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Johan Leman, 27 February 2024

Saturday 24 February appeared in DS, much to my surprise, a review by Bas Heijne of the excellent book ‘Narcissism’ by the Austrian philosopher Isolde Charim. The thesis she defends in her book boils down briefly to this: we live in a society where the ‘I’ is given disproportionate importance at the expense of the common good and the search for objectivity. Beauty, generosity, altruism as values have become the big losers in our society. It is also not abnormal that associational life has a much harder time … because in associational life, in principle, it is also about sometimes being able to sacrifice oneself for a higher common interest. And ideologies also pay a high price for this narcissistic being preoccupied with themselves and constantly putting themselves in the foreground and the attention.

The self is naturally limited in the possibilities of its self-promotion and inevitably collides with its own deficits, in most cases already in today’s reality, but over the years anyway. This happens to even the greatest celebrity or VIP.

We live in an age of selfies. People apparently can no longer take a picture of Munch’s Scream without immediately photographing themselves with it. One must be able to put oneself in the picture alongside a cycling champion or as someone close to a politician deemed powerful… The pressure to somehow ‘appear’ seems to be a necessity to still count  and exist in one’s own eyes. The ‘I think/doubt, therefore I am’ has been replaced by ‘I am seen, therefore I am’.

Isolde Charim rightly sees in it one of the reasons why, in our society, even with its relative affluence, there are so many unhappy people.

It is one of the great tasks of civil society and associational life to make people rediscover the priority or at least the importance of the common interest as a priority over the I-centredness.

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