, and all the rest — but started believing they were no different from rest of society and downplaying the habits and behaviors that led to their success. This is the Machiavelli/Pareto model we’ve discussed — the aristocracy which once ruled through confidence, competence, and force, over time degenerates into an oligarchy of manipulation, cunning, and deceit.

Pareto called this the aristocracy of lions vs. the aristocracy of foxes. Lions are proud, forceful aristocrats who explicitly own their position as leaders. Foxes, however, are humble servants who will forever deny that they’re in charge. While lions want to run the world, foxes want to save the world.

Because our new elites are foxes and not lions, they no longer feel comfortable celebrating productive habits for the rest of society.

Our old elites used to share a sense of common responsibility and noblesse oblige — not just to give back, but to expect the masses to act in a way that would let them rise up as well. Old elites knew that on average they had more productive habits than the masses (e.g. marital fidelity, two-parent households, steady employment, etc), and so it was thus their job to provide the masses an example to aspire to.

But our new elites are less likely to admit they’re more productive; if anything, they deny it. While this humility seems generous on the surface — it’s nicer to imply that elites are successful solely because of privilege and not also because they’re more productive — this also denies the elites of any responsibility to the masses.

The ordeal of civility that Cuddihy wrote about was this idea that other groups had to assimilate. The ordeal experienced by various forms of Protestants, Jews, and Catholics through the 1950's is now lost to our cultural memory, but it was a big deal at the time.

The modern relevance of Cuddihy (who wrote in the 1970's) is that we have inverted the ordeal of civility, where now the *assimilated* groups have to exhibit extreme amounts of civility towards *unassilimated* groups that have no intention of assimilating.

Cuddihy introduces his ideas of group narcissism and vicarious group narcissism.

Group narcissism is when an ethnic group has an exaggerated sense of their own virtues and superiority. When the group’s self image is threatened, it generates a disproportionate response due to narcissistic injury.

What’s happening here is what we now call "cope". When an objectively worse performing group (by outcomes) encounters an objectively better performing group (by outcomes), the worse performing group's response, nearly all the time, is to build a giant edifice of cope. Yes, everything is the better performing group's fault. There are various responses to this. One response is archaism — "we were great once, before we were oppressed" (e.g. MAGA/far-right). Another response is futurism — "we will be great again, once we are no longer oppressed" (e.g. far-left). Cuddihy focuses on a form of projection. The worse performing group group builds an elaborate theory of how "YOU TOO" (the better performing group) have the deficiencies of the worse performing group.

Vicarious group narcissism is when an ethnic group is not allowed to have its own group narcissism and thus exercises the impulse by exhibiting vicarious group narcissism about another unrelated group. This creates additional pathology in the other group, as it further fuels its own exaggerated sense of itself. We discussed this in The Abandonment of Elites.

A group has vicarious group narcissism when it can no longer have group narcisisism of its own. White people, for example, are obviously not allowed to have pride (and thankfully so!) which is why they have pride on behalf of other groups (#BLM, #MeToo, #LGTBQ, etc). White people supporting BLM at higher rates than black people emphasizes the power of vicarious group narcissism.

White people have vicarious group narcissism (“white savior complex”) because they’re not allowed to have group narcissism, whether as white people, or as hyphenated Americans, or as Catholics or Protestants or as anything else. This wasn’t always the case. There used to be a lot of, say, Italian-American and Irish-American pride. These groups used to have *massive* group narcissism. Now, in both cases, it's mainly gone. It's a shadow of what it used to be. Not to mention German-American pride, that’s definitely not allowed either.

The reason group narcissism works so well as a model for explaining/predicting behavior of groups is because of the specific dynamic of narcissism: The narcissistic individual/group has an inflated view of his/its own virtues. A challenge to that inflated view causes a narcissistic wound ("you have hurt the feelings of our people" etc.) since the narcissist feels at a deep level that the challenge may have some truth to it (whether or not it does) and can't take it. This then generates a disproportionately violent narcissistic response, deepening the narcissism further.

Group narcissism plays out similarly to individual narcissism, in that there are two ways to wound a narcissist:

(1) To puncture their narcissism — which generates with psychologists call narcissistic injury, a massive comedown of rage and depression

(2) To *encourage* their narcissism by giving them unwarranted praise — thus increasing the magnitude of the narcissistic injury to come

This is what white people have been doing to other groups for 60 years, for example. Every group is caught up some kind of narcissistic dynamic/spiral, vicariously or otherwise.

Vicarious group narcissism emerges when people who are not allowed to have their own group narcissism nevertheless want to get in on the game, want to be able to have the same emotional load/heroin hit (it’s hard to resist!), so they do it on behalf of another group. Sometimes their motivations are divorced from whether they actually help the other group, but are more about letting them (the vicarious narcissist) experience the pleasure rush of narcissism themselves when they otherwise can’t.

To be clear, what we’re describing here is a psychological/sociological phenomenon, so it in no way precludes that there are ways certain groups are legitimately victimized or oppressed.

But once in the narcissistic spiral, the underlying reality matters less than the feelings. Of course, suggesting that a person/group is being narcissistic is itself a challenge to the narcissism, hence generates a narcissistic injury and response.

To summarize, today’s elite is a hybrid of old WASPs who opened their ranks to maintain their position in society and various “ethnic” elites who civilized their beliefs to assimilate into WASP society. The ensuing amalgam of codes was synthesized in political progressivism, which demands elite self-abnegation and effort to elevate the downtrodden.

So today, the same Cuddihy/Pareto style assimilation machine is still running, it's just assimilating people not into the civil religion of 1950 but the woke religion of the 2020.

This is consistent with the political realignment we’ve been describing: It’s the top and bottom vs the middle. Or elites and their clientele underclasses (the downtrodden), vs the middle and lower middle class (the deplorables).

Ideally there would be a 'third way' between totally anal top-down liberal tolerance imposed with armies of HR people and then total particularist tribal competition.

John Gray wrote a book, Two Faces of Liberalism, arguing for this explicitly.

Two Faces of Liberalism argues that, from its inception, liberalism contained two contradictory philosophies of tolerance. In one, it advanced the enlightenment project of a universal civilization. In the other, it framed terms for peaceful coexistence between warring communities and different ways of life. Each of these liberal ideals of toleration, developed when a single worldview dominated society, has many historic achievements to its credit.

And then most interestingly:

In a spirited attack on today’s liberal orthodoxies, Gray argues that establishing a modus vivendi between different cultures and regimes should be at the heart of contemporary liberalism.

This ‘modus vivendi’ between different cultures is what Gray describes as an alternative to the universal culture that Mill aspired to when sketching out liberalism.

Cuddihy also wrote about the third way too, of course: He said civility is the civil religion we created to make multiethnic liberal democracy work. And it is civility that our culture war is destroying. Which is precisely what leads back to Balkanization.

Cuddihy was writing in defense of civility, not in opposition to it. But to have civility, older ethnic and religious bonds must be allowed to atrophy. And as we see one of the longest ethnic feuds (Israelis and Palestinians) re-energized and amplified globally in the age of Twitter, it seems like those ethic and religious bonds are doing anything but atrophying. If anything if seems like we’re bringing those bonds back in full force. Which is why we’re seeing group narcissism and vicarious group narcissism everywhere, and it’s likely to only get worse.

Group conflicts exist always, but what changes is the level of abstraction. Israelis were mostly focused on fighting each other a few weeks ago during all the political drama, but now due to the conflict they are now more unified in fighting an external enemy. As the old saying goes: “I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin, brother and I are against the stranger.”