intergenerational narcissism, evolution of polities, and cultural preparation for war.
This is a set of hunches which I don’t have anything like sufficient evidence for yet to call it a ‘theory’, but it is heading towards precisely enough defined to be testable. I’m putting it here in the hope that people will disagree with me but in interesting ways. Convince me I’m wrong, please, and specifically how?
[edit: I chatted this through with an evobio MSc friend who completed the course, and realized that the evolutionary dynamics I’m speculating about here are almost certainly bs., self-contradictory and unclear. The observations about higher frequency and severity of NPD in people from societies in conflict I think are probably true. But I may also have misunderstood what NPD is and not fully understood how severe it can be.]
I’ve been thinking about it for some years, collecting informal observations and bits of things I read which felt worth remembering. This morning what triggered writing it all down, as systematically as I’ve got to so far, was this —
My interpretation of what she’s saying is: make sure you don’t pass on narcissistic personality developmental traumas to your kids, resolve your own trauma adaptations before you transmit them to the next generation, teach kids about polysemy or multiplicity of meanings in language and to reflect on linguistic communication before reacting, and be transparent with kids (in an age-appropriate way) about our own ongoing processes of figuring out our personal and social histories, the things we’ve participated in which aren’t consistent with our consciously-held ideals and values now, practically repairing the harms we’ve done as much as we can now and asking for gracious forgiveness for the rest.
It’s a pretty good list and well simplified. You could expand it into a book-length version but the simple version is probably going to be more effective.
Before I continue tho, definition of the most important initial term here —
Essentially, ‘narcissism’ is having a temporal split in consciousness of the individuation process of becoming consciously separate from our parents.
It happens when there is no affirmation for our being other than our parents, or when they need us too much to supply them with self-esteem reinforcement, or when they put their needs for social and authoritative approval of their children and their children’s behaviour or ideal self-images higher than or prior to paying attention to their actual children and their actual experiences and feelings.
Kids of narcissistic parents don’t see themselves reflected in their parents’ eyes, but only what their parents want to see of them or project onto them, only their parents’ ideal image of their children’s selves is acceptable and loveable, and that’s how it gets passed on. “Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf” and “Who half the time were soppy-stern,
And half at one another’s throats” (Philip Larkin, in This Be the Verse).
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
― Thomas Merton (OCSO), in No Man Is an Island, 1955
In popular discourse and pop-psychology memes, it’s unfortunately quite common to demonize ‘narcissists’, as if any of us don’t have a bit of a split in consciousness of our ideal and actual self-images, or at least some slight difficulties or dysfunctionalities with regulating our self-esteem, especially often in relation to erotic adult partners and their needs and desires from us, wanting to be attractive but wanting to be valued intrinsically.
It is my firm opinion that demonizing “narcissists” is itself quite a narcissistic move. Accepting with compassionate understanding that “they” are part of us, and that those adaptations to developmental traumas, in relation to parents usually, are part of our common cultural inheritance, is integrating our collective self-image with our idealized self-image, so it’s the opposite process compared to narcissism.
Top psychotherapy mantra to cure narcissism: “it is what it is” (i.e. compassionate acceptance and understanding of what actually is, prior to any judgement on it or ideally what it should be; integrating the split).
I still have some questions.
Hunch 1:
The intergenerational transmission of narcissistic-authoritarian moral enculturation, parenting and personality disorders is a case of the cultural inheritance of parasitic memes which harm their social host but are adapted to perpetuate and proliferate themselves.
Contrary to the description in the above page, dual inheritance isn’t only a human thing, see e.g. baboons —
Social parasitism isn’t only a phenomenon in ants, but also other social species. Ants are one of the most ancient taxa so there are many examples. (I would be surprised if ants don’t also have a form of cultural inheritance.)
‘Social parasitism’ ‘dual inheritance’ and ‘evolving cultural memes’ are standard ideas in evolutionary biology, but what I’m adding which is new I think is claiming that memes themselves can be parasitic, in the sense that they incur ecological costs to their social host species in order to (no intentionality implied, it just happens) compete reproductively with other memes.
Hunch 2:
Narcissistic-authoritarian cultures produce polities more prepared to initiate war against other polities, more loyal to in-group members and more prepared to punish in-group defectors, so, as nasty as they are, they have higher fitness in terms of collective survival and reproduction values.
I think they may be less adaptively stable than mutualistic-egalitarian polities and therefore limited in size, relatively, so the latter tend to win conflicts with the former, but it's a slow and nasty process.
(I got this idea from a conference presentation in December 2016 at University of Bristol, Centre for Complexity Sciences, conference title ‘How stable are democracies?’, but I’m sorry I can’t remember who authored the presentation which I’m remembering. It was about modelling static vs. adaptive stabilities and comparing with historical data about polities which had either survived or collapsed.)
Major HUNCH, most important point here:
NPD isn't just an individual aberration but it's a result of normal parenting in many cultures. That type of moral enculturation and parenting culture occurs more in societies at war and in militia families preparing their kids for war. E.g. Hezbollah families. Their parenting culture inculcates narcissistic personality structures and dynamics, and its part of their radicalisation propaganda, especially for boys, who are meant to be military recruits, e.g. —
(For a comparable example of a nasty but effective social living strategy, see naked mole rats. They're almost 'eusocial', i.e. only one breeding pair per group at a time and the rest help to raise their offspring, but the group hierarchy is violent and despotic.)
I think it's significant that authoritarian cultures cultivate narcissistic personality traits in children because it makes them easier to manipulate into conserving that kind of polity and fighting for the in-group and for its authorities and against its (socially constructed) 'enemies'.
Cultural preparation for war/ 'radicalization' always involves socially constructing a negatively idealised enemy, with a shared mental image of the enemy which only shares some features with the actual enemy. (I got this idea from a lecture by a law professor at Groningen University for the student law society, which was open to everyone, about the definition of ‘genocide’ in international law, its history and purposes, and about her research on mass atrocity crimes in Argentina under the Pinochet regime. One of her points was that in the definition of the mens rea, specific criminal intention, of genocide crimes, the “group” in “to destroy a group in whole or in part” doesn’t have to be really a cohesive group from the point of view of the victims, as its always the perpetrators who have more power to construct their ideal enemy group.)
Summary of my set of hunches:
The intergenerational transmission of developmental traumas through normal parenting cultures leading to narcissistic personality disorders happens because such personality adaptations produce polities which compete violently more cohesively with other polities to seize their resources.
So, as long as bigger, more adaptively stable, mutualistic-egalitarian polities don’t emerge and conflict with the narcissistic-authoritarian culture and its resulting type of polity, the former will have higher fitness against its smaller and less cohesive competitors or (may be conspecific) prey. But when a bigger and more adaptively stable mutualistic-egalitarian polity competes with it, eventually the latter will probably win, but it may take a very long time, and it may involve body counts in the millions.
Where exactly am I wrong and how? Can you point to exceptions or incompatible observations?
