Anna Gotlib writes in Aeon of what we used to call egotism or self-centered Narcissism. Apparently it is now known as-
‘main character syndrome’ (MCS) or, perhaps more annoyingly, ‘main character energy’. Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best.
So, it means being very self-centered and egotistic and thinking other people only exist to do your bidding or to advance your interests. I suppose, small children go through something like this more particularly because they are so dependent on their Mummies.
Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.
There may be some developmental advantage in small kids going through this phase. After all, they really are very important. They represent the future of their family and community. Anyway, once they get to skool, they generally learn how to play nice with other kids.
Still, there are some kids who have leadership qualities such that they take charge of organizing games. That too may be a good thing. We do need leaders who see events from their own subjective perspective. In later life, they may lead revolutions or movements of social reform.
You have probably heard of MC behaviour – or perhaps even witnessed it online or in person. A TikToker and her followers physically push aside those inconvenient extras ‘ruining’ their selfies – and then post their grievances on social media. A man on a crowded subway watches a loud sports broadcast without headphones while ignoring other commuters’ requests to turn it down a bit. This is no mere rudeness: in the narrowly circumscribed world of main characters, the rest of us are merely the insignificant ghosts who happen to intrude on their spaces.
But ghosts can kick your head in. I suppose the dude without headphones thinks he is well hard. He may be. I decide discretion is the better part of valor.
Akin to chess pieces, or perhaps to animatronic figures, we have agency only in the development of the MC’s story. In current parlance, we are non-player characters (or NPCs) – a term that originated in traditional tabletop games to describe characters not controlled by a player but rather by the ‘dungeon master’.
One complaint we have against urban life is that, very often, in our jobs, we really are nothing but automatons. But, sometimes we feel this is also true in our private lives. The problem with refusing to be a NPC is that you may have nobody to interact with. This causes you to become more and more introverted and unemployable. You end up behaving in a rude and inconsiderate manner because you have become de-socialized. You have lost 'impulse control'. Today you are listening to music without headphones. Tomorrow you soil yourself while seated on the subway.
On the other hand, in the 2021 film 'Free Guy' an actual NPC in an online computer game achieves autonomy and helps a player find evidence that the CEO of the company stole the player's 'source code' for the game.
In video games, NPCs are characters with a predetermined (or algorithmically determined) set of behaviours controlled by the computer. Rather than agents with a will and intent, NPCs are there to help the MC in his quest, to intersect with the MC in preset ways, or to simply remain silent – a kind of prop, or perhaps human-shaped furniture, a part of the scenery. Another way to view NPCs is to imagine what the philosopher David Chalmers calls a philosophical zombie, or p-zombie, a being that, while physically identical to a normal human being, does not have conscious experience.
NPCs aren't p-zombies because their repertoire is very limited. A p-zombie can exhibit novel behavior. There is no way for an observer to tell that they lack consciousness. Indeed, their existence makes the very notion of consciousness problematic. By contrast, when you interact with an NPC you soon find it's range of response is very limited.
If a p-zombie laughs, it’s not because it finds anything funny – its behaviour is purely imitative of the real (main character!) individual. For someone convinced of their MC identity, the rest of us are, perhaps, just so many zombies.
This is where the analogy falls down. The egotist knows other people have their own inner lives and feelings. He just doesn't care.
While Chalmers’s p-zombie is a part of a philosophical hypothetical concerned with the nature of mind and consciousness, the non-philosophical take on people as NPCs is deeply morally worrying.
There may be mentally ill people who believe everybody else is a robot. But the boorish egoist is not such a person. He just doesn't care about other people. True, if he keeps getting the shit kicked out of him, he may dissimulate this callousness. But so would a sociopath.
Having taught and written for a number of years in the areas of ethics and moral psychology, one of the central ideas that I have tried to explain and make more vivid is that morality is something that we do together,
We can be perfectly moral while all alone. A Kantian would resist the temptation to masturbate. Indeed, he may go to the toilet to fart even if he lives all alone and doesn't mind the smell of his own farts.
By contrast, when engaging with others, we may suppress our own sense of morality. Indeed, we may find that doing so is more productive of good outcomes. Indeed, the Bible itself advises us not to be 'judgmental' or think we are morally superior beings.
that our ideas about who we are require each other’s engaged participation, and that an empathetic openness not only to each other’s moral agency, but to each other’s emotional states, is central to our shared lifeworld. We must see others as fully human, and be engaged with each other as moral beings to understand who we are, and who we are in relation to others and to the world.
If this were true, people who grew up in horrible circumstances, interacting only with evil sociopaths, would all turn out badly. It appears this isn't the case. We find plenty of people from good and loving families doing gratuitous evil, while those who have suffered greatly show greater caritas to all who are in need.
But the main character narrative denies all these possibilities.
It also denies the possibility that a person from a relatively disadvantaged background can rise far above others in some noble and worthwhile endeavor. We want to read the auto-biography of such people provided it is told from a MCN perspective. We understand that Einstein studied under great Mathematicians and Physicists but we are thrilled when we read of his finding something completely unexpected and unprecedented through his own 'gedanken' or thought experiment. We realize that if we focus our mind on a fundamental problem on our train ride to work, we may hit upon some better way of doing things. The fact that we didn't interact with very clever people the way Einstein did, is no obstacle to our achieving something worthwhile.
No doubt, when doing the job we are paid to, or when looking after a family member, we must put the needs of others first, but it is equally important for us to have a sense of autonomy as the main character in our own life-story.
It is destructive to views of human beings as fundamentally relational and interdependent,
No. It is complementary to that view. To some extent we are interdependent but, equally, we are autonomous or must seek to become so for a eusocial purpose.
and poses a threat to two important experiences of being human: the first is connection to others; the second is love.
The opposite is the case. If I follow the g.f around like a moon-calf, she will decide I am 'high maintenance' or 'too needy'. She wants a partner who will be affectionate and supportive but who has his own life and interests.
To counter objections that my worries are a simple case of generational misalignment – a confused Gen Xer misunderstanding Gen Z perspectives – I suggest that MCS is dangerous precisely because it seems to be no passing fad, and is not limited to any one generation’s political perspective, or social group – indeed, its influence extends far beyond TikTok, and is found within the business world, in academia and in the halls of power.
There have always been selfish ass-holes. But some such don't think they are Main Characters at all. They think they are doing the will of God, or the Fuhrer, or selflessly serving their Religion or Race or Ideology and if that means trampling over others- so be it. Eichmann actually thought he was following Kantian morality!
As a philosopher and a narrativist, I am an unabashed supporter of the view that selves are something that we create together, through shared stories.
This may be true of some small children. But, if I am an ignorant asshole, that is entirely my own fault. I chose not to study anything difficult and remained content to pick at only the sunny side of literature's peach. The result is that I am probably the worse poet in the English speaking world. This is my own achievement. Nobody helped me in any way.
What is a narrative? In short, anything that can be read, spoken, heard, written, viewed or otherwise expressed – and this certainly includes social media. In telling stories, we create and reveal who we think we are; in listening to the stories of others, we help to mould and sustain them as persons.
We may be called upon to supply a narrative when being interviewed for a job or when applying to an American University. But, then again, we may not. Our credentials or work achievements may speak for themselves. Our behavior, not the stories we tell about ourselves, reveal the truth about ourselves. I once spent half an hour lecturing an elderly man on monetary economics. Then I discovered he had made billions as an arbitrageur and funded countless charities. I suppose, he got something valuable out of my ignorant rant. He himself would have had to work very hard to discover how stupid people cognize 'chrematistic' processes.
Stories are thus foundational to how we view the world and our place in it,
Not really. Stories are entertaining. When I was a kid, I had a friend who was even uglier and weedier than me. But he could tell fantastic stories about his sexual escapades with stars of stage and screen. I tried my hand at this but I'd end up marrying Mary Poppins but then having to go to Japan to prevent Blofeld triggering World War III.
and through them we can make ourselves morally intelligible to ourselves and to others.
What we actually do matters not the stories we tell- unless we are JK Rowling-level smart.
And this is also where we run into a problem. Setting aside critiques within philosophy itself of a narrative view of morality as epistemically unreliable and without any foundational principles,
It is founded on the notion that 'selves' are 'socially constructed' by interactions and 'grand narratives'. Thus, but for the fact that 'Society' considers all bleck peeps- like me- to be a type of monkey, I could have rivalled the achievements of Manjul Bhargava or Kamala Harris.
there are also worries that bear more directly on our current topic: if social media is a kind of narrative,
It isn't. It is a type of communication.
can narrativists, such as myself, defend it on the same grounds as other narrative ways of understanding ourselves and the world? And if the answer is ‘yes’, then why am I spending all this time worrying about main character syndrome and its many stories?
The obvious answer is 'MCS is imbricated in Neo-Liberalism and Patriarchy and trillions of innocent Netan-Yahos being incessantly sodomized by Joe Biden whose criminal refusal to undergo gender reassignment surgery is due to he is White and Whitey be debil'.
Did you know that Indian people didn't have any gender till White British peeps constructed a narrative about how dudes have dicks while women have vaginas? Read Lord Macaulay's 'Minute on Education' if you don't believe me. He clearly states 'unless we teach the Hindoooos to read narratives by Shakespeare and Lawn Tennyson, they will continue to lack dicks or vaginas. Queen Victoria will not be amused.'
The answer has something to do with the kinds of stories MCS offers. On the one hand, narrative approaches to morality and identity centre both speaking and hearing – sharing and uptake – emphasising the importance of multivocality, of shared discourse, of mutual intelligibility. They point toward the moral significance not just of one’s own stories, but of the narratives of others as guides to understanding the fundamental interdependence of human identities.
Which is why we must ban White Male identities. Once those disappear, everybody could braid each others' hair and Beyonce will attend my birthday party and we will become Best Friends forever and ever.
On the other hand, narratives spun by the main character have little interest in, or patience for, the stories of others; they are anything but interdependent.
Nonsense! The Main Character wants to make love to a mysterious stranger- actually a Princess from a galaxy far far away- and to meet mystic sages and evil warlocks etc.
They care nothing for mutual intelligibility. Only the main character, his perspective, his story and his solitary self, matter.
Nobody wants to be Robinson Crusoe alone on his island.
In this version of narrative selfhood, there is room only for the singular speaker, and his singularly important chronicle.
Even Crusoe had his Man Friday.
Yet, as narrativists will often note, not all narratives are good, or desirable, or to be encouraged.
This lady's narrative falls into that class.
In fact, as the feminist philosopher and bioethicist Hilde Lindemann argues, some narratives can create spaces of moral damage that are detrimental to the identities of both the speaker and his audience, and destructive to the possibility of a shared moral universe.
Which is why we need to 'cancel' everybody more particularly if, like Hilde, they speak of toxic master-narratives.
Did you know that little boys are encouraged to tell stories about their having dicks rather than vaginas? Moreover, they are forced by a misogynistic master-narrative to send those dicks into hyperspace where they sodomize trillions of Netan-Yahoos. This prevents Beyonce from attending my birthday party.
I suggest that narratives emerging out of the MCS phenomenon are precisely of this damaging kind.
Stories about 'toxic master-narratives' are brain damaged, if not the outcome of severe mental illness.
MCS offers the wrong kinds of stories: harmful, isolating, solipsistic, amoral.
The notion of a 'master-narrative' is all of those things.
And it begins, in large part, with the assumed superiority of the main character’s self-conception.
That is an assumption this silly lady makes. Actual 'main character narratives' feature a young person against whom the odds are stacked who finds ingenious ways around them and who is helped by various wonderful people. A story about a super-genius who inherits a great Empire at birth and who goes on to crush everybody who is weaker aren't interesting at all. That's why we are interested in the story of a carpenter's son but exhibit little curiosity about the life and times of All-Mighty God.
While main characters are singularly important beings in their own minds,
People should be important to themselves.
this importance comes in many flavours. Let’s begin with the usual culprit – entertainment and social media – where they can be often found in their native environment. The ‘main character’ hashtag has been viewed, mostly approvingly, millions of times on TikTok and on Instagram, and #maincharacter accompanies tens of thousands of posts. Daily, social media denizens are sold the idea that becoming the heroes of their lives is the only thing that matters.
This is very toxic. Everybody should be the villain of their own lives. Also they should read shitty books by stupid psilosophers.
But it is not just social media: so many of our films – especially those targeting younger viewers – focus on the central quest of the hero, who must overcome, outsmart, outrun, outperform and, in the end, glory in her victory.
Why don't big budget films feature a hero who is actually a turd which is flushed down the toilet?
This hero’s journey, this monomyth, is on full display in The Hunger Games movies (2012-23), the Divergent film series (2014-16), the Spider-Man universe (2018-24), and The Maze Runner films (2014-18), which are but a handful of relatively recent examples.
They show courageous young people besting a corrupt and unjust social order. This is highly 'toxic'. Spiderman should be depicted as a turd produced by a victim of epistemic sexual-abuse who flushes it down the toilet while saying 'Toxic master-narratives suck ass big time!'
There are sidekicks and other characters, to be sure – but, in the end, to quote the much older film Highlander (1986), ‘there can be only one’.
Why was Sean Connery not playing the part of a turd? The answer is obvious. Under Reagan, toxic master-narratives were in control of Hollywood. My own screenplay for 'Turd getting flushed down the toilet even though it is actually Superman' was rejected by all the major studios probably because I wouldn't go down on Harvey Weinstein.
Absorbing these messages and mimicking the voiceovers of lead characters in films and other media, we also try to narrate our lives – often, directly into our smart phones – and share with the world all the ways in which our paths, our storylines, our perspectives, are the ones that matter, the ones worth paying attention to; our voices the voices that are worth hearing. We demand from others, both directly and indirectly: ‘Stop everything, and watch me – the hero!’
Did you know Obama wrote a big fat book about himself? That was when he made his first run for political office. No doubt, the author feels 'toxic master-narratives' authored by darkies should be banned otherwise they might end up in the White House.
But isn’t it a bit too easy to blame media for our growing obsession with our own importance?
It is mad. Still, we understand that this lady is getting old and hates having to teach young people. Campuses would be wonderful places if only we could keep adolescents out of them.
Long before the internet, let alone social media, people have shared their narratives in diaries, autobiographies, poems and so on, bringing their lives to centre stage.
Emily Dickinson was very evil. Why did she have to write stuff down? Did she not understand that some Professors would have teach that shite? As for Jane Austen- don't get me started, mate.
Generations of Americans have been taught to pursue happiness
Britishers were taught to be as miserable as fuck
– individual, personal happiness – above all else. There have always been solipsists, narcissists, sociopaths and simple attention-seekers – social media did not invent the me-first typology.
But maybe young peeps will read this article if you mention 'Social Media' and hashtags to show you are hip and 'with it'.
And yet, can we help ourselves in this time of global access to others, and to ourselves? Can we – well, some of us, anyway – resist demanding an audience when one is always there, ready to be engaged?
I think we should try to make ourselves more interesting to those who, for whatever reason, take an interest in us. Thus, one may prepare a self-disparaging anecdote to tell your dentist in the hope that this makes a routine procedure a little less boring for him. Our relatives or friends may have nice Social Media posts showing they are getting about and enjoying themselves. This reassures us as to their health and happiness.
Perhaps not. As the clinical psychologist Michael G Wetter said in a Newsweek interview in 2021, main character syndrome is:
the inevitable consequence of the natural human desire to be recognized and validated
if we are doing good or decent things. We don't want to be recognized or validated if we happen to soil ourselves while drunk off our heads.
merging with the rapidly evolving technology that allows for immediate and widespread self-promotion …
In some cases, there is a 'product' which is being promoted. In others, a particular person is ensuring her friends and families are reassured about her health and happiness. I was once part of a fitness group during COVID. We would post selfies of ourselves showing how far we had walked on a particular day. We were motivating each other to get needful exercise during a grim and lonely period.
Those who exhibit characteristics consistent with the experience of main character syndrome tend to want to create a narrative that is dependent on an audience to validate their story. What good is a story or movie if there is no audience?
My blog is read by hardly anybody. Yet, I find it a good enough way to while away the time while binge-watching Netflix series about vampires and werewolves who are always either getting naked or biting each other. Since I am Indian, I feel I need to get 'paisa vasool'- i.e. value for money- for my subscription even if this means having to sit through that dreck.
Media, social and otherwise, has made it easier, cheaper and, importantly, more socially acceptable to act out our MC monomyths.
Keeping a diary or writing stories or poems can be helpful in itself. The more you write, the better you get at writing.
Alternatively, by chronicling the mundane, we may end up creating art. Harvey Pekar's 'American Splendor' comic strip started coming out in the Seventies. It was turned into a movie starring Paul Giamatti in 2003.
We can upload photos, videos, entire films about ourselves – and we can choose how we are perceived through clever tricks of light and angles, apps and filters that tell exactly the stories we want told.
If we have talent, this may open career opportunities for us. I suppose a guy who is good at Social Media, could get a well paid job promoting some commercial product on it.
All this because we want to get noticed, we want to be seen
or we want to use some cool new tech which has suddenly become affordable for us.
– and seen as someone who matters, as the main someone who matters. As the influencer Ashley Ward noted on TikTok in 2020:
You have to start romanticising your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because, if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed.
To be interesting to other people, you need to take an interest in yourself. Find funny or illuminating or pathos ridden things in your own life. Your friends and relatives will find it less of a bore to have to spend time with you.
Not being seen, not being noticed as someone who matters means relegating oneself to NPC-dom – a nobody, a nothing, a mannequin without a personal story or agency, going through a prewritten script of a grey, insignificant life.
Nope. You could be a secret agent or something cool of that sort.
To be seen, on the other hand, is to be happy.
If you are doing something creditable- sure. Nobody wants to be watched when they are on the toilet.
This happiness requires making sure that others know that one is happy, successful, better than those NPCs – in other words, it calls for constant curation of one’s image, one’s narrative, one’s self.
Your friends and family will appreciate it if you do this. Then they can pick and chose topics of conversation which will be interesting to both of you.
If one is not the MC, someone else surely will be. This is, for many, simply an intolerable fate.
Nothing wrong with choosing someone else as the MC of your Social Media presence. I'd subscribe to a blog about Von Neumann or John Wheeler. I may not understand everything in it, but I'd get some vicarious satisfaction from being exposed to great thinkers.
Of course, blaming all media, or only social media, for MCS would be inaccurate.
It would be mad.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, main characters have emerged in places where psychopathy and narcissism have always reigned: in politics, academia and other public-facing institutions.
Actually, they are a feature of totalitarian regimes helmed by brutal dictators.
From a US president who claims that ‘I alone can fix’ the nation’s many crises,
but no POTUS can have you killed for saying you think he is stupid or evil
to news and manipulative media personalities who insist that they and only they are telling the truth,
but who may have to pay millions in damages to those they defame
to politicians who cannot – or do not wish to – tell the difference between being famous and being effective, MCS is becoming the norm.
No. Politicians have to pretend to care about issues. STEM subject academics can't just publish any old self-aggrandizing shite. This is also the case for News Media which are subscription based and which feature market or other objective information. You may 'editorialize' but otherwise you have to present news not views. Competitive markets ensure this.
There are worse offenders still. As an academic, I would be remiss if I did not include those within academia, or those solipsistic enough to call themselves ‘social leaders’ or, even worse, ‘thought leaders’.
For any given industry, there are indeed 'thought leaders' who emit 'public signals' which promote better correlated equilibria or provide Schelling focal solutions to coordination or discoordination problems.
Specifically, main character energy seems to be especially strong among a subgroup of academics, and the philanthropists who fund them, who like to call themselves ‘longtermists’ or ‘effective altruists’.
They were shit. That's true enough. On the other hand, there are plenty of people in the non-profit sector whom few have heard of who are highly effective. Look at Mohammad Yunus who is currently running Bangladesh. It so happened that the Ford Foundation gave his Grameen Bank a grant and they were very happy with the outcome. True, at a later point (after Yunus appeared ready to enter politics) the regime turned against him and accused him of self-aggrandizement or even embezzlement. But I know plenty of development economists who deny that Yunus was a vain man. Had he been so, then, at the height of his international fame, he could have endorsed 'for-profit' Microfinance and made a killing on the IPO.
Moved to action in significant part by the philosopher Peter Singer’s essay ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ (1972), which argues that we are morally obligated to maximise our impact by focusing on causes that bring about the greatest quality-of-life improvements, effective altruists claim that all of us have a moral responsibility to do good in the most effective way possible – in other words, we must provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people that we can, regardless of where they might be located.
This is bog standard Utilitarianism of a type which triumphed with the Indian Famine Code. I would say Binoy Ranjan Sen- of the FAO- was the man who got the world to understand that famine was avoidable. Other UN agencies showed that various contagious diseases could be virtually eliminated from regions where they were endemic. I recall being vaccinated against small pox as a child in Africa. However, this type of altruism had appeared in the late nineteenth century and was carried forward by philanthropists like Herbert Hoover.
Longtermism takes this utilitarian ethos many steps further, arguing that its goal is to lessen the threat of ‘existential risks’ to humanity: climate change, nuclear war, destructive asteroids and other catastrophes from space, the revenge effects of AI, and so on; longtermists extend this responsibility to future people as humanity’s major ethical priority.
What they need to do is abandon 'expected utility maximization' for 'regret minimization' because of Knightian Uncertainty. Incidentally 'FOMO' (fear of missing out) which drives us to new types of Social Media, is 'Hannan consistent' or 'regret minimizing'. But so is investing in ontologically dysphoric goods and services. It turns out, Utilitarian can be more 'deontic' or metaphysical than Kantianism.
One of the leaders of the movement, the moral philosopher William MacAskill,
whom I have taken down here
argues precisely this in his book What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View (2022), and is echoed by the researchers in the now-defunct Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at the University of Oxford, founded by another longtermist philosopher, Nick Bostrom. The message is generally this: we might recognise the tragedy of rationing scarce resources to the current population. However, if doing so means improving the chance of both survival and wellbeing of future generations – of which there will be innumerably more than today – then not doing so constitutes a moral crime.
It is a moral crime to waste scarce resources on 'second order public goods' (i.e. demanding more first order public goods) because the former can crowd out the latter. If you want to make the world a better place, just do so already. Others will imitate you. You don't need to do a PhD in worthless shite or write nonsense.
So, what is the problem – and how do these academic do-gooders, and their financial backers, fit the MCS criteria?
They are seeking 'obligatory passage point status' for themselves. This may be 'rent seeking' behavior though it is also possible that some billionaires have superior organizational or other technocratic skills.
The answer lies in two necessary assumptions that effective altruists and longtermists have to make. First, because of the utilitarian calculus that underwrites both worldviews, the possibility of a vastly larger human population in the future
which seems unlikely because as a Society becomes more affluent, the birthrate falls below the replacement rate.
seems to justify the NPC-ification of any humans alive at the moment.
Actually, certain gene-lines are the MCs and others, which will disappear soon, are the NPCs.
Indeed, they tell us, our suffering might be the only thing to save the future!
Though if our having fun means we have fewer babies, maybe that's what saves the future.
Second, since the wellbeing of the (much smaller) current generations matters so relatively little, the longtermists consider themselves to be justified in manipulating us so that we do the right thing.
They aren't manipulating us. They are just talking.
Choose the right professions, contribute to the right causes, suffer the right deprivations, and so on. Because such manipulation is permitted – in fact, morally required – the agency and inherent value of Earth’s current inhabitants is not merely ignored but discounted as a morally relevant consideration.
by cretins. But it is easy enough to show they have shit for brains.
And on top of the whole scheme stands the main character whose monomyth not only grants them the moral perception to understand what really matters, but (ostensibly) the means to bring their vision to fruition, all the NPCs be damned. There can be only one, indeed.
This lady has a monomyth about why she is superior to some of her colleagues. So what? She's just talking is all.
But mattering to each other still matters. The epigraph in E M Forster’s novel Howards End (1910) is ‘Only connect!’
get Gay with each other.
In an emerging modern world seemingly bent on destroying whatever humanity and interconnectedness remains,
according to this lady's 'master-narrative'.
we are urged to connect the disparate parts of our own psyches and, most importantly, to connect with each other.
Nobody is urging me to do any such thing. This is because I read out my poems to boring people till they run away.
Yet, we seem to be adrift in a world that is becoming a stage upon which increasing numbers of us choose to strut, preen, and not only declare our need to be seen and admired, but also insist that others subordinate themselves to our personas.
She is also adrift in a world where I urge everybody to get gender reassignment surgery at least once a week. My point is, anybody can talk bollocks.
We have reasons to despair – but haven’t we always had them? The social media revolution, with its vast reach and siren songs of the hero’s journey
I have come across no such thing. There are cute girls whom I do follow because they give me valuable tips on how to apply make up and shake my booty. But that is because I want to take up twerking after I retire.
or else with its cruder versions that overtly demand constant attention, is merely the current incarnation of a longstanding preoccupation with the self, with one’s identity, with one’s importance.
If one thinks one is important, one will end up writing nonsense for Aeon.
But this is our time, our moment, and it seems that it is fitting that we respond in the best way we know how.
i.e. talking bollocks.
So, while I do not pretend to have the answer – perhaps not even an answer – to addressing the moral harms of the MCS phenomenon, I do think that we can begin by asking what we are losing, and why there are reasons to try to salvage it.
Why not begin by asking where the toilet is? That way, you can broach the topic of how gay everybody should be getting with each other. Anyway, that's what I think happens at Academic Symposiums.
I take self-creating narratives to be fundamental to who we are – by telling and hearing stories about ourselves, about others and about the world, we come to understand who, why and how we might be.
What story did this lady tell about herself which made her so stupid and boring? I think it had something to do with her being a NPC in a really sordid online sex game. Main characters kept jizzing on her to win points.
Yet the kind of main-character storytelling that is presently ascendant does very little to form mutually constructed identities and, instead, reduces the complexity of human relationships to simplistic binaries of ‘me’ and ‘not me’, ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘hero’ and ‘villain’.
Not to mention the incessantly jizzed upon. Still, things could be worse. Trillions of Netan-Yahoos are currently being sodomized in Joe Biden's master-narrative.
Instead of co-creators and co-authors of each other’s selves,
Which we aren't though, it is true, some of us make babies and there is a short period of time when the stories we tell them may affect their psychological sense of self. Thus, I grew up hearing stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata which stressed that God and Nature and most people in general were really nice. Also there were plenty of talking animals. This made me feel this was a nice world and I was a nice enough part of it.
what remains is an anxiety-producing, shallow, consumerist competition for the ring of the one true self, the one true main character.
There really is no such competition. Even in Tolkein, the ring only exists so as to be destroyed by an arduous and epic journey into a land of dread.
We thus become rivals, competitors and players in what looks like a zero-sum game of winners and losers.
Social Media is positive sum. There is always room for another 'influencer'. Indeed, there can be synergy between such stars.
As the possibility of interdependently created identities disappears, we feel more alone, unheard, unseen – perhaps un-personed.
Nobody wants an 'interdependently created identity' because perverts will want that identity to feature getting jizzed on a lot.
The MCS narratives lack what psychologists and philosophers call a ‘theory of mind’ – the idea that we experience other people as having the same kind of mental states that we do, rather than playing bit parts in the monomyth of our lives.
This is not the case. Speaking generally, the Main Characters learns different things from different types of beings. They may also tell him of legends of a 'chosen one'- in other words, he may find he is part of a bigger story. At the end of the epic- as happens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer- everyone with the potential to be the Chosen One becomes a full fledged slayer.
This lack of an attunement to others as moral persons equal to oneself bears a family resemblance to narcissism.
It may be a stage in the psychological development of an infant. Equally it may be something we regress to when unable to cope.
This sense of ‘family resemblance’, an idea put forth by Ludwig Wittgenstein, argues that various practices and ideas can be connected by a series of overlapping similarities.
Even when there are no similarities. Anyone can talk bollocks about anything at all.
The family resemblance between MCS and narcissism lies in what the philosopher Aleksandar Fatic in 2023 called a kind of ‘moral incompetence’ – ‘the incompetence to experience the moral emotions, such as empathy, solidarity, loyalty, or love’.
Or the insufferable stupidity of those who claim to detect such sociopathic traits in us. My answer is 'it takes one to know one'.
MCS and narcissism connect in their rejection of our interdependence:
Nonsense! My wife found me very clingy and dependent. But I was also vain and self-centered. At some point she realized that she didn't have to stay with me because we hadn't been married in a Catholic church.
not only do they mock meaningful connections with others, but they make such mockery into a virtue.
At this point, the lady's friends ask 'who hurt you?' meaning 'why are you so damaged? Is it because you studied shite at Collidge?'
Because moral incompetence inhibits connection, MCS, and its close cousin, narcissism, are suggestive of the moral failure against which Forster’s epigraph warned.
The moral failure had to do with not having lots of gay sex. But this had to do with draconian laws against sodomy.
But there is that other word: love. Albert Camus, in his Notebooks (1935-42), confesses that: 'If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: ‘I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.’
Camus should have gotten gay with lots of Nazis. Instead he joined the Resistance.
More recently, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in The Reasons of Love (2004), tells us that love is both necessary and dangerous, making us infinitely vulnerable to each other.
Only if we play Russian Roulette while kissing or cuddling. But this is an infrequent occurrence in middle class Tambram households.
Although many of those under the spell of MCS are motivated by a desire to be adored,
Nonsense! We want to have exciting adventures. We don't want to be followed around by adoring crowds like Brian in the Monty Python film.
their very practices strain the possibilities of love. By love, I do not only mean romantic love, but the kind of tender sentiments that are present among friends, family and sometimes even more distant others. This kind of other-directed love requires an openness to mutual vulnerabilities, differences and a non-instrumental conception of the beloved.
Fuck off! Nobody wants to be slobbered over by some nutter who gasses on about our 'vulnerabilities'. For most of us, love is what flows from a working partnership and is based on a recognition of mutual strengths and capabilities. If you thought your wife was 'infinitely vulnerable', the last thing you'd want to do is give her a baby. The opposite is also true. If hubby is clingy and infantile, you can't have a baby because that would interfere with the care and attention that fat fool demands.
Yet, MCS promotes the opposite: a kind of othering, a turning of human beings into abstract entities and instrumentally useful (or not so useful) mannequins.
This is a pathology independent of whether or not the person thinks of herself in narratological terms.
Is there a ‘duty to love’ that MCS betrays?
Nope. At one time there was a stereotype of the 'gamer' who is a virgin and a computer nerd. But all the lads in 'Big Bang Theory' married strong successful women.
We might side with Immanuel Kant, and say that, at the very least, we must never treat people as a mere means to our own ends. But that seems insufficient when considering Camus’s declaration. To love is, in a sense, to enter into a mystery – a kind of connection with the other that offers no guarantees, no personal glory, no safe outcomes, and certainly no winners and losers.
No. To love is to seek a partnership involving some type of work. Our emotions are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'. They have survival value.
To love is to face uncertainty about who we are – and about who the other might be.
No. To be in a bad relationship is to face such uncertainty. Good relationships are about security, confidence and the certainty that the other person has your back.
Emmanuel Levinas argued that ‘alterity’ – the uncertainty born of the otherness of others – is the beginning of all morality.
He was wrong. We may be uncertain about our 'ipseity'- what we are in and for ourselves- because we don't know our capabilities. The otherness of others is what makes their capabilities apparent to us. Through affectionate relationships we gain mimetic models and this changes what we can do and achieve. Consider Churchill. He was a very promising, very charismatic, rising politician. But he had little money. Why did he not marry an heiress? The answer, I think, is that he saw that Clementine had certain social skills which he lacked. There's was a true partnership. Clementine would always get her husband to apologize and smooth things over when his acerbic tongue had wounded the feelings of some colleague.
It might also be the beginning of all love. The other challenges us, makes demands on us, and holds us responsible.
Only when we are going in the wrong direction. Domestic life isn't a boxing match.
The other forces us out of our self-referential solipsism, and into the awe of connection.
Only if the other is a rapist whose violent assault shakes us out of catatonia.
Look at the other’s face, Levinas tells us. In seeing the face of another, we begin to grasp what it might mean to be vulnerable, to be accountable.
Only if the other's face betrays great fear or anxiety. This allows us to grasp that it is a mistake to rush naked at strangers with an erect cock and a meat cleaver in our hand.
This is a million miles from faceless ‘Likes’, subscribers or fans.
Because you are not rushing at them with an erect cock and a meat cleaver in your hand.
Many attracted to life as a main character are seeking some kind of love, or approval, or reassurance that they matter.
They may be seeking promotion or business success so as to better provide for their family. JK Rowling was once quite poor. She started writing Harry Potter for her daughter but must have quickly realized she had immense literary talent.
They are looking for a feeling, a vibe. But love is more than an affective stance. Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving (1956), defines love as an artistic practice, noting that ‘individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbour, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline.’
Fromm was lying. My neighbors hate me but are very affectionate to their own families and friends. Perhaps, I should stop answering the front door bell while naked and holding a meat cleaver.
For him, love is ‘an activity, not a passive affect’ – in order to truly love, it is insufficient to merely feel; what is required is responsibility for the care of the beloved.
Baby doesn't love Mummy because it can't be responsible for her care. Fromm was fucked in the head.
Yet MCS denies us the ability to do exactly that – to genuinely, humbly love anyone or anything.
If she suffers from that syndrome, there may be something to what she says. But if she doesn't, then her testimony is worthless.
To the conquering hero, all interactions are transactional, all awe self-directed.
No. Plenty of 'conquering heroes' have been humble and self-effacing.
Where does this leave us? MCS is not a puzzle to be solved via a ‘do and don’t’ listicle. It is not a social problem against which laws can be passed. Instead, it calls on us to engage in what Joseph Campbell, among others, called a ‘dark night of the soul’.
Important people- like Mother Theresa may have such things. Ordinary people can rest content with being cheerful and, occasionally, emitting a witty fart.
This might mean sitting with our anonymity, solitude, boredom and lostness;
If you are doing this at home, you aren't lost at all. Also, nothing wrong with having a wank now and then.
pushing back on the equivocation between performance and authentic connections; making ourselves vulnerable to others, and thus to failure.
This lady makes herself vulnerable to others by publishing her Bank Account details and password on Social Media- I don't think.
It might mean seeing ourselves as always incomplete – and recognising that fulfilment might not be in the cards, that life is not a triumphant monomyth, and others are not here to be cast in supporting roles.
Also, they won't come and do your washing up. Sad.
Myself, I tend to turn to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957), where a character reminds us: ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’
That was a couple of years before Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and so forth.
Sounds about right – let’s begin there.
Let's not. Instead of funding non-STEM subjects, lets focus on getting kids to learn about Astrophysics and cold fusion and nano-technology. Let future generations explore the galaxy rather than write shite about the need to make ourselves vulnerable to others by publishing our computer password or other financial details.
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