Self-Actualisation is Not Enough
Desperate narcissism or crushing misery? You decide
I'm one of those insufferable people who secretly believe they transcend echo chambers but as I keep discovering I'm really really not.
As I was talking about in recent instalments I've been seeking to see the world through leftist eyes the past couple of years and while it has been a humbling carnival of inadequacy for the most part, there have been some eye-opening moments along the way. But today I want to share the most surprising and and disturbing thing I've learned from my time down the leftist rabbit hole: self-actualisation might just be problematic and that leftists hate the idea so much that self-care becomes their Jungian Shadow (obviously my framing, not theirs).
At the time I came across this particular insight for the first time I'd been working on the idea that Stoicism and Existentialism are not enough — that something in the focus on self comes up short. The next week I was doing a deep dive into Late Stage Capitalism and before you could say “Viva la Revolution” there it was: wellness is an ideology. Then, in a classic example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, it came up again and again in the articles I was reading; seemingly it's a bit of a saw among leftists these days.
As it turns out there was a major distinction between leftists and the rest of us that nobody ever told me about. I guess it's not something that shows up on the frontlines of the Culture Wars and hence it never penetrated my little corner of the internet.
The finest example I've come across of this theme is the work of the British journalist Laurie Penny. Her article No I Will Not Debate You in particular is a wonderfully written piece and within the first paragraph she touches on our talking point writing:
“Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation.”
That's pretty typical of Penny's style. I'd HIGHLY recommend her — she's full of this spicy writing and beyond style there's so much substance to her writing.
Another favourite of mine for those who love Culture Wars history is her 2016 article I'm With The Banned which is about the night she spent hanging out with Milo Yiannopoulos and features other notable names like Roosh V who offers to fake fight her for lols and Geert Wilders the far-right politician who almost became the Dutch prime minister recently.
Anyway, the subject of this essay isn't the golden age of the Culture Wars but self-actualisation and to return to her article No I Will Not Debate You another one of the great lines which set this whole train of thought in action is this:
“Anxious millennials now seem to have a choice between desperate narcissism and crushing misery.”
Non-Leftists: Desperate Narcissism
Since reading the article I've been doing some deep diving on Neoliberalism and this sort of fetishisation of the care of the self. By the time I’d finished watching Adam Curtis’s documentary series The Century of the Self, I felt like that fish who has the water pointed out to him for the first time.
While I'm not sure that I would go so far as to call this focus on self-actualisation “desperate narcissism” you can’t help but see where Penny is coming from.
When leftists look at the problems in the world, they look at the big systemic machines that are so monumental and hard to budge. In recent instalments like The Lost Art of Leisure or Is Equality is the Enemy we looked at modern ideas that maybe weren't serving us. This is to look at things in terms of what's wrong.
The leftist solution would be an analysis of the systemic dynamics and then mobilising to try to change them. The more centrist rightist approach is to watch some Aubrey Marcus, Tony Robbins or Andrew Huberman and try to optimise your life. You do some Wim Hof breathing, take some ayahuasca or yoni eggs and hope it evokes some transformation in your life. It's more in line with Gandhi’s “become the change you want to see in the world” — there’s a belief in Individualism. The world may be fucked but if we work hard enough and smart enough we might just find ourselves a bit of solid ground.
To leftists, this focus on self-care is the furthest thing from changing the world. Viewed through a leftist worldview, all this self-work is just the Emperor Nero enjoying the sound of his fiddle while Rome burned. Instead of meeting the moment, we’ve become trapped in a cycle of self-soothing that never ends and keeps us away from meaningful engagement with the problems in the world.
For a Buddhist spin on the image of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned, imagine your family are trapped in a burning building and instead of dealing with that situation you focus on the fact that you are stressed and that stress knocks years off your life. Instead of grappling with the crisis of the fire, you focus on doing some breathwork. It's not that your wrong about the damages of stress, it’s just that your reaction is inappropriate to the context.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
This is a leftist systemic thinker’s perspective of an Individualist; there’s a sense that those who are focused on Gwyneth Paltrow's latest innovation like her Psychic vampire spray or vagina eggs might potentially, maybe, possibly, be missing out on the problems in the world.
Hence we end up with the centrists/rightists being stuck in Penny's cycle of “desperate narcissism”. We individualists tell ourselves that by changing ourselves we begin to change the world but are we really? Are we not just getting caught up in the latest self-care fad that's probably not going to cure us of our ills but instead may be yet another manufactured demand — a need created that you must satisfy in the name of GDP (all hail GDP). Listen to Penny's description of it which is just poetic:
Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.
Leftists: Crushing Misery
The alternative isn’t much better. The collectivist leftists have to live with the fact that they are oriented towards the gigantic murmurations of our national and globalised systems that have evolved over generations. They no longer have the prophetic Marxist faith that all this will inevitably change — that the revolution is nigh — and they feel powerless in the face of this leviathan — hence: “crushing misery”.
All of this makes sense. Many of us have a sense that life could be better. We don't know whether this is true or just a facet of the human condition but reactionary historians tell us stories of a better past and the techno-optimists tell us stories of an ideal future.
What I want to explore a bit more though is the downstream implications of this perspective among leftist subcultures that the work of self-actualising self-care is a form of narcissism. Penny explores the tragedy of this in her article:
With the language of self-care and wellbeing almost entirely colonized by the political right, it is not surprising that progressives, liberals, and left-wing groups have begun to fetishize a species of abject hopelessness. [...] On the one hand, Instagram happiness gurus make me want to drown myself in a kale smoothie. On the other, I’m sick and tired of seeing the most brilliant people I know, the fighters and artists and mad radical thinkers whose lives’ work might actually improve the world, treat themselves and each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.
This is a haunting (and fascinating) insight. I’ve been so consumed with studying Jung, Positive Psychology and doing my self-work that I was completely oblivious to this perception. I had heard people talking about Narcissism but I assumed they were talking about those vainly obsessed with Social Media. I didn’t realise that I, as one of the Self-Actualisers, was in this crowd. Imagine my surprise.
But, as I mentioned above, it's something I was already wrestling with and so while it was interesting, it was hardly earth-shattering. What was astounding for me though was hearing about this fetishizing of abject hopelessness among leftists.
Of course, it makes perfect sense. If you see that this group of people believe that they are the problem and so they collapse in on themselves that’s going to be quite disheartening. You see them seeking their own bliss and, if they are partial to positive thinking, plugging their ears up against the shit that’s going on in the world and you begin to question the viability of that approach.
The story comes to mind of two people out walking — one with a dirty face, the other with a clean one — and when they get to the river it’s the clean person who washes their face. We see what doesn’t work in others and we try to change it in ourselves.
For the leftist, those people focused on self-actualisation are doing nothing to change the world; they have fallen into a trap of “desperate narcissism” as they rush against the stream to heal themselves. And so, they wash themselves of this self-actualisation. But clearly they've localised the wrong problem.
They’ve begun to neglect their self-care. And what's more surprising is that they treat not just themselves but
each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.
The moral of Penny's article is interesting because it's a thin veneer of silver lining over the truth of aporia. She writes:
I sometimes take a day off, because it became apparent that the revolution was not being driven any faster by my being sick and sad all the time.
Then urges us to learn from the queer community
which has long taken the attitude that caring for oneself and one's friends in a world of prejudice is not an optional part of the struggle — it many ways it is the struggle.
And then her closing line sounds like something Jordan Peterson himself could have said:
self care “is not self-indulgence—it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
And in that, I think there’s a real lesson. Because it doesn't look like what we're fighting about has anything to do with self-care or not. To brand this as a form of narcissism is to throw it into one’s Shadow and there, as Penny notes, people justify treating themselves and others in appalling ways.
It seems that the leftist worldviews orient us so much towards the collectivist side of the equation — the collective society and culture of Capitalism, Colonialism, racism, bigotry and all the rest — that self-care and self-knowledge end up in our Shadow. It becomes narcissistic and self-indulgent to focus so much on yourself when there's so much suffering in the world. All of which fits with something I once heard Jordan Peterson say about the Big 5 personality where the research has shown that those who skew left are higher in compassion while those who skew right are higher in politeness.
In the end, I’m not quite sure what to leave you with here. I can only reflect on what I’ve done in my life. I've always been attendant to the “desperate narcissism” of self-care but in the last five years, I've been diving headlong into the crushing misery. I think there's a balance to be struck. For me there's a level of self-care that's essential I just don't think you can do without it. Without introspection and analysis, you see how people become mimetic pathogens spreading hatred online (not that introspection and analysis are enough as Jordan Peterson exemplifies). On the other hand, it is clear that we are not wired for this kind of a society and there is something very...precarious about the whole thing. So there is a balance to be struck between these pillars. But what do I know I’m struggling with the disorientation of Nihilism at the moment so I don’t which way is up.