The Neonarcissism Manifesto

I saw a term neonarcissism for the first time in the book by Gilles Lipovetsky “L'ère du vide : Essais sur l'individualisme contemporain“ (Gallimard, 1983) where he is complaining thoroughly at the emptiness of contemporary society – well „contemporary“ in rather relative sense today, because he wrote it in the very year I was born and yet then (or already then?) the problem of alienation among the individuals was actual in the Western society.

In this book Lipovetsky criticize individualism which rose up from so called postmodern freedom. According to him, people are more interested in their selves than in what is going on in society, than in finding solutions how to fight social problems together with other people. There are no more groups of people, but only individuals who are speaking for themselves, not for an ideal of a group. Young people don´t have any ideals no more – everything comes so easy (technologies) and they don´t need to fight for freedom like most of their parents. The world has become so easy now, that people don´t have to do anything, there is really nothing that could fulfil them.

This is very basically what Lipovetsky tries to say by this book and in this context he uses negatively terms like individualism, alienation, emptiness, neonarcissism.

Particularly neonarcissism is here somehow equated to selfishness which means caring about yourself and only yourself. But really there is an upgrade. Selfishness is just a mere character disorder, meanwhile narcissism is more a life attitude. And for that difference Lipovetsky consider narcissism more dangerous.

But to reach my point: I see narcissism in a very different way. I look at it from darwinist perspective. Some species live in groups and there is inevitable to cooperate with one another because it is important for survival. We, humans, don´t live in groups anymore. Although normally we have to cooperate with one another to reach our goal, there is only our goal (the goal of an individual) that is to be reached. So we don´t care about the wellness of the group but only the wellness of ourselves. And considering this is happening across species, this universal selfishness is quite usual.

Narcissism is a philosophized selfishness. I know that I do things to please myself and I don´t want to hide it. It is an attitude which is not very common, because most people hide their real intentions just to seem fair in other people´s eyes. And this happens in most cases unconsciously (thanks to our selfish gene).

And after all, narcissism for me is to look at myself with respect. To be myself without any other influence. There are always many situations that crash with your self-confidence and you feel bad about that, but this care of yourself give you strength to face these situations. You have to love yourself, and this is real narcissism. Neither to look at the mirror all the day long, nor to tell all the people how fantastic you are (like the old-fashioned narcissists did); just respect yourself as you really are and don´t listen to those who want to have you as they please. Simply - to be like this because you want to be like this, not because someone else wants you to be like this. Sometimes it is hard to reach this attitude, because we (and women above all) often tend to undervalue ourselves. But it´s just to start to working at the attitude and keeping it every day. But without exaggeration and still with healthy criticism.

Finally I would like to warn, what neonarcissism is not. It is not really looking after yourself and only thinking about how to get yourself better in some way. You still have to think about other people, animals, what´s happening in the world and try to make it better. Neonarcissism is neither an opposite to altruism, nor caring for yourself at the first place. It´s not egoism. It´s an attitude of not undervaluing yourself and being all the time above any situation. It is a positive attitude which doesn´t negate the world around you.

I have changed this blog to an advice bureau for a while, but I hope I have explained the idea of neonarcissism and its importance as well I could. Maybe I haven´t described it sufficiently thoroughly, so I would be glad for any questions or suggestions.