I’ve been studying and thinking about the intersection of psychology (particularly narcissism) and politics for a few years now. I have reason to believe that this particular psychological phenomenon may actually underpin many or all of the problems/crises that our species currently faces. It is a difficult topic to talk about, however, because the nature of narcissism defies most conventional ideas about human nature and the strategies that we should employ when trying to deal with people.
During recent interactions on the /c/anarchism community of this instance I was (pleasantly) surprised to find other people in the wild who are also interested in this topic and who are reaching some of the same conclusions that I am. That particular community doesn’t seem to be well-suited for this sort of discussion, however. While anarchism is actually a pretty important part of the overall topic (it’s basically the perfect antithesis of the ideology that emerges from narcissism, as well as an important part of the optimal counter-strategy), it is not the entire topic. Additionally, it seems that /c/anarchism is a bit under-moderated compared to what it would need to be to have such discussions? The most relevant post got a lot of bad-faith comments. Many of them questioned the premise of anarchism in the first place, which is both off-topic to the post, and kindof inappropriate for an anarchist community/instance in general.
Anyways, this new community would discuss the role that narcissism plays in the issues that we face in our world on a more societal scale rather than an interpersonal one as would be typical of discussions about narcissism, generally. The discussion will be pulling from multiple fields of study, including psychology, anthropology, neurology, and mathematics. (I am still working on what the name should be…)
I do have some moderation experience already, though it is in the context of a small, private Discord server. Moderating something as open as a Lemmy community will be new for me.
A big part of why I am going to the effort of making this (long) post is that I want to make sure that the admins of this instance are really OK with the topic of this community, and the possible consequences for hosting it. Specifically…
Narcissists really hate when people start recognizing them for what they really are and actively try to counter their manipulation and remove their power. The mere existence of this community will trigger them. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if problems start showing up in the comments of this very post. Depending on how popular this community gets, this could paint a target on slrpnk.net in general. I don’t really know what the exact consequences of this would be, since, to the best of my knowledge, this sort of thing hasn’t really been done before.
The topic is also a somewhat tricky one, as it comes uncomfortably close to some lines that reasonable people tend to draw between what they think of as acceptable/unacceptable behaviors. We’ll arguably be advocating for discrimination against narcissists, and while the term ‘narcissist’ doesn’t currently refer to an individual that would be recognized as having a personality disorder under current diagnostic criteria (the term is currently broader than the relevant criteria), there is ample evidence that it probably should (that is, the criteria should probably be broadened to match the term). That said, we’re talking about a group that is defined by the patterns of abusive behavior that its members express, so the situation here is a little different than it is for, say, sexism, racism, or people suffering from depression or other kinds of mental health issues. Discriminating against people based on mental health issues is usually disallowed by blanket anti-bigotry rules, so I’d like to make sure that the admins understand how the existence of this community might strain the way that their instance rules are currently written if they agree to host it.
Despite these potential issues, this Lemmy instance seems to me to be well suited to host such a space, as I think the practical, prefigurative, anarchist philosophy of slrpnk.net is broadly compatible with the conclusions that I’ve been able to draw from my studies thus far.
Obviously, I’d have to make a new account on this instance in order to create/moderate such a community. That’s fine. It may take me a moment to gather a couple of people to help moderate as well, and it may take a bit to construct a good introduction post. I’ve got plenty of stuff to write about for some initial content, though.
Lastly, assuming you guys are cool with this, are there any tips you can give me on moderating Lemmy communities? Anything I should know coming from a Discord moderation background?
P.S. On the off-chance that someone had seen the previous iteration of this post and is confused: I re-created this post because it didn’t appear to be federating properly. I suspect this has something to do with the recent slrpnk outage. I am hoping that re-posting will fix this. EDIT: This does seem to have worked. I can see the post from the slrpnk instance directly now.
When I am talking about narcissism, I am talking about something much broader than NPD. The ICD 11 revised the whole section on personality disorders so that they are no longer separated into clusters (A, B, and C) and are now characterized on a per-individual basis by a combination of atomized descriptors. One of the major reasons for doing this was because there is a lot more overlap between them than the categorization of discrete disorders implied. The lack of empathy that characterizes narcissism was present in basically all of cluster B and frequently occurred with several disorders in clusters A and C.
Narcissism is way more common than you think. I estimate that they make up at least 1/3 of the population, and probably more like 1/2 (and exactly how I’ve arrived at these numbers is something I’d want to write about). Those “regular” people who are “pushed” into egotistic behavior? They’re actually low-grade or covert narcs who are being given permission to be narcissistic by our culture.
The capitalist system does work as intended, but the reason that it is intended to work the way that it does is because it was designed by narcissists from the very beginning (another topic we’d be discussing, with sources), and it serves them very well. They weren’t a hidden cabal, though, and the emergence of modern capitalism didn’t happen overnight. The system gradually emerged piece by piece as various people tried to solve various problems (and it probably all started with the issue of distributing portions of tribute to one’s lackeys).
I don’t think Adam Smith was a narcissist. At the time many of the novel capitalist ideas were an genuine improvement over feudalism.
Believing a third or even half of the population has narcissist tendencies seems odd to me and something I can not say for the people around me even though I am well aware of the issue and somewhat sensitized to it. Are you studying for an MBA by any chance? That would explain a selection bias in the people you meet 😅
Adam Smith described an already existing system he observed and whom emergent properties he appreciated.
It is actually just a matter of putting your threshold somewhere. Like every dimension of psychometrics, tests exists and will measure a spectrum. They will put people left or right of the average level of narcissism, so like in any other metrics, you can call half of the population “more narcissist than average”. You can also split the spectrum in 3 equal part: selfless, normal, narcissist and you have a third of the population, or you can use the DSM definition of pathological narcissism disorder which only considers cases acute enough that they cause distress in the subject and prevent them to hold any job durably, which are the typical criteria for disorders, and with that they consider 6% of the US population has it.
It makes sense however to note that narcissists cause damage before reaching the pathology threshold and calling it a disorder. Toxic politicians, CEOs, conspiracy theorists pushers, have (approximately) functional lives and do not report suffering from their traits, it causes pain to others before it does to them. The matter of where the threshold is, is a worthy matter of debate and one could argue that this specific disorder makes the “subjective feeling of distress” criterion invalid.
I am not a fan of having arbitrary and highly fluid definitions of pathological conditions as they lose all meaning that way. If you can massage the numbers to cover 50% of the population, then nothing stops you to go even further, and then we are in the territory of claiming that human nature is inherently egoistic (with some rare exceptions maybe).
And I don’t see much point in having such pessimistic world views and they also don’t fit to my personal experience 🤷
It is still worthwhile to look out for toxic behaviour pattern, but I don’t think we should be chasing shadows and expecting bad intentions behind what most people do. Because that then just becomes a self fulfilling prophesy as others are quite sensitive to even unspoken accusations of bad faith.
I am too deeply disturbed by the malleability of psychological definitions. Especially as they describe an important phenomenon that we can observe. We need to have clearer definitions, and I don’t really have an answer here, but this is one of the many important subjects to discuss in that domain!
One thing I am pretty sure of is that the “narcissistic personality disorder” does not capture the whole extent of the problem.